I would hazard the guess that these legends reflect the deep religious and political hatreds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while that about Lunsford is (as indeed the contemporary literary allusions show) a deliberate atrocity story, circulated as war propaganda. Three of the stories were almost forgotten once the passions of the period died away, but that concerning Sir Goddard Oxenbridge was probably built up again by the eighteenth-century smugglers who are known to have used Brede Place as a hiding place, and so entered on a new lease of life; as late as 1947, there were still some who believed the house to be haunted by his grisly ghost.
3
Dragons of Land and Water
Although St Leonard cannot be truly claimed as a Sussex saint (he was a French hermit of the sixth century, later often revered by returning Crusaders who believed in his power to save them from captivity), a very long-standing legend asserts that he did actually live for many years in St Leonard’s Forest, near Horsham, and moreover that he once killed a dragon there. The battle was long and ferocious, and as a reward for Leonard’s courage, Heaven granted that wild lilies of the valley would spring up for ever wherever his blood had sprinkled the earth, and that nightingales which had previously distracted him by their singing while he was at prayer would henceforth be silent. Probably, too, it was once thought that the Forest would be rid of snakes for ever, since a traditional rhyme, probably dating from Tudor times, says of the Forest:
Here the adders never sting,
Nor the nightingales sing.
But the area certainly did not remain free from snakes. On the contrary, some very remarkable reptile was apparently repeatedly sighted in the Forest in 1614, and was circumstantially described in the following brief pamphlet (now in the Harleian Miscellany):
A True and Wonderful Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great Annoyance and divers Slaughters of both Men and Cattell, by his strong and violent Poison: in Sussex, two Miles from Horsam, in a Woode called St Leonard’s Forrest, and thirtie Miles from London, this present Month of August, 1614. With the true Generation of Serpents.
In Sussex, there is a pretty market-towne, called Horsam, and neare unto it a forrest, called St Leonard’s Forrest, and there is an unfrequented place, heathie, vaultie, full of unwholesome shades, and overgrowne hollowes, where this serpent is thought to be bred; but, wheresoever bred, certaine and too true it is, that there it yet lives. Within three or four miles compasse are its usual haunts, oftentimes at a place called Faygate, and it hath been seene within half a mile of Horsam; a wonder, no doubte, most terrible and noisome to the inhabitants thereabouts. There is always in his track or path left a glutinous and slimie matter (as by a small similitude we may perceive in a snail’s) which is very corrupt and offensive to the scent…
This serpent (or dragon, as some call it) is reputed to be nine feete, or rather more, in length, and shaped almost in the forme of an axletree of a cart; a quantitie of thickness in the middest, and somewhat smaller at both endes. The former part, which he shootes forth as a necke, is supposed to be an elle long; with a white ring, as it were, of scales about it. The scales along his backe seem to be blackish, and so much as is discovered under his bellie, appeareth to be red; for I speak of no nearer description than of a reasonable ocular distance. For coming too neare it, hath already beene too dearly paid for, as you shall heare hereafter.
It is likewise discovered to have large feete, but the eye may be there deceived; for some suppose that serpents have no feete… [He] rids away (as we call it) as fast as a man can run. He is of countenance very proud, and at the sight or hearing of men or cattel, will raise his neck upright, and seem to listen and looke about, with great arrogancy. There are likewise upon either side of him discovered, two great bunches so big as a large foote-ball, and (as some thinke) will in time grow to wings; but God, I hope, will (to defend the poor people in the neighbourhood) that he shall be destroyed before he grow so fledge.
He will cast his venome about four rodde from him, as by woefull experience it was proved on the bodies of a man and woman coming that way, who afterwards were found dead, being poysoned and very much swelled, but not prayed upon. Likewise a man going to chase it and, as he imagined, to destroy it with two mastive dogs, as yet not knowing the great danger of it, his dogs were both killed, and he himselfe glad to return with haste to preserve his own life. Yet this is to be noted, that the dogs were not prayed upon, but slaine and left whole; for his food is thought to be, for the most part, in a conie-warren, which he much frequents; and it is found much scanted and impaired in the increase it had woont to afford.
