Folklore as an Historical Science
By George Laurence Gomme

[Pg303]

CHAPTER V

SOCIOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

Perhaps the most important part of the anthropological aspect of custom, rite, and belief in tradition is sociological. Perhaps, too, it is the most neglected. Inquirers into the origin of religion proceed one after the other to investigate the phenomena of early beliefs as they interpret the origin of religion, without one thought of the sociological conditions of the problem. They interpose, as I have already pointed out, the theory of a state religion, when such a foundation is incidentally found to be necessary to carry the imposing superstructure of Celtic mythology, but they do not pause to inquire whether the state, suddenly introduced into the argument, is a discoverable factor; or they proceed to erect their superstructure of religious origins without any social foundation whatever, and we are left with a great concept of abstract thought having no roots in the source from which it is supposed to be drawn. The sun-god and the dawn-god, even the All-father, are traced in the most primitive thought of man, but it is not deemed necessary to show in what relation these concepts stand to practical life. It is here I must refer back to Robertson-Smith's dictum on mythology, for it is the necessary preliminary to showing that belief cannot enter into life except through the[Pg304] sociological units into which all humanity fits itself; or rather, I would prefer Robertson-Smith's way of putting it, "the circle into which a man was born was not simply a human society, a circle of kinfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with which they stood connected as the human members of the social group."[427] Any proposal to examine a group of customs, beliefs, and rites which at their origin take us back to the earliest history of a country must, therefore, be considered from the sociological side. The great mass of the material to be used in such an inquiry is not ancient so far as its date of record is a test of antiquity, but it is ancient as traditional survival, and it is not possible to trace back custom and belief surviving in modern times to the earliest times, except through the medium of the institutions which formed the social basis of the peoples to whom such custom and belief belonged. A custom or belief exists as a living force before it sinks back into the position of a survival. It is the lingering effect of this living force which helps to preserve it for so many ages, and in the midst of such adverse circumstances, as a survival among other customs and beliefs existing under a different living force. It is not possible, therefore, to[Pg305] ascertain the origin of custom or belief in survival, except as a fragment of the social institution to which it originally belonged. No custom or belief has a life of its own separate from all other. It is joined to other customs and beliefs in indissoluble co-partnership, the whole group making up the institutions under which the race or people to whom they belong live and flourish. This, as we have already seen, is a most important principle in the study of survivals. Not only is it strictly true of all primitive peoples, but it is true of the early stages of more advanced communities.[428] Indeed it has been put into a phrase used long ago by an English writer on the manorial tenant, "His religion is a part of his copyhold,"[429] and when the jurist talks to us in highly technical language of lords, freeholders, villans, and serfs, we must bear in mind that at any rate these villans and serfs belonged to a social institution, one element of which was religion. So, too, must the folklorist bear in mind that it is not the individual belief he is concerned with, but with the belief that belongs to a community. It must be assumed that the true test of the antiquity of every custom or belief is its natural and easy assimilation with other customs and beliefs, equally with itself in the position of a survival, and the recognition of the whole group thus brought into relationship as belonging to the institutions of the people from whom it is derived.

[Pg306] It is well to understand what this condition of things exactly means as an element in the study of early beliefs. It will be dealing with beliefs from their place in the social habitat; housing them, so to speak, within the groups of human beings with which they are connected. It will be considering them as part of the living organism which the social units of man have created. All this indicates a method of treating the subject entirely different from what has hitherto obtained. Students of early English institutions are content to construct elaborate arguments from the often conflicting testimony of historical authorities; students of early beliefs construct elaborate systems of religious thought far above the custom and rite with which they are dealing. The two branches of the same subject are never brought together to illustrate each other. Early institutions cannot be separated from early beliefs. Early beliefs cannot properly be separated from the society of which they form a component part. We require to know not only what beliefs a particular people possess, but in what manner these beliefs generate custom and rite and take their place among the influences which affect the social organism. Early man does not live individually. His life is part of a collective group. The group worships collectively as it lives collectively, and it is extremely important to work out the dual conditions. If the several items of custom and belief preserved by tradition are really ancient in their origin, they must be floating fragments, as it were, of an ancient system of custom and belief—the cultus of the people among whom they originated. This cultus has been destroyed, struggling unsuccessfully against[Pg307] foreign and more vigorous systems of religion and society. To be of service to history each floating fragment of ancient custom and belief must not only be labelled "ancient," but it must be placed back in the system from which it has been torn away. To do this is to a great extent to restore the ancient system; and to restore an ancient system of culture, even if the restoration be only a mosaic and a shattered mosaic, is to bring into evidence the people to which it belongs.

