Folklore of Yorkshire

by Kai Roberts

  Thus, when Thomas Wright visited Willy Howe around 1861, he discovered that the twelfth-century legend was still well known in the locality. Assuming that Victorian farmers on the Wolds were not familiar with the work of medieval chroniclers, the narrative had survived almost 700 years through oral transmission alone – although the tale told to Wright had a slightly different twist to the conclusion. In that version, when the vessel was offered to the peasant at the banquet, it appeared to be made from pure silver; yet when he got it home, he discovered that it was nothing more than base metal and mostly worthless. Wright also notes that few locals would pass Willy Howe after dark and were greatly concerned when some antiquarians had previously attempted to excavate the barrow, fearing the supernatural retribution that might follow.

  Another story about Willy Howe was recorded by William Hone in his Table Book of 1827. In this story, a fairy maiden was uncharacteristically smitten with a local man and she told him that if he visited the top of the barrow every morning, he would find a guinea coin awaiting him. She only warned him not to inform anybody else. At first, the man heeded the injunction and he always attended the spot alone, each time finding his guinea reward as promised. But clearly this secret knowledge was too great for him to bear alone and eventually he invited a friend to accompany him to the top of the Howe. Following this, not only did the gift of guineas cease, but ‘he met with a severe punishment from the fairies for his presumption’. Sadly, Hone does not record the exact nature of the retribution meted out.

  Some idea of fairy justice can be ascertained from other stories, however. For instance, an Eskdale farmer got more than he bargained for when he accepted a wager to enter Mulgrave Woods late one night and call out Jeanie of Biggersdale, an infamously ill-tempered fairy who lived at the head of that dell. Emboldened by alcohol, the farmer approached her dwelling and called her name; unfortunately for him, Jeanie was at home and at once replied that she was coming, her voice ripe with fury. The farmer turned heel and fled, with the irate fairy in hot pursuit. He managed to escape by crossing the running stream – a boundary which no denizen of the Otherworld can traverse – but Jeanie was so nearly upon him that she managed to snatch at the rear half of his horse before the animal was fully across and her supernatural touch severed the animal in two.

  Others only happened to provoke the fairies’ wrath by accident or momentary indiscretion. Those who had the misfortune to stumble upon the nocturnal fairy revels at Gilstead Crag, for example, would immediately be deprived of their sight. Similarly, when a native of Threshfield in Wharfedale was staggering home drunk one night, his route took him by Elbolton Hill – a notorious haunt of the fairy folk. Sure enough, their festivities were in full swing and the inebriate’s sense proved so befuddled that he unwisely attempted to accompany them with a song. Instantly, the party rounded on the interloper, tormenting him with pinches and kicks until he finally managed to escape. In the melee, however, he succeeded in pocketing one of the tiny beings, and thought to present it to his daughters as a living doll. But when he arrived home, not a trace of the fairy was to be found.

  Elbolton’s association with fairies was very strong in Wharfedale folklore and this is hardly surprising as the hill possesses at least three features which are frequently identified as marks of fairy habitation. Elbolton is one of the Cracoe Reef Knolls, distinctively shaped hills formed from the remnants of a prehistoric coral reef many millions of years ago. As such, its profile is classically dome-shaped and whilst it is not particularly high at little more than 1,000 feet, it is topographically prominent. Hills of this nature are often identified with fairies; for instance, Schiehallion in Perthshire, otherwise known as the Fairy Hill of the Caledonians; or Doon Hill in Stirlingshire, which was identified as a fairy haunt by Reverend Robert Kirk in his famous tome of 1691, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies.

  Elbolton’s unique limestone geology also means that it is riddled with potholes and the fairies’ connection with subterranean, chthonic spaces is also firmly established. Similar examples in Yorkshire include the Fairy Parlour, a natural fissure which leads some hundred yards into the famed millstone grit outcrop of Almscliffe Crag. It is said that when some brave cavers attempted to explore this passage sometime in the nineteenth century, they were forced to retreat by the sound of the belligerent fairies rattling their shovels and pokers within. Several miles away in Lady Wood near Collingham, there was also a cave called the Fairy Hole from which locals claimed the sound of fairy revels could often be heard.

