by Kai Roberts
EIGHT
TUTELARY SPIRITS
Whilst the phantom hound was typically conceived as inimical to mankind, another class of ambiguous spiritual entity seemed to take a much greater interest in human affairs. Indeed, they were happy not only to exist in close quarters with mortals, but to interact and even cooperate with them. These beings tend to be categorised as ‘household spirits’ or ‘tutelary spirits’, however, as with so many folkloric taxonomies, neither term is quite satisfactory. Although in many cases these spirits were associated with a particular household, they were frequently known to haunt outdoor sites as well. Similarly, the word ‘tutelary’ implies that they acted primarily as a guardian or protector, but whilst this is sometimes true, in English folklore these spirits often present a dual aspect and prove a formidable nuisance for either the household or community to which they are attached.
In Yorkshire, such spirits were known as ‘hobs’ (with variations such as ‘hobthrush’) or ‘boggarts’. The former seems to have been a more standard appellation in the North and the East of the county, the latter in the South and the West. Generically, they are often classified as ‘hobgoblins’ or subsumed under the more widely recognised title of ‘brownie’, which has become an all-purpose term for these spirits in English folklore, despite having originated in the Borders and Scottish lowlands. Nonetheless, there has been some debate about how our ancestors perceived the nature of these entities. Writing in 1802-3, Sir Walter Scott was satisfied that they ‘formed a class of beings distinct in habit and disposition from the ... elves (fairies).’ However, more recent scholars, such as Katharine Briggs, have chosen to regard them as a species of fairy, albeit one that typically acted individually and preferred to live amongst humans, rather than their own kind.
The most common narratives concerning hobs and boggarts portray them very much as household spirits, closely connected to a particular family or house. Yet they differ from certain tutelary or ancestral spirits in that they are not irrevocably bound to specific people or places. The cooperation they extend to humans is clearly a matter of choice and it can be revoked at any moment, leading the spirit to abandon the family or building forever. They are not like the glaistigs or bean-sidhs of Celtic folklore, fated to serve one dynasty forever. Rather, they come and go on a whim, offering support or creating mischief as they fancy. The capriciousness of such creatures is one of their defining features, and it is never entirely obvious whether their involvement in human affairs was considered a blessing or a curse.
Their representation was also more consistently anthropomorphic than many denizens of the Otherworld, and on the rare occasion hobs or boggarts were actually seen, they were usually described as small, wizened men, naked but for the thick black hair that covered their bodies. Nonetheless, most narratives make clear that it was an uncommon experience to witness these beings in their household capacity. In some cases they were literally invisible, but more often it seems that they were merely very shy and preferred to conduct their business at night, away from prying eyes. That business usually consisted of all the least gratifying farm and household chores, such as sweeping, churning, spinning, weaving, winnowing, threshing and so forth. In return, the hob or boggart usually asked for nothing more than a bowl of milk, to be left out every night on the hearth.
The model spirit in this regard seems to have been the hob that resided for many generations at Hart Hall at Glaisdale on the North York Moors. The Reverend J.C. Atkinson, an avid nineteenth-century folklore collector who served for many decades as the vicar of nearby Danby, noted,
In the barn, if there was a weight of work craving to be done and time was scant or force insufficient, Hob would come unasked to the rescue. Unaccountable strength seemed to be the chief attribute ascribed to him ... What mortal strength was clearly incapable of, that was the work which Hob took upon himself ... There was no reminiscence of his mischievousness, harmless malice or even tricksiness. He was not of those who ... resent the possibly unintended interference with elfish prerogative.
Yet despite this spirit’s evidently placid disposition, Hob left Hart Hall in high dudgeon, as was the case with so many of his kind. The story was told that one night the master of the house happened to catch sight of Hob about his work in the barn, and noticed that through all the creature’s labour he was as naked as sin. The master concluded that to reward the industrious hob for his patient toil, he would provide it with a Harding smock, much like the other household servants wore. It was placed out for the creature on the hearth overnight and the master hid himself nearby to observe its gratitude. However, Hob was not impressed at all – after examining the clothes, he was heard to remark,
Hart Hall in Glaisdale, home to a famous hob. (Kai Roberts)
Gin Hob mun hae nowght but a Hardin’ hamp
He’ll come nae mair nowther to berry nor stamp.
