Folklore of Sussex

by Jacqueline Simpson

  There was also an old and semi-serious taboo against picking nuts on Sundays; if you did, the Devil would come and hold the branches down for you. This belief was sometimes deliberately used, some fifty years ago, to stop children from spoiling their good Sunday dothes; I myself heard it in the 1940s, very seriously mentioned by a pious girl of about fourteen who was trying to stop some younger children, myself included, from breaking the Sabbath in this way. There is also a Sussex saying recorded by Mrs Latham in the 1860s, and still occasionally to be heard as late as the Second World War, to the effect that something – for instance a grubby child, or a dark night – is ‘as black as the Devil’s nutting bag’.

  The earliest Sussex story involving this belief clearly shows that it could have frivolous undertones. It is an account of a practical joke played on some girls in 1814, in Tilehurst Woods, near Hailsham. It was told by an old woodman, William, to the Revd Thomas Geering of Hailsham, who included it in his book Our Parish (1884). In those days it was a common belief that if a girl went nutting on Sunday the Devil would appear to help her, but Geering pointedly adds that he was expected to make his appearance in the form of her sweetheart, who would be ‘met and welcomed’, would make himself useful, and would carry her bag of nuts home for her. One can well imagine the opportunities for flirtation to which this agreeable custom would give rise; it is even possible that in Sussex, as elsewhere, ‘going nutting’ was a rural euphemism for making love.

  William’s story was that one autumn Sunday in 1814 five young women went nutting in Tilehurst Wood, and as the afternoon wore on they were annoyed to notice that none of their sweethearts had bothered to turn up. They had piled their nuts in an open glade, and would scatter among the thickets and then return to the glade with more bagfuls. Returning from one such foray, they were horrified to see Satan himself squatting on the pile of nuts, coal black and grinning, with scarlet flames leaping round his legs. They screamed and ran, and when one of them heard her name called, they only ran the faster. William happened to meet them in their panic flight, and when he heard their queer story he told them to go home, and leave him to deal with the Devil and the nuts. But when he got to the glade, it was empty – no Devil and no nuts.

  Next day the bags of nuts were found tossed into somebody’s front garden, but the mystery was not much clearer for all that. Only two years later did the explanation emerge, when the Berkshire Militia, who had been quartered in nearby barracks, were due to leave the next day. A tall, jolly black soldier, Dan the Drummer, then confessed that he had wanted to play a trick on the girls. He had stripped, and seated himself among the nuts, draping his scarlet tunic over his legs. He had never meant to frighten them so badly, and when he saw how scared they were he realised that to run after them would only make matters worse. He had returned the nuts secretly, and had not dared admit his prank till he was about to leave the district.

  Another type of story which may sometimes be believed, at any rate by children, though it is more commonly told as a joke, is that which claims that one can raise the Devil at some particular spot. The basic procedure is simple, merely running round the spot in question, but extra conditions may be added to make the task more difficult, or even impossible. The site may be a prominent landmark, such as the earthworks crowning Mount Caburn, or the barrows known as the Devil’s Humps on Bow Hill; there are four of them, and you must go round six times, so the condition is more taxing than it seems. Or it may be a tree, like one by the old Rectory at Kingston-on-Sea (which is also said to have a man buried under its roots, with a dagger through his heart). It may be an empty building; a writer in the Sussex County Magazine in 1953 says that in her childhood she and other children in her village (which she does not name) believed that if they ran three times, very fast, round a neglected old Unitarian chapel there, and then peered in at the window, they would see Satan sitting there.

  Old tombs and family vaults attract similar tales, possibly because in the palmy days of smuggling they afforded such excellent hiding-places for contraband; the smugglers would have an obvious interest in frightening people away from churchyards, and the temptation to make puns about ‘raising spirits’ at midnight must have been quite irresistible. Be that as it may, at Heathfield, a generation or so ago, children firmly believed that if you ran seven times round the family vault of the Blunts, the Devil would leap out; and the same is said of the Miller’s Tomb (see pp. 41–3), and also of the oldest tomb in Broadwater churchyard, Worthing. But here again, frivolity creeps in. In 1968, a Worthing man in his fifties told me that when he was young he and his friends used to take their girls to Broadwater churchyard at midnight, telling them this legend – ‘and I don’t say we raised the Devil, exactly,’ he said, and broke off, grinning.

