The skulls at Warbleton Priory, on the other hand, were regarded with awe in quite recent times. These are two skulls kept in the Priory ruins (now part of a farm), and the story was that if anyone tried to move them from their place, let alone bury them, ghastly noises would break out in the night, the cattle would fall sick, and ill-luck would befall the hand that moved them. They are said to be the skulls of a former owner of the priory, foully murdered, and of the murderer; needless to say, there was an indelible bloodstain on the floor of the room where the murder took place. As late as 1947, a writer in the Sussex County Magazine found the legend very much alive, although he had also spoken with an old lady who had held the skulls in her lap for a full twenty minutes when she was a little girl without suffering any ill-effects or causing any calamities. Indeed, he also tells how the skulls were once taken out of doors and lodged in an apple tree, the only result of this profanation being that a blue tit built its nest in one of them, using the eye-socket as an entrance.
The prize for the most fantastic ghost in Sussex ought, I think, to be equally divided between Rye and Crowborough. The Rye story concerns an oddly-named street, Turkey Cock Lane, near the site of a former monastery. Long ago, it is said, one of the monks fell in love with a girl living near by, and charmed her by his lovely singing; they ran away together, but were caught, and he was buried alive beyond the town walls, whereupon she died of a broken heart. Their ghosts still meet in the lane, and he still tries to sing to her – but his punishment continues in the afterlife, for his fine voice has turned into a turkey’s gobble. As for Crowborough, there was a story current there late in the nineteenth century that Jarvis Brook Road was haunted by (of all things) a spectral bag of soot. On certain nights the bag would appear and pursue people walking in the road; once it chased a blacksmith who had defied it all the way to his own home.
A story from Cuckfield has several points of interest. It concerns a member of one of the wealthy local families, Mrs Ann Pritchard Sergison, who died in 1848 at the age of eighty-five. She had been a redoubtable old lady, notorious for her vindictive temper, which came out in bitter feuds with her tenants and even with her own son; indeed, she was locally known as ‘Wicked Dame Sergison’. Soon after her death, rumours began:
The country people said she was too wicked to rest in her grave, and ghost stories about her grew up. Carters on the road from Cuckfield to Ansty declared that their horses shied at the sight of her ghost swinging on the oak gates at the entrance to Cuckfield Park, and people became afraid to travel on this road at night. Finally three clergymen, the vicar and curate of Cuckfield and the vicar of Balcombe, are said to have held a service of exorcism in Cuckfield Church at midnight. Gossips reported that they had caused the ghost to drown in the font. However that may be, the ghost stopped haunting the highway, and soon after her son replaced the oak gates by iron ones with spikes.
This story is more shapely than most, beginning with some indication of the type of character to whom the haunting is attributed, and ending with the laying of the ghost. Many traditional tales, especially in the west of England, end with the exorcism of the ghost to some lonely pool, or far away to the Red Sea; the mention of a font for the purpose is unusual, and is perhaps an echo of Catholic belief in the efficacy of Holy Water. Other incidental details show authentic folk-beliefs, for instance in the well-known power of iron against all evil spirits, and in the ghost’s choice of a gate for its manifestations; gateways and stiles often figure in folklore as haunted spots, the idea probably being that boundaries and points of intersection are places where supernatural forces may more easily break through into the normal world.
Ghostly animals are a common theme in folklore, the most usual being dogs and horses, plus the occasional calf (see pp. 22, 40, 49). It is not always clear whether such creatures are thought of as ghosts of dead animals, as purely otherworld creatures which had never walked this earth in flesh and blood, or even sometimes as ghosts of human beings reappearing in animal form. The best-known Sussex tradition of a ghostly dog dates from the nineteenth century and concerns the road between Alfriston and Seaford; it was said that a white dog used to appear there on Midsummer Eve every seven years, and brought death or disaster to anyone who saw it. The story is associated with the discovery of a man’s skeleton at the roadside when the road was widened early in the nineteenth century; it was alleged that this was the body of the ‘long-lost heir’ of one of the local families (which one is not clear) who had been murdered by robbers, together with his faithful dog, some time in the eighteenth century. Some versions of the story stress the man’s ghost, which haunted his rightful home; others that of the dog, which is said never to have appeared again after its master’s body had been found.
