by Peter Hill
A magnificent fairy ring in a forest glade at Westhay Wood, near Kingscliffe.
Fairies could be found in different shapes and sizes, and they also varied in the way they interacted with humans. Many were friendly, and would do favours for a household, provided they were not seen, and were left water to bathe in. Hence many county women would sweep the hearth clean, and leave a bowl of water, before going to bed. However the elementals were not always so amenable. They were said to sneak into a dairy, and suck at cows and sheep, or go into the buttery and take away anything edible, leaving some kind of substitute in its place.
A young man returning home from a feast in a neighbouring village was walking through a wood when he was confronted by fairies playing football in a clearing. He asked to join in and they invited him to do so, but as soon as he managed to kick the ball, it burst, the force of the explosion knocking him senseless. When he awoke the scene was deserted. In a variation of the story however, on awakening he found himself surrounded by golden coins which had filled the ball.
A view of the pond in the parish of Little Brington, supposedly once a favourite haunt of fairies.
Children of course have always been fascinated by fairies, elves and goblins, especially in story form. The county, with its spinneys, leafy glades, meadows, ponds and streams, would have been peopled with such creatures and fired the imagination. One girl in particular was sufficiently well-educated and talented enough to write delightful and masterful lengthy verses about all kinds of subjects, but it is her poetry about fairies in particular which are impressive. She spent her early years in Pytchley and Gretton, where her father, Abner W. Brown, was vicar. Those early years playing in the beautiful countryside were the inspiration for the wonderful poetry she wrote between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, when she was tragically struck down by an epidemic sweeping the area. Shortly afterwards, in 1869, her father collected a huge volume of 255 poems, mainly by his daughter, and published them under the title, Lyrical Pieces, as a tribute to her. The following is part of one of her fairy poems, ‘The Fairies’ May-Day Gathering’ and shows what a talent was lost, not just to her family, but to the county:
Artemis,Titania,
Radiant fairy queen,
Flashes, through the twilight air,
Glistening in green.
Hark! she calls her fairy nymphs.
In wild elfin rhymes;
Listen to her lily bell
And her harebell chimes.
Come ye fairies, haste, ye fairies;
Hither away to the greenwood dale,
Come, where the emerald moss is blooming;
Joyously dance o’er the blossoms pale.
Come, where brackens are tall and verdant,
Shining with necklace of pearly dew;
Come, where asphodel beds are fragrant,
Come, where clover is young and new.
Haste! for glowworms are trimming their lamps;
Haste! ere cowslips are withered and dead;
Mushrooms are peeping to be your thrones;
See! blue vervain is rearing its head.
John Clare also included fairies in some of his verse. One such charming example is a short poem entitled, Fairy Elves, Those Minute Things:
Fairy Elves, those minute things,
That sleep and dream in flowers,
That come on Summer’s golden wings,
To dance in moonlight bowers.
That on a mushroom table sups,
By glowworm’s trembling light,
And drink their dews from acorn cups,
The summer’s pleasant night.
The ‘redman’ – similar in appearance to a small elf but preferring a solitary existence, inhabiting wells and hollows, and usually seen wearing a red cap – was less common in Northamptonshire folklore. One of the more interesting tales however, tells of three brothers who lived at Rockingham, each of whom was visited in turn by a hairy redman begging for food. The two eldest drove him away, but the youngest and cleverest, knowing of a redman’s secrets and habits, managed to trap and imprison him until he revealed the whereabouts of crocks of gold stored somewhere in a nearby underground chamber. He subsequently became rich, and left the county to live in a fine house at Barn Hill, Stamford, where he married the prettiest girl in Rutland.
The ‘boggart’, a mischievous and cunning elemental, was much more common in the county folklore. One tale commonly found around parts of Europe, has a Northamptonshire version with an agricultural setting for the confrontation between a man and a boggart. A version in the folk dialect of Lindsey in Lincolnshire in the 1880s (said to be identical to that of our county) begins:
Ther isn’t noä boggards here-aboots ‘at I knaw on, but when I liv’d i’ No’thamptonsheer, I heerd tell o’ won at reckon’d at best farm i’ loordship belonged to him, if ivrywon hed the’r aun, an’ he let foäks know it an’ all.
The story goes that a farmer was busy working on his land when a boggart approached him, telling him in a surly tone to stop. The farmer ignored him, pretending not to have seen or heard him, and carried on working as the boggart tried again and again to get his attention. Eventually the farmer got tired of the coaxing and wheedling, and told the boggart he must go through the legal process if he wanted to ‘get houd a’ land’. At this the boggart changed tack, and told him there was no need for lawyers to be involved and offered to share the land equally with him when harvest time came round. To avoid any further confrontation the farmer agreed, whereupon the boggart told him that neither of them must go back on their word. The farmer assented, asking him whether he wanted what was above the ground or below it. Studying the surface carefully, he accepted what would grow beneath it and told the farmer he would return at harvest time. The canny farmer sowed the field with wheat, thereby reaping the husks, and leaving the stubble and chaff for the boggart.
