Folklore of Sussex

by Jacqueline Simpson

  Such beliefs in the magical powers of trees are probably now quite extinct, but belief in the protection afforded by stones with a natural hole in them lingered into more recent times; within living memory such stones, sometimes draped with a red cloth or tied with red ribbon, were hung over people’s beds to keep nightmares away. In its origins this practice really belongs more with the use of protective amulets against witchcraft and evil spirits, for there was a time when nightmares were believed to be caused by ‘hag-riding’; however, Sussex sources in the last century or so do not seem to make any connection between witches and nightmares, so that the practice may appropriately be included here. Cecile Woodford has described how her grandmother, a midwife and healer, used to use holed stones to ‘scrape diseases off children’ and to prevent adults catching them.

  Mandrake palnts occupy a place midway between magic and medicine. The true mandrake, Mandragora officinalis, is chemically a very potent plant, useful as a painkiller, a hallucinogen or a soporific in small doses, but in larger quantities a deadly poison; it was also thought to be powerful in black magic and as an aphrodisiac, since its long forked root looks rather like a human body. There were sinister stories about it: that it grows under gallows, from the sperm of hanged men, and when uprooted shrieks so hideously that those who hear it go mad – a fate which can be avoided by getting a dog to drag it up. In fact, however, it does not grow easily in England, being a Mediterranean plant; most ‘mandrakes’ sold by peddlers and apothecaries in Sussex from medieval times onwards were substitutes made from two native plants with forked roots, the black bryony and the white bryony. The roots would be trimmed to make them look as human as possible, and grass seeds were often driven into the ‘head’, to sprout as ‘hair’; according to the Tudor writer Andrew Borde of Pevensey, some peddlers dressed them like dolls and sold them for their magic powers. The confusion persisted into the twentieth century; country people understood the real uses for bryony (as a very harsh purge, as a conditioner for horses, and as a help for rheumatism), but they still called it ‘mandrake’ and repeated the old tales. A writer in the Sussex County Magazine in 1929 interviewed a man who collected bryony to sell as a cure for indigestion and malaria; he thought talk of love potions and madness was ‘all bunkum’, and yet, ‘You should ’ear the row it kicks up when I pulls it out,’ he said. ‘Groans like anything, it does.’

  The range of magical folk-medicine reported by Sussex writers is wide and varied, but is certainly by no means a complete survey of what must have existed. It will be noticed, for instance, that nothing has been said about any aspect of midwifery, nor about any of the more unpleasant or embarrassing diseases. This is certainly due to the nature of the sources, namely books and articles designed for the general public in a comparatively reticent age, and probably also to the social standing of their authors, who were unlikely to be told anything ‘not nice’ by their informants. Mrs Latham, herself a clergyman’s wife, mentions her hesitation at including in her very valuable discussion of Sussex folk-medicine two cures for bed-wetting. Fortunately, she overcame her distaste, for one of the procedures is a most striking application of the paradoxical principle (already exemplified in the case of gibbet-corpses and ‘left twins’) that contact with death can be a curative force, while the other involves another use of the beneficent ash-tree. Moreover, both display an interesting use of psychology; the traumatic experience of being made to defile such sacred spots as a grave and the domestic hearth might well have a powerful effect on the unfortunate child, though whether the shock would be entirely beneficial is perhaps doubtful:

  When a poor child has in vain been whipped and scolded for the nightly repetition of a certain involuntary offence, in the last resort one of the following remedies may be tried. Upon the day appointed for the funeral of a person not of the same sex as the child, while the first part of the burial service is being read within the church, the child is to be taken to the open grave, and is there to do that which constituted the original offence. My informant told me that, although she had taken her own little boy to the churchyard, he had not the courage to carry out the first remedy, so she tried the second, with complete success. It consists in the child’s first going alone to fix upon an ash-tree suitable for the purposes of the charm, and going afterwards upon another day, without divulging its intention, to gather a handful of the ash-keys, which it must lay with the left hand in the hollow of the right arm. Thus are they to be carried home, and then they are to be burned to ashes. The charm is then completed by the child performing the same ceremony over the embers on the hearth, which in the former remedy it was to go through at the open grave.

