418 Collectanea,
FOLKLORE IN THE KENNET VALL,EY.
{Read at Meeting of 20th June, 1902.)
The district of which I am about to speak lies in the Kennet Valley; extending a few miles to the north of it, and towards Hampshire a few miles to the south. There are hardly any large villages ; the inhabitants live to a great extent in scattered houses, single and solitary ones occasionally, but more generally they are built in groups of two or three. You come upon them in all sorts of unexpected places ; dotted about upon the commons, amongst the fir-woods, up and down the valleys, and upon the hills. The cottages are built in every imaginable way, and of a great variety of materials. There are wood and plaster cottages, brick ones with thatched roofs, and brick ones with tiled roofs.
An old couple named Matthews, from whom I have gained a good deal of information, live at a place called Paradise. In the summer it may well deserve its name ; but in the winter, when it can only be reached by going down a lane which is ankle-deep in mud, or across some fields where there is no real footpath, it is a poor sort of Paradise. The house, which was originally a farm- house, is built in the most odd and irregular manner, and is now divided up into three or four small cottages. The end of the house, which is old Matthews' cottage, has a gabled roof, and is three stories high, an unusual thing in this part of Berkshire. The rest of the house is built in two stories, and part of it is thatched. The farm was once surrounded by outbuildings, which fell into decay, and have been removed.
Mrs. Matthews' relations lived in the same cottage in which she and her husband now live before she was born. The last farmer who had the farm committed suicide by cutting his throat in the room in which the Matthews now sleep, but though they have spoken to me about a stain on the boards, they have no super- stition about the matter. They have many others though, and when once you have won their confidence are quite ready to be communicative. The old man will tell you several stories of the Ananias and Sapphira type, of sudden retribution. These are some of them.