  One well-known legend of this type concerns Chanctonbury Ring, and it is very much alive. The basic idea is that if you run seven times round this famous clump of trees, the Devil will come from among them, and will offer you a bowl of soup (or, some say, milk or porridge). Many tellers lay down more specific instructions, ranging from the eerie to the impossible: the circuits must be performed on a moonless night, on the night of the full moon, at seven o’clock on Midsummer Day, at midnight, during the actual time it takes a clock to strike midnight, going anticlockwise, stark naked, or (worst of all) you must run round backwards. Some say you should refuse the proffered soup, or Satan will have you in his power; others say nothing about food at all, but simply that he will chase you, possibly to the Devil’s Dyke, nine miles away. Some children admit to having been frightened by the tale when they first heard it, and adults with an inclination to believe in the occult have also been known to take it seriously; however, it is far more often told light-heartedly, and received in the same spirit.

  There were other legends about the actual trees of Chanctonbury, before they were almost all uprooted in the Great Gale of 1987. It was said either that some spell made it impossible ever to count them correctly or, on the contrary, that there were exactly 365 of them, one for each day of the year. Occasionally, these ideas could be linked with the traditions about the Devil; one informant remembered hearing on a school outing in the 1920s that the Ring had once contained 365 trees, but the Devil had stolen some, and that ever since then the local people had had to run round the Ring three times anticlockwise on Midsummer Day to prevent him taking any more that year.

  There is one Sussex story of devil-raising which belongs in a different category, that of anecdotes about efficient (or inefficient) wizards. The belief that certain men had enough command of magical arts to raise spirits of various types, whether for good or ill, was very generally accepted in England until well on in the seventeenth century; among country people and the uneducated it lingered far longer, though naturally other magic powers, such as those of healing and of laying ghosts, were more frequently in demand. Many villages had ‘cunning men’ who traded on such beliefs, and local traditions naturally gathered about the more famous of them.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Boys Firmin heard a story about one such in Crowborough. It was said that this man had once raised the Devil in his cottage by Crowborough Green, but having done so, and having obtained from him whatever it was he wanted, he had great difficulty in laying him again. Luckily the wizard’s son was at hand, and he had the presence of mind to scatter a whole sackful of clover seed across the floor and to set Satan the task of picking every seed up, one by one. Having thus gained a precious breathing-space, father and son were able to call to mind the correct formulas and ritual, and together they sent the Devil back to his own place.

  On the other hand, Mike Mills, a noted smuggler, outwitted Satan by sheer stamina, not by magic arts. The story goes that this man, whose many crimes had made him a likely candidate for damnation, challenged the Devil to a race in St Leonard’s Forest, staking his soul against a promise that the fiend would leave him in peace for ever. The race was run along the avenue, a mile and a half in length, which is still know
n as Mike Mills’ Race; Mike won, and so became immortal, for Heaven would not have him, and the Devil had sworn never to touch him.

  Some think that the avenue is haunted. In November 2001 an informant told me how he and a friend, as schoolboys, had decided to walk its whole length at midnight one Midsummer’s Eve; they managed it, and saw neither ghost nor devil, but were so alarmed by constant rustling in the trees and bushes beside the track (more overgrown then than it is now) that they swore never to do it again.

  It will be seen that in almost all these tales in which a personalised Devil appears, he is a figure of fun, easily duped or driven off. The situation is a very different one when he is thought of as a diffuse force of ill-luck, akin to the blighting magic force of the evil eye, responsible for crop failures and inexplicable illnesses. In this aspect, the Devil was a very real source of fear to countrymen, not to be lightly named, and to be kept at bay by various charms – crossed scythes, horseshoes, horse-brasses, and so forth. But such considerations bring us to the verge of the grimmer subject of witch beliefs.

