Folklore of Sussex

by Jacqueline Simpson

  ‘In the Down there’s a golden calf buried; people know very well

  where it is – I could show you any day.’

  ‘Then why don’t you dig it up?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not allowed; he wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘Has anyone ever tried?’

  ‘Oh yes, but it’s never there when you look; he moves it away.’

  E.C. Curwen, excavating the Trundle in 1928, found that the legend ‘was much upon the lips of the people of Singleton during the progress of our excavation’. More recently still, a writer in the West Sussex Gazette gave more details of the sort of experience which, so the story goes, may be expected by those who try to unearth the treasure:

  You know, there’s many a one that tried… My Dad used to say as his grandfather got up early on Holy Sunday [i.e. Easter Sunday] an’ went along to the place an’ started digging. An’ he actually ketched sight of a lump o’ gold, an’ then he was almost deafed by a clap o’ thunder, an’ when he looked again, the gold was gone.

  There is also a quite different account of the treasure hidden on the Trundle, according to which it is not Aaron’s calf at all, but a mass of gold and other booty gathered by a Viking host – the same Vikings, indeed, who are said to have been slaughtered in Kingley Vale by men from Chichester (see below, p. 45). Before setting out for this battle, they hid their hoard somewhere on the hill, and set a ghostly calf to guard it; on certain nights this calf may still be heard bleating, as it roams the wooded slopes below the Trundle.

  The remaining Sussex treasure-legends are mostly bare statements of belief, without narrative detail. Thus, the Golden Calf is also said to lie on Clayton Hill (where there are barrows, though no fort), and to be protected by the Devil, in the same way as on the Trundle. Chanctonbury, Hollingbury, and Pulborough Mount conceal some unspecified treasure; on Mount Caburn there is a silver coffin and also (separately) a knight in golden armour; on Firle Beacon, a silver coffin; under the Long Man of Wilmington, ‘one of the Romans in a gold coffin’.

  Cissbury was the scene of a slightly more elaborate story, current in the 1860s. It was said that a blocked-up tunnel ran underground from Offington Hall to Cissbury Ring (a good two miles), and that at the far end of the tunnel there lay a treasure. The owner of the Hall ‘had offered half the money to anyone who would clear out the subterranean passage, and several persons had begun digging, but had all been driven back by large snakes springing at them with open mouths and angry hisses’. The alleged existence of the tunnel is still remembered in Worthing, though Offington Hall has been demolished; the treasure and its guardian snakes, however, seem now to be forgotten.

  The last of these hill-top legends concerns Torbery or Tarberry Hill, near South Harting. Though the nature of the treasure is not specified, it is reputed to be so splendid that a local rhyme declares:

  Who knows what Tarberry would bear

  Would plough it with a golden share.

  Such, at least, was the version of the rhyme recorded in 1877. A more recent version somewhat ironically makes the use of a golden ploughshare a necessary condition, without which the gold cannot be unearthed – no doubt, on the principle that it takes money to make money:

  He who would find what Torbery would bear

  Must plough it with a golden share.

  Finally, a treasure story attached to an old house, Chiddingly Place. In the main gallery of this Tudor mansion, there was, once upon a time, a crock of gold, over which brooded an evil spirit in the shape of a black hen. There she sat, night and day, never moving and never taking food, until one day a robber rashly tried to seize the gold. At this, the hen hurled herself at him with such violence that he fell senseless, and then flew away through the east window of the hall, bending two thick iron bars as she forced her way between them. They were pointed out long afterwards in proof of the tale. As for the foolhardy thief, when he came round from his stunned condition, he was found to have gone mad, and he had to be rocked in a cradle for the rest of his days.

  Before leaving the subject of buried treasures, it may be as well to say something about alleged underground passages, like the one mentioned above as running from Offington Hall to Cissbury. There are great numbers of these, so many that it would be impossible to list them; typically, they are said to run from some conspicuous or ancient house to the nearest church, from a church or a house to the sea, or from a tower, obelisk or other ‘folly’. The situation is confused by the occasional discovery of real short tunnels, or at any rate recesses, leading from old cellars and crypts, which may possibly have been once used as smugglers’ hides. But the great majority of the legendary tunnels are quite impossibly long, and they can only be fictitious.