The persons, whose names are hereunder printed, have seene this serpent, besides divers others, as the carrier of Horsam, who lieth at the White Horse in Southwark, and who can certifie the truth of all that has been here related.
John Steele
Christopher Holder
and a Widow Woman dwelling neare Faygate.
It is a moot point whether this curious document should be classed as folklore at all. Its details are so sober and circumstantial that one ought perhaps to look for a naturalistic explanation of the affair, rather than putting it down to superstitious beliefs in dragons, however much these may have been present in the minds of the frightened people of the area. Sheila Kaye-Smith has suggested that a large serpent had escaped from someone’s private menagerie, and had been observed at a moment when it was distended by an undigested rabbit – hence the ‘thickness in the middest’. Alternatively, to account for the feet and the ‘two great bunches’, one might interpret the description to fit one of the very large tropical lizards with a frill at the neck. In either case, the unfortunate creature could hardly have survived the winter. It is also quite possible that the account is a journalistic hoax; sensational but unreliable pamphlets were common at this period.
Discussing the St Leonard’s Forest legends in 1861, the antiquarian Mark Anthony Lower noted that in his own boyhood it was still commonly believed that the area was a haunt of monstrous snakes; in his opinion, the idea had been deliberately encouraged by smugglers and gamekeepers, who had reasons of their own to want to keep people away from the woods – ‘Beware of Adders’ has always been a far more effective notice than ‘Private, Keep Out’! Similarly, Charlotte Latham found that the villagers of Fittleworth in 1867 were frightened of an ‘audacious large snake’, which, they maintained, used to rush out hissing at anyone who passed its lair, and that at Offington there was a belief in fearsome supernatural serpents alleged to be guarding treasure in an underground tunnel under Cissbury.
Even ordinary snakes were quite often credited with strange powers. Thus the adder, which was of course thought (on Scriptural authority) to be deaf, was said to have markings on its belly that read:
If I could hear as well as see,
No mortal man should master me.
Another common belief, which was still current a few decades ago and may not yet have died out, was that any snake or worm that is cut in two will not be able to die till sunset. Snakes and snake-oil were used in various folk-medicines, and to kill the first adder you saw in spring was sometimes held to be a charm for ensuring victory. There was also a strong and widespread superstitious fear of snakes – so much so that as late as 1936 there were public protests that the erection of a large caduceus on the façade of the newly opened East Grinstead Hospital would bring bad luck to the district.
The dragon, as portrayed in many local folk-legends in England, is often simply a very large and destructive snake or ‘worm’, rather than the winged, fire-spewing, fantastic monster of literary epics and romances. One such, of whom little is remembered, is said to have lived on Bignor Hill, where the marks of his coils were still to be seen winding round the hillside – a reference, apparently, to the curving sheep-tracks which were often a noticeable feature of Downland slopes in the days of free-grazing flocks. But the other, and better known, Sussex d
ragon is said to have been a water-monster (like the Lambton Worm, the Loch Ness Monster, and various other such creatures in British lore). He was called the Knucker, and both he and his dwelling-place, the Knucker Hole at Lyminster, are of considerable interest.
Knucker Hole is a deep pool near Lyminster Church, fed by a strong underground spring, so that though a vigorous stream flows out from it, no water can be seen flowing in. For the same reason, the pool never dries up, and has various other striking and apparently mysterious characteristics. A writer in Notes and Queries in 1855 observed that this pond, and some others like it,
are called by the people thereabouts Nuckar Holes. They are very deep, and considered bottomless, because such strong springs arise in them that they never require to be … emptied and cleaned out. A mystery … attaches to them among the common people, who seem to have a vague notion of their connexion with another bottomless pit.
