These Our Monsters

by Katherine Davey

  Few now (it’s to be hoped) would think of moving or damaging such stones. Conversely, leaving offerings to them at the solstices and other significant times (as Aunty Ro and the ‘hippies’ in the story did) is increasingly common at many sites, including the Nine Stones. Yet there (again echoing Monny’s story) rival groups of neo-pagans have protested strongly against this ‘desecration’. With stone circles, you can’t be too careful.

  For more about the folklore of Stonehenge, see p.150.

  ‘The Dark Thread’ – Vampires and the Undead

  The major inspiration for the popular modern vampire craze is the novel Dracula, written in 1897 by the Irish author and theatre manager Bram (Abraham) Stoker (1847–1912). As in ‘The Dark Thread’, it takes the form of a series of letters, diary extracts and newspaper articles. In the story Count Dracula travels in an earth-filled coffin from his castle in Transylvania (in modern Romania) to Whitby. He is a vampire who, being dead, needs the blood (the life force) of the living to survive. So he drains to death all the crew of his ship and, after landing at Whitby, makes a victim of Lucy Westenra, luring her to a graveyard by night and biting her neck. Thus transformed into a vampire herself, Lucy begins to prey on children, until her former friends behead her, stake her through the heart and fill her mouth with garlic. Dracula himself is pursued to Transylvania and finally defeated by having his throat cut and a knife driven through his heart.

  Dracula is a completely fictional character, whose links with WHITBY ABBEY are entirely imaginary. This needs to be emphasised, because the world’s most famous vampire has made Whitby the Goth capital of England, and some visitors to the dramatic abbey ruins still have to be convinced that he didn’t really operate there. Bram Stoker was certainly inspired by holiday visits to Whitby, as well as (so he later claimed) by a nightmare he had after eating too much Whitby crab meat. But Dracula himself springs mainly from the eastern European vampire legends Stoker studied, and possibly from tales of the bloodsucking Irish dearg due heard in his youth. The Transylvanian vampire has little to do with English folklore.

  Little, but not nothing. Serious English folklorists are scornful about vampires and it’s certainly true that the word ‘vampire’ (or ‘vampyre’) doesn’t appear in the English language until the 1730s. Like many of the trappings of the classic vampire – stakes through the heart, garlic, contagious vampirism – the word comes from eastern Europe. Yet tales of ‘revenants’ or ‘the Undead’ (the original title of Dracula) do exist in English folklore. In these, exceptionally wicked men are given power by the Devil to rise from their graves after death – not as shadowy spectres, but walking corpses – to trouble and even kill the living. Probably the earliest such story in England, datable from internal evidence to the mid 12th century, was recorded by the courtier Walter Map (c.1135–1210) and takes place in Herefordshire. A Welsh sorcerer died unrepentant, but his undead corpse rose from the grave every night, individually summoning his fellow-villagers by name, whereafter they invariably died within three days. So many perished that the village became almost depopulated and the desperate local squire, a knight called Sir William Laudun, appealed to Bishop Foliot of Hereford for help. Dig up the corpse, ordered the bishop, cut off its head with a spade, then soak it in holy water and rebury it. This didn’t work, and the revenant summoned Sir William himself: but the valiant knight chased it back to its grave with drawn sword and as it was descending into the ground he sliced its head in half. After that, there was no more trouble.

  Other medieval tales about the undead originate from much nearer Whitby. Some are told by William of Newburgh, who came from Bridlington and spent his life at Newburgh Priory near Coxwold, both about 40 miles away from Whitby. Writing in about 1198, he complained that ‘walking corpses’ were a fairly common ‘nuisance’ in his time; he had space only for four of the many stories about them. The most horrifying – allegedly related to William by an eyewitness – involved a runaway Yorkshire miscreant who fled to (probably) Alnwick in Northumberland. There he died unconfessed after falling from the roof-beam over his wife’s bed, where he’d been spying on her frolics with a lover. Despite Christian burial, his corpse rose from the grave and roamed the town nightly, followed by a pack of dogs. It beat anyone it met ‘black and blue’ and, worse still, its ‘pestiferous breath’ infected the whole town with deadly plague, so that the surviving inhabitants fled. Eventually two sons of a plague victim went to dig up the corpse, which they found just below the surface, ‘swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its face suffused with blood’. Struck by a spade, it spewed out such a flow of gore that it seemed like a monstrously engorged leech. They dragged it to a fire and, after tearing out its heart, burnt the ‘baneful pest’ to ashes – whereupon the plague immediately ceased.