In the previous chapter it was necessary to lay somewhat special stress upon the system of social organisation known as totemism, which was not founded upon kinship. This was traced in survival among the pre-Celtic peoples of Britain. If we now turn to the Celts and Teutons of Britain we shall find that we have to deal with a social organisation founded definitely upon kinship; and if there are survivals of belief, custom, and rite, derived from this kinship system, existing side by side in the same culture area with survivals from the kinless system, it will be necessary to explain how two such opposite streams can have been kept flowing.

It is not difficult in the case of countries occupied by Celtic or Teutonic peoples to ascertain what the particular institution was which linked together the beliefs of the people, though it is not easy to trace out all the phases of it. It is the tribe—that system of society which appears as the means by which Greek and Roman, Celt and Teuton, Scandinavian and Slav, Hindu and Persian, were able to conquer, overrun, and finally to settle in the lands which they have made their own. We know something of the Celtic[Pg308] tribe, less of the Teutonic tribe, but all we know is that it possesses features in common with the tribe of its kindred. There is no fact more certainly true as a result of comparative research than that the tribe is the common heritage of those people who have become the dominant rulers of the Indo-European world. I use this term "tribe" in no formal sense, not in the sense of its Roman derivation and use, which shows it quite as a secondary institution, but as the most convenient term to define that grouping of men with wives, families, and descendants, and all the essentials of independent life, which is found as a primal unit of European society in a state of unsettlement as regards land or country. The tie which bound all together was personal not local, kinship with a tribal god, kinship more or less real with fellow-tribesmen, kinship in status and rights. We meet with this tribal organisation everywhere in Indo-European history. It made movement from country to country possible. It made conquest possible. Celt and Teuton did not conquer in families any more than Greek or Hindu did. They conquered in tribes, and it was because of the strength of the tribal organisation during the period, first of migration and wandering and then of conquest, that the settlement after conquest was possible and was so strong. Everywhere we find these people conquerors and settlers. In India, in Iran, in Greece and Rome, in Scandinavia, in Celtic and Teutonic Europe, in Slavic Europe, they are moving tribes of conquerors come to settle and rule the people they conquer.[430] When Dr. Ridgeway asks[Pg309] whence came the Acheans,[431] he answers the question much in the same fashion as that in which Dr. Duncker describes the settlement on the Ganges:—

These two divided masses thus so clearly described were, in fact, tribesmen and non-tribesmen, just that distinction which we meet with in Celtic and Teutonic law, and described in the same terms which Bishop Stubbs was obliged to use when he set forth the facts of the Teutonic invasion of Britain.

The terms are indeed necessary terms. Tribesmen capable of retaining the tribal organisation during the period of migration and conquest did not lightly lose that organisation when they settled. In Sir Alfred[Pg310] Lyall's pure genealogic clan of Central India[433] I recognise the unbroken tribal formation before the family group has arisen as a political unit. In Mr. Tupper's argument against the conclusions of Sir Henry Maine I recognise the Hindu evidence that the tribe was the earliest social group, breaking up, as later influences arose, into village communities and joint families.[434] In Bishop Stubbs's masterly analysis of English constitutional history the tribe appears at the outset—"the invaders," he says, "came in families and kindreds and in the full organisation of their tribes ... the tribe was as complete when it had removed to Kent as when it stayed in Jutland; the magistrate was the ruler of the tribe not of the soil; the divisions were those of the folk and the host not of the land; the laws were the usage of the nation not of the territory."[435] And so I agree with Mr. Skene as to the Celtic tribe that "the tuath or tribe preceded the fine or clan,"[436] and with the editors of the Irish law tracts that "the tribe existed before the family came into being and continued to exist after the latter had been dissolved."[437]

We need not go beyond this evidence. The tribe is the common form into which the early Indo-European peoples grouped themselves for the purpose of conquest and settlement. It was their primal unit. It may have been numerically large or small. It may have[Pg311] been the result of a combination of many smaller tribes into one great tribe. But in any case and under any conditions there stands out the tribal organisation, that great institutional force from which spring all later institutions. Its roots go back into the remotest past of Indo-European history; its active force caused the Indo-European people to become the mightiest in human history; its lasting results have scarcely yet ceased to shape the aspirations of political society and to affect the destinies of nations. The whole life of the early period was governed by tribal conditions—the political, social, legal, and even religious conceptions were tribal in form and expression.

