Note 5 — Chapter V · The Fenodyree and his Friends

This was written in the sixteenth century, and based probably on Higden’s Polychronicon, book I, chap. xliv. (= I. 42–3), but the same practice of wind making goes on to this day, one of the principal practitioners being the woman to whom reference was made at p. 299. She is said to tie the breezes in so many knots which she makes on the purchasing sailor’s pocket-handkerchief. This reminds one of the sibyl of Warinsey, or the Island of Guernsey, who is represented by an ancient Norse poet as ‘fashioning false prophecies.’ See Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i. 136; also Mela’s first-century account of the virgins of the island of Sena, which runs to the following effect:—‘Sena, in the Britannic Sea, opposite the coast of the Osismi, is famous for its oracle of a Gaulish god, whose priestesses, living in the holiness of perpetual virginity, are said to be nine in number. They call them Gallizenæ, and they believe them to be endowed with extraordinary gifts to rouse the sea and the wind by their incantations, to turn themselves into whatsoever animal form they may choose, to cure diseases which among others are incurable, to know what is to come and to foretell it. They are, however, devoted to the service of voyagers only who have set out on no other errand than to consult them5.’ It is probable that the sacrosanct6 inhabitants of the small islands on the coasts of Gaul and Britain had wellnigh a monopoly of the traffic in wind7.