These Our Monsters

by Katherine Davey

  In the 14th-century Canterbury Tales Chaucer’s rascally con man the Pardoner swore ‘by the blood of Christ that’s now at Hailes’. But most of its votaries were more pious, touching their rosaries against the rock-crystal globe that enshrined it and being relieved if they could see it clearly – which only those whose sins had been forgiven could do. Other (probably abbey-promoted) tales about the relic discouraged doubters: one priest who dissuaded his parishioners from visiting it saw the communion wine in his chalice boiling, another found his service-book bleeding.

  Rich gifts to Hailes and its famous relic continued right up until Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534, whereafter the doubters came into their own. Inclined to Protestant reform, Anne Boleyn enquired into the ‘abominable abuse’ of pilgrimages to Hailes, and in 1538 the relic was publicly denounced as nothing more than ‘the blood of a duck or drake, regularly renewed’.

  Others declared it was actually clarified honey coloured with saffron. It was taken to London and destroyed; magnificent Hailes Abbey was closed down, and soon afterwards enthusiastically pillaged, mainly by the local people whose pride it had been a few short years earlier.

  Okehampton Castle

  The largest castle in Devon, Okehampton is allegedly the scene of a nightly supernatural penance. The ghost of Lady Mary Howard, allegedly murderous wife of the equally dubious Sir Richard Grenville, sets out from Fitzford Manor in a coach made of human bones, driven by a headless coachman. It’s accompanied by a great black dog, either headless or with a single glowing eye – some say the hound itself is Lady Howard. It drives 16 miles across the moor to Okehampton Castle mound, where the dog plucks just one blade of grass. Then it returns to Fitzford, where the grass is placed on a stone, and the spectral procession vanishes – until the next night. The penance won’t be completed until the castle mound is bare of grass; and that will never happen, because the grass grows more quickly than the hound can pluck it.

  This popular story is still told, and perhaps believed, in Okehampton. In some versions Lady Mary is condemned to her torment for murdering the first three of her four husbands, in others for disinheriting her children. But it’s also been suggested that the legend is a case of mistaken ghostly identity. Its ‘Lady Howard’ is not the locally infamous Lady Mary Howard, but the even more nationally notorious Lady Frances Howard. This scandalous Jacobean courtier was alleged to have bewitched her first husband into impotence, and was certainly instrumental in poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, who opposed her second marriage, with arsenic-tainted tarts and a mercury chloride enema. But who, unfortunately, had nothing to do with Okehampton.

  THE EAST OF ENGLAND

  Leiston Abbey

  Terrifying phantom hounds, generally black and sometimes headless, but usually with big, glowing saucer-eyes, appear in folklore from all over England. The most renowned in literature is Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. Set on Dartmoor, his story was probably inspired by a local legend of the squire who sold his soul to the Devil, and after death continued to hunt with a pack of black hounds.

  But the demon dog’s favourite haunts seem to be in East Anglia, where he’s known as Old Shuck, from the Anglo-Saxon scucca, meaning devil, and often has a ‘shucky’ (shaggy) coat. He’s recorded there as early as 1127, when ‘jet black dogs with eyes like saucers were seen by all the country’ among a spectral Wild Hunt which appeared for over forty successive days between Peterborough and Stamford.

  His most spectacular East Anglian manifestation, recorded in a popular pamphlet called ‘A Straunge and terrible Wunder’, was at Bungay in Suffolk on Sunday, 4 August 1577. He burst into the crowded parish church of St Mary during a violent storm, breaking the necks of two parishioners ‘in one instant’ and shrivelling up another ‘like a piece of leather scorched in a hot fire’. On the same stormy day he also appeared in Holy Trinity Church, Blythburgh, killing another three people and leaving scorch marks on a door, still shown to visitors.

  Stories about Old Shuck remain widespread in East Anglia. He can be kindly, guarding women on lonely roads, guiding lost travellers, or (according to a Norfolk report in 1988) even saving them from rogue car drivers. But more often ‘the Hateful Thing’ is an omen of death and disaster. So there was great excitement in May 2014, when archaeologists working near the impressive monastic ruins of Leiston Abbey in Suffolk discovered the wellpreserved skeleton of a huge male hound. It would have weighed about 90kg, and stood an alarming 2m high on its hind legs. It had been buried long after the suppression of the abbey, but radiocarbon dating of the bones wasn’t precise about exactly when: it may have been in 1650–90, 1730–1810 or even after 1920. The local press, of course, speculated that this was Old Shuck. But it couldn’t have been. As a demon dog, Shuck doesn’t die, and besides (if recent stories are true) he’s still appearing in East Anglia.

