Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/68

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54
Snakestones and Stone Thunderbolts.

(1779) says, of Keynsham, "formerly the credulous inhabitants of this Village believed these Snake-stones to have been real serpents, changed into stone by one Keina, a devout British virgin." Alban Butler's version of this belief[1] is as follows:—

"St. Keyna, Virgin. ... St. Keyna, surnamed by the Welch, The Virgin, who lived a recluse in a wood in Somersetshire, . . . near the town of Cainsham, which seems so called from her, and stands on the Avon not far from Bristol. Spiral stones in the figure of serpents have been found in that country, which some of the people pretend to have been serpents turned into stones by her prayers. They seem either petrifactions or sports of nature in uncommon crystallizations in a mineral soil."

I may remark here that this version of the legend is more important than the Whitby one, for Butler gives as his authority for the turning of serpents into stone Camden's Britannia, which takes us back at once to the Elizabethan period. The passage in Camden's Britannia, when translated, runs as follows:—

"Here (at Whitby) are found certain stones, in the form of serpents rolled up into a spiral, the marvels of Nature in her sportive mood . . . You would believe them to have once been serpents that have been covered by a stony cuticle. But superstition attributes them to the prayers of Hilda."[2]

This quotation shows that the belief was a matter of general report as far back as the year 1586, but a different passage from Camden bearing upon the same subject is quoted by Plot in The Natural History of Oxfordshire. This second passage adds the important information that Camden believed himself to have seen another kind of snakestone, the head of which projected at its circumference, while its tail was rolled up in the

  1. Op cit., vol. X., p. 607.
  2. "Lapides hic inueniuntur, serpentium in spiram reuolutorum effigie, naturæ ludentis miracula . . . serpentes oilm fuisse crederes, quos lapideus cortex intexissist. Hildæ autem precibus adscribit credulitas," (Camden, p. 419).