  They seem to have a strong hold on the popular imagination, even nowadays, but oddly enough there are few interesting explanations attached to them, and nothing that can reasonably be called a story. The commonest reason given for their existence is that they were made as escape routes by smugglers; it may well be that smugglers encouraged people to believe in such tunnels, if only to distract attention from their real routes. They may also be said to be the work of monks, of Catholic priests hiding from persecution, or (in one case, that of Dedisham Manor) of King John seeking a ready escape from the barons! In Brighton, for obvious reasons, there is said to be one leading from the Pavilion to Mrs Fitzherbert’s house. But on the whole, underground passages are a disappointment to the folklore collector, their dramatic possibilities having remained quite undeveloped.

  2

  Giants and Bogeymen

  The tallest man in England is a Sussex man – the famous Long Man of Wilmington, a gigantic figure, 226 feet long, cut in the turf on the steep northern flank of Windover Hill, facing Wilmington Priory. Nowadays his outline is permanently picked out in white bricks, and has been so since 1874; originally his form would have been simply ‘drawn’ by cutting away the turf from the white chalk, but in the course of time he had been allowed to become so overgrown as to be only dimly visible when the light fell obliquely or when snow lay longer in his outline, and so a restoration became essential. In his overgrown state, he was also sometimes locally known as the Green Man, but that name is now forgotten.

  The age of such chalk-cut figures has been much debated; the Long Man has been ascribed to pretty well every period from the Neolithic to the late medieval, but nowadays it would be fairly generally conceded that the only realistic choice lies between the Celtic and the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon periods. A recent theory plausibly compares his pose, as he stands with a staff in either hand, with that of a naked warrior in a horned helmet, carrying two spears, engraved on a belt-buckle found in a seventh-century Saxon grave at Finglesham, Kent. This figure, and others like it on Scandinavian helmets, are connected with the cult of a war-god, and may represent either the supernatural being or his human devotees. But, of course, staffs are not spears, and the Long Man wears no helmet. Presumably what happened was that when Sussex became Christian the distinctive emblems of the warrior god were deliberately turfed over, leaving an inoffensive giant, less objectionable to Christian eyes.

  The giant must have remained locally popular, for only repeatedly scraping away the turf could have kept him in existence through the centuries so that he survived, however dimly, until he was given his permanent outline in late Victorian times. Scouring such a large figure must have been a considerable task, and it is probably fair to assume that it was a communal undertaking, enlivened by sports and merrymaking (as at the famous scourings of the White Horse of Uffington, in Berkshire), but unfortunately no records of such activity have survived.

  Naturally, a local legend grew up to explain how such a figure was there at all. According to this, a living giant had once had his home on Windover Hill, but had been killed, and the figure was either a memorial to him or the actual outline of his body, drawn round him as he lay dead on the slope. As for how he died, the versions differ. Some say he simply tripped on the crest of the hill, which
is very steep, and broke his neck; others, that he was killed by pilgrims on their way to Wilmington Priory (an echo, perhaps, of religious objections to, or mutilations of, the figure?); others, that he was killed by a shepherd who threw his dinner at him. But the commonest tale was that there were two giants, the one on Windover Hill, and the other living in the large round barrow on top of Firle Beacon, three miles away across the Cuckmere Valley. The two of them quarrelled, and hurled boulders at one another – some flint mines and quarries on Windover Hill are said to be the craters left by these missiles. At length, the Firle Giant killed the Long Man, either with a boulder or by flinging his hammer at him, and he now lies dead on the hillside – or else, say some, in a long barrow called Hunter’s Burgh up on the crest of the hill.

