A dictionary of english folklore ABEE

BM British Museum DNB Dictionary of National Biography ED&S English Dance and Song EDD English Dialect Dictionary FMJ Folk Music Journal JEFDS Journal of the English Folk Dance Society J

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A Dictionary of

English Folklore

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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in socio-economic status, interests, etc.; the notion that folklore is found only

or chieﬂy where an uneducated, homogeneous peasantry preserves ancientways has no relevance to England today, and probably never had

We have included a broad range of oral genres, performance genres, dar customs, life-cycle customs, supernatural, and ‘superstitious’ beliefs Lack

calen-of space forced us regretfully to omit entries on traditional foods, sports,games, fairs, and most obsolete customs; we have also been selective in child-ren’s lore, fairies, plants, and superstitions, since excellent books on thesetopics are available already Material culture (such as traditional farming,crafts, vernacular buildings, etc.) has been left aside, this being an immensebut separate topic But modern everyday lore is well represented; the *ToothFairy counts as well as *Puck, the *Vanishing Hitchhiker as well as Lady *Godi-

va On some topics (e.g *conception, *menstruation, *sex) data are scarce, asearlier scholars ignored these ‘unpleasant’ matters; we hope these entries willinspire others to fuller research There are entries for past writers who havecontributed signiﬁcantly to the study of English folklore, but not for those stillliving (except in so far as it is impossible to separate Iona Opie’s work from that

of her late husband Peter)

There appears to be no precedent for taking ‘England’ as the basis for a bookcovering all folklore genres, although there have been books on, for instance,English calendar customs or dances Folklorists have either studied a speciﬁccounty, or have drawn material from all over the British Isles Indeed, therehas always been great stress on Scottish, Welsh, and Irish traditions as richer,more ancient, and more worth preserving than those of England This became

a self-fulﬁlling theory; the more scholars thronged to study them, the largergrew their archives, and the duller England seemed in comparison

Moreover, the English have never used folklore to assert their patriotic tity, or even (until recent years) to attract tourists, though certain countiesand regions have Whereas Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have celebrated their

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iden-Introduction vi

traditions with pride, here folklore is seen as something quaint, appropriate torural backwaters, but irrelevant to nationhood Whereas virtually every otherEuropean country has university departments for folklore studies, with mas-sive archives, English academia has almost unanimously turned a blind eye.The paradoxical result is that the country which invented the word ‘folklore’and whose scholars, a hundred years ago, were leaders in the ﬁeld, is now aneglected area We have long wished to redress the balance; the fact thatour work appears now, at a time when there is some public debate on how

‘Englishness’ should be deﬁned, is purely coincidental

Our second reason for excluding Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and theChannel Isles, is that these areas have languages of their own; being unable toread their primary material, we could not have treated them adequately Weare fully aware that the traditions of the whole British Isles (plus Ireland) dohave vast areas of overlap, in which separate treatment is unnecessary How-ever, there are also great historical and cultural differences; any book attempt-ing to combine them would either be vastly longer than the present one, or, inour view, unacceptably shallow We hope other ‘Dictionaries’ will be written,

by those more qualiﬁed than ourselves, to cover those areas

Similarly, we reluctantly decided not to cover the many ethnic groups nowforming part of English society We could have described large-scale publicevents such as the Notting Hill Carnival or Chinese New Year dragon dances,but how could we, as outsiders, get access to the more intimate world of familycustom and personal beliefs? How, for example, could we know wherereligious ritual ends and customary practice begins in a Muslim or Hindu wed-ding? Or distinguish between different types of Chinese medicine? Moreover,various families, generations, or individuals within each ethnic group guard,modify, or reject their traditions in different degrees in reaction to their Eng-lish environment; the situation is currently too ﬂuid and complex for briefsummary Likewise, it is too early to say whether the policy in multiculturalschools of encouraging all children to share one another’s festivals will spreadinto the community, and modify established traditions

Our intention is to provide a work of reference, not to build theories, ofwhich there have been too many, based on too little evidence The entriestherefore emphasize established dates and facts; speculative interpretationsare kept to a minimum In particular, we view with scepticism theories thatitems of folklore are direct survivals of pre-Christian religion or magic, sincethe time-lag between their ascertainable dates and the suggested pagan origins

is generally over a thousand years, and alternative explanations are oftenavailable

Similarly, although entries on folk medicine and superstitions sometimesrefer to cognate ideas in classical writers, notably Pliny, we must stateemphatically that we do not imply that the English items are orally transmit-ted from equally ancient times; classical medicine and ‘science’ was known tomedieval and early modern compilers of bestiaries, lapidaries, and herbals,through whom it passed to ordinary people The importance of Greek andRoman authors to English folklore is that their prestige among the educatedsupported various popular beliefs The authority of the Bible and Church waseven more powerful; it endorsed the reality of ghosts, witchcraft, and demons,while the pervasive inﬂuence of its ethics and imagery can be traced in verymany legends, practices, and beliefs