Feeling cheated, the boggart asked for a reversal of roles for the next harvest, with the upper part going to him, but again the farmer tricked him by sowing turnips, so the boggart only got the leaves. Not wishing to be outdone a third time he challenged the farmer to a mowing match, with the whole field as the prize. However, once again the farmer was one step ahead and the day before the match he took a cartload of iron bars and put them in the half of the field that the boggart was going to plough. When his scythe continually kept striking the bars, he thought he was being obstructed by dock leaves. Looking ruefully at his blunted blade he asked for a break in order to wring out his shirt and have ‘a bit o’ bacca’. The farmer, nearly finished, asked him why he wanted to rest when he had hardly mown a stretch, and that he himself was going to carry on regardless, non-stop until midday. Unable to counter this, the boggart flung down his scythe in disgust, telling him he could keep his mucky old land, and (in the words of the dialect version of the tale), he ‘goa’s an’ niver cums back noär moor’.
Will o’ the wisp
Nowadays we know that these phenomena are caused by methane from decaying vegetable matter, and that being lighter than air tend to float, dance around and abruptly change direction. The north of the county was particularly noted for sightings, and many accounts were handed down by villagers and travellers about mysterious lights trying to lure them to their deaths. In his diary, Clare notes that he had frequently seen them as had the ‘alewife’ of the Exeter Arms, who told him she had often seen as many as fifteen ‘in and out in a company as if dancing reels and dances’ on Eastwell Green. There had been a great upstir in his village about the regular appearance of a ghost in a neighbour’s field, wrapped in a large white winding sheet. It was that of an old woman who had recently drowned in a well. Clare and his friends decided to go out each night to see this apparition for themselves, but saw or heard nothing. What they did see however one evening was a bright light which began to get larger and then ‘glided onwards as if a man was riding on horseback at full speed with a lanthorn light.’ Presently, it was joined by another from the south-east, b
oth of them ‘dancing a sort of reel’, before chasing each other playfully and disappearing.
In the following extract from his diary (which is housed in Northampton Library as MS15) he perfectly encapsulates the sense of fear of the supernatural felt by county folk, as he recalls another occasion, this time in his younger days, when he encountered a will o’the wisp while returning from courting a girl over at Ashton, some miles away. He was feeling terrified on the long walk back home, alone and in darkness, when he saw something that seemed to be waiting for him on the path. He climbed a stile to see if it was human or supernatural:
It came on steadily as if on the pathway and when it got near me within a pole’s reach, perhaps as I thought, it made a sudden stop as if to listen to me. I then believ’d it was someone, but it blaz’d out like a whisp of straw and made a crackling noise like straw burning, which soon convinced me of its visit. The luminous halo that spread from it was of a mysterious terrific hue and the enlarg’d size and whiteness of my own hands frit me. The rushes appear’d to have grown up as large and tall as whalebone whips and the bushes seem’d to be climbing the sky. Everything was extorted out of its own figure and magnified. The darkness all round seemed to form a circular black wall and I fancied that if I took a step forward, I should fall into a bottomless gulph which seem’d yawning all round me, so I held fast by the stile post till it dart’d away, when I took to my heels and got home as fast as I could.
A nineteenth-century engraving of a will o’the wisp.
The Wild Hunt
Among the most evocative images of the county’s folklore are those of the Wild Hunt. The original source of all these traditions are probably folk memories of the Anglo-Saxon god Woden and his Scandinavian counterpart Odin, leading a hunt through the skies with a band of dead warriors, looking for warrior heroes who had fallen in battle and, with the help of the Valkyries, transporting them to Valhalla where a glorious future life awaited them.
As Christianity became established, the pagan war leader was transformed into the Devil, riding through forests or the sky, looking for lost souls. The hunting party was now a gruesome band of undesirables consisting of the unbaptised, criminals and demons, riding red-eyed steeds and accompanied by fierce black dogs that also had red eyes. Tales also sprang up that the hunter was once human and loved hunting so much that on his death he spurned the chance to go to heaven in order to carry on his favourite pastime. Another legend was that he was condemned to hunt for eternity as a punishment for hunting on the Sabbath. Whatever the case, seeing or hearing the hunt was, like the appearance of an eclipse or comet, a bad omen, portending disaster or death.
In England, the earliest written accounts of the Wild Hunt take place around the northern edge of Rockingham Forest, in the vicinity of Stamford and Peterborough. The Anglo-Saxon chronicles for 1127 state that:
as soon as he arrived, it was heard and seen by many men, many hunters hunting. The hunters were black and great and loathly, their hounds all black and wide-eyed and loathly, and they ride on black horses and black he-goats. This was seen in the very deer-park in the town of Peterborough and in the woods from Peterborough to Stamford.
This happened continuously from February through to Easter. The ‘he’ mentioned in the first line is a French cleric, Henry, abbot of Poitou, who was the cause of the Wild Hunt appearing. He had earlier obtained ‘through his great wiles’ the archbishopric of Besançon and had since lost both bishoprics, deciding thereafter to try his luck in England. Through Henry I, he obtained the abbacy of Peterborough which was ‘basely given away between Christmas and Candlemas’, according to the monks and local folk who were obviously not happy at the new appointment, hence the ill omen.
