The area of Axholme, only eight miles to the west of Scunthorpe, has a history teeming with incident and myth, yet it has suffered from the fate of most borderlands in the chronicles: being neglected as neither one nor the other. Is it Yorkshire or Lincolnshire, or some of both? Records of the area often mention Cornelius Vermuyden, the seventeenth century Dutch engineer who managed to convert a large area of the Isle from marsh to good farming country, but even this advance, as Colin Ella makes clear, caused local rebellions and The Drainage saw ‘sporadic rioting for almost a century.’
The land in question is along the Trent at the eastern side, from Amcotts down to Gunthorpe, and then to Crowle moors and Wroot in the west. In the centre of all this is the Wesley home of Epworth rectory, and even this place of pilgrimage has not been free of conflict and strife. Something about the Isle generates characters, but also a particular type of enmity and fierce local pride. Some account for the myths around the place by mentioning ley lines; but much of the explanation rests on the distance from any really large settlement in years gone by, and the insular nature of the attitudes bred. It could be summed up in the phrase ‘stubborn independence.’
Even when Axholme had a brief self rule, in the Saxon period, there was murder. A deep rift between the Mercian king and Ornulff ended in the latter’s banishment. He had had an affair with Elfrida, the proposed future king’s wife. Ornulff, sent as an emissary, fell in love with her himself and they married and had a child. When he was told to come home, Ornulff wisely left the country and kept out of the way for a long time.
The story came to a head when Ornulff, in possession of a letter from the Pope, returned home, thinking that all would be forgotten. He was wrong: letter from the Pontiff or not, the man was knifed, and the tale is that Elfrida was ruined and crazed by this and soon the king was defeated. Ornulff’s son reigned in Axholme following this. The story shows the basic northern tendency never to forgive and to bear a grudge forever, and that is probably the point of the tale, almost a parable.
The Wesley’s home, a prominent tourist attraction today, on the south side of the village, is reputed to have its ghost, but aside from paranormal activity, the life of the Wesley family there tells us a great deal about the law and order – or lack of it – in the Isle in past centuries. Samuel, John’s rector father, was always subject to his home and grounds being packed with parishioners rioting, barracking and making their objections to him known. The English custom of ‘rough music’ was rife then, and as Samuel Wesley was a hard man who treated his family (daughters in particular) unfeelingly, at times he was far from popular.
Part of this rural Lincolnshire rough music was the stang nominy: local women had their own ways of meting out justice to a partner who was violent to a spouse. In Epworth at that time it would have been the ‘ran tan song’ that explains this:
Now all ye old women, and old women kind,
Get together and be in a mind;
Collar him, and take him to the shit-house,
And shove him over head …
Added to this treatment would be the visit to the tannery where they would ‘skelp’ his backside. In Lincoln in 1556, a woman called Emma Kirkby was sentenced to a rough music punishment for adultery: she was to be ‘ridden through the city and market in a cart and be rung out with basins.’
Nothing much changed in Victorian times: there was always the threat of riot and disturbance: in Axholme, at Owston, for instance, in 1873, a gang of youths caused fear and trembling in the church by rapping the pews, throwing wheat and yelling at everyone. In 1888, two men attacked a police constable; one of them fired a gun at the man and was lucky to do no harm. He was prosecuted for grievous bodily harm.
The Isle is on record as a place where violence settled many disputes and there is no doubt that rivalry between specific villages is at the heart of some of this. The Haxey Hood game on 6 January still commemorates the old traditions of rough and physical confrontation, as two villages gather all the men together and play a primitive version of football/rugby with a woman’s hood.
Local historian, Colin Ella, sums up the Axholme history very well: he has summarised some of the crimes around Epworth, even back to the early seventeenth century, as recorded on the Court Rolls. The constables had a tough task, and perhaps the crimes recorded here are mostly concerned with maintaining the watch and the constables. It is surely symptomatic of the problems of the area when a certain John Fair was in court for failing to find a watch during a full day in June, 1625.