Having recently met with some curious instances of the extent to which the same or similar traditions extend themselves, not only in our own country, but in Wales and France, I have “made a note” of them for your service.

Burying in the church wall is supposed to be burying in neutral ground.

In the north wall of the church of Tremeirchion, near the banks of the Elwy, North Wales (described by Pennant, vol. ii. p. 139.), is the tomb of a former vicar, Daffydd Ddu, or the black of Hiradduc, who was vicar of the parish, and celebrated as a necromancer, flourishing about 1340.  Of him the tradition is, that he proved himself more clever than the Wicked One himself.  A bargain was made between them that the vicar should practise the black art with impunity during his life, but that the Wicked One should possess his body after death, whether he were buried within or without the church; and that the worthy vicar cheated his ally of his bargain by being buried neither within nor without the church, but in the wall itself.

A very similar tradition exists at Brent Pelham, Hertfordshire, with reference to the tomb of Pierce Shonke, which was also in the wall.  He is said to have died A.D. 1086.  Under the feet of the figure {514} was a “cross flourie, and under the cross a serpent” (Weever, p. 549.), and the inscription is thus translated in Chauncy’s Hertfordshire, p. 143: 

    “Nothing of Cadmus nor St. George, those names
     Of great renown, survives them, but their fames;
     Time was so sharp set as to make no bones
     Of theirs nor of their monumental stones,
     But Shonke one serpent kills, t’other defies,
     And in this wall as in a fortress lyes.”

Whilst in the north wall of Rouen Cathedral is the tomb of an early archbishop, who having accidentally killed a man by hitting him with a soup ladle, because the soup given by the servant to the poor was of an inferior quality, thought himself unworthy of a resting-place within the church, and disliking to be buried without, was interred in the wall itself.

Miraculous Cures for Lameness.—­The holy well Y fynnon fair, or Our Lady’s Well, near Pont yr allt Goch, close to the Elwy, has to this day the reputation of curing lameness so thoroughly, that those who can reach it walking on crutches may fling their crutches away on their return home.  Welsh people still come several miles over the hills to this holy spring.  A whole family was there when I visited its healing waters last month.

The same virtue is ascribed at Rouen to a walk to the altar at St. Katherine’s Church, at the top of St. Katherine’s Hill, where the cast-off crutches have been preserved.  In the latter case something less than a miracle may account for the possibility of going away without crutches; for they may be required to mount to a lofty eminence, and may well be dispensed with on coming down:  but as this supposition would lessen the value of a tradition implicitly believed, of course all sensible men will reject it at once.