  Elbolton Hill in Wharfedale, notorious haunt of the fairies. (Kai Roberts)

  However, Elbolton’s most significant association is with the remains of our prehistoric ancestors. During excavation of an Elbolton cave known as Navvy Noddle Hole in 1888, the remains of twelve Neolithic humans were discovered, along with a quantity of Neolithic and Bronze-Age pottery and the bones of long-extinct animals. The link between fairies and the Bronze-Age burial mound, Willy Howe, has already been discussed, whilst Pudding Pie Hill near Thirsk represents another example. Originally a Bronze-Age barrow, this site was reused by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the Dark Ages and excavation revealed several burials, accompanied by rich grave goods. Significantly, local folklore had long claimed that if a person ran round the barrow nine times and stuck a knife in the top, they would be able to hear the fairies babbling within.

  This relationship between ancient burial sites and the fairies is repeated across the British Isles, and it may be relevant that in some northern traditions, the fairies are regarded as the spirits of the unbaptised, pre-Christian dead. Some folklorists have even suggested that oral transmission of fairy legends preserved a corrupted memory of barrows and so forth as burial grounds, long after their actual history had been forgotten. A similar (albeit largely discredited) theory holds that the fairies originated as an ancient folk-memory of conquered races who took refuge in rock-shelters and caves during the waves of prehistoric migration and invasion. This hypothesis ably explains the fairies’ connection with rocky and subterranean places, but such a reductive rationalisation cannot do justice to the diversity and dynamism of the fairy tradition through the ages.

  It may simply be that fairy locations were classically liminal and so inevitably became associated with the supernatural in the pre-modern psyche. Such symbolism seems to be an intrinsic feature of the collective consciousness which manifests in diverse cultures across time and space. This would account for the fact that fairies are also similarly associated with water sources. The Queen of the Craven fairies was believed to dwell behind the picturesque waterfall of Jennet’s Foss near Malham, whilst across the county, they were especially thought to congregate around wells. For instance, the fairies were believed to wash their clothes in Claymore Well near Kettleness. On their washing days, their efforts to beat the linen dry with a battledore could supposedly be heard as far away as Runswick Bay.

  A particularly famous watery encounter with the fairies occurred around 1815 at White Wells, an eighteenth-century spa-house on the edge of Ilkley Moor. The keeper at White Wells at that time was named William Butterfield, described by somebody who had known him as ‘a good sort of a man, honest, truthful and as steady and as respectable a fellow as you could find.’ It was Butterfield’s habit to open the door to the bathhouse at White Wells early in the day, but one midsummer morning when the birds were particularly active, he found the job unusually tricky. On that particular day, his key merely spun round in the lock and would not cause the lever to turn. At length, he admitted defeat and decided to apply brute force to the situation, but whilst he succeeded in pushing the door ajar, it was pushed right back again.

  Jennet’s Foss near Malham, home of the Fairy Queen. (Kathryn Wilson)

  Losing his patience, Butterfield gave the door an almighty shove and it flung open to reveal a staggering sight:

  Whirr, whirr, whirr, such a noise and sight! All over the water and dipping into it was a lot of little creatures, dressed in
green from head to foot, none of them more than eighteen inches high and making a chatter and a jabber thoroughly unintelligible. They seemed to be taking a bath, only they bathed with all their clothes on. Soon, however, one or two of them began to make off, bounding over the walls like squirrels.

  Hoping to communicate with these strange creatures before they left, Butterfield greeted them, but inevitably this only provoked greater haste. ‘Then away the whole tribe went, helter-skelter, toppling and tumbling, heads over heels, heels over heads, and all the while making a noise not unlike that of a disturbed nest of partridges.’

