It is a curious characteristic of intelligent people that they only begin to value their cultural inheritance highly when it is in danger of disappearing for ever over the cliff-edge of time – at which point they seize the tip end of its tail and exert tremendous energy in trying to haul it back. Usually what happens is that the tail comes away in their hands, and the body is lost – to become, in time, ‘the evidence’ by which the archaeologist supports the anthropologist in reconstructing a picture of a period or a society gone by. So it was with the great corpus of folk tale that must have existed orally everywhere in England until the great changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Masses of people pulled up their roots in rural areas and moved to the growing towns, living for the first time among people from other districts who were, to all intents and purposes, ‘foreigners’ to them. There can be little doubt that they all took their culture (and their tales) with them, and that for a short period, at least, there would be interchange and melding, resulting in modification of details carefully preserved until then. But such a period could not have lasted long, because the towns themselves began to generate a culture of their own which, once it had become established, chose to despise its own rural origins. (Two-generation industrial workers in Peterborough made no bones about referring to us fen-dwellers from Ramsey as ‘country bumpkins’, even though we knew them and their families personally, and could still point to the tiny turf-diggers’ dwellings from which their grandfathers had walked to try their luck in the town.)
I found an astonishingly clear example of the survival of this attitude in a book I read just recently. This was a sociologically-slanted survey of a street in Northampton, where a community spirit has survived because so many of its present population have a common rural background. The author appeared to deplore this shared thread of identity, in particular as it is evidenced by the continued use of country idiom still retained from former times.
The passage roused in me emotions of anger and distress amounting almost to fury. For one thing, the very idioms he chose to castigate were those that might very well rise to my own tongue at any moment anywhere, while chatting in a village shop or delivering a lecture at a university; but in another, less personal but much stronger fashion, I was perturbed by the implied pejorative attack on this sort of language in general.
I regard such idiom, and its metaphorical content, as what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘the native thew and sinew of the language’. To the modern town-bred author, it appeared to be a ready-made, almost ‘processed’ or ‘convenience’ language denoting in its users sluggish, unoriginal minds that had not progressed at all since leaving the lumpish countryside. In my view, such idiom indicates the essential nature of our linguistic heritage. It is a point to which I shall return.
The terrible conditions of the early industrial towns were adverse to the preservation of oral rural culture because there could have been little time or energy left for tale-telling at the end of a working day; and in any case the spread of literacy, beginning in the towns and extending gradually to the surrounding countryside, removed the need to memorize, so that the actual faculty for recalling and recounting an oral tale began to atrophy. The result was that the great body of oral tradition was already a long way down the cliff-face when the antiquarians of the nineteenth century grabbed at what was left and managed to save a considerable amount. From Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudoxia Epidemica (1646), through Aubrey, Brand, Strutt, Sinclair and Hone (plus the Gentleman’s Magazine) there was a thin but tough thread of continuity to help them in their task, and the sudden surge of interest culminated in the foundation of the Folklore Society in 1878. These nineteenth-century collectors were, almost without exception, educated men who were collecting as amateurs, in the strictly literal sense of that term; but it was from ‘the folk’, and mainly the folk of rural England, that they gathered the tales – and from our vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, it is easy to understand some of their difficulties.
In the first place, the countryman has no predilection for being either despised or exploited, and his shrewd intelligence warned him that educated clergymen out with their notebooks were ‘after something’, which probably had the effect of sealing an otherwise loquacious labourer’s lips. If the listener showed the least sign of condescension, he would in all probability either receive in return nothing but a series of unintelligible grunts, or be sent away in possession of what we should now designate as ‘a load of old cobblers’. We have a strangely parallel phenomenon occurring today, when sociologists with tape recorders are setting out from universities to make surveys of villages here, there and everywhere. This is a laudable enterprise, in danger of foundering badly if the researchers do not understand absolutely the nature of the people they are interviewing, and fail to set out in possession of enough sociological knowledge to inform them how to begin on their task.
When, on retirement from full-time employment, I chose to go back to my native countryside, I was somewhat surprised and mystified to find myself viewed very much askance, and certainly not accorded the welcome I would have expected to be given to a fen-tiger returning home from choice and a genuine love both of the area and its people. My book Fenland Chronicle had proved that, and indeed had been very popular in the area. So why the obvious suspicion of me?
Then one day someone asked me outright if I was the person responsible for a recently published sociological survey of a nearby village. Resentment at conclusions drawn (and stated) from what had been given freely in conversation by the village people had, apparently, spread across the fens far and wide.
I heard another example only a week or two ago, of a team with a tape-recorder researching a village in a different area. They started by visiting the oldest couple, explained their purpose, and switched on the tape. Then the interviewer said to the old man, ‘Tell me first of all everything you can about your mother and your father.’ The old man remained dumb, and not another word from either of the couple was forthcoming. The reason, of course, was that the old man had been born illegitimate in a time when bastardy was an ineradicable stain on the character – a fact that a modern youngster was not in any way likely to appreciate. Any other beginning would have got him further!
We have the testimony of Arthur N. Norway to the truth of my assertions. When travelling in the West Country gathering material for his volume (published in 1919) in the Highways and Byways series, he met and commented upon it:
Tales such as these flutter round Devon as plentifully as bats flit across the chimneys of an ancient manor house; for in both Western counties the Keltic temperament has produced its full crop of superstition. There is hardly a cottage in the West where the incidents of domestic life are not affected almost daily by the welling up in the hearts of the people of some belief or prejudice so ancient that no centuries which we can count exhaust its life, but which has risen generation after generation, throbbing today as powerfully as a thousand years ago, if more secretly. Those who search openly for these beliefs will seldom find them; for the people hide them with a sedulous anxiety which springs, partly from pride in the old faiths which have become entirely their own since the world rejected them, and partly from timidity lest what they cherish and believe should be laughed at by superior persons. And so not the most sympathetic inquirer will learn much by directly questioning the peasants. He will be met at every turn by ‘Augh, tidd’n worth listening to by a gentleman’, and no persuasions will break down this attitude of reserve.
In another place, the same author touches upon one of the factors controlling the countryman’s attitude. It is the credulity of the listener. If he is prepared to believe, or, at any rate, in Coleridge’s words ‘to suspend disbelief’, then he is likely to be rewarded. It is obvious that it was this factor of credulity that hindered and perturbed a good many of the nineteenth-century collectors themselves, for in the hey-day of Victorian doctrinal Christianity, any semblance of belief, even half-admitted, must have seemed like heresy. A case in point is the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, a clergyman to whose interest in folk tales and folklore in general we owe a considerable debt. His Book of Folk-Lore begins with a description of how he himself (as a child) and subsequently his young son, had actually seen ‘the little people’; but this is followed immediately by an attempt to explain away the visions, by blaming them on imagination, derived from the too-vivid tales they had heard from their country nursemaids. It is, one feels, a sort of whistling in the dark by the reverend gentleman, to keep at bay any temptation to believe on his own part; but a few pages farther on, he tells the story of how the local sexton opened the grave, and the coffin, of his (the author’s) grandmother, a formidable old lady known as Madame Introduction Gould. When the sexton raised the coffin lid, the old lady sat up and glared at him. The sexton beat a hasty retreat, but Madame Gould followed him all the way home, so that when in terror he flung himself into bed by the side of his wife, she roused, and also saw the dead woman standing over them. This story is related by the Reverend Gould without a hint of any kind that he doubted the sexton’s word. Madame Gould had been seen by too many others in different places for his doubts on this to be genuine ones. The whole of the rest of the book displays the same ambivalent attitude. Again, there is a parallel today, in the recent rediscovery of ‘magic’ and ‘the paranormal’, in the growing interest in dowsing and ley-lines, and extrasensory perception of all kinds (as investigated, for instance, in the writings of Colin Wilson). The things that are not comprehensible in ordinary terms are ‘explained away’ by a variety of theories, mostly psychological – but they are not denied.