  Two centuries later, in about 1400, another revenant was reported from BYLAND ABBEY, a few miles from William’s home and, again, not very far from Whitby. It’s among an extraordinary series of 12 very matter-of-fact ghost tales recorded by an anonymous Byland monk, who even provides the undead’s name in his account: the body of James Tankerlay, rector of ‘Kereby’ (probably Cold Kirby), was honourably buried in the abbey’s chapter house. But it took to wandering back to Kereby by night and eventually ‘blew out’ the eyes of Tankerlay’s former mistress. Instead of chopping up, decapitating or burning the corpse in the usual way, the Byland authorities had it dragged, coffin and all, to nearby Lake Gormire and thrown in, though the oxen pulling it nearly died of fright.

  The most striking evidence for medieval Yorkshire belief in the undead, however, emerged only in 2017, when archaeologists investigated pits at WHARRAM PERCY MEDIEVAL VILLAGE. These pits were separate from the churchyard where villagers were normally buried, yet they held the jumbled remains of about ten people, including a teenager, two women, and two infants aged between two and four, deposited at various times between the 11th and 13th centuries. Surprisingly, many displayed clear signs of having been deliberately beheaded, chopped up or partly burnt after death. The most likely explanation for this treatment, the archaeologists concluded, was that these were people who the villagers suspected of ‘walking’ after death. If this interpretation is true (and there are other possibilities), then Wharram was plagued not only by female and teenage vampires as well as the usual adult male revenants, but even by undead toddlers.

  Though there’s no evidence in history or folklore for the undead in Whitby itself, the town and abbey have legends of their own. The local tales of Abbess Hild of the (still-performed) Penny Hedge ceremony and of alum entrepreneur Thomas Chaloner mentioned in ‘The Dark Thread’ are all genuine, though only the fevered imagination (or a surfeit of Whitby crab sandwiches) of the character of Stoker in the story can produce a dark thread of vampirism in them. There’s also a myth about the abbey bells, allegedly carried off by ship when Henry VIII dissolved the abbey in 1539. At the earnest prayer of the outraged townspeople, the ship inexplicably sank in a flat calm off Black Nab, where on calm nights the submerged bells can still be heard ringing.

  The most famous Whitby legend concerns the historical Abbess Hild, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon princess-turnedabbess who rid the headland monastery of an infestation of poisonous snakes. Wielding a ‘holy or magical wand’, she drove them over the cliff, and in the fall they smashed their heads; her prayers then miraculously turned them to stone. This accounts for the fossilised ammonites – resembling coiled snakes to the eye of faith – still sometimes found on Whitby’s beaches, and which still figure in the town’s heraldic arms. A formidable woman, honoured, respected and feared by kings, churchmen and commoners alike, Hild would surely have been more than a match for Dracula, if he had ever existed.

  ‘Breakynecky’ – Redcaps and Hobgoblins

  The background to this story is the partial demolition of the ruins of medieval BERWICK CASTLE in 1847–50 to make room for the new railway station. Its platforms now stand on the site of the castle’s great hall. Stone from the castle was als
o used for the station and the majestic Royal Border Bridge over the Tweed, still used today by London–Edinburgh trains. About a third of the ‘navvies’ who did the work were Irish, many of them (like Séan in the story) refugees from the Great Hunger, the potato-blight famine which killed about a million Irish people between 1845 and 1849. Among the few remains of the castle they left is the steep and dangerous medieval stairway, which once linked the castle to its riverside jetty, called the Breakneck Steps – ‘Breakynecky’. The redcap in the stories told by the modern teenagers was a goblin who killed people by dropping stones on them; Séan died when a stone from Berwick Castle fell on his head.

