inclined to believe that the Irish, the Scotch-Gaelic, and the English variants are closely connected, while, of course, the latter as well as the European versions seem to derive from the apocryphal legend of the Pseudo-Matthew's gospel which has been printed in Tischendorf's Evangelica Apocrypha. The legend is, as a consequence of its origin, to be found in mediaeval literature.
In the English versions the Babe's prediction of His death is sometimes printed as a separate ballad, and this seems to me to account for the composite origin of the Irish version. (Vid. Religious Songs of Connacht, ut supra, p. 276.)
Barron Hill House, Bailey, Howth, Co. Dublin.
Arval or Avril Bread.
(Folk-Lore, xxviii. p. 303 ff.)
My mother, aged 67, who was brought up in Westmoreland, has frequently told me of the custom of providing arval bread at funerals; she always said arval and never avril. She spoke as if she remembered this quite well, and I have always thought that the custom was still prevalent amongst the old families of Troutbeck and Applethwaite when she was a girl, but that it was rapidly dying out.
As far as I recollect she spoke of different kinds of arval bread: (1) Small cakes of unleavened wheaten bread, generally baked at home. (2) Small thick oat biscuits, quite different from the usual Westmoreland oatcake, which is wafery and baked on large sheets. This, too, was usually if not always baked at home. When not baked at home these oaten biscuits and also the unleavened wheaten cakes were baked by a relative, friend, or near neighbour. (3) Small spiced cakes or sweet biscuits which could be purchased from a shop in Windermere or Kendal.
The cakes or biscuits were, I think, always round, but I am uncertain as to the size, except that they were smallish. They were wrapped in paper, and sometimes a funeral card was