  Binham Priory

  Almost every ancient building worth its salt is rumoured to conceal secret passages. Several stories (for instance from RICHMOND CASTLE and NETLEY ABBEY) recount the sad fate of adventurers who’ve tried to penetrate them. At Binham Priory in Norfolk (notable for its splendid nave, still in full use as the parish church) the passage supposedly led to nearby Walsingham Priory, or alternatively to BLAKENEY GUILDHALL. Its course was patrolled above ground by a ghostly black monk, who seemed to be searching for something. Perhaps he was one of several mad or wicked characters from Binham’s unusually troubled history: one prior squandered the priory’s treasures to pay for alchemical experiments, another died raving and was buried in chains.

  The story goes that a local fiddler, Jimmy Griggs, with his dog Trap, rashly volunteered to explore the passage, fiddling all the way so that his friends on the surface could trace his progress. But when they reached Fiddler’s Hill the music suddenly stopped and Trap came dashing out yelping. Jimmy Griggs was never seen again, and some said the phantom monk had collared him.

  Fiddler’s Hill is actually a prehistoric burial mound at a crossroads. When roadworks cut into it in 1933, two human skeletons – thought to be Bronze Age or Anglo-Saxon – were found, along with the skull of an animal. These were immediately hailed locally as the remains of the fiddler, the monk and Trap, ‘proving’ the legend’s truth. In fact one of the skeletons was that of a girl, and the animal skull may have been a goat’s – and anyway Trap supposedly escaped. But facts should never spoil a good story.

  Waltham Abbey

  The burial place of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, has never been firmly established. Rival stories began to emerge soon after his death at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. One was that William the Conqueror refused to hand the body over to Harold’s mother, despite her offer of its weight in gold; instead, he had it buried by the Sussex seashore, with an epitaph mocking Harold’s failure to guard the coast against the Normans. But the priests of Waltham Abbey in Essex insisted that the king’s naked and mutilated corpse was identified on the battlefield by his mistress Edith Swan-Neck, by ‘certain secret marks’ only she knew. It was then taken for burial at Waltham, where a gravestone in the abbey grounds marks its resting place.

  Harold had certainly rebuilt the abbey of Waltham Holy Cross in 1060, allegedly in thanks for being miraculously cured of paralysis by its famous relic. This ‘holy cross’, a black marble crucifix, was discovered in Somerset in about 1016 by a blacksmith led to it by a dream. When 24 oxen were harnessed to the cart carrying it they refused to move until the name ‘Waltham’ was spoken, after which they drew it of their own volition the 150 or so miles to the Essex church. ‘Holy Cross’ was the English battle-cry at Hastings, where Harold died.

  Or did he? Within a century of 1066, tales that he’d survived spread, growing ever more elaborate. Badly wounded, he’d been taken to Winchester and secretly nursed back to health by a ‘Saracen woman’. Then he’d wandered around English shrines for many decades as a nameless pilgrim, until divinely directed to St John’s Church in Chester. There (aged over 100) he’d confessed his
identity to Henry I in 1121, died and been buried. It was even claimed that his body was rediscovered there in 1332, still showing no signs of corruption – one of the indications of sanctity.

  THE MIDLANDS

  Stokesay Castle

  Shropshire’s Stokesay Castle is the finest surviving fortified medieval manor house in England. It’s encircled by hills, the most prominent being View Edge to the west and Norton Camp to the east. On these two hilltops, according to a legend recorded in the 19th century, lived two giants, probably brothers, who kept their shared money in a locked chest in the castle vaults. They also shared a key to the chest. If one wanted it and the other had it, he shouted to his brother on the opposite hilltop to throw it across. But one day a throw fell short, and the key dropped into the (then water-filled) castle moat. Both giants searched for it, but never found it, and nobody has found it since. So the giant’s locked treasure chest still stands somewhere under the castle. Even if anyone finds it, they can’t break in, because it’s guarded by the ‘great big raven’ sitting on it and the key remains lost. And, ends the story, ‘many say it never will be found, let folks try as much as they please.’