The folk who preserved, generation after generation, the stories we now call folk tales would, I feel sure, never have denied them. To understand the nature of the folk tale (whatever the definition of a folk tale may be), it is absolutely necessary to understand first the nature of the folk and their language, which in its turn reflects their thinking and their way of coping with life. They would not have asked, as Pontius Pilate did, ‘What is truth?’; but they would, if the truth of anything was being questioned, probably remark, ‘Truth’s at the bottom of the well’. In fact, they question not the existence or the nature of truth, but accept that it lies somewhere deep down and probably has to be searched for. And they use a terse and homely metaphor to express their philosophy, and expect other people to understand the extended meaning.
Writing in the introduction to his Teutonic Myth and Legend at the end of the nineteenth century, Donald A. Mackenzie states: ‘Not infrequently scholars, by a process of detached reasoning, miss the mark when dealing with folklore because their early years were not passed in its strange atmosphere.’ In this, perhaps, I have an advantage. I belong, unequivocally, to the folk themselves; people who are still born and bred in the tradition of tale-telling, listening, assimilating, eclectically remembering, and in their turn, recounting. In the ordinary way, they have no academic axe to grind, and seek no reward, not even that of private satisfaction such as motivates the desultory amateur collector. To hear and then disseminate such tales is as much a part of their ordinary fives as sitting down to Sunday’s dinner, or sluicing a sweating face with cold water. They appear to think nothing of, or about, the tales they tell, except for the pleasure of the telling, or, as the case may be, of listening in order to be able to cap one good tale with another.
To return for a moment to the present volume; there are many different reasons for publishing collections of so-called ‘folk tales’ beside the obvious one of giving the reader who likes such things some entertainment. They shed light, for instance, on history, particularly local history, by supplying details that the academic historian cannot find room for. The story of the Radcliffe family, as given in ‘The Gilstone Ghost’, is more likely to give an O-level history candidate a true grasp of the Stuart/House of Hanover conflict than many pages of dry historical ‘fact’ baldly stated. Equally, they can be regarded as matter relevant to the sociologist, providing sudden insights and examples of how common self-interest and group emotion operate, as in the local reaction expressed towards the fellow who made quite sure that ‘the witch’ of Tring did not escape drowning at her ‘trial’.
They cast, too, a gentle glow of illumination over the field of philosophy, demonstrating thought patterns and beliefs so old as to be almost instinctive, among people too uneducated to express them in accepted philosophical terms, but nonetheless very articulate when using their own linguistic patterns. And they intrigue the antiquary by sending him searching in his own mind after answers to questions with regard to the origins of some of these beliefs. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, for instance, derived the ubiquitous ‘death-coach’ stories in England from the Breton Ankou (La Mort, who travels about the countryside in a cart, picking up souls); but this in turn he connected with the Celtic goddess of Death, represented by the rude female figures carved in the chalk above some Celtic necropolises. In the same way, he thought our (once-popular) exclamation ‘What the Deuce?’ to be a reference back through the years to a belief in the god Tiu, the Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the Norse Tyr, the Latin Deus, Greek Zeus and Sanskrit Djous. Such amateur anthropological deductions pointed the way in turn to the other more scholarly works, for example, the brilliant seven-volume exegesis of Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough.
For the archaeologist as well, folk tales can occasionally give a sudden flash of understanding; a concrete example of this may prove interesting. The Icelandic Sagas (surely some of the most comprehensive and exciting collections of genuine folk tales in existence) make many references to objects called ‘life-stones’. In the tales, these life-stones appear to have magic-amulet properties, but are always mentioned in the context of the warrior’s most treasured possession, his sword. Folklorists were puzzled as to what these ‘life-stones’ could be; meanwhile, at the same time, archaeologists were equally puzzled about the objects found in warriors’ graves of the same period, which they designated ‘sword-beads’. These were large beads, which could be elaborately worked of gold inset with garnets, or made of meerschaum, of rock crystal, or of plain pottery; the thing they had in common was that they were always found lying next to the sword, usually by the side of the blade, a little way down from the hilt. Then, in the course of research centred specifically on swords of the Anglo-Saxon period in England, a flash of inspired insight made the connection. The life-stones of the tales and the sword-beads of the archaeologists were one and the same thing. Many a sword had its ‘good-luck’ bead. The warrior probably wore the bead (or life-stone) on a thong round his neck when alive; in his grave, it was attached to his sword, the thong looped round the sword hilt, so that the bead lay alongside the blade. The thong rotted away, and left the bead lying.
Then there is the study of the tales themselves, that is, with regard to the different types within the genre as a whole, the different but ever-recurring motifs, the location of different variations, and so on; this is the realm of the modern academic folklorist per se as, for example, the late Katharine Briggs, whose four-volume Dictionary of British Folk-Tales will be referred to later.
And lastly, though by no means least, there is great value in them for the entertainer, by which I really mean, any story-teller. Teachers of young children, particularly, are for ever on the watch for stories to tell or to read, for it seems that mankind is born with an avid appetite for details of other lives beside the one his own small span of corporeal existence grants to him; it is as though he seizes from his earliest years upon this way of enlarging the bounds of his own life. Teachers look to folk tales more and more as the treasury from which they can draw, day after day and year after year, for their exacting needs. (In passing, it is worth remarking how the majority of teachers will scour the world for tales to tell their pupils and forget that their own country has a wealth of them. Very few other than the so-called ‘fairy tales’, and the deservedly well-worn ‘matter of England’ about King Arthur, ever find their place in our schools.)
The need and desire for stories is, apparently, a psychological one that people never grow out of, which must be why they sit, hour after hour, with their eyes fixed on a television screen. The box in the corner is today’s equivalent of the story-teller. Sound radio is nearer still to the original, since it deals with words more than with pictures, and thereby allows more scope to individual imagination. It is also an interesting thought that both radio and television have proved beyond doubt the need for humanity to share ‘community tales’ with each other. Coronation Street and The Archers provide simultaneously membership of a closed community and the tales of lives within it. Perhaps both are truly necessary to a great many who feel lost and isolated in the conditions of modern society. Indeed it may not be going too far to designate either of these programmes (and others of a similar nature) as ‘modern folk tales’.
There are still many, however, who love the old tales better than the new, and like to read them for themselves. The purpose of this book is to give Everyman a chance to do just that. I hope the entertainment value in the wide variety of types of tale I have selected will be enough to keep him reading, whatever other ‘spinoffs’ of interest there may be. But the comfortable simplicity of such a statement of aim or purpose disappears Tike dew against the sun’ when it comes to deciding what to put in, and what to leave out. What constitutes a ‘folk’ tale?
Much has been written about this, and it is no part of my task here to make a comparative study of such academic research. Nevertheless, everyone who for any purpose begins to deal seriously with the genre has perforce to reach some conclusions of his own before being able to proceed. I shall, in the course of this introductory dissertation, be obliged to reach a point where I can state fairly firmly the ‘definition’ I have made for myself; but this requires a lot of thought, and much weighing of other people’s arguments. I begin with two main ideas. One is that any definition seems to depend upon the purpose to which the tales are being put; where there is a declared and specific purpose, the definition of the author or compiler (implied if never exactly stated) is angled towards the purpose, and the selection of tales thereafter is governed by it. The second is that in my own case the main criterion on which I begin my selection is the question of a tale’s intrinsic validity (call it ‘truth’ if you will) with regard to the nature of the folk and their philosophy.
Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, writes, ‘Folktales are a faithful reflection of the world as it appeared to the primitive mind.’ Sir James was, of course, an antiquarian/anthropologist with a specific purpose in mind. He was looking backwards into time past, and was concerned mainly with ‘primitive’ minds. With his attention fixed upon his immediate purpose, he ignored the fact that the present is the child of the past, and the future of the present. He tells many an excellent tale in passing, if in brief, to prove a specific point, but without intending to supply entertainment for those who do not care much about ‘the succession to the priesthood of Diana in Aricia’. It would amount almost to an insult to apply his (implied) definition to Coronation Street or The Archers – or, on second thoughts, would it? If one were to substitute for his word ‘primitive’, which has pejorative connotations, the word ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’, it would be apt. Are not those programmes ‘a faithful reflection of the world as it appears’ to the countless thousands of their fans?
In an essay, on ‘Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales in the Lives of Children’, which stands as an introduction to her brilliant book for teachers, The Ordinary and the Fabulous, Elizabeth Cook writes:
In rough and ready phrasing myths are about gods, legends are about heroes, and fairy tales are about woodcutters and princesses. A rather more respectable definition might run: myths are about the creation of all things, the origin of evil, and the salvation of man’s soul; legends and sagas are about the doings of kings and peoples in the period before records were kept; fairy tales, folk tales and fables are about human behaviour in a world of magic, and often become incorporated in legends.
She then goes on to say that while critics argue endlessly about the differences, to the ordinary reader they all appear very much alike. In other words, she is admitting that, in this particular field, any definitions are more academic than practical, except to the person attempting to make them. But she hits the nail on the head, I think, by saying that ‘folk tales are about human behaviour’, and the only quarrel I would have with her is that I would have wanted to qualify the rest of the statement by the inclusion of the word ‘often’ – that is ‘often’ (but not always) ‘in a world of magic’.
Katharine Briggs, in her monumental work already cited, took on the enormous task of collecting, collating, categorizing and commenting upon the huge corpus of English folk tale (though she has to admit that she had perforce to leave a good deal out). She divided the mass of her material into two main categories, ‘Folk Narrative’ and ‘Folk Legend’, and distinguished between them by stating that the former is composed of ‘folk fiction’ and the latter of matter ‘which was once believed to be true’.
I have some difficulty in accepting this rather arbitrary distinction. Fiction is, from its etymological root, something deliberately made up, and therefore declaring itself to be ‘not true’. That fiction (particularly the works of creative literary genius) is often a better reflection of the human condition than a bald recital of true facts, cannot be denied, and that the folk would have understood the metaphorical truth of such fictions as they heard, I am equally prepared to believe; in fact, this is the cornerstone of my argument set out below. Nevertheless, I find it almost impossible to conceive of the folk actually deliberately concocting tales from no root of factual or historical truth whatever. My contention is that however fantastic genuine folk tales may be (as for example, the story of Bolster and Jecholiah), they have grown to what they are from some germ of belief somewhere in centuries long past. If they had sprung, ready-made, as it were, like Athene from the thigh of Jove, the folk would not have claimed them, nor repeated them without qualification. That they embroidered the basic elements of a story with a wealth of fantastic detail as it passed from mouth to mouth, I accept entirely and without question, and this must blur the dividing line between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’. ‘Folk narrative’ must have included fiction – which is somewhat different from classing all folk narrative as fiction.
The so-called ‘fairy tales’ are a case in point; not the stories of folk who have encountered the little people, which in my opinion are genuine folk tales, but those concerning ‘princesses and woodcutters’. These are, I believe, courtly in origin, fiction deliberately created by court minstrels for the beguiling of the knightly classes, which gradually descended to the peasants and, later still, to children. (We now use the term ‘fairy tale’ very loosely, and collections made for children often include some ‘folk’ tales, which again helps to confuse the issue.) I would exclude the courtly ‘fairy tales’ from the folk tale genre on the grounds that, though they may have been told by the folk, they were not believed, either factually or metaphorically; whereas I think the genuine folk tale contained something in which the teller could believe, and indeed, often did, in all its detail. Let me give an example from my own experience.
As a child, I remember the occasion when my mother and her closest friend discussed, in my hearing, a dreadful tragedy that had occurred in a village just too far away from us for actual contact to be made with the people who lived there. It was harvest-time, and the women were out in the fields (as ours were) helping their menfolk to get the corn in. A mother had taken her baby with her, put it down in the shade of a stook, and left it asleep there. When she returned to it, it had been eaten by a sow that had escaped its sty and wandered into the field. My mother and my ‘aunt’ (by courtesy) were horrified by the tragedy, and shed tears of anguished sympathy combined with terror that it might have been me, or my cousin, Marjorie, to whom it had happened. They believed it absolutely.
Twenty-five years or so later, we were in the middle of a war when every pair of hands was needed to gather crops. I was staying with my sister, a farmer’s wife. A field of peas was ready for picking, and we went to help get them in, along with a lot of other women from the village. My daughter was eight months old, and I took her with me, in her pram, leaving her at the side of the field. She fell out, having managed yet again to escape her straps, and was found by one of the village women sleeping quite peacefully among the pea rows. The woman grabbed her up, brought her to me, and proceeded in great agitation to recount the dreadful fate of a baby who had done exactly the same thing as my own in a village a few miles away – in a pea-field – and had been devoured by a hungry sow. There is no question whatsoever that my baby’s rescuer believed implicitly what she was telling me. So might I have done, had I not remembered the first time I had heard it. Years afterwards, when I had become an avid reader of folklore myself, I met it in a nineteenth-century book, which stated that it had by then been long in existence, turning up somewhere fresh every year with the details slightly changed. My guess is that it goes back to a real tragic occurrence when a wild sow did attack a peasant child, probably in the early Middle Ages.
Now if we need to question why people in the twentieth century who are not ‘primitive-minded’, not gullible country bumpkins, not now out of touch with the big world outside their village community, should believe such tales, the answer is that there are various levels of ‘truth’. A tale such as the one I have just recounted is ‘a faithful reflection of the world’ as it appears to them (and as no fictional courtly ‘fairy tale’ could possibly be). It reflects the kind of tragedy that does, all too often, disturb the tenor of rural life – the child who is drowned, run over by a tractor, gored by a bull, smothered in a wheat-drier – and so on. In a small community, one person’s tragedy is everybody’s tragedy, because next time the little corpse might be brought home to anybody. Their belief is in the reflection, but it is nevertheless very real. And the reason for this is to be found in the metaphorical nature of the language they have always used, and continue to use. Whether it be a question of the use of metaphor, or ritual sacrifice, ‘the folk’ everywhere are conditioned to the idea of substituting the particular for the general, the reflection for the reality.
It has often been noted what an extraordinarily metaphorical language English is. We hardly ever open our mouths to speak without employing some kind of metaphor, usually so common that it passes unnoticed, and so general that we should find difficulty in making plain our meaning easily without it. Behind such a metaphorical way of communicating lies metaphorical thinking.
Country folk speak much in proverbs, sayings, and saws, many of them very old indeed. The difference between a proverb and a saying is, I think, that the first is probably used nationwide, and the second may be localized. A proverb is a crystal of wisdom left at the bottom of the crucible of human experience, summed up in a few words. The metaphor employed is usually a very homely one, so that all who will may benefit by it. ‘When the cat’s away, the mice will play.’ Everybody knows what it means – but how many pages of psychological jargon would it take to explain such ordinary reactions of human nature to specific conditions, I wonder? The proverb does it in eight words; the difficulties of ‘mice’ in the presence of a ‘cat’ are those that peasants have had good reason to understand since time began. The old fable (folk tale) ‘Belling the Cat’ simply extends the metaphor of the proverb.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of these sayings ready at hand for use (which is what some people seem to find so reprehensible). ‘Visitors and fish stink after three days’ keeping’, my father used to say. How many a host or hostess must have acknowledged the truth of that one, for instance!