In conclusion, we offer appreciation and thanks to our friends and

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vii Introduction

colleagues whose writings, lectures, and conversation have taught us so much:Gillian Bennett, Julia Bishop, Marion Bowman, Georgina Boyes, Theresa Buck-land, E C Cawte, Jennifer Chandler, Keith Chandler, Hilda Ellis Davidson,George Frampton, Reg Hall, Gabrielle Hatﬁeld, Michael Heaney, Roy Judge,Venetia Newall, Iona Opie, Roy Palmer, Tom Pettitt, Neil Philip, Doc Rowe,Leslie Shepard, Brian Shuel, Paul Smith, Roy Vickery, John Widdowson,Juliette Wood

Particular thanks to Caroline Oates (Librarian of the Folklore Society),Malcolm Taylor (Librarian of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library), and thestaff of Worthing Public Library and Croydon Libraries (RTS and Local Studiesand Archives)

J.S.S.R

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BM British Museum

DNB Dictionary of National Biography

ED&S English Dance and Song

EDD English Dialect Dictionary

FMJ Folk Music Journal

JEFDS Journal of the English Folk Dance Society JEFDSS Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song

Society

JFSS Journal of the Folk-Song Society

L&L Lore and Language

N&Q Notes & Queries

OED Oxford English Dictionary

[ JS], [SR] Information from the authors’ own

ﬁeldwork or personal experience

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List of Plates

Plate 1: HOBBY HORSE: May Day in Padstow (Cornwall) 1994 The Blue Ribbon

’Obby ’Oss party; a) The ’Oss itself, b) Members of the team dancing

Plate 2: MUMMING PLAY: Bob Rolfe of the Andover (Hampshire) Johnny Jacks,

dressing for the part of King George, c 1952

Plate 3: MAY DAY: Children with their garland, Hertfordshire, c.1905

Plate 4: TWELFTH NIGHT: Passers-by admiring the cakes on show in a shopwindow fall victim to the traditional urchin’s trick of pinning people’s clothestogether behind their backs

Plate 5: FOOTBALL / SHROVETIDE: Shrove Tuesday street football at upon-Thames (Surrey)

Kingston-Plate 6: MAYPOLE: The Maypole before the introduction of plaited ribbonsPlate 7: MORRIS DANCING: The cake-Bearer of the Bampton Morris dancers,

c.1929, with Jinky Wells, the team’s ﬁddler, standing behind

Plate 8: MILKMAIDS’ GARLAND: Milkmaids dancing on May Day, with their

‘garland’ carried on the head of a male helper

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Abbots Ann (Hampshire), see *maidens’

garlands

Abbots Bromley Horn Dance A unique

*calendar custom which takes place in Abbots

Bromley, Staffordshire, on the Monday

follow-ing the ﬁrst Sunday after 4 September, the day

of the village *wakes The team is made up of

six dancers, each carrying a pair of antler

horns, a Fool, a man-woman called Maid

Marian, a *hobby horse, a Bow-man, a triangle

player, and a musician, each wearing a

pseudo-medieval costume designed in the late

19th century The horns which the dancers

carry are reindeer antlers, mounted on a

wooden head, with a short wooden handle for

carrying Three are painted white with brown

tips, and three are brown with golden tips

The horns have naturally caused much

specu-lation, and a radiocarbon dating test carried

out on one of them in 1976 gave a mean date

of ad 1065 ± 80 years Reindeer have been

extinct in Britain since before the Norman

Conquest, but these particular horns could

have been imported at any point in the

cus-tom’s history The performers spend all day

perambulating the parish, sometimes

pro-gressing in single ﬁle, sometimes following

the leader in a serpentine hey-type movement,

but every now and then they form up in lines

of three (the hobby horse and bowman join in

to make it four and sometimes Jester and Maid

Marian) facing each other They go forward

and back towards each other a few times and

then cross over It is thought to be unlucky if

they do not visit your house or

neighbour-hood After the dance, the horns are deposited

back in the church, where they will remain

until next September The earliest mention of

the custom so far found is in Robert Plot’s

Nat-ural History of Staffordshire (1686), where he

mentions the ‘Hobby-horse dance’ being

per-formed at Christmas, New Year, and Twelfth

Night, and Sir Simon Degge (1612–1704)

anno-tated his copy of Plot’s book with the ment that he had often seen the dance beforethe Civil War An even earlier reference, in

com-1532, conﬁrms the existence of a hobby horsebut does not mention the horns (see Heaney)

Kightly, 1986: 41–3; Hole, 1975: 95–6; Stone, 1906: 16–

18; Michael Heaney, FMJ 5:3 (1987), 359–60; Theresa Buckland, L&L 3:2 (1980), 1–8 (also 3:7 (1982), 87, and 4:1

(1985), 86–7).

Abbotsbury garland day (13 May)

Abbots-bury in Dorset has been famous for its land day customs for many years, and theystill continue, despite major alterations with-

*gar-in liv*gar-ing memory and before Changes *gar-in thevillage, such as the decline of the local ﬁshingindustry, and the closure of local schools, haveeffected major changes in the way the custom

is carried out, but locals have been sufﬁcientlydetermined to meet those changes and toensure its survival A number of other villages

in the area formerly had similar garland toms, but Abbotsbury is the only one that hassurvived The way the custom was described inthe 1980s was as follows: The children whoattend the local school get the day off for theevent and they construct two garlands—one ofwild flowers and another of garden flowers.The flowers are fixed onto wire frames whichare carried on poles The children go fromhouse to house round the village, displayingthe garlands and receiving money, which theykeep Later in the day, the older children whohave been at school in Weymouth get homeand construct a third, more elaborate garland,which they also take round the houses Two ofthe garlands are eventually laid on the localWar Memorial (suggested by benefactor LordIlchester after the First World War) This isquite different to how things were one hun-dred years earlier The custom was first de-

cus-scribed by Hutchins’ History of Dorset (1867),

and later by C H Mayo (1893) At that time thegarlands were made and exhibited only by the

