2 94 Folklore and History in Ireland.
This is all the more interesting as I do not think the mayor of Gahvay had any admiralty rights, at least Hardiman mentions no such custom as those performed by the mayor of the senior city of Limerick.
The Dublin ceremony smacked more of the Mayor and less of the Admiral. Every member of the twenty-five city companies, " prepared as for a jubilee ^ to accompany the Lord Mayor on his tri-annual tour round " the fringes." Dublin claimed to have " the most magnificent of showy processions . . . except those of Rome," and visitors from England would come to witness the sight. When the procession reached the strand the Lord Mayor rode out into the sea as far as his horse could find foothold, and between the Black Rock and the Lighthouse hurled a lance out into the water. Where it struck made the limits of municipal jurisdiction for the next three years.
Different writers have suggested a variety of meanings and origins for these customs, ranging from Druidical magic rites to the Venetian marriage of the Adriatic 1 For my part I do not see that any such abstruse explanation is necessary to seek. To measure by a bowshot or a spear's cast is no new thing, nor need one smell magical rites in the doing. It was a practical act. Magic may accumulate round it, as for that matter it may around any- thing. But the act gave rise to the magic, not the magic to the act, and the act in the first instance was purely utilitarian. If the Danes measured in this fashion the custom may well enough have come down from the days when their long barques lay in the fair harbours of Ireland, and Danish settlements arose where the Irish cities stand to-day ; but as a mayorial custom it is nothing more than a picturesque survival of primitive methods, a symbol to be classed with the thrusting of the Lord Mayor's sword through a hole in the wall when, during the perambulation of Dublin, he skirted the Earl of Meath's liberties — or the arrying of a silver oar by the Bailiffs of Carrickfergus,
