The Book of English Folk Tales

by Sybil Marshall

  At intervals during the next few days the poor girl returned to consciousness, and the awful noises ceased. Once more she began to recover, and once more the fits returned, though in a different form. This time, she worked herself up each time into a frightening frenzy, pinching and hitting herself, and talking wildly as if to herself, calling, ‘Stop that! I won’t have you!’ and the like. Then, one day, she stood up from her couch and flung herself on to the fire glowing on the hearth, calling out loudly as she did so, ‘I’ll burn ye! I’ll burn ye!’ This happened several times, so that her family were thereafter afraid to leave her alone, lest she should succeed in casting herself bodily on to the fire.

  And so it went on, for two whole years, while the stress and strain on the family began more and more to tell, especially as the fits grew more and more frequent, and each worse than the last.

  In 1702, worn out with work and worry, Mary, too, became ill; and as she began to recover, she, too, went into fits. First of all, she was struck with blindness, and then became dumb for days together. When these passed off, she joined her sister Rebecca in talk and behaviour such that they appeared mad to all who saw and heard them.

  They conversed with each other about apparitions they could both clearly see, though no one else could, pointing and laughing, or sometimes cringing with fear, at the sights and sounds they were subjected to, shrieking, ‘See there! See there!’ and, ‘It’s coming! It’s coming!’ At other times they carried on lengthy conversations with their invisible guests, though people present could neither see nor hear the other participants in the discussion.

  After one such occurrence, when the invisible visitants had departed, both girls stood up to go about the house, but found that from that moment they could not move forwards or sideways. They could only move backwards, which they continued to do, day by day, until such moments came when they would suddenly cry out in unison, ‘Now we shall fall down’ – and both would fall heavily to the ground, wherever they happened to be.

  The distracted parents thought their cup of bitterness was full to the brim; but they discovered that still worse was to come, for in the course of time Anne, too, became affected, and joined her sisters in their extraordinary behaviour.

  Now Anne was the oldest, and the most stable of the three. In her normal time she had; like her parents, believed wholeheartedly in the power of prayer. The spirit of John Bunyan was still much in evidence in the country, for he had preached at several nearby villages in his time, and had left behind him a strong nucleus of nonconformist believers, of whom John Baldwin was one, and Anne another. So John did not turn to the parson, for sprinkling with Holy Water, but to his friends and neighbours.

  This was a bold decision, placing them all in danger. Some thirty years or so before, a law had been passed forbidding the gathering together of more than five people for any religious meeting, other than in the Anglican church. The penalties for disobeying were very strict, but this did not prevent nonconformists from worshipping in secret when and how they could. But to call his friends and neighbours together for such a purpose, in his own house, placed both John Baldwin himself and them in grave danger.

  Nevertheless, he asked help from them, and he found them staunch and true, both to him and the God they all believed in. They gathered together in his house and a long and fervent prayermeeting was held for the recovery of Anne from her terrible delusions. Within hours, she began to recover, and was soon herself again.

  Then she urged her father to repeat the process on behalf of her two demented sisters. So once again the faithful friends and neighbours met in John Baldwin’s cottage, to plead with the Almighty for the deliverance of Rebecca and Mary. One by one the visitors kneeled and prayed aloud in supplication for the release from their torments of each of the girls in turn. As one impassioned plea was rising to heaven on behalf of Mary, the girl suddenly went deathly white, shivered and trembled, and broke out into a cold sweat. Leaping to her feet, she cried out. ‘Oh, I shall throw up! I must throw up!’ and leaving the prayerful meeting, she rushed for the door. Her sister Rebecca immediately followed her, as did, indeed, many of the congregation.

  Out in the air, Mary began to heave ‘as if she would throw her heart up’, until, suddenly, there shot from her mouth a piece of raw flesh the size of a mouse. Then she screamed aloud that all the apparitions were standing around the piece of flesh, and Rebecca, too, averred that she could see them. They were, said the two girls, snivelling and crying, and begging for pity; and as the piece of flesh Mary had vomited gathered itself together and began to crawl away, they followed it, still crying and promising never to meddle again with the peace and comfort of the Baldwin household.