  White Wells on Ilkley Moor, a fairies’ bathing house? (Kai Roberts)

  Of course, Ilkley Moor had long been known as a haunt of fairies. A cavity in the outcrop known as Hanging Stones, a small distance east along the moor from White Wells, had been called the Fairies’ Parlour or Fairies’ Kirk for centuries prior to Butterfield’s account and according to local folklore, its tenants should not be disturbed. It is perhaps relevant that Hanging Stones is also the location of some fine examples of that enigmatic form of prehistoric rock-art known as cup-and-ring carvings. Indeed, Ilkley Moor bristles with such artefacts and with prehistoric archaeology generally. Once again, it seems that pre-modern man may have overtly associated the fairies with the visible relics of his pagan ancestors.

  The fairies’ pagan connotations may be one reason why they were so opposed to churches being built in their vicinity. This common migratory legend crops up at several places in Yorkshire including Holme-on-the-Wolds and a number of villages around Huddersfield – specifically Kirkheaton, Kirkburton and Thornhill. The church-builders are invariably warned that their favoured location in which to raise a new place of worship would not be favourably regarded by the fairies, but they ignore the advice and construct the church there anyway. Then just as they are nearing completion, they awake one morning to find everything demolished and the stones moved to a different place. They attempt to rebuild it on their chosen site but once again, their work is torn down and the materials shifted. Eventually, the builders admit defeat and simply build the church elsewhere.

  In functional terms, this narrative probably accounted for cases where shifting patterns of land-use over the centuries had left the modern village centre at some distance from the local church. It is a story also connected with the Devil in some places (North Otterington and Leake, for instance) but whilst the Devil’s motive is easily recognised as animosity towards Christianity, the fairies’ intentions are a little more vague. Are they proclaiming their hostility to the new religion, or are they simply keen to be left alone? Given that their reticence is an almost universal theme in fairy lore, it may be the latter. Any form of disturbance seems to be resented by them and a church would certainly represent a substantial imposition.

  Such behaviour could also be a product of their fondness for pranks and mischief: for whilst the fairies begrudge any human interference in their affairs, they seem happy to meddle with impunity in ours. Most famously, they were believed to enjoy firing arrows at cattle and so causing disease in the herd. Indeed, the earliest recorded mention of the fairies in England is an Anglo-Saxon charm against ‘elf-shot’. Over 1,000 years later, Richard Blakeborough attested that this superstition was alive and well in Yorkshire, whilst it was even mentioned in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Yet again there is a connection with ancient man, as farmers regarded the prehistoric flint arrowheads often revealed by ploughing as evidence that fairies had been targeting their cattle. Touching the afflicted beasts with one of these flints was also considered to effect a cure.

  Another game the fairies liked to play was to fling their ‘butter’ at the doors, gates and window-frames of a building, to which it would adhere and rot the wood away. Apparently the houses around Egton Grange were especially known for being thus targeted. Of course, ‘fairy butter’ was actually a common gelatinous fungus of the Tremellales order. Fungus is also implicated in the creation of ‘fairy rings’, circles of darkened grass which previous generations held to have been created by the fairies dancing overnight. In fact, it was caused by fungal mycelium beneath the surface of the soil, whose parasitic action on the grass leaves it in poorer condition than the surrounding field. Fairy Cross Plain in Fryupdale was renowned for its fairy rings which local children would dance around, taking care to circle fewer than nine times, lest the fairies gain power over them.

  The fairies’ need for human children is well known and once again, despite their aversion to humans intruding in their affairs, the fairies were more than happy to take great liberties when it came to ours. As the folklorist Katharine Briggs notes, ‘So far as respect for human goods is concerned, honesty means nothing to fairies. They consider that they have a right to whatever they need or fancy, including the human beings themselves.’ Indeed, they seemed to desperately require human children every now and then to keep the fairy stock healthy, and showed no qualms about stealing them as they chose, often leaving an unhealthy specimen of their own in the infant’s place. This so-called ‘changeling’ is one of the most ubiquitous fairy motifs and undoubtedly arose to explain developmental disabilities in less enlightened ages.