In actual fact, this particular pool is only about thirty feet deep, but the story goes that the men of Lyminster once took the six bellropes from their church tower, tied them end to end, and still could not touch the bottom. Other Sussex pools once had a similar reputation, and indeed in some cases shared the same name, though the Lyminster one is now, as far as I know, the only one where the old name is still used. It was also used of ‘swallow-holes’, i.e. places where streams vanish underground. Miss Helena Hall, whose expanded edition of Parish’s Dictionary of Sussex Dialect was published in 1957, there defines ‘knucker-holes’ or ‘nucker-holes’ as
springs which rise in the flatlands of the South Downs. They keep at one level, are often twenty feet or so across, and are reputed to be bottomless. The water is cold in summer, but never freezes; in a frost it gives off a vapour, being warmer that the air. Knucker-holes are found at Lyminster, Lancing, Shoreham, Worthing, and many other flats.
The Lancing pool in question may be that near the Sussex Pad, long known to boys of Lancing College as ‘the bottomless pond’, and Angmering too could be added to the list. All these lie south of the Downs, but the general idea of bottomless pools is not unknown inland; indeed, a correspondent in the Sussex County Magazine in 1935 wrote that, thanks to the notions of a nanny from Ashdown Forest, she believed as a child that the whole countryside was full of ponds that went straight through to Australia.
But even more remarkable is the word Knucker or Nucker itself, for it undoubtedly is descended from the Anglo-Saxon nicor, ‘a water-monster’. Originally, presumably, every knucker-hole had its Knucker, a fearsome creature of the Otherworld haunting the ‘bottomless’ depths. The Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf twice describes nicoras, once as fish-like monsters of the open sea, and once as creatures of the same type as our Knucker, ‘water-dragons’, beings ‘of serpent race’, living in an eerie pool of immense depth that led straight down to the Otherworld of ogres.
There are words related to nicor in Scandinavian languages too, and there they refer to various types of supernatural beings in human or animal form to be found in rivers or lakes. One of these, the Icelandic nykur, is a water-horse exactly like the Scottish kelpie in behaviour, and monsters of this type are not unknown in Sussex lore as well. Once again, the legend is associated with a large, deep pool on the coastal plain, this time near Rye; two elderly sisters from Rye used to tell, in the 1920s, how their parents had once seen the creature:
Their father and mother … when courting, went for a walk one evening with a dog. They were in a field when a strange creature like a horse came galloping past them. It had the face of a man, and great eyes like saucers. The thunder of the galloping sound seemed to shake the earth. The young man tried to send the dog after it, but he was terrified and would not go. Nothing would induce him to stir. So the young man, leaving the girl, himself followed the creature, when it jumped a high fence and went padding down into a large deep pool just below Mountsfield.
To revert to the story of the Lyminster Knucker, who, unlike this fearsome water-horse, eventually came to a bad end, as most dragons do. For many years he ravaged the countryside for miles around, carrying off cattle, sheep and men, and devouring them in his inaccessible haunts among the marshes of the Arun valley. The devastation grew so dire, and every attempt to dislodge the monster failed so miserably, that at length the King of Sussex offered his daughter’s hand to anybody who could kill the Knucker. Even for this reward, few would try. At last, some say, a wandering stranger, a knight errant, killed the dragon in a heroic combat, married the princess, and settled down in Lyminster. There, in the course of time, he died, and there his gravestone can be seen to this day.
This stone is, in fact, a medieval tombstone; it has no inscription, but has a very worn design in which a battered full-length Cross is superimposed on a herring-bone pattern – this, so local tradition asserts, represents the hero’s sword laid across the dragon’s ribs. The tombstone formerly lay in the graveyard near the church porch, but has now been brought inside the church to save it from further weathering.
But not everybody agrees that the hero who slew the Knucker was a wandering knight. On the contrary, there were some who strongly maintained that he was a local man, either a farmer’s boy from Lyminster itself, called Jim Pulk, or ‘a young chap from Wick’ called Jim Puttock. Nor did he face his foe in open combat, but outwitted him by coolness and cunning, as befits a true Sussex man, who is by no means silly.
Take the story of Jim Pulk first, as told in the 1930s by John Bishop, the gardener at Church Field, Lyminster. When he decided to kill the dragon, he first baked a huge Sussex pie, put poison in it, and drew it on a farm cart near to the Knucker Hole, while he himself hid behind a hedge. The dragon came up out of the water, sniffed the pie, ate the pie, the cart, the horses and all, and very soon afterwards curled up and died. Once he was quite dead, Jim Pulk came out from behind the hedge, and cut off his head with his scythe. He then, so the story goes, went to the Six Bells Inn, had a drink to celebrate his victory, and fell down dead. (Presumably he had unwittingly got some of the poison on his hand, and then, very properly, drawn his hand across his mouth after downing his pint, with disastrous results.) He was buried in the churchyard, under the gravestone already described; at least one child in the 1930s, impressed by the tale, used to deck the stone with snapdragons.
The version of the story with Jim Puttock as the hero was printed by Charles G. Joiner in the Sussex County Magazine in 1929, as told to him by a man from Toddington, whom he met trimming a hedge somewhere near Knucker Hole. It has much in common with the story of Jim Pulk (though not the tragic ending), but also interesting differences and additions; moreover, it is one of the few Sussex legends to have been written down more or less as spoken, with all the raciness of first-class oral story-telling.
Knucker, said the hedger, was a great dragon who lived in the pool ‘dunnamany years ago’. Not only would he snap up cows, horses and men for his supper, but he would go swimming in the Arun ‘sticking his ugly face up agin the winders in Shipyard when people was sitting having their tea’, till the Mayor of Arundel offered a large reward to anyone who would put an end to the Knucker.
So this Jim Puttock, he goes to Mayor and tells him his plan. And Mayor he says everybody must give ’en what he asks, and never mind the expense, ’cause they oughter be thankful anyway for getting rid of the Knucker.
So he goos to the smith and horders a gert iron pot – ’bout so big. And he goos to the miller and asks him for so much flour. And he goos to the woodman and tells ’en to build a gert stack-fire in the middle of the Square. And when ’twas done, he set to and made the biggest pudden that was ever seen.
And when ’twas done – not that ’twas quite done – bit sad in the middle, I reckon, but that was all the better, like – they heaved ’en onto a timber-tug, and somebody lent ’en a team to draw it, and off he goos, bold as a lion.
All the people followed ’en as far as the [Arundel] bridge, but they dursn’t goo no furder, for there was ole Knucker, lying just below Bill Dawe
s’es. Least, his head was, but his neck and body-parts lay all along up the hill, past the station, and he was a-tearing up the trees in Batworth Park with his tail.
And he sees thisyer tug a-coming, and he sings out, affable-like, ‘How do, Man?’
‘How do, Dragon,’ says Jim.
‘What you got there?’ says Dragon, sniffing.
‘Pudden,’ says Jim.
‘Pudden?’ says Dragon. ‘What be that?’
‘Just you try,’ says Jim.
And he didn’t want no more telling – pudden, horses, tug, they was gone in a blink. Jimmy ’ud ’a gone too, only he hung on to one of they trees what blew down last year.
‘’Tweren’t bad,’ says Knucker, licking his lips.
‘Like another?’. says Jim.
‘Shouldn’t mind,’ says he.
‘Right,’ says Jim, ‘Bring ’ee one ’sarternoon.’ But he knew better ’n that, surelye.
Fore long, they hears ’en rowling about and roaring and bellering fit to bust hisself. And as he rowls, he chucks up gert big clods, big as houses, and trees and stones and all manner, he did lash so with his tail. But that Jim Puttock, he weren’t afeared, not he. He took a gallon or so with his dinner, and goes off to have a look at ’en.
When he sees ’en coming, ole Knucker roars out: ‘Don’t you dare bring me no more o’ that ’ere pudden, young marn!’
‘Why?’ says Jim. ‘What’s matter?’
‘Collywobbles,’ says Dragon. ‘It do set so heavy on me I can’t stand up, nohows in the wurreld.’
Folklore of Sussex Page 4