Far from showing sluggish, uncreative minds or thought processes, it seems to me that they incorporate the very essence of English wit; and they have other, social, uses. Within a small community, this type of short-hand communication is like a badge of membership, a token of’belonging’, while at the same time relating the local and particular to the general in the world outside the community. Moreover, we ‘heir it’ (as my folks would say) from our ancestors. It is undeniably part of our cultural inheritance.
We are wont to call ourselves Anglo-Saxon – a foolish term, like calling ourselves English-English, since there was so very little difference between Angles and Saxons anyway. We could be better described as Celtic-Norse. The indigenous Britons at the beginning of our history were basically Celtic (with a smattering of Latin blood thrown in); the successive waves of invaders – Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans – were all basically Teutonic. From the Celtic strain we inherit the love of words, the need to use words as a means of coming to terms with experience, the willingness to believe in mysteries of a supernatural kind, and the desire to communicate joy or sorrow with our neighbours. From the Norsemen we inherit a fear of the supernatural, a stolid acceptance of the idea of fate or ill-fortune, and the resolution to meet it with as much outward indifference as possible (the ‘stiff upper lip’); but from them too we have the habit of attempting to avert it by refusing to name what we fear, and to speak in riddles (or metaphors). From both sides, of course, we inherit the love of a good tale.
The Norseman had a custom called ‘kenning’ – that is, of not calling a spade a spade. He invented some euphemism for almost every article upon which his life depended, so he might well have called a spade ‘disturber of the ground’ or ‘worm-slicer’, if he had need to invent a kenning for such an instrument. To a Viking, his sword was not simply a sword, but ‘Odin’s flame’, ‘the widow-maker’ or ‘the scabbard’s tongue’; his arrows were ‘birds of the string’, ‘glad-fliers’ or ‘the rain of the bow’; his shield was ‘the land of arrows’ or ‘the net of spears’; his ships (among a wealth of other kennings) were ‘ravens of the wind’, and the sea was ‘the whale’s way’.
As an example of how we continue to follow in their linguistic footsteps, consider the number of expressions we employ to avoid admitting that human beings die. There’s a lovely passage in Noël Coward’s play, This Happy Breed, when someone makes a remark to the effect that dear mother has passed on, and is met by an exasperated rejoinder that mother neither passed on, passed over, nor passed out – she died! The mirror up to nature: people in our society rarely die. They depart this life, pass on, pass over, pass out, peg out, breathe their last, fall asleep in Jesus, hop the twig, snuff the candle, kick the bucket, slip their cable, give up the ghost, shrug off this mortal coil, are gathered to their fathers, turn up their toes, fly to Abraham’s bosom, cease to be, go to meet their maker, and ‘are no more’. The list is as endless as a Viking’s kennings for his horse or his boat. The translators of the Bible into the Authorized Version, and their contemporary, Shakespeare, relied absolutely upon the people’s ability to interpret metaphor. Until very recently, the Bible in particular was, like proverbs and country sayings, universal verbal currency that opened up the lanes of communication. We still give honour and praise to the poet who can create striking images, that is, present reflections of experience to which we can relate.
From a phrase to a fable is a small step, as we have seen in the example of the cat and the mice. The parables of Christ are only extended metaphors. Surely nobody has ever been expected to believe the actual details of his parables factually true? He rarely specified ‘which man’ had ‘which vineyard’ or the exact place where the talent was hidden; what was true to his listeners was the setting, the recognizable human characteristics, the common experience – the essential truths, valid for his audience.
Folk tales belong to the same category as the parables – not just the fables and moral exempla, but all of them. They are the currency of common experience, extended metaphors that reflect the image of reality. They go with the metaphorical, often witty language the countryman is still capable of extemporizing, rely though he may on the old sayings for much of his time. George Eliot observed this ability with accuracy in the last century, and gives brilliant examples of it. ‘Some folks go on talking, like some clocks go on striking, not to tell you the time, but because there’s something wrong with their insides.’ I can vouch for it that in spite of radio and television, the ability still exists, though it may not for much longer, lacking, as it does now, constant example. In my childhood, local preachers told many a folk tale from the pulpit, as a moral example, using the metaphorical vernacular to do so. How many politicians or trade union leaders would nowadays employ the same simple expedient to get their meaning over quickly and succinctly? None, more’s the pity! Instead, they learn the current dreadful, meaningless jargon, and stupefy rather than enlighten their listeners. Not that they eschew metaphor altogether; but they have lost the knack of it, and muddle us with talk of ‘triggering thresholds’ and the like. Jargon is the replacement for the naturally metaphorical vernacular of the people. If their speech reflects their thinking, then there are many professionals and politicians, trade union leaders and civil servants who know not what they do. They are not merely neglecting a glorious heritage of wonderful language; they are obscuring the paths of truth.
I hope this lengthy digression has not led us too far from the main thread of my argument, which is that to be valid, a folk tale must have enough truth in it somewhere, even if it is only reflected truth, to enable the folk to believe it. If they thought it ‘fiction’ they would not repeat it. To my paternal grandmother, novels were suspect (though all her children were insatiable readers of the novel). ‘Fiction’ was Ties’, and Ties’ were sinful – but the same old lady was a mine of folk tale, especially with regard to the number of ghosts and apparitions she had personally encountered.
Nevertheless, no one can deny the fact that whatever germ of truth a tale begins from, it gets changed, shaped, altered by omissions, overloaded with additions, and embroidered with detail as it is handed along from generation to generation and from place to place. This is largely because story-telling is an art, and all artists are given some licence with their material. The good story-teller selects what elements he wants to suit his immediate audience, and then shapes his tale to please them, couching it in the kind of language he hopes will catch their attention and stir their emotions. The good storyteller enhances the basic, universal truth with his details; the bad one obscures it.
Let us take a specific example of a ‘folk tale’, and examine its history, as far as we know about it, and the changes time has wrought upon it. There are few children in the English-speaking world who, by the end of their schooldays, have not heard of the exploits of the Indian brave, Hiawatha; he belongs now to their world of heroes in the same way as King Arthur and Robin Hood do. How does this happen?
The choice of an example from the New World is deliberate, because it allows us to examine objectively a process that has been going on so long with regard to our own heritage that we are often quite unable to see the wood for the trees. When white men first heard Indian tales, they got them first hand – but the process of mutation then continued, in print, in much the same way as it had previously done in oral tradition.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) was an American explorer and ethnologist who in 1822 became Indian agent for the tribes living in the Great Lakes district of North America. He married the granddaughter of an Indian chief, living with and among the Indians for a period of nearly thirty years altogether. He interested himself in everything concerning the folklore of what was a threatened if not already a vanishing people. (The term folklore was coined in 1846 to describe the study of traditions, beliefs, customs, rituals and superstitions of the ordinary folk everywhere.) Schoolcraft was able to observe much Indian lore at first hand; but it became clear to him that the origins of much of it lay far, far back in the history of the tribes, and that understanding of the observable lore was wrapped up in the oral traditions that had been handed down from generation to generation, retained in the memory of men whose chief duty to their tribe was to learn it, assimilate it, and in due course pass it on. (This was part of the shaman’s role in most primitive societies, an element of his priestly duty.)