  9

  From the Cradle to the Grave

  The great turning-points of life – birth, marriage, death – are inevitably marked by ceremonies both religious and secular, and inevitably, too, are surrounded by various traditional beliefs and customs. Yet, as so often, it can be difficult to tell whether a custom does or does not contain elements of irrationality; when for instance, somebody seeing a friend’s young baby for the first time slips a silver coin into its hand (as is still commonly done), is this mere present-giving? Or is it meant to ensure luck, and particularly wealth, for the baby’s later life? The latter seems likelier, and the principle involved would then be ‘begin as you mean to go on’.

  One custom which certainly embodies this principle was noted by Mrs Latham in the 1860s, and was indeed still current, according to another Sussex writer, in the 1940s: in order that a new-born baby should thrive well, it is vital that when he is to be moved for the first time from the room in which he was born, he should be carried upstairs before he is carried down. If this is impossible, because he was born in a top-floor room, some other way of raising him must be found – for instance, someone holding him might climb onto a step-ladder or a tall piece of furniture, and this would be enough to break the bad luck. The implied magical symbolism is of course that of healthy upward growth contrasted with a downward, graveward, movement.

  The idea of lucky days and hours has not had as much influence as one might expect on beliefs about birth. Almost the only trace of it is an old notion, now obsolete, that children born on a Sunday or on Christmas Day would never be drowned or hanged; the nursery rhyme beginning ‘Monday’s child is fair of face’, which is known in Sussex as elsewhere; and a former belief that those born on the stroke of midnight would grow up able to see ghosts. To these fragments of old rural lore may be added, in modern times, a widespread semi-serious belief in astrology fostered by newspapers and commercial interests, and the associated taste for ‘lucky birthstones’.

  Warding off evil spirits from a new-born baby must once have been an important branch of the midwife’s art, but I have only come across one reference to it: Cecile Woodford tells how her grandmother, a Newhaven midwife, used to brush the baby’s face with a rabbit’s foot for this purpose.

  Sacraments and religious ceremonies were formerly sometimes valued for rather unorthodox reasons, in particular for their supposed good effect on one’s health. One of Mrs Latham’s informants, who was clearly suffering from post-natal depression, said to her: ‘I feel very weak and teary after my confinement, but I dare say I shall get up my strength after I have been churched.’ There also lingered some confused memory of the archaic notion that a woman was ‘unclean’ after childbirth until she had been churched, and that her behaviour during this period must be governed by various taboos; this is seen in the belief that it is dangerous for a woman to carry her baby across running water if she has not been churched, which was occasionally to be found two generations ago.

  Baptism was similarly regarded as health-giving, and possibly still is; fretful or ailing babies, it was thought, would be helped by it. Various superstitions surrounded this sacrament; it was held to be unlucky to reveal the chosen name to outsiders before the ceremony, or to wipe off the baptismal water from the child’s head. But the most vital point – and one which is still sometim
es noted and commented on – was that the baby must cry during the ceremony, and that this proves that the Devil has left it. Among Roman Catholics, it is said that it ought to cry at the moment when salt is put on its tongue (not surprisingly, it often does); among Anglicans and Nonconformists, who use no salt, the precise moment is not specified. Mrs Latham remarked on the prevalence of this belief in her time, ‘even among the educated classes’:

  I was lately present at a christening in Sussex, when a lady of the party, who was grandmother of the child, whispered in a voice of anxiety, ‘The child never cried; why did the nurse not rouse it up?’ After we had left church she said to her, ‘Oh, Nurse, why did you not pinch baby?’ And when the baby’s good behaviour was afterwards commented upon, she observed, with a serious air, ‘I wish that he had cried.’