Tales of the hunt also occur elsewhere in the county. Sternberg mentions that the wild huntsman is not confined to any particular district and (allowing for a little exaggeration perhaps) is common to almost every parish, and may be seen:
...on a calm summer’s night when the pale glimmer of the young moon scarcely penetrates the dark foliage of the trees ... slowly riding along the green-sward border of some old green lane or lonely road.
The forests of Rockingham and Whittlewood became the setting for a Wild Hunt in county literature. A member of a visiting royal hunting party sees the beautiful daughter of a forester and falls in love with her. She leads him on, playing with his feelings, making promises one minute, spurning him the next, until she finally jilts him, causing him to decapitate himself. Seeking revenge in death – for which she shows no remorse – he reappears at the spot where they first met, riding a black horse. Seeing him, she flees into the woods and is pursued by the headless spectre and his hounds, and is torn apart. This scene is re-enacted for eternity and the tradition of fatality applies to anyone witnessing the scene, for they will also come to a nasty end. In Historical Legends of Northamptonshire (1880), Alfred T. Story describes the huntsmen:
...in their quaint dresses of Lincoln green dashing across the glades on fiery steeds cheering their hell hounds with unearthy glee.
Later, Charles Montagu-Douglas-Scott set the legend in ballad form as ‘The Wild Huntsman of Whittlebury’, the first verse of which begins:
Ho, ho! for the Whittlebury’s huntsman true
The huntsman who hunts by the keen moonlight!
Hurrah! for his hounds that a maid pursue!
She crosses a moonlit ride in view,
Tallyho! and a scream that startles the night,
Forever, and aye when the moon is bright.
Supernatural animals
A spectral hound known variously as Black Shuck, Padfoot, Shag and Shagfoal was a lingering superstition in the region. Depending on the area in which it was seen, it could appear in different forms: as a shaggy black dog with fiery red eyes (the inspiration for The Hound of the Baskervilles on Dartmoor); as a great ‘bear-like’ creature (around the Helpston area of John Clare); as part-dog and part-horse (at Thorney) or as a creature the size of a calf. To touch it, even to see it or speak its name, was considered an ill omen. It usually haunted lonely places such as country lanes, bridges, fields and sometimes appeared close to a village. The black dog in the Cottingham area, however, was quite amicable. Its favourite haunt was the road between Cottingham and Rockingham, where it was said to appear by the side of any wayfarer travelling alone, gladly providing company, protection and guidance. However, if an attempt was made to touch or stroke the animal, it would instantly vanish.
Sightings of another animal have been a talking point in more recent times. Every year, there are reports in the media of sightings of a large black cat seen around the county, particularly in the central and northern parts. Whether such a beast exists or not is a moot point but there are many who testify to having seen such a creature or its tracks. County newspapers like the Evening Telegraph have offered rewards to anyone producing concrete proof on film or other documentary evidence. In 2003 alone, there were five sightings: near Aldwincle, in Corby village, in Cranford and two around Gretton. A woman from Desborough claimed in 2001:
I totally believe it exists. Before when I had seen reports about it, I had my doubts and thought it was a big domestic cat. But when I saw it for myself for the first time, I realised it was real ... It was halfway across a field, crouched down as if it was either eating or drinking from a puddle.
Described variously as being the size of a lion, having yellow eyes and a black coat, a distinctive head and long tail, no evidence has yet been forthcoming but the situation could change at any time. Like crop circles – which actually date back in recorded form to the seventeenth century – they are becoming part of modern folklore, the first recorded sighting in Britain being in 1860.
Witches
At church, it was customary to bless holy water once a year for use at baptisms, for the sick and on special occasions. It was widely believed that witches were liable to use the baptismal water from the font for their charms and spells. Therefore, to safeguard against this, fon
ts were often fitted with a stapled lock to prevent the contents from being stolen. Ten staples survive in the county at Barton Seagrave, Cottingham, Cranford St Andrew, Duddington, Flore, Little Billing, Nassington, Pitsford, Roade and Thurning.
So-called witches were indeed a social problem. It is human nature to follow a set pattern in life within a community for the sake of harmony. If anything disturbs that pattern and something goes wrong or interferes with the status quo, the cause is found and removed. A sudden illness, an unexpected death or damage to property, crops or livestock had to be attributed to something or someone. In past times, when communities were smaller and everyone knew each other, those causes were not hard to find. On a personal level, there may have been a recent quarrel or disagreement between two people or more, perhaps over the refusal of a request, followed by a curse or threat. There may have been a long-term problem affecting the community, usually caused by social misfits like the poor, the old, the infirm or the mentally unstable, or by outsiders like vagrants, all of whom created a social burden. Anyone living alone could be seen as suspicious and would be the focus of superstition, rumour and a lack of trust. There was commonly an unpopular individual such as a gossip, a spiteful person or one of ‘loose living’. Finally, anyone performing some kind of social service such as a wise woman or midwife could find themself vulnerable in a tense situation, if something went wrong. Once the cause of the misfortune was found, gossip or rumour would cause widespread fear and anger in the community, eventually reaching the ears of someone of higher social standing or influence, who consequently would take the case to court, which in turn would lead to an indictment and trial as a witch.