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adders 2

children of ﬁshing families The garlands were

blessed in a church service and some were

rowed out to sea and thrown into the water

The rest of the day was spent in jolliﬁcation on

the beach Around the time of the First World

War, the ﬁrst non-ﬁshermen garlands

appeared, and the number of garlands has

since ﬂuctuated a great deal The local school

closed in 1981, and as children no longer get a

holiday on Garland Day there has been a

ten-dency to move the custom further to the

even-ing, or to the nearest Saturday

C.H Mayo, ‘Garland Days’, Somerset & Dorset N&Q 3

(1893); Peter Robson, ‘Dorset Garland Days on the Chesil

Coast’, in Buckland & Wood, 1993: 155–66; Kightly, 1986:

43; Stone, 1906: 70–1.

adders There are a number of beliefs about

the adder which have been collected across

the country, with little variation It was said to

be deaf, on the authority of Psalm 58 (‘They

are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear,

which will not hearken to the voice of the

charmer’) It can only die at sunset, and if you

kill one its mate will come looking for you

Adult female adders swallow their young

when in danger, then vomit them up once the

danger is past An adder coming to the door

of a house is a death *omen, and to dream

of adders means your enemies are trying

to do you some secret mischief In the

Fens, it was said they were attracted by the

smell of a *menstruating woman (Porter, 1969:

51)

Adders were thought to like milk A story in

The British Chronicle of 15 October 1770

con-cerns a farmer and his wife who, having

noticed that their best cow gave little milk,

stayed up one night to catch the thief Just

about sunrise they saw ‘a most enormous

overgrown adder, or hag worm, crawl out of

the bush, and winding up one of the cow’s

legs, apply its mouth to one of the paps’ The

man managed to kill it with his cudgel, and

the stuffed four-foot long skin could be seen

displayed at the farmhouse (quoted in

Mors-ley, 1979: 72)

On the principle that like cures like, adder’s

oil was prized as a remedy for *deafness and

earache; one snake-catcher used to sell it

regu-larly to a chemist in Uckﬁeld (Sussex) at a

guinea an ounce in the late 19th century The

way to catch an adder was to shake a silk

neck-cloth in front of the snake, which would strike

at it and be unable to withdraw its fangs; one

could then break its back, slash its skin, and

hang it in a warm place for the fat to drip out

as oil

A shed adder skin could draw out thorns,splinters, or even needles when applied to theother side of the hand or ﬁnger This cure ismentioned by Aubrey (1686, 1880: 38), as well

as by 19th- and 20th-century folklorists Healso mentions that ‘Sussexians’ wear the skins

‘for hatt-bands, which they say doe preservethem from the gripeing of the gutts’ Othersources list this as a remedy for a headache InCornwall, adder skin sewn to ﬂannel was worn

by pregnant women as a belt (Opie and Tatem,1989: 362–3)

If a man or animal has been bitten by anadder, the best remedy is fat taken from thatvery adder, but another is to wrap the victim

in a fresh sheepskin Aubrey’s cure (Natural

History of Wiltshire MS in Royal Society) involves

the ‘fundament of a pigeon applied to the place’ The pigeon will quickly die Keep putt-ing fresh pigeons to the wound till they stopdying

bite-adderstone, see *snakestone.

Addy, Sidney Oldall (1848–1933) A solicitor

in Shefﬁeld from 1877 until his retirement in

1905, his real passion was for the dialect, lore, and history of the Yorkshire/Derbyshirearea in which he lived and worked He was anenthusiastic member of local societies andregular contributor to local journals andnewspapers, as well as national publications

folk-such as *Notes & Queries and *Folk-Lore Addy

joined the *Folklore Society in 1894, havingalready published enough to make him anacknowledged expert in his area, but soonbecame disenchanted with the Society’s policywhich at the time foregrounded reiterativepublishing of previously printed works(exemplified by their County Folk-Lore series)and the construction of high theory, at theexpense of first-hand fieldwork Addy was one

of several regional folklorists who felt similarfrustration, and after urging, unsuccessfully, a

new policy of active collection (e.g in Folk-Lore

13 (1902), 297–9) he resigned from the Society

in 1905, although he continued to gather andpublish material eleswhere In retrospect,Addy was ahead of his time in the quality ofhis ﬁeldwork, combining careful observationwith interviews and an ethnographicapproach, which can be seen in his article onthe *Castleton Garland custom published in

1901 Much of his folklore work remains little

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3 alien big cats

known, buried in local publications, and

would certainly repay collecting together and

republishing

Major folklore publications: Glossary of

Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Shefﬁeld

(1888); Household Tales and Traditional Remains

(1895); ‘Garland day at Castleton’, Folk-Lore 12

(1901) 394–428; ‘Guising and Mumming in

Derbyshire’, Derbyshire Archaeology and Natural

History Society Journal 29 (1907), 31–42.

John Ashton, Folklore Historian 15 (1998), 5–13; John

Ash-ton, Folklore 108 (1997), 19–23; Walter T Hall, ‘The Late

Sidney Oldall Addy’, Transactions of the Hunter

Archaeo-logical Society 4 (1937), 221–5.

afterbirth, see *placenta.

alabaster Powdered alabaster was formerly

believed to have medicinal value when made

up into an ointment, and was reputedly

par-ticularly good for bad legs It was common

for people to chip pieces off church statues for

the purpose, with the implication that this

holy connection would make the stone even

more effective, and many ecclesiastical

buildings show mutilated statues at ground

level both inside and outside the building for

this reason Correspondents in N&Q report

that the efﬁcacy of powdered alabaster was

recorded in a number of leech-books, as early

as ad 900

N&Q 11s:6 (1912), 129, 175, 234–5.

Alderley Edge (Cheshire) A rocky outcrop

near Macclesﬁeld, honeycombed with old

mining tunnels A farmer was once stopped

there by a wizard, who insisted on buying his

white mare, and led him through huge iron

gates inside the rock, where he saw many

horses and warriors asleep These, the wizard

explained, would ride out and decide the fate

of a great battle to save England, ‘when

George the son of George shall reign’ Then he

paid the farmer from the treasures in the cave,

and led him out; the iron gates shut, and no

one has seen them since

The tale has been noted by many local

writers from 1805 onwards; it is said to have

circulated orally since the 1750s The earlier

versions do not name the wizard and the

sleepers; later ones identify them as *Merlin,

*Arthur, and his knights A spring in the rocks

was called the Holy Well in the 18th century,

and its water was thought to cure women of

barrenness; it is now called the Wizard’s Well,

and used as a *wishing well

Alford, Violet (1881–1972) An authority of

international repute on all forms of folk cing, and the related music and festival cus-toms She stressed the similarities to be foundover much of Europe, which she believed weredue to a common origin in prehistoric ritual.Most of her research was done in France andSpain, especially in the Pyrenees; she was atireless traveller and a close observer, whosevivid ﬁrst-hand impressions of customs andperformances are of enduring interest evenwhere her theoretic framework is outdated.She was an active member of the EFDSS,organized several major dance festivals, andadjudicated at others; she held strong views

dan-on authenticity, and deplored commercial ortouristic changes to tradition She spotted thefragmentary traces of the *Marshﬁeld mum-ming tradition, stimulated its revival in 1932,and then, characteristically, tried to controlthe performances

Her main books are Pyrenean Festivals (1937);

The Singing of the Travels (1956); Sword Dance and Drama (1962); The Hobby Horse and Other Animal Masks (1978).

See D N Kennedy, Folklore 82 (1971), 344–50, for a selected bibliography; Lucille Armstrong, Folklore 84 (1973), 104–10, and Edward Nicol, FMJ (1972), 257–8, for

obituaries.

alien big cats Since the 1960s, there have

been press reports from many areas of largecat-like animals, brieﬂy glimpsed, andassumed by witnesses to be pumas, lions,lynxes, or cheetahs; paw-prints and droppingsare sometimes found, and the sightings areoften linked to allegedly unusual deaths andinjuries among sheep and deer There were

304 press items drawn from 31 counties in

1997 alone Interpretation of the evidence iscontroversial, since alternative explanationsare always possible If exotic animals really are

at large, they must be illegal pets, dumpedwhen they grow troublesome, and possiblynow breeding in the wild; however, it isunlikely there could be so many as the reportssuggest No foreign feline has yet been cap-tured or killed, apart from one tame puma inScotland in 1980 and a small swamp cat acci-dentally run over on Hayling Island (Hamp-shire) in 1988 Some writers therefore prefer aparanormal explanation; the media adopt anambiguous attitude, alternating betweendread and humour, and favouring emotiveterms such as ‘beast’, ‘alien’, and ‘mystery’.Many reports are conﬁned to local papers;