  There were also a few taboos relating to the care of young children. If you cut a baby’s nails before he is one year old, he will grow up to be a thief, so you must only trim them by biting them short. And when the child begins to lose his milk teeth, you must never throw them away, for if an animal should find one and gnaw it the corresponding tooth in the child’s new set will grow deformed, resembling that of the animal in question. The informant who told Mrs Latham about this in the 1860s knew an old man who had one huge tooth shaped like a pig’s tusk, who blamed it on his mother’s stupidity in throwing one of his milk teeth in the trough. Finally, it may be noted that to rock an empty cradle was regarded as a sure way to bring about the birth of more babies, though whether this was looked on as good or bad luck depended on circumstances.

  If you rock the cradle empty,

  Then you shall have babies plenty.

  A natural preoccupation of young people with love and marriage inspired various rituals (mostly performed by girls) intended to reveal whom one was fated to marry, or whether an existing romance would develop favourably. The most interesting of these are the seasonal ones associated with the January New Moon, Midsummer Eve and Hallowe’en, which will be described in the next chapter. There were also ways of telling the future from cards, tea-leaves, apple-peel, or cherry-stones; these, however, are practically universal in England and still well known, so they need no description here.

  More characteristic of the countryside is the picturesque saying, ‘When the gorse is not in bloom, then kissing’s not in fashion’ – the point being that gorse blooms all the year round, even if the blossoms are few at certain seasons. Equally pleasant was the Sussex custom that young men, when they went out courting, used to carry a ‘honeysuckle stick’ to bring them luck and to indicate their intentions. Such a stick is one cut from the stem of a tree (preferably hazel) which has been distorted by a honeysuckle growing up it, so that it is marked by a deep, twisting groove and a corresponding ridge of swollen bark. In popular songs and verses, a clinging honeysuckle often symbolises a woman’s faithful love; hence it brings good luck to lovers.

  In some villages, a curious taboo was current in the nineteenth century: a man should not attend the church services at which his own banns were called – ‘hearing hisself church-bawled’, as dialect speakers put it – for if he did, his first child would be born deaf, or even deaf and dumb. Weddings themselves, of course, are a focus for many picturesque customs, often intended to bring luck and fertility. One charming one, common in the nineteenth century, was strewing the path outside the church as the couple emerged. The strewers were often poor women with babies in their arms, and would expect a tip for their pains; they threw flowers, wheat and sometimes sugar plums. The bride’s wreath and posy sometimes included an ear of wheat and a twig of gorse. Next morning, the happy pair might also find that the threshold of their home had been strewn with flowers in the night. Moreover, families following certain trades had their own ways of celebrating weddings; fishermen trimmed their boats with flowers and ribbons, and millers set the mill-sails in the position known as ‘the Miller’s Glory’, i.e. like a St George’s, not a St Andrew’s, Cross.

  But not all weddings lead to happy marriages. Lower, describing bridal strewing in 1861, adds that a very different type of strewing could occur. When a man was known to beat his wife too much, the neighbours might express their disapproval by emptying a bag of straw and chaff at his door, punning on the words ‘threshing’ and ‘thrashing’. This is a typical example of the ritual ways in which rural communities expressed contempt and disapproval, usually for offenders against the decencies of family life. Another was the hanging in effigy once practised at Horsham on St Crispin’s Day (see below, pp. 136–7). Another was ‘Rough Music’, which consisted in visiting the offender’s home after dark, sometimes for several nights running, and serenading him or her by clashing tongs and pots and pans, booing and yelling, rattling bones, blowing cow-horns and so forth. Three instances at East Lavant between 1869 and 1872 were typical; two were against men who bullied their wives, the third against a woman who beat her husband. Such demonstrations were often a form of intimidation intended to drive the victim out of the village.

