by Kai Roberts
As a result, their lives were made a misery for the next two years as their new home was wracked by terrible moans and other uncanny noises. No servant would remain in their employment and eventually they were forced to have their late sister’s corpse exhumed. Her skull was removed and placed on a table in a position of honour in the Hall. The belief developed that as long as ‘Owd Nance’ remained undisturbed, the building and its occupants would enjoy good fortune. However, should the skull be displaced or slighted in any way, dire consequences were sure to follow. One story claims that a maid, sick of the skull’s macabre presence and sceptical of its supposed power, threw the offending item on a loaded wagon outside. At once ‘the horses plunged and reared, the house shook, pictures fell,’ and the skull was returned to its proper position forthwith.
Owd Nance’s unnerving visage was never particularly appreciated by the residents of Burton Agnes and during the nineteenth century, Sir Henry Boynton (a descendant of the Griffith sisters) had it bricked up in the wall, ensuring that it could no longer disturb the residents, nor could it ever be removed. The precise location of the skull today remains a closely guarded secret, although it is variously believed to be above a doorway in one of the upper corridors, or behind the fireplace of the Queen’s State bedroom in the north wing. The latter room is also rumoured to be haunted by a ghost thought to be that of Owd Nance. According to one source, ‘She still appears occasionally and generally in the month of October, which is supposed to have been the month of her death. She is short, slight and dressed in fawn colour.’
The only difficulty is that whilst the existence of the skull is never doubted, the legend of its origin appears to be entirely fictitious. Burton Agnes Hall was built in 1601 for Sir Henry Griffith and besides a portrait of dubious provenance known as ‘The Three Miss Griffiths’, there is no historical record of an Anne Griffiths in the family during this period. It raises the possibility that the skull may have been a much older relic brought to Burton Agnes by the Griffith family when they moved from their native Wales in the thirteenth century. There would certainly be precedent for such a conclusion: the guardian skull kept at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, which local tradition asserted belonged to a West Indian servant who worked there during the seventeenth century, actually proved to be the remains of a prehistoric woman, some three to four thousand years old.
Although Burton Agnes is the most famous case, several other examples of guardian skulls exist in Yorkshire and bad luck invariably follows their removal. During the early nineteenth century, a skull was discovered in a lead box concealed behind the fireplace of Sowood House at Coley, near Halifax. It was given a Christian burial in the local churchyard, but the tenants of Sowood were subsequently disturbed by nocturnal cries of ‘Where’s my head?’ and forced to return the skull to its original position to bring the trouble to an end. Unfortunately, the skull was revealed yet again during renovations in the 1960s and passed to the police for investigation, since which time its whereabouts have been impossible to ascertain. A specimen was also recorded at Lund Manor House in East Yorkshire, but this too was walled up and no narratives relating to it survive.
Sowood House, where a guardian skull was uncovered in the 1960s. (Kai Roberts)
Traditions continue to be attached to such artefacts even in the modern period. Hull’s Ye Olde White Harte Inn has a skull on permanent display in its bar, believed to have been discovered at the hostelry in the late nineteenth century. It appears to have belonged to a youth and a fracture in the bone suggests its owner may have died from a blunt blow to the head. Various stories have arisen to account for this fact: one version suggests the skull belonged to a boy who was murdered by a drunken sea captain and his body concealed under the staircase; another account claims the skull is that of a serving maid who maybe committed suicide or was murdered following a liaison with the landlord and her corpse concealed in the attic. Either way, it is believed bad luck will befall the pub should the skull ever be removed from the building.
In another example, in the late nineteenth century, Lord Halifax placed three skulls – believed to be former medical specimens – in a glass case beside the lych-gate at St Wilfrid’s Church in Hickleton, South Yorkshire. He intended them to serve as a memento mori and reinforced this function by having the legend ‘Today For Me, Tomorrow For Thee’ inscribed beneath. Yet a hundred years later, their original purpose had been forgotten in the village and local tradition now associated them with three highwaymen who had been gibbeted at a nearby crossroads. When the glass case was smashed and one of the skulls stolen in 1996, even the vicar of St Wilfrid’s gave voice to the local feeling that the skulls were cursed and misfortune would befall anybody who removed them from their rightful position at the church.
