An illustration drawn from the writings of Mr Thomas Hardy will doubtless be pardoned, since much genuine Wessex folklore has been presented to us in the garb of fiction by that shrewd observer and archaeologist. In _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ [i.e. Dorchester], after having been told of the death of Mrs Henchard, the reader is treated to a rustic gossip on death in general. Mrs Cuxsom gives her own little commentary, and then proceeds to quote the words of her dead neighbour: “And there’s four ounce pennies, the heaviest I could find, a-tied up in bits of linen, for weights--two for my right eye, and two for my left. And when you’ve used ’em, and my eyes don’t open no more, bury the pennies, good souls, and don’t ye go spending ’em, for I shouldn’t like it.” In the sequel, a servant buries the coins in the garden, but Christopher Coney digs them up and spends them. One of the listeners, Solomon Longways, excuses this action, and can see “no treason in it,” but the general verdict ran: “’Twas a cannibal deed[743].”
Now we may be certain that this conversation describes, in all essential details, the Wessex superstition. Within our own times, Northumbrian folk were wont to bury a penny piece just under the soil of a newly-made grave. And it is a very common belief that misfortune will follow him who desecrates the coin--the ferryman’s penny--by ignoble use. If, as is probable, the “eye-coin” be the genuine representative of this penny, it has degenerated into a humble accessory of the death-chamber; it is not now even deposited in the grave. Nevertheless, the segregated coin must not be put again to everyday uses. Well did Jowett of Balliol in luminous phrase speak of “underground religion,” that strain of superstition which cannot be banished from the peasant mind. Nor, indeed, does orthodoxy, at least as understood by provincial or unthinking folk, raise any serious demur to the observance.
We cannot accept as adequate the superficial explanation that the penny is simply used to close the eyes. This is the immediate purpose, of course, but it does not explain why a penny, though certainly an object of convenient size and shape, should alone be used. Least of all does it account for the placing of coins in the mouth, or of burying money in the grave. Norwegian folk-lore supplies us with a curious correlative. When the Norwegian peasant takes earth from the churchyard to succour ailing children, he must bury silver coins in place of the stolen specific. Customs like these carry us back, by almost imperceptible transitions, to the building of the British barrow, and to the interment therein of flawless arrow-head or fractured celt. Following the centuries forward, we may dimly surmise why the various changes took place; glancing back, we marvel that the beliefs have been clung to so tenaciously.