  7

  Witches

  Witch trials in Sussex were relatively few and far between, and none attained the notoriety of certain trials in other counties. Only sixteen people were indicted for witchcraft during the years covered by the Home Circuit assize records (1558–1736). Of these, only four were found guilty: three were sent to prison for a year (two for bewitching farm animals, the third for bewitching a young woman) and the fourth, Margaret Cooper of Kirdford, was hanged in 1575 for causing the death of two men and a woman by witchcraft. All four were in the sixteenth century; although cases were still occasionally brought to court in the seventeenth (the last being in 1680), the accused were acquitted.

  But the end of the trials did not mean the end of fear. Dread of the power of witches was very real in rural life at least until the latter part of the nineteenth century, and anecdotes about alleged witches, together with various pieces of traditional advice on how to foil them, lingered on until modern times. It is indeed noteworthy how often those contributors to the Sussex County Magazine who sent in the most detailed accounts of local witches thought it advisable, even in the 1930s and 1940s, to conceal the true names of persons and places, in order to spare the feelings of surviving relatives of the people concerned.

  Anecdotes about witches fall into certain recurrent patterns, of which the two most popular concern their ability to turn themselves into hares, and their power to immobilise wagons or other vehicles. It was firmly believed that any witch could turn into a hare as soon as she was alone and unobserved. In proof of this, it was often alleged that the local huntsmen had repeatedly sighted a hare, chased it, and failed to catch it because it had disappeared into the garden of some particular old woman, or bolted into her drain. If the huntsmen knocked at her door, they would find her at home, but panting. This went on till one day one of the hounds snapped at the hare’s hindquarters as it fled – and when next seen, the old woman was nursing a wounded leg. This story is told of Mother Digby of East Harting, of an unnamed woman at Ditchling, of Dame Garson of Duddleswell, and of four other old women in villages that are not named.

  Other transformation tales were less elaborate, but to those who were already inclined to believe them, they seemed quite convincing. For instance, a certain countryman named Tom Reed, whose beliefs and stories (collected c. 1915) formed the basis of an article in the Sussex County Magazine in 1935, declared that a friend of his called Crowhurst once caught an animal in the dark, in the garden of a house alleged to be witch-haunted, but when he called for a light to see what it was that was struggling in his hands, they were empty – ‘for you cannot catch a witch’, said Reed. Again, Crowhurst once shot a cat in the leg because it would come roaming round the house whenever his wife was out; his wife came home from market limping – ‘she had fallen down, so she said’.

  Or again, another countryman told this tale:

  My mates and me was resting under a hedge nigh Up Waltham, ’aving our dinner, when a hare comes lopping along. Darky Tussler says, ‘That bain’t a hare, that’s that — old ’ooman down along under,’ (speaking of a village where we was lodging). I takes up a stone and throws it, and catches that hare. She didn’t half holler, letting out a screech just like an ol’ ’ooman; an’ then she goes limping away. That night, when we was down in village, ol’ Sary Weaver, wot people said could make a cow run dry by lookin’ at her – folks said she were a witch – comes ’obbling outer ’er cottage. When she sees we, she lets out a screech, same as hare did, an’ goes a-limping off, for all the world as if she were that there hare. She were lame in the same leg wot the hare was, but she ’adn’t been afore!

  In 1933 a contributor to Sussex Notes and Queries, George Aitchison, wrote:

  An instance of the survival of a belief in witchcraft comes from West Sussex. An old man, well over eighty, hearing witchcraft described as ‘all rubbish’, got very excited and exclaimed, ‘All rubbish! It ain’t. Why, I knew a witch myself in this very village. Her daughter’s alive still. I’ll tell you what happened to me once.’

  He told first of the bewitching of animals, mostly Farmer —’s horse, which was ‘overlooked’ by the witch so that it became quite helpless. ‘Why, it couldn’t even die. They got a gun and shot it through the head, but even then it couldn’t die. It did not die till they got her to let it die. She only wanted to do Master — harm and she was satisfied when she had given him all that trouble. She had a book of charms we all know, and she used it. But one of her daughters took it out of the village – and a good thing, too! We don’t want any truck with that sort of thing!’