An archaic stone head at Coley Hall near Halifax. (Kai Roberts)
The apotropaic role of the human skull also has echoes in one of the most individual features of Yorkshire folk art: the archaic stone head. These carvings of human heads are referred to as ‘archaic’ as they appear to have been deliberately carved in a crude, almost primitive style, even where the mason was clearly capable of more sophisticated work. The face is typically flat and almost two-dimensional: the eyes are round or oval and often bulging; the nose is little more than a triangle in relief; and the mouth a mere hole or groove. Other features such as ears and hair occasionally appear, but always rendered in the same rudimentary style. As such, these carvings seem intended to represent not any historical individual, or mythological figure, but a universal archetype of the human head.
It is similarly evident that they were not designed as decorative motifs. Often the appearance of these carvings is quite disconcerting and they are frequently found in locations where they are impossible to see without great effort. Furthermore, they are almost exclusively positioned at ‘liminal’ points. Liminality describes locations which are betwixt and between, neither one place nor the other, the point where a defined space is divided from the next – boundaries, thresholds, margins, borders and so forth. But to a holistic worldview, which perceives the material and non-material realm as intrinsically entangled, liminal places are not just boundaries and thresholds in the physical world alone. They are also places where our world presses close against the Other and as such, are especially vulnerable to incursions from beyond.
In the household, doors, windows, chimneys, roofs, gables and gateways are classic liminal points; whilst outdoors, field boundaries, water-crossings and wells are regarded similarly. Clearly such vulnerable spots required magical protection against malevolent supernatural intrusion and the fact that archaic stone heads are found exclusively in these places indicates that their purpose was primarily apotropaic. Although no study of such features was made until the mid-twentieth century, this hypothesis was confirmed by what few narrative traditions remained connected with the carvings. Where local people did hold an opinion on the function of an archaic stone head in their neighbourhood, they were most often believed to protect the structure against misfortune and malign influences.
Archaic stone heads were also sometimes believed to commemorate an individual who died during construction work or nearby, despite the carvings having few distinguishing features. It is possible that this belief may be a corrupted remembrance of the apotropaic function of foundation sacrifices, of which the stone head has become a symbolic representation. A classic example is carved on an aqueduct constructed in 1795, which carries the Rochdale Canal over the River Calder at Hebden Bridge. Local tradition claims it is a memorial to somebody who drowned in the river below whilst trying to rescue a child. However, it is almost impossible to see the carving from any vantage point other than the river itself – hardly a fitting monument. As the folklorist John Billingsley comments, the head ‘appears to be directed at a supernatural rather than a human audience.’
Although archaic stone heads are found throughout the South Pennines, the greatest concentration of such features in vernacular architectu
re is found around the Aire and Calder valleys. Indeed, their significance was first noticed by Sidney Jackson, a curator working for Bradford Museums Service. Impressed by the contemporary work of Professor Anne Ross on the religious beliefs of Celtic Britain, Jackson grew convinced that many archaic stone heads were actually Celtic in origin, or at least represented an unbroken tradition of such carvings in the region since the Iron Age. Considering that West Yorkshire was the last independent Celtic territory in England – surviving until at least the seventh century before it was subsumed by the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria – such speculation did not seem entirely improbable.
It is true that skulls and other representations of the human head were widely used as cultic objects by the Celts, and a number of the carved heads found in West Yorkshire do have an Iron Age or Romano-British provenance. Equally, many of the later examples bear a striking stylistic resemblance to the authentically Celtic specimens. Anne Ross herself noted when she surveyed a collection put together by Jackson, ‘What strikes me as above all significant is not so much whether this head or that is genuinely Celtic or not, but the extraordinary continuity of culture shown by this collection. Presumably without knowing it, there are local craftsmen of this very century in these Yorkshire industrial valleys, carving heads with specific characteristics such as the “Celtic eye” … It is a treasure house of continuity.’