  Then the girls, absolutely cured, joined their prayers of thanksgiving to those of the assembled company, and from that moment onwards, so the report goes, all was well.

  Ways of Getting a Living

  England having always been a seafaring nation, stories of smuggling and wrecking abound, as do other more romantic tales of what happened to those who earned their livelihood on, from, or by the sea. As the old man of Deal said, they ‘stole honest’, and didn’t go about it with their gloves on. What they did use was their native crafty wit, which often has the effect of turning what might otherwise be a gruesome tale into a humorous one. Stories of wreckers are not so likely to have that saving grace. Professional thieves also have their own particular means of accomplishing their ends, as illustrated by ‘The Hand of Glory’.

  The Vicar of Germsoe and The Wrecker of Sennen Cove

  The macabre trade of ‘wrecking’ was as widely pursued round our shores as smuggling, though the West Country seems to have retained more detailed stories about it than other areas; but even this was not devoid of its humour, occasionally.

  The Vicar of Germsoe

  ‘God keep us from rocks and shelving sands

  And save us from Breage and Germsoe men’s hands,’

  the people of Cornwall used to say, especially those on the southern seaboard, fronting the channel, for there was a pretty trade in wrecking carried out along that stretch of coast in days gone by, if the old tales be true. If a ship was unfortunate enough to run aground, there were always those with axe in hand to descend upon her, and rip her to pieces between tide and tide. Their axes fell with just as much ferocity on any of the crew who dared to stand against them, and in most cases ship and cargo alike fell unhindered to the wreckers. Such happenings were commonplace round all the coasts of Britain, and it is a little unfair that Cornwall should be so singled out for memory of it; but it owes this distinction largely to a man of the church, the vicar of Germsoe (or of Breage) or even, perhaps, of both; for the story goes that on one Sunday morning the vicar was in his pulpit, delivering a sermon to his gathered parishioners. All at once, the church door burst open, a man put in his head, and bawled, ‘Wreck’!

  With one accord the worshippers rose, and began to move door-wards, but the vicar was a man of quick reactions. Breaking off in midsentence, he roared to his clerk, ‘Anthony! SHUT THAT DOOR!’

  The clerk, used to obeying his master’s instructions, hastily swung the great wooden doors together, let fall the latch, and stood guarding the entrance. The congregation, brought to a sudden halt by this unexpected hindrance, paused for a moment, quite taken aback, and looked towards their priest. That worthy was wrenching off his clerical garb as fast as he could, and throwing his gown over the pulpit, he ran down the steps and elbowed his way to the front of the crowd till he stood by his clerk with his back to the great oak door, facing his flock.

  Then looking them over with a smile, he said, ‘And now, my brothers in Christ, when Anthony opens the door, we’ll all start fair!’

  The Wrecker of Sennen Cove

  Fear swept along the coast like fire through dry bracken at the sight of a pirate sail, for numerous were the tales of wholesale murder and kidnapping, when as many as fifty men would be taken in a night, and their families left to starve. So it
was that the fishermen of Sennen Cove watched anxiously as a pirate ship neared their coast in broad daylight. To their astonishment, a boat was lowered, and in it was placed a man, shackled and manacled till he could barely move. The boat came inshore, and the captive’s companions hauled him on to the sands; then they removed his irons, leapt into the boat and began to row as fast as they could back to the ship. In vain he tried to regain the boat, but as it drew away, his pleas and his curses alike fell on deaf ears, as far as his erstwhile companions were concerned. They had left him marooned, and before long the ship stood off, much to the relief of the watching Cornish fishermen.

  But their joy was shortlived, for the stranger settled down among them, where he had been left, in a house at Tregaseal; and a man of desperate character he proved to be. He was, in fact, a most cruel and murderous wrecker, without the least shred of conscience to trouble him in his doings. Used as they were to the sights and sounds of the wreckers’ trade, they turned aside from contact with a man who not only robbed the desperate wretches struggling ashore half-drowned from their ship, but sliced off their hands at the wrists with his axe as they crawled to safety on the sands. His behaviour earned them all a bad name. They regretted the day he had ever come among them, and looked forward to the day of his death as their only chance of relief from his hated presence. In the course of the years he grew old, and they noted with joy the signs of approaching death upon him. The doctor, the parson, and one or two other brave worthies went to him at his house, to watch for the end and do what they might for him in his last hours.

  It was early summer, in the time of the barley harvest. Two men were mowing the barley in a field a little below the pirate’s house on the cliff. The day was hot and breathless, without even enough breeze to ripple the silver-white barley. Suddenly, as the reapers straightened their backs to whet their sickles, a blast of cold breeze struck them, and on the breeze they heard a voice that said, ‘The time is come, but the man is not.’

  Staring round them in bewilderment and superstitious terror, they looked out to sea. There, making her way inshore against both tide and breeze, was a black, clumsy square-rigged ship – moving, it seemed, without human aid of any kind, for not a man could be seen anywhere aboard her. All round the sombre vessel lay a pall of gloom; the sky grew dark above her, and as she moved in close under the cliff, it seemed as if a storm cloud of lurid purple and black moved with her. Though everywhere else, from horizon to horizon, lay in the glory of golden summer sunshine, the ship, the cliff, and the dying man’s house was shrouded with the cloud.

  Inside the room of death, the wrecker writhed and screamed as if in delirious terror, while the watchers could only stand by and hope that this agony would not last long.

  ‘Put them out!’ he raved. ‘Put them out! All the sailors with their bloody hands! Don’t let them come near me! Put them out!’

  The room, so said the witnesses, was growing as black as night, so that they could hardly see each other in the gloom. Then, suddenly, it was lit up by such blinding, glaring brilliance that they could see the terror on the old wrecker’s face, as his white hair rose stiff, and stood on end; and with the blaze of light came a sound as of the sea, of great tides crashing and breaking around jagged rocks, of the surge and the swell of deep waters heaving to and fro, and the hiss as the angry waves curled on to the beach, and as angrily withdrew themselves again.

  Then followed a peal of thunder so loud that the onlookers were paralysed with fright, and the most intense flash of lightning that any had ever beheld. The ground on which the house stood heaved and rocked, as if an earthquake were moving it. This put the watchers into such fear that they abandoned the dying man, and ran outside into the open. From there they watched as the black cloud which had followed the ship began curling itself into violent motion, and rolling menacingly into a smaller and smaller but darker and darker ball. Then it began to spin, as in a whirlwind it left Tregaseal and rushed out to sea again, towards the black ship, which it enveloped. For a few minutes afterwards, the ship was still visible as she was impelled by the cloud at a swift pace out to sea, while the thunder and lightning crashed and flashed and roared in a very pandemonium of elemental fury.

  When the subdued watchers returned to the house, the wrecker was dead; but the decencies of death had now to be complied with, and the kindly parson and doctor arranged for a coffin to be made, and a funeral service held. Volunteers to carry the unloved stranger’s coffin to its last resting place were difficult to find, but at last six stalwart fishermen came forward. When they went to take up the coffin, to place it upon their shoulders, it was as light as air – so much so that the bearers declared it could not contain a body, howsoever frail and emaciated by the ravages of death. Nevertheless, they bore their light burden down the path, and away towards the church; but as they left the house of terror, they were startled to hear strange pattering footsteps behind them, and glancing back, saw that the only mourner following the coffin was a large, evillooking black boar. This creature followed sedately behind them, till they came to the stile that divided the sea path from that which led to the churchyard.

  They had, perforce, to set the coffin down before crossing the stile, and as they did so, they noticed that the boar was no longer with them, though no one had seen it depart.

  At this moment, however, the sky, which had rapidly become very dark and overcast, was cracked open by a flash of blue lightning, and tempestuous rain began to fall, accompanied by dreadful peals of thunder. The bearers left the coffin where it lay, and ran helter-skelter to the church porch for shelter. By the time they reached it, the day had become as dark as night again; but once inside, the hardiest of them took courage and looked back. Lightning was playing round the stile in a vivid display of flashes, and suddenly, the darkness was lit by a different kind of light. The coffin had been set alight, and was blazing with fire from end to end. Then, as they stood gazing with fear-stricken faces, the wind grew in strength till it picked up the burning coffin, and lifted it into the air, till it was borne away and out of their sight, into the pitchy-blackness of the surrounding sky.