  In answer to the question about his own personal experiences of the witch, the old man told how he went to fetch help for a sick person very late at night. ‘By that hedge over there I saw the dark form of a woman. On getting up to her I saw it was Mrs —. I says, “Why, Mrs —, you ain’t got no call to be out so late as this!” And I tell you, as true as I’m sitting here, she vanished, and instead of her I saw a hare running through a gap in the hedge. I saw it – and you could have knocked me down with a feather. I shall never forget it, not to my dying day.’

  The old man, telling his story so excitedly, sitting bolt upright in his armchair by the kitchen fire, had never been more than a day’s walk from his own village and knew nothing of the book lore which records the belief all over Europe that a witch trying to escape from men turns herself into a hare.

  The second common Sussex anecdote, about a witch who stopped wagons or carts, was already known 150 years ago. M.A. Lower, writing in 1861, says that in his boyhood he knew of two women reputed to have evil powers; one was said to cause the death of pigs or cattle, and to prevent kettles boiling and butter churning, while the other had the power of stopping any cart that passed her cottage. Lower adds that the lane where she lived was notoriously muddy, which may have been a relevant factor – a commonsense suggestion which may perhaps apply in other cases too, for cottages of impoverished old women are likely to be in the least pleasant parts of a village. Be that as it may, this power was widely believed in. At Ditchling, for instance, stories still circulated in 1935 about an old woman living on the Common some fifty or sixty years previously, who used to halt the carters’ wagons as they passed her door:

  The men ’ud beat the hosses, an’ they’d pull an’ they’d tug, but the waggon wouldn’t move, an’ the ol’ witch ’ud come out a-laughin’ an’ a-jeerin’ at ’em, an’ they couldn’t get on till she let ’em. But there wor a carter wot knew, an’ he guessed he’d be even wid the ol’ witch, so he druv hes waggon before her door, an’ then it stopped, an’ the hosses they tugged, and they pulled, an’ they couldn’t move it nohow, an’ he heard this ol’ witch a-laughin’ in the cottage. Then this carter what knew, he took out a large knife an’ he cuts notches on the spokes, an’ there war a screechin’ an’ a hollerin’ inside, an’ out come the ol’ witch a-yellin’ an’ sloppin’ blood, an’ for every no
tch on the spokes there war a cut on her fingers.

  The same story is told of a woman at Plumpton; while at Stedham, on the other side of Sussex, there was one who first halted a carter’s wagon and then, relenting, herself taught him how to break the spell by flogging the wheel. Up on the Surrey border, the recommended counterspell was to run a knife under each of the horses’ hooves, and something similar was done near the Sussex Pad (a pub near swampy land, in north Lancing), according to H.S. Toms:

  I was told at Findon of a witch who resided, not within living memory, in a cottage by the Sussex Pad, near Old Shoreham Bridge; and that when carters passed that way, they were in the habit of running the blade of their pocket-knife round the iron tyres of their waggon-wheels. By some mysterious means, this so affected the witch in her cottage that she was heard to cry aloud in agony.

  The motive for such pranks was sometimes revenge; thus, according to Tom Reed, a certain Old Mother Venus immobilised a carter’s horses because he would not run an errand for her, but released them when he gave in. Of another reputed witch (whose name and home were disguised, to spare the feelings of her daughter, still alive in 1943), it was said that the most wicked thing she ever did was to immobilise the Rector’s pony and trap all day, not releasing them till eight o’clock in the evening – this was alleged to have happened around 1920!

  Witches were also believed to harm farm horses by ‘hag-riding’ them all night, or by casting the evil eye on them. There were various means to guard against these dangers, such as putting glittering brasses on the harness to deflect the evil, hanging pieces of iron or stones with natural holes in them in the stables, and nailing horseshoes over the door. Even so, horses might still be bewitched. A ploughman had a story about this: