Folklore of Northamptonshire

by Peter Hill

  Earlier, a crucial battle of the War of the Roses had taken place in the rain-drenched meadows at Delapré in Northampton in July 1460, which saw Yorkist forces defeat the Lancastrians, inflicting heavy losses (around 500 men) and taking Henry VI prisoner. The conditions and bloody carnage led to the field ‘turning red’ and the ghosts of the slain were said to have been seen and heard for many years afterwards.

  The Tudor and Stuart periods would give rise to more fanciful legends. In 1585, Queen Elizabeth I is said to have visited Kirby Hall, which lies in isolation near Gretton. Kirby Hall was the newly acquired home of her chancellor and favourite dancing partner, Sir Christopher Hatton, a member of a distinguished county family. The esteem in which she held him was mentioned, if somewhat humorously, by Richard Barham in The Ingoldsby Legends (1837):

  So what with his form and what with his face,

  And what with his velvet coat guarded with lace,

  And what with his elegant dancing and grace,

  His dress and address so tickled Queen Bess

  That her Majesty gave him a very snug place;

  And seeing, moreover, at one single peep, her

  Advisers were, few of them, sharper or deeper,

  (Old Burleigh excepted) she made him Lord Keeper.

  It is said that on certain nights of the year, a banquet given by Hatton in her honour is re-enacted at Kirby Hall, with flickering lights and shadowy figures seen dancing in the long-uninhabited building. Although there is no evidence that Elizabeth I did stay there, another tradition says that while in the area, she fell from her horse into a treacherous bog during a hunt and was rescued by men from nearby Corby. In gratitude, she issued a charter commanding that all men and tenants of the village be given certain rights and concessions around the kingdom:

  to be quit from such toll, pannage, murage and passage to be paid on accounts of their goods and things throughout our whole realm aforesaid ... Also that you do not place the same men and tenants of the same manor in any assizes, juries or recognisances to be held out of the Court of the Manor.

  Fotheringhay is also the site of several traditions. In 1387, Edmund of Langley, the first Duke of York, acquired the castle which was in a ruinous state, rebuilding and enlarging it to grand proportions, as befitted such an illustrious family. The village became a hive of activity, with more accommodation being built outside the castle to cater for the number of important guests arriving for feasts and tournaments. Three members of the family who were slain on the battlefield were eventually buried there: Edward, the second Duke of York, who died at Agincourt in 1415; Edward IV’s father, Richard, the third Duke of York; and brother Edmund, who were both slain at Wakefield. The future Richard III was born at Fotheringhay in October 1482, with one biased chronicler writing:

  A costumed re-enactment at Kirby Hall, as part of an English Heritage Living History event.

  ...he was suppressed in his mother’s womb for two years, emerging with teeth and shoulder length hair.

  Long after the demise of the castle, many local people insisted they could hear ‘strange music’ from drums and trumpets coming from the earthworks of the former castle, including one well-documented case in the 1950s of a policeman from Oundle who went to investigate but was unable to find or see anything tangible. A similar situation has also occurred on occasion in the now truncated church, the missing portion being part of an attached chantry college which disappeared in the years following the Dissolution. There have been cases of medieval funeral music being heard from within, but when the door has been opened to investigate, everything goes silent.

  Mary Queen of Scots, who was seen as a threat to Elizabeth I, was imprisoned and ultimately beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle. On the way to her final destination, she is said to have uttered the word ‘Perio!’ as she sighted the village in the distance. The word was incorrectly taken to mean ‘I perish!’, when in fact she was passing through the former settlement called Perio and the road on which she was journeying was known as Perio Lane.

  An engraving of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringhay Castle.

  On 31 January 1587, eight days before her execution, a strange incident took place, for an hour from midnight, when a flame of bright fire appeared from nowhere and hovered outside the window of the queen’s chamber, lighting up the room. It disappeared then returned twice more to act in the same manner. It was not visible anywhere else at the castle; only the guards, frightened out of their wits, were witnesses.

  Mary’s beheading took two blows of the axe and, after a final severing with a knife, the head was held up by the executioner. It became detached from the wig in the process and fell to the floor. An eyewitness, Robert Wynfield, wrote an account of the execution to Chief Minister Burghley, which included a description of a remarkable sight following the beheading:

  one of the executioners pulling of her garments espied her little dogge which was under her clothes, which could not be gotten forth but by force, and afterwards would not depart from its dead companion, but came and laid betweene her head and shulders.

  After Mary’s death, her apparition was said to follow an underground passage from the castle to the oratory at nearby Southwick Hall, her footsteps sounding on the stone steps leading up to the door and pausing before she entered the small room, holding a rosary, to pray. A tradition was also passed down through the centuries that when Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England, he had the walls of the castle torn down as an act of retribution for his mother’s execution. However, history proves otherwise, since the castle survived for many years, at one stage being used as an armaments store, until the mid-1630s when its stonework was used for the building or repair of local dwellings, walls and, in one case, a chapel at Fineshade. A visitor in the castle’s final days is said to have found graffiti scratched on a window sill by Mary’s diamond ring with the words:

  The only surviving fragment of the keep of Fotheringhay Castle and the mound on which it formerly stood. The church in the background is where members of the York family were buried.