And with these words he abandoned Hart Hall, never to return.
Although this tale in relation to Hart Hall is one of the most famous concerning hobs in the canon of Yorkshire folklore, it is far from unique. A similar narrative is told at several other locations in the county. The boggart of Sturfit Hall at Reeth in Wensleydale left the house for exactly the same reason, whilst the boggart of Close House near Addingham in Craven was offended by the gift of a red cap, and in a novel twist, the hob attached to the Oughtred family at Upleatham departed when a farmhand forgetfully left his coat hanging on the winnowing machine overnight, which the creature then believed had been placed there as an offering for him. In all cases the essence of the story is the same: a hob or boggart would take umbrage at any attempt to present him with clothes, and forsake the house and family for good.
This tale is not only common in Yorkshire; it is well known in relation to household spirits throughout England and the Scottish lowlands. A similar narrative was recorded concerning an unnamed demon as early as the fourteenth century by the preacher John of Promyard; then again in connection with brownies by Reginald Scot in his influential treatise of 1584, The Discoverie of Witchcraft; and once again about Puck in an influential sixteenth-century chapbook, The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow (which famously influenced William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). In recent years, it has been incorporated in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter mythos as a trait of house-elves, meaning the motif will remain familiar to children for generations to come, albeit in a consciously fictional context.
The moral of the story is somewhat uncertain and regional variations make it difficult to identify a single theme. For instance, in the case of the Hob of Hart Hall the phrasing of the rhyme suggests that he was offended by the paucity of the offering. He indicates that he believes he deserves better than a mere Harding smock. However, in other versions, it seems to be the very notion of being rewarded for his work at all that provokes the household spirit. Writing in 1856, George Henderson suggests that such spirits were regarded as ‘commissioned by God to relieve mankind under the drudgery of original sin, hence they were forbidden to accept wages or bribes.’ However, this seems unlikely given that Christianity and the belief in household spirits generally stood in tension with each other.
It seems more likely that it is another expression of the hob or boggart’s fierce individuality and free will. Hilda Ellis Davidson notes, ‘It is clear in the Icelandic tales that the guardian spirits made a contract with the farmers they chose to help, but they could never be regarded as servants. They were the luck-bringers and the luck must be freely given.’ A functionalist approach might cynically speculate that the story impressed on the rural labouring classes the virtue of treating work as its own reward. It implied that the servant should be happy to do all the sweeping, and the farmhand should be content to get on with the threshing without any expectation of advantage – certain other creatures were thus satisfied and why should human ingrates think any differently? Conversely, it may be taken to indicate that hard work would be rewarded and the recipients should
be appropriately thankful for their master’s largesse.
Yet, whilst this story indicates that, should a family wish to rid themselves of their hob or boggart, all that was required was to leave it a gift of clothes, a seemingly contradictory strand of the household spirit tradition suggests that an unwanted hob or boggart was almost impossible to dislodge. Unlike the blameless Hob of Hart Hall, many such beings had a dual aspect which ranged from trivial acts of mischief to outright malice. It seems that household spirits were particularly sensitive creatures and would take offence at a variety of perceived slights, such as general mockery, criticism of its work, interference with its movements, failure to leave a bowl of milk for it to drink or spying on its labours. Some writers have suggested that when a hob was angered it became a boggart, and it is true that ‘boggart’ seems to be applied to mischievous household spirits more often than helpful ones, but in other cases the terms are used inconsistently or interchangeably.