Schoolcraft listened, collected, and wrote down what he heard. In 1847 he was authorized by Congress to make his research official. The result was a six-volume work entitled Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Conditions and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States. It is somewhat to be doubted if the matter contained in so formidable a work would ever have reached a wide public direct. But Schoolcraft had, in 1839, published a few of the Indian legends separately. They fell into the hands of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet, and inspired him to write what he himself called ‘The Indian Edda’ – The Song of Hiawatha. It is, to quote Longfellow himself:
founded on a tradition prevalent among the North American Indians, of a person of miraculous birth who was sent among them to clear their rivers, forests and fishing grounds, and teach them the arts of peace. He was known among the different tribes by the several names of Michabou, Chiabo, Manabozo, Tarenyawagon, and Hiawatha.
(He then acknowledges his debt to Schoolcraft, and tells the reader where to look for the original, heard by Schoolcraft from an Onandaga chief.) Then he goes on:
Longfellow inserted this note, in 1842, at the head of the poem whose (un-Indian-like) rhythm caught the public fancy. Its popularity soared like a rocket, and it has, in the intervening 150 years, never been wholly out of favour; moreover, it has been translated into prose, art, music – even into comic-strip – as one purveyor of the tale has succeeded another in selecting what he needed for his work, not from Schoolcraft, but from Longfellow. Schoolcraft collected the basic elements of truth, as far as ‘the truth’ could be ascertained after centuries of oral tradition; but his account by chance reached a story-teller who, as an artist in his own right, used poetic licence on the original. All the god-hero’s other personae he eclipsed, leaving Hiawatha supreme: he changed the tribe, and gave the story a specific location of his own choosing; and he deliberately wove into the tale details from others belonging to different tribes. The result was not history, not the study of folklore, not education, but pure entertainment (though, as an educationist of long standing, I must here insert my lifelong conviction that you can’t have one of the last two without the other).
What Longfellow did was to reach down for the essentials of his story, trim away some details and add others, till the result was a sort of archetypal tale that could be understood by those who had no previous knowledge of the Red Man.
The attraction of Longfellow’s Hiawatha has since then probably been the bait that has lured many an anthropologist back to a more profound and academic study of the American Indian. Such a researcher would not look for historical truth in Longfellow’s poem (though he might very well find it. The National Film Board of Canada have recently made a film of an Indian constructing a birch-bark canoe in the way of his forefathers. ‘Hiawatha’s Fishing’ describes the identical process step by step.) Neither would the anthropologist trust Longfellow, Schoolcraft, or even the Onandaga chief absolutely on matters of history, since common sense would tell him, if other evidence did not, that tales handed down over many generations must have lost much in the way of fact, and gained much in the way of embroidered detail. Nevertheless, they might serve to corroborate other historical evidence, and supply, as nothing else could, the intangible atmosphere of times gone by.
Let us now look at a similar example from our own country. I was brought up on the story of the ‘soldier’, Matcham, who gave his name to a little bridge spanning a brook on a road where now runs the A1 in Cambridgeshire. The version my father told was of a soldier who killed a drummer-boy who insisted on following him, and buried the body near the bridge, which lay at the bottom of a gentle incline. Then he went on his way, for many years, carrying his guilty secret with him, until a compulsion to visit the scene of his crime became too strong for him, and sent him back; and as the dreadful spot at last came into view from the top of the incline, the stones of the road gathered themselves together and rolled uphill to meet him. Terrified, he turned and fled from them, to give himself up to be hanged. This was to us a local story, Matcham’s Bridge being about fifteen miles from my native village. It had obviously been handed down orally, coming to me through about six generations, allowing thirty years to a generation. The story is given in the Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Great Britain (1973). In this account, Gervase Matchem (sic) was a sailor who committed his crime in 1780, but was compelled by an encounter with his victim’s ghost on Salisbury Plain to return and give himself up to justice. He was hanged in chains at Brampton Hut (now a hotel on the A1). There, one night, a gang of local youths dared each other to offer the corpse a drink. One of them accepted the dare, and as he held up the mug towards the corpse, a ghostly voice commanded him to ‘Cool it! Cool it!’ This version omits entirely the spine-chilling supernatural element of the stones rolling uphill (the bit that affected me most of all when I heard it as a child); and adds another ‘supernatural’ bit which I think must be a fairly recent updating of the tale. What had, in fact, happened to the story in the meantime?
Gervase Matchan (sic) made a full confession, before being hanged, to a local clergyman, the Reverend J. Nicholson of Great Paxton. In it, he recounted the story of his whole life, including the crime, and what followed up to the moment when he gave himself up. The case was, not unnaturally, reported in the newspapers of the time, though no doubt in garbled fashion.
From these reports Richard Harris Barham, better known to us as Thomas Ingoldsby, took the elements for his poem The Dead Drummer’, included in The Ingoldsby Legends (published in 1840, some sixty years after Matchan’s execution). Ingoldsby certainly took liberties with the original tale. In his poem, Matchan, under the assumed name of Harry Waters, encountered the ghost of his victim one night while crossing Salisbury Plain with a sailor called Spanking Bill. The sight of the spectre, and the sound of his drum, had, so it seemed, never left him since the foul deed had been done years before; but the apparition on the wilds of Salisbury Plain in the middle of a storm at the very spot on which the crime had been committed at last broke his nerve, and he poured out his dreadful history (in verse) to Spanking Bill. According to it, he had done well in the Army, gained much promotion, and was looked up to and honoured by all. Being selected to fetch the regimental pay, he had been given ‘young drum’ Andrew Brand, to accompany him. As they were crossing Salisbury Plain, the temptation to kill his young, innocent and trusting companion was too strong for him, and he yielded to it.
‘Twas done! the deed that damns me – done
I know not how – I never knew; –
And HERE I stood – but not alone, –
The prostrate Boy my madness slew
Was at my side – limb, feature, name,
‘Twas He!! – another – yet the same.
The reader can, if he has the patience, read the rest of Ingoldsby’s lumbering poem for himself; he can also read for himself the version I have retold as ‘Truth, and Murder, Will Out’, in this volume. It is taken from Legends and Traditions of Huntingdonshire (1878) and is derived from Matchan’s own confession. So now we have at least four variations on the story. Unlike Longfellow, Ingoldsby, in my view, did harm to the tale. Why, for instance, change the name of the drummer-boy from Benjamin Jones to Andrew Brand? Why move the crime from Alconbury to Salisbury Plain? Why omit the accusing stones? Why make the spectre on Salisbury Plain that of his victim, when in reality that last horror was reserved for the very moment when Matchan might have reached the security of other human companionship? Such alterations did nothing for the elemental or moral truth of the effects of a guilty conscience, and confused the truth of effective detail – though I must say the constant presence of the dead boy’s ghost and the beating of his drum in the murderer’s ears would have been exactly the sort of yeasty supernatural concoction the folk would have enjoyed hearing.
It seems to me, though, that the version I first heard had been refined by telling to the essentials of both kinds of truth. I give the added details of the actual gibbet as sent to Notes and Queries by the Reverend R. E. Bradley, who under the pseudonym of Cuthbert Bede was a fairly regular contributor to that paper, related to him by an old man who remembered Matchan’s corpse hanging in its chains.
The gibbet was at the scene of the crime, that is on the side of the old Great North Road, near the village of Alconbury – not at Brampton Hut, because the informant actually stated that it was ‘on the Buckden Road before Peacham’s Hut’. So there was no question of it being outside a hostelry. The ‘Cool it’ detail perhaps arose after the gibbet was erroneously placed in memory outside the inn known now as Brampton Hut.