  The changeling belief appears to have been strong in Wharfedale during the early nineteenth century and the fairies of Almscliffe Crag were especially feared as child-stealers. During the early part of that century, a farmer named Bradley lived in that region and he was convinced that three of his children were changelings. According to one source, ‘Three of his sons, and two of the daughters were fine, tall men and women, who married early and well; but the three changelings were dwarfish, crooked and ill-tempered, and never married.’ These three ‘changelings’ were still alive around the 1850s, and a writer for the Leeds Mercury in 1885 recalled gawping at Tom and Fanny Bradley during his childhood. Even then the rumour endured that their mother had left her real children unattended in the vicinity of Almscliffe Crag and had been left with changelings in their stead.

  Almscliffe Crag in Wharfedale, home of child-stealing fairies. (Kathryn Wilson)

  Fairies undoubtedly bore their own children. According to one report, a farm-girl once stumbled across such an infant on Fairy Cross Plain: ‘It was lying in a swathe of half-made hay, as bonny a little thing as you’d ever seen. But it did not stay long with the lass that found it. It sort of dwindled away and she supposed the fairy-mother could do without it any longer.’ Perhaps, however, they were not all as healthy as that one; or perhaps complications often developed during the birth, as one of the most curious requests fairies made of humans was for the services of a midwife. Again, this is an old and widespread migratory narrative, a version of which was recorded by Gervase of Tilbury in the twelfth century.

  In Yorkshire, the legend is attached to Keighley market. One day, a stunted grey man approached a butter-wife at her stall in the town and pulled at her apron, gesturing that he needed her to assist his pregnant wife. The woman followed him, but curiously all those who saw her leave insisted that she had been alone and she retained no memory of the journey. At length, she found herself in a limestone cavern where she helped deliver a child from a similarly stunted and grey woman. Following the birth, the mother took a crystal phial and anointed the eyes of the infant; before she left, the butter-wife was sure to appropriate a drop for herself, knowing it to offer the gift of second sight.

  The little man presently returned her to Keighley and left her with a bag of fairy gold for her trouble. But thanks to the liquid she had stolen, she had a greater reward: the ability to see the little people permanently. Unfortunately, it was not to last. Several weeks later, the butter-wife saw the stunted grey man again, stealing a bag of corn from the market. She asked after his wife and child, which startled the fairy and he jumped up on her stall. ‘Which eye see you with?’ he demanded, and the butter-wife pointed at the eye into which she’d dropped the liquid. The fairy then blew in that eye and vanished, after which the butter-wife never saw such a
being again.

  This story nicely exhibits the fairies’ double standards; they were quite happy to exploit a human’s midwifery skill and steal corn that men had harvested, but as soon as their own domain is threatened, they take action to eliminate the danger. Curiously, the fairy-midwife legend was clearly still circulating in the rural areas of North Yorkshire into the twentieth century. In a study of latter day fairy accounts, Katharine Briggs records the story of a district nurse who was supposedly taken by a diminutive man to deliver a child in a hut somewhere on Greenhow Hill – the wild expanse of moorland which rises between Wharfedale and Nidderdale. Naturally, she was never able to find this hut again.

  That such a narrative survived into the last century is further proof of the enduring power of the fairy faith. As Katharine Briggs observes, ‘English fairy beliefs … from Chaucer’s time onwards have been supposed to belong to the last generation and to be lost to the present one. The strange thing is that rare, tenuous and fragile as it is, the tradition is still there and lingers on from generation to generation substantially unchanged.’ Yet in some ways, it seems appropriate for the educated observer to regard fairy belief as a relic of the past, as it echoes the strong association between the fairies and the remains of our ancestors that prevailed amongst fairy believers themselves. Whatever the fairies might be, they have always existed on the fringes of the temporal landscape and perhaps they will continue to dwell on that threshold for many generations to come.

  SIX

  THE DEVIL

  The Devil occupies a prominent place as an antagonist in the annals of local legend; a scarcely surprising position considering the emphasis which both medieval and post-Reformation Christianity gave to his persisting influence. Indeed, whilst most of the denizens with which folklore populated the countryside seem to have represented a parallel current of belief to Christianity and were often condemned by the Church, legends concerning the Devil may well have been sanctioned or even generated by ecclesiastic agencies. Whilst the subversive hand of vernacular belief can be detected in some of these narratives, by and large they appear consistent with the tenets of orthodox theology in England from the Middle Ages onwards.