In some instances, such as at Spaldington Hall in the East Riding, the boggart’s shenanigans would be little more than a harmless irritation. Robin Round-Cap – as this example was known – gained fame for ‘remixing the winnowed wheat with the chaff ... putting out the fire ... kicking over the milk-pail.’ In this respect, he seems to have acted as a scapegoat for all the minor irritations of daily life, not to mention a phenomenon on to which clumsy and lazy servants could deflect blame for their lapses. In other cases, however, the spirit’s devilry was more pronounced and less explicable. Katharine Briggs writes, ‘The traditional behaviour of boggarts and mischievous hobgoblins is indistinguishable from what psychical researchers call “poltergeist manifestations” ... The phenomena are fairly constant. There is always knocking, almost always the throwing of stones and pebbles, over-setting of dishes, sometimes throwing of fire [and] clattering of china.’
On other occasions, the boggart became a great deal more violent. A story collected from a Yorkshire tailor in the 1750s relates,
The children’s bread and butter would be snatched away, or their porringers of bread and milk would be dashed down by an invisible hand … One day the farmer’s youngest boy was playing with the shoe-horn and as children will do he stuck the horn in a knot-hole … The horn darted out with velocity and struck the poor child over the head.
Meanwhile, a story recorded around Whitby in 1828 suggests that one farm hob took umbrage when the farmer’s new wife cut back on household expenditure and replaced the cream regularly left out for him overnight with skimmed milk. The offended hob not only stopped performing the household chores, but it began to make strange noises and tear the covers from the bed in the middle of the night, and even killed the poultry.
Houses which had a reputation for ‘poltergeist’-style hauntings (prior to the first use of this German loanword in an English context by the Society for Psychical Research in the late nineteenth century) were frequently known colloquially as ‘boggart houses’. Several examples are found in West Yorkshire, including at Midgley, Brighouse and Leeds, where a whole council estate has inherited the name from the now-demolished house on whose site it stands. It was famously applied to Bierley Hall near Cleckheaton sometime in the early 1800s, when the manifestations in one upstairs room of the building grew so violent that crowds of people gathered outside hoping to glimpse the phenomena, whilst numerous attempts were made to exorcise the room by clergyman and cunning folk, but all to no avail.
If the hob or boggart began to behave in such a fashion, it also became notoriously difficult to get rid of. In a story which rivals the narrative of the gifting of clothes for its ubiquity and geographical spread, the spirit becomes so troublesome and tenacious that the family decides to move house and leave it behind. To this end, they quietly pack up all their belongings onto a cart and creep out of their former home early one morning. When they are only a short distance down the road, a neighbour sees them and enquires as to what is happening, to which the voice of the boggart responds from the cart, ‘We’re flitting!’ The family abandon their flight and return to their old home, resigned to the fact that if they are going to be harassed, they might as well be harassed in familiar surroundings.
This is another classic example of a migratory legend, which is told about different locations across Yorkshire from the Holderness coast, to Cliviger on the Lancashire border – not to mention several neighbouring counties. It is now impossible to tell exactly where the narrative originated from, but despite its frequent appearance in collections of the county’s folklore today, Reverend J.C. Atkinson for one doubted that it originated in Yorkshire. However much the boggart stubbornly refuses to be evicted, Atkinson suggests that any Yorkshireman is more stubborn still and would not be driven from his home by a mere spirit. From his extensive forty years’ experience as vicar of Danby, he notes that, ‘Flitting is, like matrimony, “not to be lightly or wantonly taken in hand”; and, still less, abandoned after the said fashion.’
Nonetheless, the tale colourfully makes the point that ridding your family of a troublesome boggart was not an easy prospect. At one time they were evidently considered such a nuisance around Yeadon in West Yorkshire, that the town accounts actually record sums paid from the public purse for ‘boggart-catching’! In many stories, priests or cunning folk have to be called in and they must resort to imaginative tactics to succeed. Whilst the clergy were unable to exorcise Bierley Hall’s resident spook, in other places intervention proved more effective. For instance, the prayers of three men of the cloth succeeded in coaxing Robin Round-Cap from Spaldington Hall into the confines of a nearby well, where he was condemned to remain for a certain number of years.