  Redcaps are probably the most vicious and dangerous creatures in Anglo-Scottish folklore. Haunting ruined Border castles, they look like short, thickset old men with long protruding teeth, skinny fingers with nails like eagle’s talons, fiery red eyes and straggly grey hair. Shod in iron boots, they carry a staff with an iron spike and wear a distinctive red cap. If travellers are unwary enough to shelter in their lair, they kill them with stones, and then refresh the dye in their red cap by soaking it in their blood. Too powerful to be vanquished by human strength alone, a redcap can be driven off (by Protestants) by reciting verses from the Bible or (by Catholics) by brandishing a crucifix. He will then utter a disappointed howl and vanish in flames, leaving a large tooth behind him. Rather like a tooth-fairy in reverse.

  A redcap called ‘Fatlips’ was believed to haunt the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, but the most notorious of the breed was Robin Redcap or Redcap Sly, who lived in a triple-locked chest at the sinister castle of Hermitage in Liddesdale. As much a witch’s familiar spirit as a goblin, he protected the wicked black magician Lord William de Soulis against his enemies, until Soulis broke the taboo against looking at him, whereupon he vanished. Soulis’s vengeful neighbours were then able to capture him, wrap him in a sheet of lead and boil him to death in a cauldron at Ninestane Rig stone circle. Lord William was a real person, who actually died while in prison for conspiring against King Robert the Bruce. But the boiling makes a better story.

  These redcaps are from the Scottish side of the Border, and tales of English redcaps are harder to find. But since they were traditionally attracted to fortresses where blood had been shed and injustices done, there’s no lack of English candidates, Berwick Castle being the clear front runner. Originally a prosperous Scottish Border town, Berwick changed hands no less than 13 times during the long Anglo-Scottish wars, often after bloody sieges. On Good Friday 1296 Edward I of England took the town and proceeded to massacre its inhabitants, even though they’d submitted to him. According to the 15th-century Scots chronicler Walter Bower, he ‘spared no one, whatever their age or sex. For two days streams of blood flowed from the bodies of the slain, for in his tyrannous rage he ordered 7,500 souls to be massacred … So that the town’s watermills could be turned by their blood.’

  Edward I was also largely responsible for building Berwick Castle, which became the key to the eastern end of the Border. Superseded in the 16th century by the up-to-date bastioned ramparts which make Berwick one of the most impressive fortified towns in Europe – they’re worth going a long way to see – the old castle had fallen into ruin long before Séan and his comrades cannibalised it for the railway station.

  Away from the Border and its redcaps, northern England was infested by the much less dangerous beings called hobs, hobgoblins or hobthrushes. Some lived wild in natural caves or, like the alleged inhabitant of HOB HURST’S HOUSE (‘Hobthrush house’) in the Derbyshire Peak District, in ancient prehistoric burial mounds. But more attached themselves to houses and families, invisibly doing farm or domestic work by night and achieving more than any ten people could do, in return for the occasional bowl of cream. Like their relations the ‘boggarts’ and ‘brownies’, however, they were very easily offended, and then everything around the house was sure to go wrong.

  Probably the most famous hob was ‘the Cauld Lad’ of HYLTON CASTLE in Tyne and Wear, where English Heritage care for a splendid, heraldry-bedecked, late medieval gatehouse which is all that remains of a once much larger mansion. Bound to the place by a spell, the Cauld Lad could often be heard lamenting:

  Wae’s me. Wae’s me

  The acorn’s not yet fallen from the tree

  That’s to grow the wood, that’s to make the cradle

  That’s to rock the bairn, that’s to grow to a man

  That’s to lay me

  Though he tidied up overnight anything left untidy, he also perversely messed up any room already left in order, throwing plates about and breaking pots. Eventually the exasperated servants decided to get rid of him. Following the traditional procedure for ‘laying’ hobs, they set out a suit of green clothes for him; if he accepted them, he’d have to go. Joyfully crying out:

  Here’s a cloak and here’s a hood

  The cauld lad o’Hylton will do no more good

  the hob vanished forever.