  In May 1954 the West Sussex Gazette printed a lively description of Rough Music in Burpham in the 1890s, used against men who were violent to their wives or children. The band would gather by night outside the village and then march noisily to the culprit’s house, where they chanted a rhyme, most of which the informant had forgotten. If this brought no improvement, a few weeks later the performance would be repeated, this time with the addition of an effigy, which would be burnt outside the man’s house, with loud threats and shots. ‘It gave great pleasure to the youth of the village, when there were not so many distractions as there are today,’ commented the journalist. The article drew several letters from readers, one of whom recalled the full verses, as used in Bury:

  There is a man lives in this place,

  He beat his wife – a sad disgrace!

  He beat her black, he beat her blue,

  He made her poor bones rattle too.

  Now, if this man don’t mend his manners,

  We’ll have to send him to the tanner’s;

  And if the tanner don’t tan him well

  We’ll nail him on a nail in hell.

  And if that nail should chance to crack

  He’ll fall upon the Devil’s back;

  And should the Devil chance to run

  We’ll shoot him with this fiery gun.

  Such demonstrators felt sure their behaviour was legal, and at Lyminster in October 1873 three young men refused to desist when told to do so by a policeman, and fought him when he tried to take away their tin trays and pans; the fines imposed on them were ‘easily found’, presumably by a whip-round among sympathisers. Arundel men around 1900 thought they were within the law provided they kept on the move, whereas if they remained outside the house, this would be ‘causing a riot’; at West Hoathly in 1947, the crowd told the police it was their right to serenade for three nights running, though no more.

  Like many old customs, Rough Music may reappear unexpectedly in our own times, if feelings run high, as can be seen from the following account, given by a schoolmistress, of the reaction to an alleged case of cruelty to a child in about 1950:

  About seven years ago, Rough Music was made for a certain family at Copthorne, in Sussex. One Saturday night, about 11 p m., I heard the sound of shouting and banging on metal coming from about half a mile from where I then lived. I did not know what it was all about at the time, but soon afterwards I heard that the family in question were being shunned by the villagers, and demonstrations made against them. The reason for this was that the father had smacked the little boy next door for hitting his own little girl with a brick. The boy developed pneumonia shortly afterwards, and his mother claimed that it was the result of the man’s blow. There was a court case about it, but it was dismissed.

  However, the villagers were determined to have their ‘pound of flesh’, and started ‘rough musicking’ the family. I only heard it once myself, but I understand that the demonstration was repeated on sever
al successive Saturday nights. There was a procession and the traditional noise on each occasion, but no effigy was carried. The victims tried to stick it out, but it was too much for them in the end, and eventually they sold their cottage and moved from the district.

  The men of Copthorne took to violence after having tried and failed to get redress at law. Dissatisfaction with the law accounts for the growth of other surprising pseudo-legal ceremonies which uneducated people in former centuries performed publicly, in the conviction that they were legally binding. One of these, the ‘Smock Wedding’, was believed to be a way of circumventing an unpopular law concerning the remarriage of widows whose husbands had died in debt, which decreed that their second husbands would become liable for the debts. The bawdy aspect of ‘Smock Weddings’ tickled the humour of eighteenth-century journalists, so that the Sussex Weekly Advertiser printed two accounts of such incidents, in March 1770 and November 1794:

  Last Monday a maltster in this town [Lewes] was married to a widow whose husband died enthralled (i.e. heavily in debt); he, to save himself the obligation of paying her late husband’s debts, took her in her smock only, she going across the street to his appartments with no one thing on her but her shift, which was witnessed by Cork Fig.

  On Tuesday last, Mr. F. Hollingdale, of Barcombe, was married to a widow of the same place named Ford. In order to get rid of some pecuniary obligations, it was judged expedient by the above couple that the bride should cross the High Road, attired in a chemise only, in the presence of three male witnesses. Three neighbours were accordingly sent for, without being informed of the occasion, before whom the widow performed the curious ceremony; but as one of the witnesses was so confounded by what he saw as to render him incapable of swearing to particulars, ’tis doubted whether the stratagem of the newly-married pair will prove successful.