An archaic stone head on Agden Bridge in South Yorkshire. (Kai Roberts)
However, firm evidence of a continuing tradition is impossible to establish. The vast majority of heads seem to have been carved between the sixteenth and nineteenth century, whilst many others were not found in datable contexts. There are certainly no obvious examples from the early Middle Ages which could bolster the notion of an unbroken lineage and stylistic evidence alone is not sufficient to establish survival over a thousand years from the Dark Ages into the early modern period. As a result, the term ‘archaic stone head’ is now favoured over ‘Celtic stone head’ and most are regarded as the indigenous product of Yorkshire craftsmen during the period following the Reformation until the end of the Industrial Revolution.
Nonetheless, isolated instances of head carving for apotropaic purposes endured in West Yorkshire well into the twentieth century. In 1971, when the landlord and regulars of the Old Sun Inn at Haworth complained that their pub was being haunted by a disembodied voice, a local advised them to have a head carved and place it above the threshold. The landlord acted on this recommendation and an archaic stone head was fitted above the porch. Sure enough, the supernatural disturbances ceased and the head remains in place today. Even where the apotropaic function of such carvings has been forgotten, there is evidence that they are still being fashioned as part of a self-conscious revival of the vernacular architectural traditions of the region. Thus, however old the tradition may be, it may thrive for many years yet.
THREE
DRAGONS AND SERPENTS
Today, we tend to think of dragons as mythical creatures that belong to the same category as demons, fairies and other such impossible entities. Their legends seem equally fanciful and their natures similarly super-natural. However, it is clear that our ancestors lacked any such association. As veteran folklorist Jacqueline Simpson notes in her study of the subject, ‘There is no connection between dragons and those sites which are traditionally regarded as haunted, sinister or demonic, such as graveyards, gallows and gibbets, places where murders and suicides have occurred and so forth … Dragons were not categorised as part of the eerie world of supernatural spirits and demons that lurk in haunted, evil places.’
Whilst they may have thought dragons to be extinct in our own country, previous generations seemed to have had no doubt that such flesh-and-blood creatures had once infested the land and perhaps endured in certain remote parts of the globe. Nor was this belief confined to the uneducated classes; even scholarly commentators affirmed the existence of such beasts, as evinced by Edmund Topsell in his 1608 work, The Historie of Serpents, or Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Serpentum et Draconum of 1640. Prior to the greater understanding of natural history which developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is not entirely surprising. Dragons are referred to in both Biblical and Classical sources, and such textual authority was once sufficient to endorse the truth of a matter.
Similarly, until palaeontology developed as a scientific discipline, the bones and fossilised prints of dinosaurs seemed to provide material evidence for the former existence of dragons. Indeed, until the fossil sequence was properly delineated and it became clear that dinosaurs were not contemporaneous with early humans, some writers wondered if dragons might not have been a race memory of those great reptiles. The issue was further compounded by the numerous fakes which were once displayed by travelling fairs and the like. Known as Jenny Hanivers, these specimens were actually dried sea creatures modified to resemble all manner of fantastical creatures, including dragons, but also mermaids, angels and devils.
Castle Hill above Huddersfield, once home to a treasure-guarding dragon? (Kai Roberts)
Of course, tales of dragons have a long and illustrious pedigree in Britain. Known to the Anglo-Saxons as ‘wyrms’, dragons seem to have been a significant motif in their culture and an important portion of the eighth-century epic poem Beowulf revolves around an archetypal example of the beast. This treasure-guarding dragon has become the dominant image of the dragon in Western culture, probably through its use by J.R.R. Tolkien and subsequent assimilation into fantasy fiction. However, the dragons of English local legend rarely conform to this treasure-guardian type and beyond a few hints here and there, it seems as if the Anglo-Saxon tradition did not survive in the popular consciousness much beyond the Norman Conquest.