  Other versions of the story, however, insist that the Cauld – or ‘cold’ – Lad was not a hob at all, but the unquiet ghost of a servant boy. He’d either died of cold when locked in a cupboard or been murdered by a lord of Hylton and dumped in a pond, where it was said a boy’s skeleton had been found. In 1609, Robert Hylton of Hylton Castle was indeed pardoned for killing one Roger Skelton with the point of a scythe at harvest time – allegedly by accident. According to this version, moreover, the Cauld Lad wasn’t banished, but in early Victorian times could still be heard wailing in a room in the castle. Even a wailing ghost, however, was surely preferable to a murderous redcap.

  ‘The Loathly Lady’ – The Arthurian Legends

  The story of the Loathly Lady and her marriage to King Arthur’s handsome knight Sir Gawain was a great medieval favourite. This retelling is based on a poem called ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’, written in the mid 15th century. It’s just possibly by Sir Thomas Malory, more famous as the author of the great Arthurian story-cycle Le Morte Darthur (The Death of Arthur), originally called The Whole Book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table. It’s only one of many versions, and the tale and the character were already so well known by the 13th century that (according to a slightly dubious chronicler) a squire dressed up as the Loathly Lady was a star turn at the entertainments celebrating Edward I’s second marriage in 1299. Which is rather ironic, since the battle-scarred king was over 60 at the time, while his bride, renowned for her beauty, was just 20.

  At the end of the 14th century John Gower retold the story in his Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession), and his much more famous contemporary Chaucer used it in his Canterbury Tales as ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’. In Chaucer’s version, however, the man who seeks the answer to the story’s central question, ‘what do women want?’, is a knight condemned to death for rape, who is eventually reprieved by Guinevere and ladies of Arthur’s court when he provides the ‘right’ answer. But what was the ‘right’ answer? All the medieval versions agree that what women wanted was ‘sovereignty’ or ‘mastery’ – which is to say domination:

  We desire of men above all manner of things

  To have the sovereignty of all both high and low

  says the Dame Ragnell version, while the Chaucer story says:

  Women desire to have sovereignty

  As well over her husband as her love

  And for to be in mastery him above

  That’s the public medieval answer, which saves Arthur (and Chaucer’s knight) from death. But in private, in all the medieval variants, it’s Gawain’s offer of ‘choice’ which breaks the spell on the Loathly Lady, making her beautiful both day and night. The subtle, or not so subtle, difference in Fiona Mozley’s modern retelling is that both the public and the private answers are the same. What women most want is not domination, but choice.

  The story is set around Carlisle in Cumbria, a region which Sir Gawain knew well, having already completed an arduous quest there. The retelling’s
‘Gawain has experience of bargains struck, of twelve-month promises, and the honest proffering of a neck for a woodsman’s axe’ is a sly reference to another great medieval poem, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. Contemporary with Chaucer’s work, it’s nothing like as well known, because it’s written in a north-western dialect, much further removed from modern English than Chaucer’s ‘London’ speech. In it Gawain journeys alone through the ‘wilderness of the Wirral’, assailed by dragons, giants, wild woodwoses and terrible winter weather:

  Ner slayn wyth the slete he sleped in his yrnes

  Mo nyghtes then innoghe in naked rokkes

  [Nearly killed by the sleet, he slept in his armour

  More nights than enough in the bare rocks]

  He’s seeking to meet the Green Knight and fulfil a promise to take a return blow from him, in recompense for a stroke dealt by Gawain a year earlier at Arthur’s court.

  There’s no room to tell the rest of that tale here – it’s well worth seeking out and reading for yourself. But it’s a reminder that north-west England, and Cumbria in particular, has a strong claim to be Arthur’s homeland – though Cornwall, Wales, Somerset, lowland Scotland and several other parts of Britain would violently dispute that. As its name shows, Cumbria was not originally English territory: it’s related to Cymru and Cymry, the Welsh-language titles for Wales and the Welsh. All three names come from the Romano-British word ‘combrogi’ meaning ‘fellow countrymen’ or ‘fellow (Roman) citizens’ – fellow Britons who, like Arthur, held out against the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The fact that the forest where the tale of the Loathly Lady begins is called Inglewood – ‘the wood of the English’ – is further evidence that the English were the exception thereabouts. You wouldn’t need to single out a wood in, say, Anglo-Saxon Wiltshire as belonging to the English, because all woods there did.