  Leigh Court Barn

  Though comparatively little-visited, Leigh Court Barn in Worcestershire is an amazing triumph of medieval carpentry. Over 42m long, 11m wide and 9m high, it’s the biggest timber cruck-framed structure anywhere in Britain. Built for the monks of Pershore Abbey, medieval owners of the manor of Leigh, it’s now believed to have been raised in about 1345.

  According to legend, a phantom coach drawn by four firebreathing horses used to be seen flying up and over the barn, before disappearing into the nearby river Teme. It was driven by the spirit of ‘Old Colles’, condemned to do so for a highway robbery. Desperate for money, he had ambushed by night a friend carrying bags of gold, seizing the horse’s bridle to stop him. But the friend drew his sword and cut off the grabbing hand. It remained attached to the bridle, and was immediately recognised as Colles’s hand by a distinctive signet ring. Though his friend forgave him, Colles soon died of the wound. But his ghost drove the coach until 12 parsons were gathered to exorcise it with bell, book and candle. The spirit couldn’t rise again until the last inch of candle burnt out. So the parsons threw the stub into a pond, where it could never be relit, and to make doubly sure filled in the pond. And, said local people: ‘peaceful ever after slept Old Colles’s shade.’

  Old Colles was very much a real person – Edmund Colles, whose family had long administered Leigh manor for the Pershore monks, and acquired it for themselves after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. His grandfather had been ‘a grave, wise and learned’ judge, but young Edmund, ‘being loaded with debts which like a snowball from Malvern Hill gathered increase’, was forced to sell the family manor to a wealthy outsider from Suffolk, Sir Walter Devereux. Perhaps his breaking the ancestral ties of ownership (as with the phantom coach-driver at OKEHAMPTON CASTLE) was the real reason for his punishment, rather than highway robbery. Unusually, you can still see effigies of the characters in this story – the judge, Sir Walter and Old Colles himself, the eldest kneeling son on his father William’s monument – in nearby Leigh church.

  Lincoln Medieval Bishop’s Palace

  Tucked away in the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln Medieval Bishop’s Palace was once the focus of the largest diocese in England, stretching from the rivers Humber to the Thames. The oldest part of the palace, the east hall, was built by the most famous and universally beloved of all Lincoln’s medieval bishops – Saint Hugh.

  Hugh of Avalon (not the mythical Arthurian island of Avalon, but his birthplace in Burgundy) became bishop in 1186. ‘Fearless as a lion in any danger’, he stood up to violent anti-Jewish mobs of stay-at-home crusaders in Lincoln and Northampton and defied Plantagenet kings, treating Richard the Lionheart ‘like a naughty child’ and always fiercely defending the rights of ordinary people. He could also defy convention, once biting off two fingers from the supposed hand of St Mary Magdalen he was shown in Normandy and bringing them to Lincoln as a relic. If he could chew the body of Christ Himself at holy communion, he reasoned, why not the bones of a saint?

  Hugh’s funeral at Lincoln in 1200 attracted one of the biggest crowds ever seen, with King John helping to bear his coffin. Twenty years later he was canonised, and pilgrims flocked to his two shrines in the cathedral, one housing his body and the other his head. When thieves stole the jewelled head reliquary, but then took fright and dumped the skull in a field, a black crow stood guard over it until it was found. Many other stories emphasise Hugh’s power over wild creatures. He kept squirrels as pets, and befriended a shy wild whooper swan which appeared at his palace at Stow near Lincoln; it would eat from his hand, and guarded him when he slept, attacking anyone who came near him. It was clearly seen to mourn his death, and remains St Hugh’s emblem today.

  YORKSHIRE AND THE HUMBER

  Burton Agnes Manor House

  Standing beside magnificent Jacobean Burton Agnes Hall in East Yorkshire – a privately owned mansion, but open to the public – is what looks like a sash-windowed early Georgian brick building. But this facade hides the core of the medieval Burton Agnes Manor House, with its lovely 12th-century vaulted undercroft and a 15th-century upper floor.