The tribal institution of the Aryan-speaking peoples includes a life outside the tribe. That was an outlaw's life, a kinless outcast, whom no tribesman would look upon or assist, whom every tribesman considered as an enemy until he had reduced him to the position of helot or slave, but for whom every tribe had a place in its organisation and a legal status in its constitution. But it was the legal status imposed by the master over the servant, and the kinless included not only the outcast from the tribe, but the conquered aboriginal who had never been within the tribe. It is important to notice this, for it to some extent measures the strength of the tribal organisation. It not only allowed for a special position for all tribesmen, but it allowed for that position to have a definite relationship to persons who were not tribesmen, and it is in the combined forces of tribesmen and non-tribesmen that the tribal organisation which swept over part of Asia and over all Europe obtains its greatest power. There are tribal systems[Pg312] outside the Semitic and the Indo-European, but these do not have the distinctive features that the tribal systems of these two great civilising peoples possess. Like the Semitic and Aryan tribal systems, savage tribes are fashioned for conquest, but, unlike them, they are not fashioned for settlement and resettlement, and perhaps again and again conquest and resettlement. They spent all their power, or most of their power, in their one great effort of conquest, and whether we turn to the American Indian tribes, to the African tribes, or to the Asiatic tribes we find the same facts of frequent dissipation of power after sudden and complete conquest of it. The tribal system which led to civilisation has a different history. It has, too, a different constitution in that to the strength of tribesmen was added the subordination—politically, industrially, and economically—of non-tribesmen. They were the people who, in the terms of the northern poem,

Unfortunately the institution of the tribe has never been properly studied by the great authorities in history, and students are left without guidance in this important matter. And yet in any attempt to get back to the earliest period of history in lands governed by an Aryan-speaking people we must proceed, can only proceed, on the basis of the tribe, and it is the failure to[Pg313] understand this which has made so much early history unsatisfactory and inconclusive and compels us to the conclusion that the master-hand is still needed to rewrite in terms of tribal history all that has been written in terms merely of political history.

If, however, history from the written records is thus at fault, so too is history from the traditional records. No systematic effort has been made to treat the traditional story or the traditional custom and belief as part of the tribal history of our race, and yet in the few cases where it has been so treated the results are obviously satisfactory. I can illustrate the value of this point of view by an example drawn from the period which witnessed the earliest struggles of our race. I think with Mr. Keary that in those German stories "which delight above all things in that portrait of the youngest son of the house—he is the youngest of three—who is left behind despised and neglected when his brothers go forth to seek their fortunes," we have traces of a veritable fact, of an historical condition where the elder sons actually went forth to conquest and to settlement and the youngest son remained in the original home as the hearth-child.[439] The position of hearth-child, surviving as it does in our law of Borough English, is of great significance, and that we can by the aid of tradition reach a state of society which gave birth to it is a point of the greatest importance, even if we could go no further. But there is a stage beyond it. The majority of these youngest-son[Pg314] stories relate to events not to be identified with any particular tribe or people, but which belong to all the tribes and peoples whose course of conquest and settlement took the common form. But if apart from these all-world stories there exist stories, or if there be but one story which has become identified with an episode, a person, or a place belonging to a particular people, we may claim it as part of the history of that particular people. It may be that the general story has become specialised in this one case, or it may be that an entirely new story has sprung out of the special case. But whichever be the origin of such a story attached to a particular people, it must tell us something of that people at a period when its history was being made rather than recorded. What it tells may be very little, may not lead up to anything very great or definite, so far as later history is concerned; but that for the period to which it belongs it relates to an episode worthy to have been kept in the memories of the descendants of the chief actors in the events is the point to bear in mind.

There is one such story which belongs to English history. One of the most famous of these youngest-son stories is that of Childe Rowland, and Mr. Jacobs, on examining its incidents and details, suggests that "our story may have a certain amount of historic basis and give a record which history fails to give of the very earliest conflict of races in these isles."[440] Mr. Jacobs gives good grounds for this conclusion, and shows up a picture of earliest English history which is certainly not contained elsewhere, and we are able[Pg315] by this means to pass from that large group of youngest-son stories, which have brought with them living testimony of an ancient institution of our race in its oldest home, to the narrower but more direct example which comes to us from events which happened just at the dawn of history in our own land. It is not necessary to emphasise the importance of this service to history at the instance of tradition, for it will be obvious to every student that many a struggle must have remained unrecorded and many a hero must have died unnamed in the events which belong to the period of tribal conquest and settlement. And to have still with us the far-off echo of these events is no slight encouragement to an inquiry which has for its object the reconstruction of the conditions under which such events took place.

This would be all the better understood if we could get a concrete case for illustration, and, fortunately, this is possible by turning to the evidence of India. "What we know of the manner in which the states of Upper India were founded," says Sir Alfred Lyall,

The evidence from India is fact, the evidence from England is tradition, and yet I do not think any student will deny that both fact and tradition are part and parcel of the same conditions of society, the same forces operating upon the same material. The conditions of society in both cases are tribal conditions, and the common factor having thus been discovered, it is possible to determine not only the inter-relationship between fact and tradition, but the means by which we may estimate the value of both.

We cannot, however, stop here. I carry on the same argument from the traditional legend to the traditional custom and belief, and affirm that it is only by their position as part of the tribal system that custom and belief in survival must be tested. If they have descended from early Celtic or Teutonic custom and belief, they have descended from tribal custom and belief, and somewhere in the stages of descent will be found the link which connects them definitely with the tribe. That not all custom and belief has so descended is due to the fact that much of it belongs to the pre-Celtic period, which was not tribal; some of it, no doubt, to comparatively modern times, when, as we have already seen, superstition had taken the place of thought, while[Pg317] some phases of early belief belong to conditions which transcend the division between pre-Aryan and Aryan folk. On this I will say something by way of explanation presently. In the meantime it is an extremely important task to classify survivals into tribal and non-tribal groups. Those which belong to Celtic or Teutonic origins must show their tribal origin, for they could not have come into existence apart from the tribe, and apart from the tribe they could not have survived after the break-up of the tribe consequent upon the development of national and political life. Custom and belief which do not fit into the ancient tribal system, therefore, cannot be recognised as ancient Celtic or ancient Teutonic custom and belief, and contrariwise when it is seen that they naturally fall into this system it may be argued that there we must search for their origin. Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers have left a curious testimony to this view of the question in their word "holy" or wholesome. What is wholesome is so for the whole group. The Anglo-Saxon idea of holiness implies as its chief element relation to the tribal life.[442]

The classification of survivals in folklore into tribal and non-tribal items is a lengthy and intricate process. Some years ago I made a start in a study of fire worship which I presented to the British Association,[443] and I hope shortly to be ready with a volume on Tribal Custom, which will embody a fuller study of fire[Pg318] worship and its accompanying beliefs, together with a complete study of all the remains of traditional custom, rite, and belief, which only as the detritus of the ancient tribal organisation receive adequate explanation of their presence in the midst of modern political and religious institutions. If I leave this part of my subject without further illustration in this present volume, I must add one important note upon the persistence of survivals of both kinless and kinship societies. I have shown that the tribal system of the advanced races included provision for non-tribesmen, provision which kept non-tribesmen outside the tribal bond, and at the same time kept them tied to the tribe by using them as the necessary dependent adjunct of the tribe, using them as bondmen and serfs in point of fact. This extremely important factor in the history of the tribal organisation, which has not been properly noticed by the few authorities who have investigated tribal institutions, receives additional importance when viewed from the standpoint of folklore, for it allows for the preservation of non-tribal cults side by side with tribal cults. Non-tribesmen preserved their custom, belief, and rite simply because they were not admitted to the custom, belief, and rite of the tribe, and this is the explanation of the existence, in survival, of folklore which goes back to pre-Celtic times. Some of this pre-Celtic folklore we have already had before us, and some of it I have studied in my Ethnology in Folklore. Later on I shall have something more to say on the subject. Here it is only necessary to emphasise the importance of having ascertained why it is that the[Pg319] Celtic conquerors of Britain and the earliest tribal conquerors of the Indo-European world generally permitted to live in their midst what in a sense was opposed to all that they believed, to all that they practised, to all that governed them in thought and action.

I think this is a strong position upon which to conduct folklore research. It includes the whole of the historical position; it takes due count of historical facts instead of ignoring them. It is based upon a scientific conception of the meaning of a survival of culture. A survival is that which has been left stranded amidst the development that is going on around. Its future life is not one of development but of decay. We are not dealing with the evolution of society, but with the decaying fragments of a social system which has passed away. We have to trace out its line of decay from the point where it almost vanishes as the mere superstition or practice of a peasant or an outcast, back to phases where it exists in more strenuous fashion, and finally back to its original position as part and parcel of a living social fabric. Moreover, the strength of our position is based upon a scientific conception of the development of the nation or people among whom survivals exist. It is not all parts of the nation which develop at the same rate, at the same time, and for the same period. There are social strata in every country, and it is the observance of these strata which has made it possible for the inquirer of to-day to use the evidence they afford for historical purposes.

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