  So the wrecker was never laid to rest in Christian manner after all, and there were many who believed that that was only as it should be, a just and fitting end to a life of wickedness and sin.

  Bury Me in England

  A smuggling story from East Anglia, characteristic of the outwardly stolid but innately quick-witted and drily humorous folk of the region.

  They sat, busy as always with their hands, among the clutter of gear and tackle in a weather-beaten net shed. Behind them, sloping down from the town, was the jumble of pebble-built cottages and red-roofed curing sheds that made up the fishermen’s quarter. They worked facing the sea, within hailing distance of others similarly engaged in neighbouring shacks, and even of those busy with boats down on the beach, should they choose to raise their voices to the ear-splitting East Anglian pitch that carries so far on land or on sea; and they scanned the seaward horizon with seeming nonchalance in the pauses between silent bouts of net-mending and sail-patching.

  Dan’el drove his strong and wiry fingers into the heavy mass of net at his feet, and yanked it more securely on to his knees, draping it with care so that the coil of tarred rope on which he sat took the weight and prevented it from being dragged off when he let go. He reached down into the pocket of his fisherman’s smock with one hand, and into his trousers pocket with the other, bringing up a stick of black tobacco and a bone-handled, curved-bladed knife. With great deliberation he cut off a plug about an inch long, and stowed it carefully into his cheek with the hand holding the knife, missing his own eye by the fraction of distance long practice had made safe. The shortened slab of tobacco lay in the palm of his left hand.

  ‘Bacca’s near out,’ he said. ‘That fare to be the last.’ Dick hitched his upturned bucket to accommodate his broad behind more comfortably.

  ‘Ar bor! So’s brandy. Leastwise tha’s what parson say. His�
��n’s whully gone. He fare to git some yis’ty, but I said I reckoned any day now. He were a bit worried, though, I could see that. ’E say we shall hetta be whully careful, come this run. ’e seem to think They ’ad got wind o’ some’at up like – they near as nothing nabbed us last trip, ’e say. So he say no churchin’ this run, on no ’count. I tell ’im ’e needn’t fare to worry. We got a tidy few places ‘they’ don’t know nathen about, yit.’

  Dick jerked his head sideways every time he said ‘they’, indicating vaguely a spot farther along the beach where excisemen were wont to gather. ‘They’ were a keen lot, and Dan’el and Dick (along with all their mates) had a comfortable knowledge of their vigilance, and even took a perverse pride in it. There was no satisfaction in ‘cornin’ top side’ of ‘them preventives’ if they didn’t seem to have enough sense to tell a cow’s tail from a pump handle.

  ‘There she be!’ exclaimed Dan’el, his eyes on a speck of sail far out on the eastern horizon. Dick followed his gaze.

  ‘Ah bor! Might be, an’ agin that might not. Cap’n Jarkies worn’t born yis’ty. ’e oon’t come near enough to be reckernised till tha’s tew dark to see a black cat in the coal ‘ole.’ He worked steadily on, giving the boat in question only a casual glance from time to time.

  Dan’el shook his net clear, and stood up, to get a better view of the beach.

  ‘Enery’s seen her, Dick bor,’ he said. ‘E’s throwed them owd oars down acrorst each other, so as all the others’ll know by the cross to be ready.’

  Dick nodded. ‘I see ’im,’ he said. ‘But tain’t no use ’aving fits tew farst. Cap’n Jarkies oon’t come inter the roadstead till dark, and the boys all know where ter meet me afore then. ‘Them preventives’ll be waitin’ for us by the church; so we’ll slip round an’ up over the cliffs to Farmer Tranter’s ‘oiler cornstack. Built it a-purpose, ’e did, with an ’ole in the middle o’ the sheaves, an’ a tunnel ter git into it, on’y that’s blocked wi’ a bit o’ stror an’ a cart till we want it. I shall hetta send young Jim bor round there, wi’ a can fer a ’aporth o’ skim milk – what a’yer garp’n at?’