Many of the stories retold in this volume can be found, sometimes in several different versions, in the collections of the dedicated antiquarians of the nineteenth century, or of such indefatigable modern collectors as Christina Hole and Ruth Tongue; they can be checked again in the comprehensive and erudite works of eminent folklorists such as Katharine Briggs, whose Dictionary of British Folk-Tales has a bibliography that should satisfy even the most persistent seeker after original sources. My task is to tell the tales and not to put anything but the tale itself between me and the reader. In writing down these tales again, I am simply assuming the mantle of those among the folk themselves who knew a good tale when they heard it, and enjoyed passing it on.
Folk tales are tales that belong to the folk, tales that they told each other. Whatever purpose occasioned the telling – in the first instance, perhaps it was no more than the passing on of a bit of news, to emphasize a moral or give a warning to the young, or simply to pass an idle hour – it also occasioned communication between people, and countered shared experience with shared emotion. The act of telling in itself raised the pulse-rate of life, and sent warmth along the arteries of the community. As to the matter a tale contained, it could be anything from a centuries-old legend based on history to the latest nine days’ wonder in the next village; the story of a departed local hero, or the latest bit of foolery and skulduggery by Billy Tibbs next door. My working definition of a folk tale is simplicity itself. It is a tale that ‘the folk’ have liked well enough to remember and go on repeating to each other until somebody has finally ‘collected it’ and written it down.
Those tales that interest them, the folk hold in memory. Those that make no impact on them, they are content to forget; but the talk goes on. In this way, stories that originate in one locality gradually migrate to other places far afield, with details marginally altered to suit fresh topography, custom and characteristics. In the leaky vessel of human memory, essential details only are retained, and the less important ones allowed to drain away like whey from the curds of cheese. Moreover, in this process the details, like the fragrances in a pot-pourri, become so subtly intermingled that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from another, or to reallocate any to its origin. This widespread generality gives the academic researcher much trouble, and constrains him to categorize the material of his collection into groups with similar motifs, or to give a dozen variants of the same story with painstaking detail of how and where it was collected. To the folk themselves, such things do not matter – or, at least, did not matter until they saw in print that a story they had always thought of as theirs was said to ‘belong’ to another region far away. The people of Gotham, in Nottinghamshire, no doubt now claim as their very own the story of the wise fools who attempted to hedge in the cuckoo, that by so doing they could ensure for themselves eternal spring; but it is on record that the people of St Ives, in Cornwall, are known to taunt the men of nearby Zennor by asking superciliously, ‘Who built a wall round the cuckoo?’ (to which the correct reply is – ‘And who thrashed the hake for disturbing the mackerel?’); while up in the Lake District the people of Borrowdale still smart under the sting of being called ‘Borrowdale Cuckoos’, for the very same reason.
Who shall now say with any real certainty to which of these regions this bit of folklore truly ‘belongs’? I have no doubt that it has variations in many another part of England, too – or at least, had, until allocated firmly to Gotham by the early folklorists. The folk themselves, in the past, would not have hesitated to recount it against any ‘foreign’ locality, once they had heard it, to prove their own superiority of thought and reason; or, quite as possibly, to turn it against themselves, because one of the more delightful characteristics of those with their roots deep in English soil is the ability to direct a joke back home. Another example is that of ‘The Wild Hunt’. The version I have chosen is only one of those originating in the West Country. Katharine Briggs tells an entirely different one under the title of ‘Dando and his Dogs’, in volume one of the Dictionary of British Folk-Tales.
It may surprise some that what has been said above about tale-telling is couched in the continuous present tense. Surely, they will say, the age of ‘the folk’ who told each other such tales is over, buried for ever with our grandfathers and grandmothers in their graves? Or that such story-telling belonged only to remote rural areas in days long past when there was nothing to do after dusk but to sit round a smoky hearth by the glow of a dim rushlight and regale each other with ‘old wives’ tales and lying legends’.
On the contrary; this is far too facile and even perhaps a little too patronizing a view of the folk and their lore. We are, of course, heavily indebted to the folklorists who have preserved for us many tales from the past that might otherwise well have been forgotten by now. But that does not mean that the practice of telling tales is dead, or that the body of such tales remaining in existence ever grows significantly less. New tales arise all the time to take the place of others dropped from the current repertoire.
It is the details that change, to keep up with the prevailing spirit of the times. Let us take an example of this. Many and widespread are the stories of hauntings at the scene of coaching accidents ‘in the olden days’. I was told one recently concerning a spot just outside Battle (Sussex) where the crash and confusion of colliding coaches, together with the shrieks of injured passengers and the screams of dying horses are to be heard, though nothing is to be seen. But what about the ubiquitous tale of the phantom hitch-hiker? That can be no older than fifty years at the very most because it concerns motor transport. A few years ago, the local evening paper in the Brighton area gave a good deal of space to reporting the alleged experiences of motorists who had picked up the blonde girl they had found, wearing only one shoe, walking in a dazed condition down the central white line of the main London to Brighton road. She was given a lift by car-drivers and motor-cyclists alike (apparently); all offered to take her home to the address she gave them, only to find, when they reached that destination, that they had no passenger. Worried and anxious, they knocked at the door to explain; inevitably, it was opened by the girl’s mother, who sadly explained that it was just a year – or two, or five – since her daughter had been killed in a road accident at the very spot where she had been picked up. Convincing, one may say, in its freshness, its local detail, and the apparent corroboration of living people. Unfortunately for those who want to claim this pathetic little wayfaring ghost for Sussex, the same story in all but the local detail was collected from several districts of the USA, and recorded in print in a book of American folklore as early as 1972 (Folklore of the American Land by Duncan Emrich, published by Little, Brown & Co., 1972). Last year I heard the same tale again from Horsham (West Sussex), with the detail slightly changed. The hitch-hiker was dripping wet, and the mother’s explanation was that her daughter had committed suicide in a local pool. And so on, and so on.
On Saturday evenings, nowadays, in pubs and clubs the length and breadth of the land, the talk is of the day’s football matches, with wild exaggeration of miraculous saves, or of the unmitigated stupidity of a botched goal, and the like. How long will it be before the ghost of a departed footballer appears to take a header that turns the fortunes of his erstwhile team? Some local noteworthy perhaps, or even one of the nationally mourned members of Manchester United’s team killed on the snowy runway of Munich airport. Who would there be to disprove such a claim? But there would be many who would love to repeat it, half afraid but at the same time half hoping and prepared to believe that it might just possibly be true!
I have included in this collection a story called ‘Time to Think’, which records a very strange experience in the words of my own brother, Gerald Edwards, to whom it happened, and who left it in a manuscript that he wrote just before his death in 1976. Apart from the fact that I should have no reason to disbelieve a brother who was generally a truthful man, it seems to me that the simplicity and sincerity with which it is recounted give it an undeniable air of credibility. At any rate, there is absolutely no doubt that my brother believed implicitly the story he was telling; and many who knew him personally would (perhaps will) retell it with conviction, knowing him to be a man to whom odd psychic experiences tended to happen (besides being able to charm away their warts). They will also, like me, remember the locality, the horse concerned, and the atmosphere of the twenties during which it occurred. The chances are that, by putting it into print here, we have launched a new ‘folk tale’.
