“We do not send them anywhere. Where would we send them. The chapel sits with them and the street feeds them and nobody writes to anybody, and I have known that arrangement four times and I would not tell you the names of any of them.”
As the chapel villages of the Blackdown coalfield tell it
A man came up wrong one year. Nobody in the village could say what had happened below, and he could not say it either. He sat where he had always sat and ate what was put in front of him, and he was not the man who had gone down. Before long the street had a word for it. He was ridden, they said, and the chapel was quick to tell anybody who asked that it was not the church’s word.
Nobody sent for anybody. The chapel sat with him in turns, the street fed him, and the neighbours worked out between them whose night it was. The chapel wrote him into its book, as it writes everybody, and waited. Most entries in that book close. The man mends, or the man dies, and somebody writes down which.
His did neither. Depending on who is telling it, he is still in the house at the end of the row, or in a house like it in the next village along. His entry has no end to it. No rite has been said over him and no officer has been fetched, because fetching one means fetching the rest. What the chapel will say, if it says anything at all, is that sitting with him seems to have been enough.
What is known
The pit villages are about eighty years old, chapel rather than parish, with no incumbent; their dead are burnt with the city’s. Most of what the word covers is not possession, and in most cases the chapels could name the cause: injury underground, exhaustion, fever, drink or grief. Every chapel keeps a book from its settlement’s founding. A handful of such entries neither close nor end. Four such people are being kept now, with no rite, blessing or suppression asked. No chapel has counted its own and nobody outside has read a page.
The county has no examiner. Between 4590 and 4620 its assizes hanged thirty-one people on indictments alleging a power, and in twenty-six the power was laid beside another charge. One case, tried in 4607, ended in a hanging within the day and a burning, with no attendance, rite or suppression entered anywhere. The chapel books and the assize calendar have never been laid side by side. The word is the pit villages’ own.