  Here, while the new Hall was being built in 1598–1610, lived the three daughters of Sir Henry Griffith. All were agog to see the new mansion completed, but none more than the youngest, Anne. Before that happened, sadly, Anne was attacked and mortally wounded by robbers. As she lay dying, she made her sisters promise to cut off her head after her death and keep it in the new Hall ‘as long as it shall last’. Instead, they buried her complete body in the churchyard.

  When the family moved into the Hall, however, mysterious groans and strange noises made the place uninhabitable. No servant would stay. So after two years of this torment they dug up and decapitated Anne, setting her skull on a table in the house. All was then well, unless any attempt was made to oust the skull: when an unbelieving maid threw it onto a passing waggon, the horses went wild and the whole house shook. Eventually the Boynton family (who succeeded the Griffiths and whose descendants still live in the Hall) had it bricked up somewhere in the house walls, so that it could never be moved again. If the present owners know exactly where it is, they don’t tell. But some say that ‘Owd Nance’, as she was known in the village in the 19th century, still (rather perversely) haunts a bedchamber in the Hall.

  Thornton Abbey and Gatehouse

  Comparatively remote but once very wealthy, Thornton Abbey in north Lincolnshire has an utterly astonishing 14th-century gatehouse, bedecked with turrets, sculpture and carved figures. As the local antiquarian Abraham de la Pryme put it in 1697, it’s ‘of a vast and incredible bigness and of the greatest art, ingenuity, and workmanship that I ever saw in my life’.

  Abraham also tells us why so little remains of the other abbey buildings. They were deliberately pulled down in about 1607 by the newly rich Sir Vincent Skinner to furnish material for his ‘most stately hall’ on the site; ‘which hall, when it was finished, fell quite down to the bare ground without any visible cause, and broke in pieces all the rich furniture that was therein’. Cannibalising monastic buildings was notoriously unlucky, but Thornton’s buildings were unluckier than most. Even when its stones were taken away for buildings elsewhere – a sluice on the Humber and a mansion in Thornton Curtis – these too fell down ‘by the just judgement of God’.

  The antiquary likewise heard that, about a century before his visit, workmen had found a room containing a monk sitting at a table with pen, book and paper, ‘all which fell to ashes when touched’. William Stukeley, who visited in 1722, was told a similar story. Tales of walled-up monks, like unlucky ruins, are almost standard elements of monastic folklore, but this one has a twist: later writers believed that the walled-up monk was Abbot Thomas Gresham, who really did build Thornton’s magnificent gatehouse in the 1380s. Though revered immediately aft
er his death as a miracle-worker, Gresham seems subsequently to have developed a reputation as a black magician, for which he was allegedly punished by walling-up.

  Sadly, we may never know more. For the portion of the manuscript Thornton chronicle recording his life was deliberately torn out by some anonymous busybody in the 17th century; ‘to prevent, as he sayd, the scandal of the church. The truth is the account given on him was that he was a wicked man, a Sodomite and wot not.’

  Wheeldale Roman Road

  Visible amid high moorland near Goathland, this enigmatic milelong stretch of stone trackway is part of ‘Wade’s Causeway’, a much longer but now hard-to-trace route extending both northwards and southwards. Usually identified as a Roman road, it may rather be prehistoric, medieval or not a road at all but a Neolithic boundary marker.

  Folklore has the answer. The Wheeldale Roman Road was of course built by the giant Wade and his giant wife, Bell, either to link their respective homes at Mulgrave Castle and PICKERING CASTLE, or to help Bell reach and milk her (giant) cow as it grazed the moorlands. Bell brought the stones and Wade hammered them in. Many other prehistoric or natural features hereabouts are also attributed to Wade and Bell. Stone cairns mark where Bell tripped and spilt aprons-full of road stones, and stone monoliths are boulders hurled about in tantrums by Wade as a giant baby.

  Here reduced to rural domesticity, the giant warrior Wade once figured in more heroic legends from all over northern Europe, and may have originated as a Baltic sea-god. Giants like him were also thought responsible for other inexplicable ancient structures in the English landscape: describing the ruins of a Roman town, an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poet called them ‘enta geweorc’ – the work of giants.