  One intriguing question that must tantalise both archaeologist and folklorist is whether the Sussex Downs, which lend themselves so well to the cutting of chalk figures, ever had any more of them besides the Long Man (apart, that is, from a horse on Hindover Hill, south of Alfriston, known to have been first cut about 1838 by some young men from Frog Firle, and re-cut in 1924). There are strong hints that older figures did once exist in this same region of the Cuckmere Valley. The late T.C. Lethbridge remembered being told by a shepherd, when he was a schoolboy at Seaford, that the Long Man had once had a companion, and that these figures had been known as Adam and Eve. Moreover, J.P. Emslie, collecting traditions in this area in 1905, came upon memories of a figure representing ‘a man thrown from a horse’ on a hill above Alfriston, which was locally said to mark the site of a victory of Saxons over Normans. Two other writers specifically locate a figure (possibly the same one) as having been on the slopes of Hindover Hill, a mile and a half south of Alfriston; one, A.H. Allcroft, says of it: ‘Men who were schoolboys in the 1860s recollect it well enough, though it is now so vanished that learned folks refuse to believe them.’

  To return to legends, rather than figures, there seems to have been a traditional Downland giant named Gill, for on the slopes of Mount Caburn, not far from Glynde, is a barrow known as Gill’s Grave; at one time there was a story current that Gill used to stand on top of the Caburn and hurl his hammer from that height – though at whom is not said. Two other place names, Gill’s Ridge near Crowborough and Gill’s Lap in Ashdown Forest, may possibly allude to the same gigantic hero (though the latter is usually ‘explained’ by a rather pointless anecdote about a carter named Gill whose overlapping load upset his cart). There was also an unnamed giant in the neighbourhood of Lewes, who, so local children believed in the 1880s, had hollowed out the great coombe in the Downs behind the town.

  The only giant associated with West Sussex is a more literary figure, Bevis of Hampton, the hero of a lengthy poem of the fourteenth century, who accomplished many exploits with the help of his horse Arundel (or Hirondelle) and his sword Morglay. The ‘Hampton’ of the poem is Southampton, but in Sussex lore Bevis, presumably because of his horse’s name, is associated with the town of Arundel. He is here said to have been a giant, who could wade across from the Isle of Wight, and frequently did so, for his own amusement. He acted as warder at the gates of the Earls of Arundel, who built a tower to house him, and allowed him a whole ox and two hogsheads of beer each week. He served them loyally for many years, and when he grew old and felt that his end was near, he flung his sword from the top of the castle keep, and asked to be buried where it fell. A prehistoric burial mound in Arundel Park is known as Bevis’s Grave, a huge sword in the armoury is alleged to be Morglay, and the tower called Bevis Tower is pointed out as his home.

  Bosham too has a legend about Bevis. He is said to have been in the habit of pausing there to wash his dogs when on his way from Southampton to Arundel, on which occasions he generally had with him a staff which he used to use when he went wading across from the Isle of Wight. This staff he eventually gave to Bosham Church as a keepsake – and to prove the tale, people used at one time to point to a large pole kept in the church tower, though by the end of the nineteenth century it had been removed. A few miles inland from Bosham, on Telegraph Hill near Compton, there is a fine prehistoric long barrow known as Bevis’s Thumb.

  The giants considered so far have been an amiable company, keeping their aggressiveness for one another, not for men. Very different are the bogeymen, terrifying figures whom children believed in, and whom parents deliberately used in order to scare their offspring into good behaviour. These bogeys might be, in origin, real human beings, but to the children they would easily seem supernatural in their ubiquity and omniscience; people still living can remember the nursery threat ‘Boney will come and take you away’, which originated in the fear of the Napoleonic invasion, but continued long after Napoleon was no more. More ancient, and all the more fearsome for that, were the foes whom certain nineteenth-century mothers would invoke to control their children: ‘I’ll set the Danes on to yer, if yer doänt do as I tells yer!’

  Some bogeys were only mentioned in connection with a specific type of naughtiness; thus, ‘if you go gathering firewood on Sunday, the Man in the Moon will carry you off’, while ‘if you go nutting on Sunday, the Devil will come and hold the branches down for you’. The point of both prohibitions, in this context, was to stop children spoiling their best clothes by rough use, but the one about nutting could have other meanings too (see pp. 62–3).

  One very impressive bogey was Spring-Heeled Jack. He is first mentioned as a topic for rumours and panic in and around London in the winter of 1837/38, where he was alleged to be some sort of devil or ghost which terrorised people by suddenly leaping out at them in dark streets, slashing them with his claws. Others said he was a human prankster, scaring people for a bet and escaping at high speed, thanks to springs hidden in the heels of his boots. If there was indeed a practical joker at work he was never caught, and the rumours quickly spread far and wide, reappearing in many parts of England at intervals during the nineteenth century. Boys’ comics and ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ took up the theme, though they usually presented Jack as a disguised hero who exploited his athletic skill and demonic costume to terrify evil-doers. But to the children of Lewes in the 1890s he was a fearsome supernatural figure, extremely tall, and with such powerful springs in his heels that he could leap and rattle over hedges and ditches. Naughty children were told that he could spring so high that if they were not good he would peer in through their bedroom windows. Two Lewes boys were once thrown into utter panic by a glimpse of something white moving behind a hedge, with moaning sounds and clanking chains. They fled home, convinced that Spring-Heeled Jack was after them, but when their fathers went to investigate, the bogey proved to be a sick cow tethered in a field.

  One odd and macabre type of legend, peculiar to East Sussex, alleges that some member of a prominent local family was an ogre who devoured babies. The Devenishes of Horselungs Manor, at Hellingly, and the Darrells of Scotney Castle (on the Kentish/Sussex border) have each had this legend attached to one of their family, and the prominent Cavalier, Colonel Thomas Lunsford of Whyly, who was the target of several political satires, was accused in his own lifetime of this crime. One poem declares (inaccurately) that he was killed at the battle of Edgehill, and that there was a child’s arm in his pocket at the time; another says that he fed his dogs on the scraps of his ghoulish meals; while in Butler’s Hudibras he is jokingly compared with Bloody Bones, a traditional ogre in nursery lore. Finally, one may mention that four carved figures on the doorways of the seventeenth-century Socknersh Manor at Brightling are locally known as ‘the Baby Eaters’, though who they are meant to represent has been forgotten.

  Such tales are grim enough, but the legend that has gathered round Sir Goddard Oxenbridge of Brede is more gruesome still, and has been elaborated over the centuries into a very satisfying tale of the macabre. Sir Goddard, who died in 1537, and whose monument can be seen in Brede Church, seems in fact to have been a quite normal and amiable person, piously concerned with endowing a chantry for the repose of his soul. I
n local legend, however, he has been transformed into a fearsome giant who roamed the countryside, carrying children off to eat them. Nobody could get at him to kill him, partly because of his great strength, and partly because a crow which was his familiar always brought him warning. Moreover, he was proof against all normal weapons, though it had been foretold that a wooden saw would be his death. Meanwhile, he was still unharmed, and every day he ate one child for his supper.

  So at length, all the children of Sussex gathered together, and in great secrecy they brewed an enormous vat of beer (a drink previously unknown in the district), and fashioned a huge wooden saw. They brought the vat to Groaning Bridge, at the entrance to Brede Park, where Sir Goddard could not fail to see it, and they lay in ambush near the bridge. Sure enough, the giant saw the beer, smelled it, and began to drink; in next to no time he had drained the vat, and was lying helplessly drunk on the bridge. Then the children brought out their saw and laid it across him, as if across a fallen tree. Those from East Sussex rode upon one end of it, and those from West Sussex upon the other, and so they sawed Sir Goddard Oxenbridge in half. Long afterwards his ghost was still said to haunt both the house and the bridge, in the form of a severed trunk.

  The status and origins of these grotesque tales of cannibalism are hard to determine – were they seriously believed, and if so, by whom, and why? It has been suggested by one Sussex historian, Edward Shoosmith, that they began as a local joke based on the existence of some article of food (e.g. a biscuit or pudding) familiarly known as a ‘baby’, but he was not able to offer evidence that any such food existed. On the other hand, the four reputed ogres do at least have one trait in common, namely their religious affiliations. Sir Goddard Oxenbridge and the Devenish family at Horselungs were Roman Catholics of the Reformation period, the Darrells of Scotney (induding the ‘Wild Darrell’ to whom the legend is attached) remained recusant Catholics for several generations, and since Thomas Lunsford was a Cavalier leader, he must have been a High Church man. But Sussex on the whole sympathised with the Puritan and Parliamentarian movements, and honoured the memory of Protestant martyrs burned at Lewes in the reign of Mary Tudor.