The hints which exist are tantalising but not conclusive, primarily stemming from the notoriously unreliable study of toponymy. For instance, on Cringle Moor in Cleveland there is a tumulus known as Drake Howe, the name of which is thought to derive from the Old English term for a dragon. There is also a legend that treasure is buried within the mound. However, no surviving narrative explicitly connects a dragon with the treasure, and as Chapter 11 shows, associations between ancient earthworks and treasure are not at all uncommon in Yorkshire, so this may have nothing to do with a dragon at all. Attempts have also been made to connect the legend of a ‘Golden Cradle’ buried in the earthworks of Castle Hill above Huddersfield to a dragon suggested by the nearby toponym ‘Wyrmcliffe’.
However, as so many toponyms have been subject to centuries of consonantal drift, it is difficult to say with confidence to what it originally referred and a great deal of wishful thinking has been exhibited by amateur philologists over the years. An example of the controversial nature of such speculation can be seen in Reverend H.N. Pobjoy’s attempt to derive the name of Blakelaw, a vanished hamlet that once stood on Hartshead Moor in West Yorkshire, from the Old English Dracanhlawe, meaning ‘Mound of the Dragon’. He sought to connect this with vague rumours of a dragon legend he’d heard amongst the locals of his parish. Yet another, arguably more authoritative source, prefers to give it as Blachelana, which has the prosaic translation of ‘black hill’.
Where detailed dragon legends do survive in Yorkshire, they all conform to a single type. These beasts are invariably voracious and destructive, but do not guard treasure. Nor does it take theft to incite them to terrorise the surrounding countryside – rather such aggression is intrinsic to their nature. Furthermore, whilst Anglo-Saxon dragons were usually located in wild, remote and ancient places – Beowulf’s dragon resides in ‘a steep stone burial mound high on the heath – in most surviving local legends a dragon’s habitat is typically located on the borders of civilisation and their lairs close to a settlement.
Jacqueline Simpson also observes that dragon tales are ‘characteristic of either coastal areas or of river valleys, and preferably of areas where hills are fairly low’. This is especially true of Yorkshire, where the majority of narratives are conc
entrated in the fertile, woody and relatively low-lying areas of the county, particularly Cleveland, the Vale of York and the South Yorkshire Coalfield. There are no dragons to be found in the heart of the Pennines, although what this geographical distribution says about the origin, spread and function of such legends remains unclear.
It must equally be noted that most Yorkshire dragons fail to conform to the image of a dragon as it is understood today. Although their breath is often noisome and poisonous, it is not fiery and perhaps more significantly, some examples may be described as possessing wings, but they are never reported to fly. They more typically resemble a gigantic snake – coiling up in their den and crawling along the ground, often killing their victims in the manner of a boa constrictor. Indeed, in many cases the beasts are referred to as ‘worms’ or ‘serpents’ in the original sources of the narrative.
Similarly, these monsters rarely capture or feast on young maidens as in the legend of St George and its ilk. The only place in Yorkshire with which this motif is associated is Handale. More often they simply exhibit such an insatiable appetite as to place a serious burden on the neighbouring farmers’ livelihoods. Kellington’s dragon devoured flocks of sheep, Wantley’s stole cattle and tore up trees, whilst Sexhow’s demanded the milk of nine cows daily. Meanwhile, at Filey – in one of the most original dragon legends to have emerged from Yorkshire – the dragon’s unappeasable appetite is successfully used against it.
The most famous and well-developed dragon legend in Yorkshire is that of the Dragon of Wantley, and this provides a vivid retelling of the template from which all such narratives in the county (with the exception of one) seem to have been drawn. The Wantley story survives in such detail largely because it was immortalised as a popular ballad, which circulated widely as a printed broadside in the seventeenth century. The earliest surviving version comes from 1685, titled ‘An Excellent Ballad of the Dreadful Combat Fought between Moore of Moore-Hall and the Dragon of Wantley’ and it was subsequently included in the 1794 edition of Bishop Percy’s seminal collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.
