The Book of English Folk Tales Read online

  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 b
een 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.

  The Little People

  These fall roughly into two sub-groups. The first is that of the fairies, who can be male or female, well-disposed or vindictive towards mankind. They seem generally to be associated with Nature-out-of-doors, and claim the colour green as their own, resenting any infringement of their rights upon it. (See ‘Visions of Fairies’.) In England they are almost always diminutive (as reported, for example by William Blake, who claimed to have witnessed a fairy funeral). However, some fairies may occasionally be man-size, as in the Welsh story of the Fairy Woman of Llyn-y-fan-fach (not given in this volume).

  The second group is that of the dwarfs, elves, brownies, pixies (piskies) and bogles (or boggarts, or bogies), to which Puck and Robin Goodfellow belong. These seem
to be almost always male, small, and often misshapen; but they are helpful and well-disposed towards humans until offended. Their tempers are very touchy indeed, and their quirky nature allows them to brook no interference, makes them resent the least intrusion into their privacy, and causes them to carry vengeance to inordinate lengths sometimes. Such are the piskie threshers: see ‘Seeing Is Believing’, a very widespread tale, though the version I have given comes from Sussex, and ‘The Farndale Hob’, which is from Yorkshire.

  Some early folklorists sought philological explanations of the belief in these supernatural beings – for example Baring-Gould and the derivation of the terms bogle, bogie, boggart and all the other variations of the same word. He quotes: (a) Psalm 91, ‘from the Bug that walketh in darkness’, (b) Bayle’s English Dictionary, 1755, ‘Bug: an immaginary [sic] monster to frighten children with’, (c) Shakespeare, ‘Tush! tush! fear [i.e. frighten] boys with bugs’ and (d) L’Estrange, ‘upon experience, all these bugs grow familiar and easy to us’. We still, said Baring-Gould, use the word ourselves, in bug-bear, or bug-a-boo: and he thought all bogles, boggarts and the like rise from the same word-root, and belong to the same group of names as Phooka (Irish), Puck (English), Spük (German) and consequently our modern Spook. He identifies them all with the Bogs of Slavonic tongues, Tchernebog the Black God, and Brelabog the White God – brought to our shores, he supposed, by the Norsemen who had conceived a notion (gained from the despised Slavs) of these gods as fiendish spirits.