  From the top of all my trust, mishap hath laid me in the dust.

  Robert Catesby, the charismatic leader and instigator of the Gunpowder Plot, was associated with the county, being based at Ashby St Ledgers. Two other conspirators, also associated with the county, were the last to join the plot: Sir Everard Digby of Gayton and, more reluctantly, Catesby’s cousin and boyhood companion, Francis Tresham of Rushton, ‘a wyld and unstayed man’. Significantly, two places where the conspirators are said to have met in secret to hatch the plot were the gatehouse of Catesby’s home and the Triangular Lodge at Rushton Hall. It is Tresham who is credited with revealing the plot by secretly delivering a letter to his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, in London, urging him not to attend the opening of Parliament. It began:

  My Lord, out of love I bear to some of your friends, I have care of your preservation. Therefore I would advise you, as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift of your attendance at this Parliament.

  The letter was taken to the Chief Minister and acted upon. It may well have been a forgery, planted by ministers who knew about the plot but waited to watch its development before doing anything, but this did not prevent Tresham from being implicated and he died in painful circumstances in the Tower on 23 December 1605, possibly from a urinary infection, although some say he was poisoned. Innocent or not, he was beheaded after his death. His body was thrown into a hole in the vicinity and his head was sent to Northampton, where it was put on public display.

  Monteagle became a national hero for saving King and Country and another high-ranking county man, Sir Edward Montagu of Boughton House, introduced a Bill in Parliament proposing an annual day of rejoicing on the anniversary of the plot’s discovery, which was the origin of Bonfire Night. Initially, 5 November was a day of bell-ringing and church attendance for prayers of thanksgiving. The prayers were later dropped and by 1625, bonfires began to be a regula
r feature, these being combined with firework displays by 1662.

  In later years, a popular rhyme or ‘catch’ chanted by children around the county as they went from house to house on Bonfire Night was:

  Guy Fawkes and his companions did the plot contrive,

  To blow up the king and parliament and people all up alive.

  By God’s providence they were cotch’d,

  Two of the supposed meeting places of the conspirators the Gunpowder Plot: the gatehouse at Ashby St Ledgers and Rushton Triangular Lodge.

  With a dark lantern and a lighted match.

  [‘cotch’d’ means ‘caught’]

  Northamptonshire was the scene of much action during the Civil War. The county was mainly Parliamentarian in allegiance and it was difficult to be in the Royalist faction. Many of the leading aristocracy were either taken prisoner or went into exile and their great houses were plundered, such as that at Deene where a valuable local history collection was ransacked and depleted, or at Rockingham where the castle was left virtually as a shell, with the church, almshouses and much of the village destroyed. Some Royalists did hold their ground, however, such as the daring Dr Michael Hudson, rector of Kingscliffe and chaplain to Charles I, whom he accompanied from Oxford to Newark. Hudson was constantly trying to recruit men for the Royalist cause and legends abound about how he managed to escape the clutches of Parliamentarian troops three times, on one occasion with a basket of apples on his head. In anger, the Parliamentarians used the church as stables and caused damage to its spire. Finally, on 6 June 1648, they pursued Hudson to Woodcroft Castle, on the county border near Elton. Hudson hung on to a parapet while they hacked at his fingers, causing him to fall to his death in the moat below. The incident was used by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Woodstock.

  A pen-and-ink sketch, said to be by Oliver Cromwell, of the ‘Plane of Batell’ at Naseby, showing the positions of the opposing armies.

  The decisive battle of the war took place in the county, at Naseby. On 14 June 1645, 14,000 Parliamentary troops under Fairfax and Cromwell routed the 10,000-strong Royalist forces commanded by Prince Rupert. In the aftermath, 4,000 bodies lay on the field and for many years afterwards, on the anniversary, the battle was said to have been re-enacted in the sky above. There were also eyewitness accounts of regular ghostly combat on the field itself. According to widely held belief, Cromwell’s body was taken back to the scene of his victory after his death in 1658 and his ghost was said to roam in the fields. Today, anyone visiting that bleak isolated spot, where a memorial overlooks the site, cannot fail to picture the scene of such carnage.

  The slaughter continued as Royalist survivors fled the scene. Cromwell wrote about the aftermath in a letter shortly after the victory:

  We pursued them from three miles short of Harborough to nine beyond even to sight of Leicester, whither the King fled.

  Years later, an elderly eyewitness gave an account of the battle and its aftermath, reporting that even women accompanying the defeated troops were cut and slashed in the face or nose, some with the comment: ‘Remember Cromwell, you whores!’

  Part of the battlefield, as seen from the memorial at Naseby.

  At Marston Trussell, a group of Royalists were trapped in an enclosed field known as Pudding End, close to the church, and were massacred, their bodies buried in a shallow pit, long afterwards known as Cavaliers’ Grave, giving rise to yet another haunted location in the county.

  Tradition also says that Oliver Cromwell and some of his men stayed in the Hind Hotel in Wellingborough on the eve of the battle, although this has been proved impossible. However, true or not, a room named after him exists there today. Similarly, a table in the church at Naseby is where Royalists were dining when they were interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Cromwell’s men.

  These events are just some of many that have given rise to all kinds of speculation over the centuries, contributing to the vast body of folklore of Northamptonshire, Rose of the Shires. Let us now enter that fascinating world, go along some of its paths and explore the rich landscape within.

  An idyllic scene evoking a lost era: the former watermill, now Conygar Farm, at Woodnewton.

  two

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  If you could travel back in time to old Northamptonshire, you would encounter many familiar words such as holt, stag, hog, crab stick, twang, budget, stickers, shorts, take away, tight, great, hike, fridge, fashion, broad cast and drop out, to name but a few. The problem is that these words had a different meaning then. That process of change in our language continues unabated today, as our way of life changes. In spelling, vocabulary, grammar and usage, new words are coming in, others going out of fashion and some (e.g. gay, pad, coke) undergoing a change of meaning. Many of these words can be found in the Glossary section of this book.

  Our county ancestors had a whole host of local words and expressions (folk rhymes), some of which were used by one community to describe a neighbouring one, mainly alluding to some characteristic of the topography or reputation of the inhabitants, justified or invented by inter-village rivalry or harmless ribaldry, the origins of which have often been lost or distorted long ago. There have been occasions when rivalry has been apparent in some form (usually a form of superiority) between the adjoining villages of Cottingham and Middleton, as well as between Wilbarston and neighbouring Stoke Albany, Rothwell and Desborough, and Corby and Kettering. A case in point was the discovery of a saying marked on a wall of a demolished pub in Corby some years ago:

  Rockingham on the hill, Oakley in the vale

  Kettering for silly b-----s, Corby for ale!

  The same saying occurred elsewhere for many years in the north of the county towards Leicestershire and other parts of the Midlands, as any villages or towns could be substituted in the rhyme at will. Here it may have reflected the onetime strong feelings and rivalry between the two towns, with Corby feeling that Kettering gladly accepted the generous employment prospects offered by their large steelworks, but looked down on them as coarse and uneducated.

  Some expressions are a complete mystery and may be some form of underhand insult about those living in a certain place, such as that for Raunds: ‘Go to Ranse to see the dogs dance’. There may be an insult – or a compliment, depending how you see it – about the quality of the local water supply at Warkworth, on the edge of the county near Banbury, in the expression: ‘Cattle that drink Warkworth water, never come back’. For Corby, which perhaps suffered greater poverty than elsewhere when the weaving industry collapsed in the first years of the nineteenth century, there may be sympathy for the plight of the inhabitants in the expression, ‘Where do you come from? Corby, God bless you!’

  The supposed quality of a village’s bells often led to neighbourly derision or bragging in the form of a taunting rhyme. Aynho boasted that its bells were better than those in Souldern just over the boundary in Oxfordshire: ‘Aynho, bell metal; Souldern, tin kettle’. Among other villages that were mocked for their poverty were Rockingham and Naseby: ‘poor people, one bell, wooden steeple’.

  Little Bowden was also mocked for having ‘poor people, one bell, wooden steeple’ and Great Houghton had ‘wicked people’ who ‘sold their bells to buy a steeple’. However, taunt and response was the case with two other neighbouring villages: Cotterstock would chant, ‘Who rings best, who rings best?’ to which Tansor would reply, ‘We do! we do!’

  Reciprocation would also take place between the males of the neighbouring villages of Piddington and Hackleton, one of them taunting the other about their aloofness and manliness. If the former shouted, ‘Hackleton bolshen, shut up in a den. Don’t come out to Piddington men’, the rhyme would be shouted back with the names of the villages reversed!

  Two places in the county, Brackley and Yardley Gobion, seem to have had more than their fair share of taunting, neither being held in high estimation by their neighbours, who considered them to be of low intelligence. One expression was: ‘Half sharp and hardl
y, like the folk of Yardley’. Another was: ‘Yardley skegs come to Pury, to suck eggs’, a taunt used by the boys of Pury End when those from the neighbouring village went there. This is in fact a very clever play on the two words ‘suck’ and ‘eggs’, in which letters were taken out to form ‘skegs’. A skeg was a name for the wild plum or bullace but it also meant ‘a foolish person’ and to suck eggs, of course, means to tell someone something he or she already knows.

  Brackley was given a similar form of insult by Evenley in the expression: ‘Brackley skegs come t’Imley ta et th’addled eggs’, with the implication that they ate rotten or empty eggs. Brackley was also the target of another saying. At one time its people were said to be the most bad-mannered in the county and the village had a considerably large number of poor and unemployed people. This gave rise to the expression: ‘Brackley breed, better to hang than to feed’.

  The village of Little Houghton was apparently happy with its lowly status and made the most of what it had, at the same time having a swipe at Brayfield which it thought was affluent and artificial:

  Houghton for pride and poverty, Brayfield for money and muck.

  However, Brayfield retaliates in another rhyme, adding a second neighbour to the argument. Perhaps there is an undercurrent of three-way rivalry in the saying, in which Brayfield tries to show it is smarter, adding a touch of bravado as its shows the weaknesses of the other two:

  Denton folk don’t know when they’re told,