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Allendale tar barrels 4

others cause nationwide interest and

large-scale hunts by police or the army—the Surrey

Puma in 1962–6, the Black Beast of Exmoor in

1983, the Beast of Bodmin Moor in 1994–5

The Bodmin case collapsed when investigated

by the Ministry of Agriculture (see press

reports of 20 July 1995), but further incidents

continue; in March 1998 a ‘Beast of Essex’ was

suspected of killing four geese near Epping

Whatever facts may underlie some reports,

media-generated interest encourages rumour,

misinterpretation, and exaggeration Hoaxing

occurs; a skull ‘found’ on Bodmin Moor in late

July 1995 came from a leopard-skin rug, and

some photos simply show domestic cats shot

from angles which distort their size

See also *cats

A dossier of press items is held by Paul

Sieveking, editor of Fortean Times For a

selec-tion of material and a folkloric interpretaselec-tion,

see Michael Goss, ‘Alien Big Cat Sightings in

Britain: A Possible Rumour Legend?’, Folklore

103 (1992), 184–202 Janet and Colin Bord, in

Alien Animals (1980), explain these and other

mystery beasts as paranormal phenomena; Di

Francis argues in Cat Country (1983) that

ancient wildcats survive, unrecognized

Allendale tar barrels The people of

Allendale, Northumberland, welcome the

*New Year in a spectacular way with their

procession of blazing *tar barrels During the

evening, men in home-made costume (the

*guisers) visit the town’s pubs and shortly

before midnight assemble for the procession

which is the focal point of the custom The

barrels are actually one end of a wooden

bar-rel, about twelve inches deep, ﬁlled with wood

and shavings soaked in parafﬁn Once the

bar-rels are alight, the procession follows the town

band round the streets and back to the

market-place, where an unlit bonﬁre awaits

them After circling the ﬁre, and at the stroke

of midnight, some of the barrels are thrown

on to the ﬁre, while others are extinguished

and saved for next year, as it is hard to get

decent wooden barrels these days The crowd

cheers, and Auld Lang Syne is sung Most of the

Guisers spend the rest of the night ﬁrst footing

(see *New Year) According to extensive

research carried out by Venetia Newall, the

tar-barrel custom is not nearly as old as most

people assume it to be, dating only from about

1858 It seems to have started with the band’s

New Year perambulation of the village One

year, the wind was so strong that it kept

blow-ing their candles out, and someone suggestedthat a tar barrel would be a more effectiveillumination

Venetia Newall, Folklore 85 (1974), 93–103; Sykes, 1977:

mar-it became customary to pray for the dead onthis date At dusk, torchlit processions andchurch vigils were held, and bells were rungtill midnight At the Reformation the customwas forbidden, but many people were defyingthe ban and ringing church bells as late as the1580s Later still, in the 18th and early 19thcenturies, some villagers in Lancashire andDerbyshire would light small ﬁres in the ﬁelds

at midnight on All Saints’ Day, to see in AllSouls, and kneel round them to pray for theirdead

This date falls between *Halloween and AllSouls, so in those areas around Shropshire andStaffordshire where *souling was prevalent,All Saints did not have a separate identity butwas swamped by these other two festivals Inother areas, however, a range of customs tookplace on this day, though none of them seems

to be widespread, or at least widely reported

At Goadby (Leicestershire) in the 18th century,

a children’s *bonﬁre custom is recorded InDerbyshire it was customary to strew ﬂowers

on the *graves of departed loved ones InHampshire and the Isle of Wight special cakeswere made and eaten A 19th-century *lovedivination is reported from Worcestershire asspecial to All Saints’ Day: ‘A young womantook a ball of new worsted and holding it inher ﬁngers, threw the ball through the openwindow at midnight, saying “Who holds?” Itwas assumed that her future husband wouldpick up the worsted, mention his name, and

disappear’ (N&Q for Worcestershire (1856), 190).

See also *halloween, *all souls’ day, and

*souling

Wright and Lones, 1940: iii 121–37.

All Souls’ Day (2 November) Also called

Soulmas Day, Saumas, etc This feast was

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5 Angels of Mons

devised by Abbot Odilo of Cluny (d 1049), to

pray for ‘all the dead who have existed from

the beginning of the world to the end of time’

He set it in February, but it was soon

trans-ferred to the day after *All Saints; its sombre

associations affected All Saints’ Day and

ultimately its eve as well, giving rise to many

aspects of *Halloween It is probable that in

medieval England, as in many Catholic

coun-tries, the dead were believed to leave

Purga-tory for two or three days, to revisit their

homes and seek the prayers of their relatives

In The Gentleman’s Magazine for November

1784, a correspondent said children at Findern

(Derbyshire) lit small *bonﬁres on the

com-mon on 2 November, calling them ‘tindles’;

adults recalled that the purpose had originally

been ‘to light souls out of Purgatory’ There

are similar reports from Lancashire, but these

seem to be isolated examples

Before the Reformation, it was customary to

distribute food and alms to the poor on All

Souls’ Day as a fee for praying for the dead

Later, *Aubrey describes piles of small cakes

set out on this day in Shropshire houses, for

visitors to take one; he also gives ‘an old

Rhythm or saying’:

A Soule-cake, a Soule-cake,

Have mercy on all Christen soules for a Soule-cake.

(Aubrey, 1686/1880: 23)

Cakes were long made in many regions, and

called ‘soul-cake’ in some places The type

var-ies widely from place to place, and even two

reports from Whitby (Yorkshire) disagree—‘a

small round loaf ’, says one, but ‘a square

far-thing cake with currents on top’ says the

other

See also *antrobus soul-cakers, *mumming

plays, *souling

Wright and Lones, 1940: iii 137–45.

amber Occasionally said to be rubbed on sore

eyes and sprained limbs (Henderson, 1866:

113), or worn for chest ailments (Folk-Lore 53

(1942), 98) One soldier from the First World

War reckoned he owed his life to his amber

bead (Lovett, 1925: 13)

Ambleside rushbearing Not quite so well

known as neighbouring *Grasmere,

Amble-side, Cumbria, keeps its own version of the

rushbearing custom On the Saturday nearest

St Anne’s Day (26 July), villagers process to the

St Mary’s church with men carrying pointed

rush pillars, about eight feet tall, while

chil-dren carry rush and ﬂower constructions (the

‘bearings’) in the shape of harps and so on Ahymn is sung at the market-place, and a ser-mon preached in the church Gingerbread isdistributed afterwards A description pub-lished in 1892 shows there has been littlechange in the form of the custom since thattime

Hogg, 1971: 96–7; N&Q 8s:2 (1892), 141–2.

Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–75) A

Dan-ish shoemaker’s son who as a child had heardtraditional storytelling ‘in the spinning-room

or during the hop harvest’ He began writingfairytales in 1835, and continued all his life;the ﬁrst English translations appeared in 1846.Some, for instance ‘The Travelling Com-panions’ and ‘Big Claus and Little Claus’, fol-low traditional plots quite closely; others arevariations on old motifs, such as ‘The LittleMermaid’, elaborating the belief that water-spirits may love humans, and may desire toobtain salvation Many, including the well-known ‘Ugly Duckling’, are entirely his owncreations; almost all are full of pathos andemotionalism Andersen’s inﬂuence on thelater literary fairytale in England was pro-found; it pervades the fairytales of OscarWilde, and can be felt as early as 1857 in sev-

eral passages of Dickens’s Little Dorrit About a

dozen are now among the stock of fairytaleswhich most English children know, and are nolonger felt as foreign

Angels of Mons During 1915, there were

strong rumours that British and French troopshad been miraculously protected from theGermans during their retreat from Mons late

in August 1914 The earliest allusions are inletters written by Brigadier-General JohnCharteris on 5 September 1914 and 11 Febru-ary 1915, though only published in 1931:

[5 September 1914] Then there is the story of the

‘Angels of Mons’ going strong through the 2nd Corps, of how the Angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with ﬂaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress Men’s nerves and imaginations play weird pranks in these strenuous times All the same the angel at Mons interests me I cannot ﬁnd out how the legend arose.

[11 February 1915] I have been at some trouble to trace

the rumour to its source The best I can make of it

is that some religiously minded man wrote home that the Germans halted at Mons, as if an Angel of the Lord had appeared in front of them In due

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animal disguise 6

course the letter appeared in a Parish Magazine,

which in time was sent back to some other men at

the front From them the story went back home with

the ‘as if’ omitted, and at home it went the rounds in

its expurgated form [At GHQ (1931), 25–6, 75].

During the spring and summer of 1915 the

story ﬂourished in the religious press,

whether Spiritualist, Catholic, or Anglican, in

parish magazines, and in sermons, before

eventually reaching the national press The

accounts are given with heartfelt conviction,

but none is a ﬁrst-hand eyewitness report The

details vary considerably In some versions

there are only two or three angels, in others a

whole troop; in some, they are visible to the

British soldiers, in others only to the Germans;

in some they merely deter the Germans from

attacking, in others they actually kill large

numbers of them; in some, there is an

indi-vidual leader of the visionary host, described

as a horseman in armour and identiﬁed by the

English as St George and by the French as the

Archangel Michael or as Joan of Arc; in some,

‘a strange cloud’ comes between the Germans

and the British

Arthur Machen, a leader-writer on The

Even-ing News, later maintained that these rumours

had all grown out of a story he published in

that paper on 29 September 1914, entitled

‘The Bowmen’ This tells how an English

sol-dier called on St George for help, and became

aware of an army of medieval archers

slaugh-tering the Germans with their arrows; he

real-izes they are the bowmen of Agincourt As

Brigadier-General Charteris’s ﬁrst letter

shows, the legend was current three weeks

before Machen’s story, so his claim to be its

originator cannot be accepted, though he may

have genuinely believed he was Moreover,

there are no angels in his story, and no ghostly

bowmen in the oral rumours The latter are

best explained as a *contemporary legend

which satisﬁed religious and patriotic needs,

and became a powerful and enduring part of

the mythology of the Great War

Kevin McLure, Visions of Angels and Tales of Bowmen

(Har-rogate, 1996); John Harlow, The Sunday Times (26 Jan.

1997), 9.

animal disguise A number of *calendar

cus-toms include, or consist of, people dressing up

to impersonate animals See *hobby horses for

a general discussion, and for speciﬁc

examples: *Abbots Bromley Horn Dance,

*Antrobus Soul-Cakers, *Hooden Horse,

*Minehead Hobby Horse, *Old Horse, *Old Tup/

Derby Ram, *Padstow Hobby Horse, *stag hunt,

*straw bears

Cawte, 1978.

animal infestation The horror of parasitic

infestation is extended in folklore to includethe fear that certain types of animal (usually

*frogs, *toads, newts, or snakes) could live andgrow inside people; allegedly true reports arefairly common from the 18th century to thepresent day In most cases, the person is said

to have drunk pond or river water containingthe eggs or newly hatched young, which thengrow in the stomach, causing great discom-fort Typical of the many realistic ‘medical’

reports is the following, reprinted in N&Q from The North Lindsey Star of 20 February 1892:

A woman named Jane Rowe, residing at Marazion, in Cornwall, has for several years suffered from violent pains in the stomach, from which she has been unable to obtain any relief, although she has been continually under medical treatment On Friday evening, after taking some medicine, she had a severe attack of vomiting, in the course of which she threw up a living lizard, from four to ﬁve inches in length Dr J Mudge, who has been the woman’s medical attendant, has preserved the lizard, which

he believes must have been in her stomach for many years Since the reptile was ejected, Mrs Rowe has

been almost entirely free from pain (N&Q 8s:1 (1892),

Such stories and beliefs could serve asexplanations for chronic dyspepsia andunnatural hunger In the latter case, the crea-ture in the stomach could be visualised asmuch bigger and more aggressive ‘He musthave a wolf in his stomach’ was a commonphrase, though it is not always clear what

‘wolf’ means in such contexts; there is a shire term ‘water-wolf’ which seems to refer

York-to some form of super-newt

The motif of animal infestation remainspopular in *contemporary legends When the

‘beehive’ hairdo was fashionable, there werestories about girls who neither washed norcombed their hair for weeks, so spiders orbugs bred in it and gnawed into their skulls;more recently, stories about people returning

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7 April Fool’s Day

from exotic holidays with a boil, which bursts

to reveal hundreds of tiny spiders, or a mass of

ant eggs From antiquity to the mid-19th

cen-tury, there are accounts (often supported by

medical writers) of lice generating

spon-taneously on or in the human body The

notion that earwigs creep into people’s ears if

they lie down on the grass, and will there

gnaw through your brain, ranges from the

18th century to modern children’s lore

The possibility of animals in the stomach was repeatedly

debated in N&Q, under the heading ‘newspaper folklore’

(1s:6 (1852), 221, 338, 446; 1s:9 (1854), 29–30, 84, 276–7,

523–4); also under the heading ‘animals living inside

people’ (9s:7 (1901), 222–3, 332–3, 390–2; 9s:8 (1901), 89–

90, 346; 9s:9 (1903), 467–8) See also Gillian Bennett,

‘Vermin in Boils: What if it were True?’, Southern Folklore

54 (1997), 185–95; ‘Bosom Serpents and Alimentary

Amphibians: A Language for Sickness’, in Illness and

Heal-ing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed Marijke

Guswijt-Hofstra and others (1997), 224–42.

animals For the folklore of real-life animals,

see under each individual species Two forms

can occur: beliefs about the *luck or ill luck

the animal brings or foretells, and ideas about

its biology and behaviour which, though

mis-taken, are not superstitious but merely

popu-lar fallacies The latter often have a long

his-tory in books as well as oral tradition Also,

pious legends about animals and birds explain

their markings or behaviour by association

with Jesus (see *donkey, *robin) The haddock

and the dory both have a black spot behind

each gill, said to be the marks of St Peter’s

thumb and foreﬁnger as he held the ﬁsh to

extract a coin from its mouth (Matthew 17:

7)—a tale recorded in the 17th century, but

probably medieval

There are many supernatural creatures in

animal form, some being shape-changing

*boggarts and *fairies, others human *ghosts,

others demonic; each account has to be

separ-ately assessed

Antrobus Soul-Cakers One of the very few

surviving *mumming play teams which have a

claim to be traditional, the Soul-Cakers

per-form their souling play every year at

*Hal-loween and the following two weeks, around

the vicinity of the village of Antrobus

(Chesh-ire) As is usual with this type of play, the basic

action is that King George and the Black Prince

ﬁght, and the latter is killed and brought back

to life by a Doctor, and the last characters to

enter are the Wild Horse (Dick) and his Driver

The Wild Horse is made up of a real horse’s

skull, painted black, mounted on a pole, held

by a man bent double under a canvas cover—aconstruction deﬁned as a ‘mast-horse’ (see

*hobby horse) The Driver’s attempts tocontrol his cavortings and misbehaviour arethe highlight of the play for many of the audi-ence A local team is known to have performed

up to the First World War, and then lapsed for

a while, being revived in the late 1920s at theinstigation of Major A W Boyd, and it hasbeen regularly performed ever since

Shuel, 1985: 179–80; Helm, 1981: 69–71; A W Boyd, A

Country Parish (1951), 69–74.

April Fool’s Day The ﬁrst mention of this

custom is a curt note in Aubrey: ‘Fooles holyday We observe it on ye ﬁrst of April And so it

is kept in Germany everywhere.’ (Aubrey,

1686, 1880: 10) It must have reached Englandfrom Germany or France in the mid-17th cen-tury, and quickly became very popular underthe name All Fools’ Day; 18th-century writerscall it ‘universal’ At this period it was an adultamusement; people tried to trick one anotherinto going on ridiculous errands, seeking non-existent objects such as pigeon’s milk or abiography of Eve’s mother, and so on.Individual hoaxing of this kind grew rareamong adults in the 19th century, but inrecent decades impersonal media hoaxes havebecome popular; every year, press and televi-sion produce a crop of plausible, poker-facedabsurdities ingeniously disguised as newsitems On 1 April 1970 BBC radio broadcast atribute to a non-existent scholar and philan-thropist, in which various celebrities took

part The Times, abandoning its rule that

hoaxes should be ignored, did report this one;readers were amused, not angry The idea wasincreasingly imitated, for example by the

Guardian’s 1977 account of the delightful but

imaginary island of Sans Serif

Children’s tricks can be directed eitheragainst adults or against one another Someare novel, as when some Bradford sixth-formers in 1970 advertised their school asbeing for sale, but most are traditional inform; they give false warnings and disconcert-ing news, and mock those who believe them,play simple practical jokes, send people onfutile errands (Opie and Opie, 1959: 243–7) Aswith other children’s customs, there is a timelimit; anyone attempting a trick after midday

is taunted:

April Fool is gone and past, You’re the biggest fool at last.

