Excerpt from County Folklore, Vol. 5
Judging by the sheaf of extracts contained in the following pages, and by my own gleanings in Lindsey during the past twenty years, it seems to me that the only striking characteristic of Lincolnshire folk-lore is its lack of originality. Nearly every superstition and custom of the county appears to be a local variant of something already familiarly known in other parts of the British Islands, or beyond their limits. The curious Haxey game, known as "Throwing the Hood," has, for instance, an evident relationship with Cornish "Hurling" and East Anglian "Camping," not to speak of several archaic forms of foot-ball, or of those foreign sports, European, Asiatic, and American, to which it bears a close resemblance.
Even the mediaeval traditions relating to the saints once famous between the Humber and the Welland have close affinity with other pious legends.
St. Guthlac and St. Botulph were not the only hermits harassed by evil spirits; though it is likely that fen-demons may have been particularly trying to holy ascetics, whose nerves were already disordered by the agues of a watery country, and the weird clamour of innumerable wild-fowl.
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