Let me give another example, or even two or three, of how this sort of tradition works. I remember, as a child of about six years old, sitting on the lap of my favourite aunt. Her husband was engaged in his ritual Saturday ablutions, and had left on the table his silver pocket-watch, to which was attached a long silver chain with a genuine spade-guinea as a fob. It was a privilege to be allowed to examine the guinea and on this occasion, as my uncle was not present, I picked up the whole watch and chain. My aunt, carefully guarding it (and me) from any mishap, put the watch up against my ear, and asked, ‘What is it saying?’ Of course, to me it was only ticking. She said, ‘Isn’t it saying “Click-a-ma-click, wheel me round”?’ And she then proceeded to tell me the tale she had heard from her grandfather, about a gang of old fen-tigers in the turf-fen, who, on coming out of the turf-pit to knock off for the day, found a gold watch hanging by its chain from the high back of a turf-barrow. They had never seen such a thing before, and had no conception what it was, so they approached it with great circumspection, and refrained from handling it.
‘That’s somink alive,’ said one of them. ‘Look at its face.’
‘Ah bor! An’ look at its tail, an’ all,’ said another.
‘It’s a-talkin’!’ exclaimed a third, who was closer to it than the others. ‘I can ‘ear it!’
‘W’ass it say?’ inquired the fourth, anxiously. The man concerned leaned as near as he dared, and then said, ‘It’s a-saying “Click-ama-click! Wheel me round! Click-a-ma-click! Wheel me round!” ’
So instead of going home to their teas, the old fen-tigers took turns at wheeling the barrow gently round and round, till the strange thing they had found should get tired and countermand its orders.
And there the tale peters out, perhaps because my aunt didn’t remember the details of what happened at the end, or perhaps because after sixty years I can’t recall it. So unless some other fenman knows the tale in its entirety, it has been lost for ever.
But others will take its place. I was perhaps, a couple of years ago, in at the birth of such a one. I was having Sunday lunch, along with other members of my family, at the table of a prosperous fenland farmer. Some other members of the farmer’s wife’s family, and therefore distant relatives of my own, arrived unexpectedly, and the lunch lingered long into the afternoon as one topic after another familiar to us all was fished up for inspection and discussion. The talk turned suddenly to a family we all knew vaguely, in a village close by. One of the company asked, quite seriously, ‘How’s ——? I heard he ha’nt bin very well, lately.’
Now it so happened that our host (who still sat at the head of the table behind the ruins of a hearty meal) had only very recently been favoured with the confidences of the said sufferer – let’s call him Joe, though that wasn’t his name. Of this we were not aware, but as we all turned to look at our host, for some unexplained reason we all expected him to be able to answer the inquiry. It became obvious at once that he was undergoing an inward struggle as to how he should frame his answer. The extraordinary contrast between his concerned visage and the glitter of suppressed amusement in the twinkling eyes made it quite clear to me that he knew a good deal more than he was, for the moment, prepared to say. But the company was composed almost entirely of fen-folk, and what is more, of that particular pocket of peatland fenmen whose Celtic origins predominate. Every one of us had caught the first whiff of a good tale, and all of us knew that in this respect our host, like Oscar Wilde, could resist everything except temptation.
So he was tempted, gravely, by seriously phrased questions. A stranger among us would have been justified in thinking us all truly and deeply concerned about the well-being of our mutual acquaintance, Joe. The pressure on our host built up, and he gave in – as we had all known he would. He had been told the details in confidence, so he took the precaution of swearing us all to secrecy, and then proceeded.
I wish I could now tell the story as I heard it – but alas, it is too bawdy even for this day and age, except in the intimacy of old friends such as sat round the table that day.
Joe had, it appeared, been having some trouble in performing his conjugal functions, and in desperation had gone to see the doctor. The doctor had given him the very latest aphrodisiac drug on the market, and had, so it seemed, in ignorance and inexperience overdone the dosage. The resultant difficulties were what formed the core of the tale, as the doctor failed to provide an antidote and the poor sufferer was forced to try one extraordinary though homely expedient after another to cope with his embarrassing affliction.
Our host began the account with all due seriousness, as befits a true tale of misfortune; but by the time the first stifled giggle from one of us reached his ears, he had ceased to be a reporter, and had become a folk-tale-teller. Details began to proliferate – in which he was ably abetted by his wife – and the normal easy English of the farming community slipped farther and farther into the regional dialect, along with its local idiom and metaphor that made the telling brilliant. The rest of us were by this time laughing with tears running into our apple pie, and stuffing handkerchiefs or napkins into our mouths to prevent any sound escaping that should stop the marvellous flow of the tale.
How many of us have kept our pledge of secrecy, I wonder? I know I haven’t. Given the right company, I simply could not resist the temptation to retell it, any more than our host could. How long will it be before one of us repeats it to a grown-up grandson who by chance mentions Joe’s family name? My guess is that that tale will still be going the rounds when every one of us at the dinner-party, and even our grandchildren, are no more than specks in a dust-blow sweeping across the fens in May.
One last example. A friend of mine, most eminent in her own academic field of spoken English (Christabel Burniston, MBE), at Christmas 1979 sent round her usual newsletter. It contained sad tidings of her gardener, who had looked after her cottage in Cheshire for her for many years. She had found him dead in the garden, a spade in one hand and a plant in the other. But, she adds, his spirit seemed to have attached itself to the antique clock inside the hall of the cottage. Later in the evening on which he died she had noticed that the clock had stopped at 5.25 pm – the very time his body had been discovered. And supposing it to have run down, she began to wind the clock up, upon which it started to strike, and did so one hundred and thirteen times without stopping!
That story might have come from any village anywhere in England since the days that clocks were first invented, for the association of stopped clocks and continuous-striking clocks with death is one of the most widespread and universally attested superstitions I know.
So, again, to the present volume. The task I have undertaken is to select a few gems from the fabulous treasury of stories that have been collected, to add to them a few perhaps not so well known, and to retell them, not merely for the student, but for everyone who finds them entertaining and in some way useful.
There are a few obvious guidelines to be followed. One is to arrange the stories into recognizable groups without going deeply into the academic questions of type, motif, origin or popularity.
Another is to make a wide choice, geographically, of those tales that are unequivocally rooted in particular spots, buildings or local events. Such are the etiological tales relating to such things as standing stones, for example ‘The Rollright Stones’, ‘The Hurlers’, ‘The Devil’s Armful’; and those tales direct from history, for instance the story of Robert Lyde of Topsham, or the ordeal of ‘the witches’ of Tring in Hertfordshire. There are also in this group some romantic legends, for example ‘The Legend of Lyulph’s Tower’ and specific hauntings, as at Bisham Abbey (‘The Ghost of Lady Hobby’).
In other cases it is the district, rather than the precise locality, that sets its stamp on a tale; the details of an East Anglian story, for instance, are bound to differ from those of a story set, let us say, in North Yorkshire.
In this geographical connection, too, there arises the problem of local speech pattern and the use of dialect. Where direct speech is involved, and my source has given a clear lead on this, as in ‘Jeanie, the Bogle of Mulgrave Wood’, or the Sussex tale I have called ‘Seeing Is Believing’, I have not hesitated to include a dialect phrase or two, or to attempt giving some idea of the regional speech pattern. Nor have I in cases where a tale belongs to a region whose dialect I know well enough to be reasonably confident about using it correctly.
A third is to recount the tales chosen, not in the terse sentences of the collector who has too many to deal with, or the standard phraseology of the academic researcher, but as they would have been told by a practised raconteur of folk origin, with extraneous detail or vivid turn of phrase added on the spur of the moment to enhance suspense or exaggerate character; in fact, to put new and attractive flesh on the age-old bones of the story without in any way changing the basic structure. So much licence has been given to the story-teller since the invention of language made his art possible. The type of tale in some measure dictates the mode of telling, or of writing. I hope the mixture in the following pages will at least please some of my readers some of the time.
