[21]
The silence of Bayeux is peopled with so many memories, of wars so
terrible, and of legends so wild and weird, that a book might be
written about Bayeux and called 'The Past.' We must not trench upon the
work of the antiquary, or we might point out where Henry I. of England
attacked and destroyed the city, and the exact spot in the market-place
where they first lighted the flames of Revolution; but we may dwell for
a moment upon one or two curious customs and legends connected with
Bayeux.
The 'Fete of the three Kings' (a remnant of a custom in the time of the
Druids) is still religiously observed by its inhabitants, and
incantations and ceremonies are kept up by the country people around
Bayeux, especially on the eve of this fete. The time is winter, and
around the town of Bayeux (as many visitors may have noticed) a curious
fog or mist hangs over the fields and the neighbouring gardens, through
which the towers of the cathedral are seen like phantoms; it is then
that the peasants light their torches, and both priests and people
wander in procession through the fields, singing in a loud, but mournful
tone, a strange and quaint ditty. Thus their fields and the crops (which
they are about to sow) will be productive, and a good harvest bless the
land!
We are still in the middle ages at Bayeux, we believe implicitly in
witches, in good omens, and in fairy rings; we are told gravely by an
old inhabitant that a knight of Argouges, near Bayeux, was protected by
a good fairy in his encounter with some great enemy, and we are shewn,
in proof of the assertion, the family arms of the house of Argouges,
with a female figure in the costume of Lady Godiva of Coventry, and the
motto, _a la fee_; and we hear so many other romantic stories of the
dark ages, that history at last becomes enveloped in a cloud of haze,
like the town of Bayeux itself on a winter's night.
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