The prolific nineteenth-century Yorkshire antiquarian, Harry Speight, suggested that it was the hobs and boggarts who had been forced to leave their homes – whether through taking offence or compulsion – that subsequently became an even greater nuisance to unwary travellers in the wild. Following its departure from Close House, he suggests the boggart has ‘ever since been wandering through the dale and field, an idle worthless wight, no good to anyone and tempting others to idle, evil ways.’ Whilst no folk narrative makes this trajectory clear itself, the notion nicely accounts for the seeming disparity between relatively well-behaved domestic hobs or boggarts (such as Hob of Hart Hall) and the less-civilised, more naturally malignant examples which roamed the countryside.
Hob Holes at Runswick Bay, home to a malevolent hob. (Kai Roberts)
The hob that gave its name to Hob Hole, a large sea cave in Runswick Bay on the North Yorkshire coast, retained some vestige of its former generosity. In less enlightened times, local mothers took their children there at low tide to beg a cure for whooping cough, invoking the spirit with the words,
Hob Hole hob, my bairn’s gotten t’kin cough
Tak ‘t off, Tak ‘t off!
However, one source adds that when the hob was not remedying common childhood illnesses, he ‘used to wander over the moors behind the bay with a lantern and often decoyed travellers into the pots to be found amongst the rock or else in a driving night storm of rain would offer them shelter in his hole and leave them to perish by the incoming tide.’
Hobs and boggarts in the wild were often associated with caves and potholes. In ‘The Boggart of Hellen Pot’, Victorian folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould narrates a first-hand account in which he finds himself lost at night in the limestone country between Pen-y-ghent and Arncliffe – an area riddled with such chasms. Stumbling blindly across the moors, he encounters a lame man, who, despite never speaking, seems to be leading him to safety. Baring-Gould notes ‘The impression forced itself on me that just thus would a man walk who had his neck and legs broken ...’ But after taking him some distance along the bed of a stream, the strange man vanishes, leaving the unwary traveller to stagger on in the darkness. Then, suddenly he reappears, just as his victim is teetering on the edge of Hull Pot – a vast, gaping rent in the fabric of the landscape – and tries to drag him down. Baring-Gould only saves himse
lf by clinging to a rowan tree which overhung the precipice.
Baring-Gould was a notorious romanticist and it seems unlikely that he was recounting an incident that he actually experienced personally. However, it probably does record a narrative that was popular in the Three Peaks region of Ribblesdale in the nineteenth century. At Hurtle Pot, a pothole near Chapel-le-Dale in the same area, a boggart was once believed to pull unfortunate passers-by down into the hole and drown them in the murky depths. A local writer remarks, ‘Both this and Jingle Pot are choked with water from subterranean channels in flood time and then there is heard such an intermittent throbbing, gurgling noise, accompanied by what seems dismal gaspings, that a timorous listener might easily believe the boggart was drowning his victims.’
Hurtle Pot near Chapel-le-Dale, home to a malevolent boggart. (Kathryn Wilson)
Meanwhile, in the lead mining district around Grassington and Greenhow Hill, the miners had their own tutelary spirits with a similar dual nature to hobs and boggarts. Locally they were known as the Ghostly Shift, but miners who had migrated to Yorkshire from Cornwall brought with them their own term – the ‘Knockers’. These spirits were so-called due to their tendency to make mysterious, loud rapping noises, especially in new workings. In some cases, the miners believed these sounds to be a sign that they were nearing a rich seam; in other instances, however, they were regarded as portents of disaster and thought to occur just before any serious accident. Often in those cases, superstition amongst the miners was such that they refused to continue work until further safety precautions had been taken.
The association between such beings and chthonic regions suggests some relation to the ancestors. The Knockers or Ghostly Shift were quite explicitly regarded as the personification of all the miners who had died in shaft falls over the generations, but whilst in the case of household or other tutelary spirits the connection with the dead is not so unequivocal, such correspondences suggest that hobs and boggarts may be a corrupted remembrance of the ancestral spirits that are a common tradition across many non-monotheistic world views. Although the Victorian conceit that all folklore is a fossilised relic of pre-Christian pagan practices has largely been discredited, it is nonetheless possible to draw valuable parallels with beliefs in other pre-modern cultures, as long as they are not overstated.