The Alfriston dog was visible to men, but it was also once commonly believed that ‘the ghosts of dogs occasionally walk abroad, unheard, unseen, except by their own species’, and that if dogs bark inexplicably and persistently, it is a sign that they are disturbed by the sight of their ghostly counterparts. On the other hand, the black dogs which Lower declares were once to be found in every unfrequented corner are classified by him as demons, not as ghosts; there is still a vague tradition of a headless black dog haunting Black Dog Hill, on the road between Ditchling and Westmeston, but there is nothing to cast light on its nature or the reason for its presence.
Definitely demonic are the spectral packs of ‘wish hounds’ or ‘witch hounds’; as late as the 1930s it was possible to find Downland shepherds who claimed that they, or more often their sheepdogs, had heard them sweeping past overhead, as they hunted the souls of the damned through the sky. The great windswept height of Ditchling Beacon is said to be the site of such a spectral hunt; one can hear the cry of the hounds, the horses’ hooves, and the huntsman’s horn, but nothing is ever to be seen. The belief can lend itself to deliberate exploitation; round Fairlight Cove, smugglers and their allies used to fill the ears of credulous folk with tales about ‘wind hounds’, fierce unearthly creatures that raced along the cliffs on certain nights – the nights when cargoes were due to be landed.
Smugglers did a great deal to foster all sorts of ghost stories as a cover for their activities. It is widely believed that the famous eighteenth-century ‘Drummer of Hurstmonceux’, a spectre sometimes described as being nine feet tall, which filled the nights with eerie drum-beats, was a signalman for the local smuggling gang, and it was noticed that once the preventive men had restored the rule of law in this part of Sussex, the manifestations ceased. Another well-known story is that of the Phantom of Romney Marsh, a black-cloaked rider whose face was a skull, haunting the marshes and churchyard; it is said he was one of the local gentry disguised in a grey cloth mask, leader of the Romney smugglers. This legend was the basis for the exploits of the fictional ‘Dr Syn’. Occasionally tricks of this sort were unmasked on the spot by some resolute investigator, as in an incident at Edburton early in the nineteenth century:
One morning the whole place was in consternation, owing to a report that two men had been frightened close to a large wood by a ghost, which appeared in the shape of an animal about the size of a calf, with two flaming eyes. Everyone was afraid to go near the place. Mr Thomas Marshall … went and examined it, and found a large quantity of smuggled goods.
So much for the legendary ghosts of old Sussex; but the modern age has evolved some widely circulating stories of its own, each with its own typical pattern, and at least one of these, the ‘Phantom Hitch-Hiker’, has cropped up in a Sussex setting. A motorist, so the story goes, gave a lift to a girl who was hitching southwards on the London to Worthing road. As he passed through Horsham, he felt a great longing for a cup of coffee, so he stopped at a wayside café; the girl refused to get out, so he left her sitting in the car. When he came back, she had disappeared, and he could find nobody who had seen what became of her. He was so worried over what might have happened to her that he decided to telephone her parents (for she had mentioned their address); to h
is horror, he learnt that their only daughter had been killed three years before, run over while hitching a lift outside a Horsham café.
5
Fairies
Although it is most improbable that a belief in fairies is seriously held by any adult of the present generation, it was a different matter in the nineteenth century, when anecdotes based on this once quite general belief were still circulating fairly widely. Even two generations ago, it was not utterly extinct. A contributor to the Sussex County Magazine in 1954 described how, during her childhood on a farm near Chiddingly, a labourer named Harry used to tell her how:
The little ‘pharisees’ helped a sick workman by thrashing out his corn for him while he slept, until he woke to hear one little man say to his companion, ‘I twet; do you twet?’ [i.e. sweat], and the sick man burst out laughing, which so offended the pharisees that they never helped him again. This and other stories he told us, not so much to amuse us, as to warn us never to offend these little people, whom he firmly believed in and said he had seen when he was at work in the woods.
The tale Harry told is a common one, earlier and fuller versions of which will be given below – what is interesting is his attitude to the fairies, whom he thinks of as living in close daily contact with men, and as being both helpful, up to a point, and also potentially dangerous if offended. This is firmly in the main line of English fairy legends (as opposed to the more fanciful nursery tales); as the writer shrewdly notes, Harry told his stories ‘not to amuse us, but to warn’.
The term ‘pharisees’, incidentally, is not so inexplicable as it may appear. A feature of Sussex dialect, as of several others, is the reduplicated plural such as ‘waspses’ or ‘ghostses’; by this process, ‘fairies’ became ‘fairises’, and this in turn came to be confused with the Biblical Pharisees, in pronunciation at least.
The Sussex fairy beliefs are excellently illustrated by two cautionary tales which the antiquary M.A. Lower published in 1854, these having been told him by a countryman named William Fowington, who had turned seventy at the time. Lower regarded them as mere survivals of stories current in the eighteenth century (Will Fowington having set them three generations before his own time), but it will be seen that the second is the full version of the story Harry was still telling early in the twentieth century, about the sweating fairies. Lower took pains to render Will Fowington’s tales in his own words, thus providing us with a vivid example of rural narrative art from 150 years ago:
When I was a liddle boy and lived with my gurt-uncle, old Jan Duly, dere was a old place dey used to call Burlow Castle [i.e. the earthwork, probably a medieval fort, near Arlington]. It warn’t much ov a castle – onny a few old walls like – but it had been a famous place in de time when dere was a king in every county. Well, whatever it had been afore, at the time I speak on, it was de very hem [hell] of a place for Pharisees, and nobody didn’t like to goo by it ahter dark for fear on um.
One dee as Chols Packham, uncle’s grandfather (I’ve heerd uncle tell de story a dunna-many times) was at plough up dere, jest about cojer time [i.e. lunch break], he heerd a queer sort of a noise right down under de groun’ dat frightened him uncommonly, sure-lie. ‘Hullow,’ says Chols to his mate, ‘did you hear dat, Harry?’ ‘Yahs,’ says Harry, ‘what was it?’ ‘I reckon ’twas a Pharisee,’ says uncle’s grandfather. ‘No ’twarn’t,’ says Harry, ‘dere aren’t no Pharisees now. Dere was once – at Jerusalem; but dey was full-growed people, and has been dead hunderds o’ years.’
Well, while dey was a-talking, Chols heerd de noise agin – ‘Help! Help! Help!’ Chols was terribly afeard, but he plucked up heart enough to ax what was wanted.
‘I’ve been a-bakin’,’ said de liddle voice, ‘and have broke my peel’ (dat’s a sort o’ thing dat’s used to put loaves into de oven wid), ‘and I dunno what upon de airth to do.’
Under de airth, Chols thought she ought to ha’ said, but howsomever he didn’t say so. And being a tender-hearted kind of a chap dat didn’t like anybody to be in trouble, he made answer without any preamble, ‘Put it up, and I’ll try to mend it.’
No sooner said dan done; dere was a chink in de groun’, for de season was dryish, and sure enough, through dat chink dere come up a liddle peel not bigger dan a bren-cheese knife. Chols couldn’t hardly help laughin’, it was such a monstrous liddle peel, not big enough to hold a gingey-bread nut hardly; but howsomever he thought ’twas too seerous a thing to laugh at, for he knowed of old how dahngerous ’twas to offend any of dem liddle customers. So he outs wud a tin-tack or two as he happened to have in his weskit pocket, and wud de help ov his cojer knife for a hammer, and his knee for a bench, he soon mended de peel and put it down de chink.
Harry was back-turned while dis was a-gooin’ on, and when he come back Chols up and told him all about it; but Harry said ’twas all stuff, and he didn’t believe a word consarnin’ on’t, for Master Pettit, de parish clerk, had told him ’twas all a galushon [delusion], and dere warn’t no Pharisees nowadays.
But howsomever he proved to be wrong more ways dan one, for next dee at cojer time when Harry was back-turned agin, Chols Packham heerd de voice as afore a-comin’ up out ov de chink, and a-sayin’, ‘Look here!’
Well, Chols turned roun’, not quite so much frightened dis time, and what should he see standin’ close agin de chink but a liddle bowl full of summat dat smelled a hem-an’-all better dan small beer.
‘Hullow!’ thinks Chols to hisself, ‘dis is worth havin,’ he thinks. So he tasted it, and at last drunk it all up; and he ’llowed dat of all de stuff he ever tasted, dat was de very best. He was a-gooin’ to save de liddle bowl to show Harry dat dere certainly was fairies, but whilst he was a-thinking about it, all of a sudden de bowl slipped out of his hands and dashed itself into a hundred pieces, so dat Harry onny laughed at him, and said ’twas naun but a cracked basin.
But howsomever, Harry got sarved out for bein’ so unbelievin’, for he fell into a poor way, and couldn’t goo to work as usual, and he got so tedious bad, dat he fell away to mere skin and boän and no doctors couldn’t do him no good, and dat very day twelmont he died, at de very same hour dat de Pharisees was fust heerd, and dat he spoke agin ’em.
An ol’ brother of my wife’s gurt-granmother see some Pharisees once, and ’twould ha’ been a power better if so be he hadn’t never seen ’em, or leastways never offended ’em. I’ll tell ye how it happened. Jeems Meppom – dat was his naüm – Jeems was a liddle farmer, and used to thresh his own corn. His barn stood in a very elenge [i.e. dreary] lonesome place, a goodish bit from de house, and de Pharisees used to come dere a nights and thresh out some wheat and wuts [i.e. oats] for him, so dat de hep o’ threshed corn was ginnerly bigger in de morning dan what he left it overnight.
Well, ye see, Mas’ Meppom thought dis a liddle odd, and didn’t rightly know what to make on’t. So, bein’ an out-and-out bold chep, dat didn’t fear man nor devil, as de sayin’ is, he made up his mind dat he’d goo over some night to see how ’twas managed.
Well, accordingly he went out rather airly in de evenin’, and laid up behind de mow [straw stack] for a long while, till he got rather tired and sleepy, and thought ’twaunt no use a-watchin’ no longer. It was gettin’ pretty handy to midnight, and he thought how he’d goo home to bed. But jest as he was upon de move, he heerd a odd sort of a soun’ comin’ toe-ards de barn, and so he stopped to see what it was. He looked out of de strah [straw], and what should he catch sight on but a couple of liddle cheps about eighteen inches high or dereaway come into de barn without uppening de doors. Dey pulled off dere jackets and begun to thresh wud two liddle frails as dey had brought wud ’em, at de hem of a rate.
Mas’ Meppom would ha’ been froughten if dey had been bigger, but as dey was such tedious liddle fellers, he couldn’t hardly help bustin’ right out a-laffin’. Howsomever, he pushed a handfull of strah into his mouth and so managed to kip quiet a few minutes a-lookin’ at ’em – thump, thump; thump, thump; as riglar a
s a clock.
At last dey got rader tired and left off to rest derselves, and one on ’em said, in a liddle squeakin’ voice, as it might ha’ bin a mouse a-talkin’: ‘I say, Puck, I tweat; do you tweat?’
At dat, Jeems couldn’t contain hisself no-how, but set up a loud haw-haw; and jumpin’ up from de strah hollered out: ‘I’ll tweat ye, ye liddle rascals! What bisness ha’ you got in my barn?’
Well upon dis, de Pharisees picked up der frails and cut away right by him, and as dey passed by him he felt sich a queer pain in his head as if somebody had gi’en him a lamentable hard thump wud a hammer, dat knocked him down as flat as a flounder. How long he laid dere he never rightly knowed, but it must ha’ bin a goodish bit, for when he come to, ’twas gettin’ deelight.
He couldn’t hardly contrive to doddle home, and when he did he looked so tedious bad dat his wife sent for de doctor dirackly. But bless ye, dat waunt no use; and old Jeems Meppom knowed it well enough. De doctor told him to kip up his sperits, beein’ ’twas onny a fit he had had from bein’ amost smothered wud de handful of strah and kippin’ his laugh down. But Jeems knowed better. ‘’Tain’t no use, sir’, he says, says he, to de doctor, ‘de cuss of de Pharisees is uppon me, and all de stuff in your shop can’t do me no good.’
Folklore of Sussex Page 6