The categories into which the stories are placed below are only very simple ones. They may perhaps seem to be a bit arbitrary, and even out of keeping with the generally loose structure I have adopted in trying to present a typical cross-section of the mass of folk tale that exists. On the other hand, without some sort of guidance, the reader may perhaps lose sight of the wide and variable nature of the tales. They will also aid easy reference and quick identification for such as may need to find a particular type of tale at short notice – as a teacher with an unexpected need to fill a ten-minute gap in class might well do, for instance.
(A) The Supernatural
These are tales which deal with representations of human form that cannot be normally and naturally accounted for. Phantom or fabulous animals and beasts are not included in this group.
I have not been able to discover the history of The punting woman’. No doubt in life her journeys to and fro by punt were regular enough to constitute a habit. This repetition of what was in life a regular practice is a feature of many ghost stories. It is as though a pattern or rhythm had been developed and superimposed upon the material surroundings, so that when the instigator of the pattern was no longer able to carry it out, some imprint of the sequence still remained in the physical surroundings.
Colin Wilson, in Mysteries (1978), has much to say on this question, and on ‘the ghouls’ of the next category.
(B) The Relics of History
A second category, probably larger than the first though possibly not so popular, is composed of tales concocted around a thread of historical truth. In these, folk-embroidery adds a great deal to folk-memory, and weaves new tales that often bear little resemblance to the original, perhaps because of a psychological need to create heroes or saints to serve as examples, or to provide scapegoats for ritual verbal sacrifice, in order to expiate some deeply hidden folk guilt. Such creative embroidery of detail has, for instance, changed a low-lived, murderous thug like the real Richard Turpin to the romantic Dick astride gallant Black Bess, and sent him flying through the night from London to York (or to one of a dozen or more other places which claim to have been his destination); or, in the same fashion, has loaded some nameless, excommunicated medieval cut-throat outlaw with the trappings of noble birth and chivalry, and set him up as a defender of the poor against the rich oppressor, and thereby created the enduring legend of Robin Hood.
(C) Localities, Origins and Causes
Most stories are located somewhere or other, of necessity, though as we have seen, the same tale may be claimed by more than one geographically distanced region. However, there are some which cannot, because of their intrinsic ingredients, be moved.
(D) Fabulous Beasts
Dragons (i.e. any outlandish creature) play an important role in folk tale, as huge and fierce corporeal beasts from which the localities they frequented had to be saved by some courageous local hero – as in Durham, where the Wyvern of Sockburn was slaughtered after a ferocious struggle with ‘the Conyers Falchion’, a replica of which, already in its own right seven hundred years old, is still to be seen in the Cathedral Library; or as in Pelham, Herts, where the Devil’s dragon was overcome by one Piers Shonkes, and with the Laidley Worm of Yorkshire.
(E) Domestic and Simpleton Tales
This is a category made up largely of domestic or local community tales. To it belong husband/wife contentions, such as ‘Get up and bar the door’ and ‘The Last Word’. (The latter I took in with my suppertime bread and milk at about the age of four, when I asked why one or other of my parents so often said ‘O, Scissors!’ to the other.) In them, too, the wise fool (see the stories of the men of Gotham), or the village simpleton (‘Numbskull’s Errand’) figure large; most areas have a legendary character to whom foolish sayings are attributed. In my own case, it was somebody called Fred Tatt, who constantly gave out such pearls of wisdom as ‘the longest ladder I ever went up were down a well’.
These stories simply do not lend themselves happily to print. For one thing, they are essentially oral. The humour in them is so delicate and subtle that trying to pin it down in written words destroys it, like attempting to catch a soap-bubble. They need telling in the vernacular, too, for the full flavour to come through – and they depend a great deal for effect on the eye-to-eye contact between the teller and his audience. There is the change of facial expression, for example, the lifting of a quizzical eyebrow, the deliberate lowering of the voice to a mournful monotone so as to be able to raise it again for a dramatic punch-line – all this and much more is lost in print.
Secondly, they are often very local stories, in which the point is completely lost if the listener does not know the person concerned, or at least his family, and their characteristics. Though this type is perhaps one of the most prevalent of all, the details in this category matter more than in most. My father had a wealth of such anecdotes – like one about a local character known as ‘Mauley’ who would do anything for a free pint of beer. He once offered (according to the tale) to eat his own dirty stockings for such a reward. Somebody challenged him, and the beer was brought. He took off his filthy stockings, put them in a frying pan and held them over the tap-room fire till they were reduced to ashes – which he then swilled down with his free pint. Written thus, it becomes a rather distasteful reflection of rural crudity; but if one happens to know the background details of’Mauley’s’ character, other examples of his wit, his sad life-story and his sadder end it is a different matter. I can still hear in my head, and see in my mind’s eye, my father telling such a tale with a mixture of moral condemnation tempered with tolerance, compassion and understanding in his voice, and it makes all the difference. Only a Homer or a Shakespeare could really capture it in written language. I prefer as a general rule not to try. It is for this reason that very few such tales have found their way into this selection.
(F) Moral Tales
To ‘point a moral’ is as natural to the folk as to ‘adorn a tale’. In fact, they very often boil down to the same thing. People used to summing up a human situation with a proverb like ‘A man with a pretty wife needs eyes in his backside’ turn naturally to a tale to point a moral when they find it necessary. Such a narration as ‘Wild Darrell’ may have been used to warn many a beloved son against hedonistic extravagance, however different circumstances might be. It was such stories that unlettered local preachers found so useful for the pulpit, and which were welcomed with such interest by the rows of bored children surreptitiously making ‘rabbits’ of their Sunday handkerchiefs. I can vouch personally for the fact that while prayers and homilies went unheeded, such tales often left a permanent signpost to good behaviour in adult life.
One last point remains to be explained, the inclusion of four ballads (of varying age) in their poetic form. It seemed to me necessary to remind the reader how much our folk literature owes to those in the past who could neither read nor write, and who had to memorize the story and its detail whole before they could add it to their repertoire. The slight difference between the Norse skald and the Anglo-Saxon scop was largely that the one was expected to extemporize new stories, about his lord’s deeds for instance, while the other often shaped and reshaped old ones. One was, in fact, a poet, or ‘maker’, and the other a minstrel. The poet made his tales in rhythm; there are various suggestions as to the reason why – that it accompanied the movements of the oar, or that it might be accompanied by percussion or harp, for instance. The minstrel no doubt found this rhythm (and rhyme, when that, too, was employed) an enormous aid to memory; and once a story had really become shaped into ballad form, there was far less chance of details being altered. The oldest folk story in the English literature (i.e. written down), Beowulf, is in poetic form. Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, though later, is another case in point.
The ballad sellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often quite illiterate; but they learned by heart the words, and recited or sang the tale instead of merely telling it. It was a different way of putting the same thing over to an audience, and in considering ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawaine’, for example, it seemed to me that no words of mine could do justice to the tale half so well as the old ballad. ‘The Smuggler’s Bride’ is typical of ’the Debatable Land’ that still exists between folk tale and folk song; their common frontier is the passing on of a good story.
To sum up, then, this lengthy introduction: I regard my function in this book to be the same as that of the scop or the medieval minstrel – that is, to purvey old tales in an entertaining fashion. It has been a labour of love. No doubt this is because of my own folk-origin in rural England, in whose ‘strange atmosphere my early years were passed’ (as well as most of my later years, incidentally). Whatever education and experience may have done to modify the influence of those early years, it is there among my folk that I still belong in spirit. And I like the feeling (rather than the knowledge) that by telling these old stories yet again for others to enjoy, I reach out across ages past to add my voice to the babble of those countless folk forebears of mine who found pleasure and solace in repeating, over and over again, the same endless, age-defying yarns.
1981
Sybil Marshall