Excerpt from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1918, Vol. 1 The sort of false rumours that I have been quoting above were all concerning matters of high political or military import. But the Middle Ages were no less rife in popular fictions which were purely anecdotal, mar vellous, or intended to act as moral warnings. Tales of ghosts, devils, or impossible natural phenomena, of awful instances Of divine judgment on criminals, heretics, or blasphemers, used to pass freely from mouth to mouth, and sometimes even to get enshrined in a chronicle by some credulous writer greedy of anecdotes. For the sort of thing that would nowadays appear among the 'short paragraphs' of a halfpenny newspaper would in the thirteenth century have appealed to the less severe type of chronicler. The parallels of the gigantic straw berry or the five-ounce hen's-egg of to-day were such things as an apparition of the devil in Essex, or the Swallowing up by the 'earth of a woman at Newbury who was adding appeals to God to rank perjury. If the place was sufficiently remote from the chronicler's abode, the story might get down in black and white. The length of time for which some of these legends passed current is extraordinary. They emerge sub stantially identical in outline, but with place and name and date changed, at very long intervals, and in very different parts of Europe. They were still strong in the seventeenth century, and I Should not like to say that they altogether died out in the eighteenth. They were the parents of many ballads and chap-books. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.