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Arbor Day 8

Arbor Day Until 1995, a large black poplar

tree standing in the centre of the village of

Aston-on-Clun in Shropshire was

perman-ently decorated with ﬂags suspended from its

branches In that year the old tree died, and

since a young one grown from its seeds is not

yet large or strong enough to carry the

ﬂags, they are currently lashed to railings

around it

The ﬂags are renewed on 29 May (*Oak

Apple Day), locally called Arbor Day As far as

is known, the custom began in 1786, to

cele-brate the wedding of the local squire John

Marston The poplar was called the Bride’s

Tree; sprigs from it were given to village girls

on their wedding day, to ensure a large family

Some authorities assume that the

tree-decoration was a previous custom adapted for

the occasion, but there is no evidence to back

this The Marston family eventually died out,

so Hopesay Parish Council took over the

ceremony, and gave it great publicity from

1954 to 1959; unfortunately, the press dubbed

it a ‘pagan fertility rite’, rousing disapproval

which nearly led to its abolition However, it

continued, and is still organized by the Parish

Council supported by the proceeds of an

annual fête

Michael M Rix, Folklore 71 (1960), 184–5; Tom

Cham-bers, FLS News 23 (1996), 14.

art The study of English regional folk-art

styles has been deplorably neglected Yet

vis-ual display has always been essential to many

traditional customs; even if the objects

cre-ated were only to be seen for one day, they had

to have an impact They were skilfully made,

showing individual variations within

trad-itionally determined designs

Folk-art of this kind includes the purely

domestic (e.g *Easter eggs, *Christmas

decor-ations); communal artistic creation

(*well-dressing); objects made and displayed by an

occupational group, or by children, in

expect-ation of reward (*Jack-in-the-Green, *May

garlands, *grottoes, the *poppy show); carts

temporarily decorated for seasonal

celebra-tions (*rushbearing, *harvest home); *efﬁgies

to be burnt More substantial objects, designed

to be repeatedly used at annual events,

include many costumes and masks worn by

participants in folk drama, dancing, and

pageantry, such as *hobby horses and

proces-sional *giants and *dragons Many are comic,

or mock-horriﬁc A few objects, notably *corn

dollies, were displayed for a year and then

des-troyed; the funereal *Maidens’ Garlands weremeant to be permanent All were made, notbought; all show the interplay of traditionalpatterns and individual variation which is theessence of folklore

In pre-industrial England, most men’s craftswere utilitarian, their beauty depending onthe match between form and function, ratherthan ornament; only a few working groupsmade much use of colour, mainly carters andboatmen Decorative woodcarving is found onfurniture and a few personal items such aspipes, whips, tool-handles, walking sticks, andshepherds’ crooks Certain intricately chip-carved objects were fashioned by men not fortheir own use but as love-tokens; notableexamples are the Yorkshire knitting sheaths,whose shape and ornamentation varies fromone dale to the next, and Yorkshire stay-busks(Brears, 1989: 46–62, 75–80; Lambert andMarx, 1989: 20–1)

Women’s needlework emphasized ment; lace-making, smocking, embroidery,tapestry, and beadwork were always popular,among those who could afford the materials.One widespread product was the sampler, asmall linen square displaying differentstitches in silk or wool, made by children toprove their skill; its centrepiece was lettering,usually expressing piety, surrounded by pic-torial decoration Elaborate satin or velvetpincushions were made as christening pres-ents, shining pinheads forming patterns and amessage (e.g ‘Welcome, little stranger’).Women also made sturdy rag-rugs from strips

orna-of cloth threaded through hessian in attractivedesigns, especially in the northern counties(Brears, 1989: 140–51) This region also had avigorous quilting tradition, using embroidery,patchwork, and appliqué; many nineteenth-century examples survive

Ornamental objects created by local men as a means of public communicationincluded carved or painted inn signs and tradesigns, ships’ ﬁgureheads, weathervanes, andtombstones They were handmade, andoffered scope for lively invention within ashared tradition In recent decades, ‘villagesigns’ have become popular in East Anglia.When discussing material objects in anindustrialized society, it is hard to knowwhere to draw the line between ‘folk culture’and ‘popular culture’ Items such as fair-ground souvenirs, greetings cards, mourningjewellery, or religious pictures have beenfactory-made since early Victorian times, and

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crafts-9 Arthur

hence fairly standardized; yet they are used as

adjuncts to festivities and life-cycle events

which are essentially folkloric Their designs

may also be rooted in folk tradition On this

level, folk/popular art has been, and still is,

abundant

Towards the middle of the 19th century,

various social groupings began using

con-spicuous objects, created by industrial

tech-niques, to symbolize their identity There

were large, bright pictorial banners used in

street parades by many organizations,

religious and secular, especially Temperance

Clubs and Trade Union branches Painted on

rubberized silk and adorned with fringes and

tassels, they conveyed the aims of the

organ-ization through realistic or symbolic ﬁgures,

mottoes, heraldic devices, and portraits of

leaders

Gaudy decoration characterized the world

of popular amusements: music halls, pubs,

fairs, and circuses Here too the 19th century

saw an increase of industrial products, but

individual craftsmen and amateurs were

still active What is now thought of as a

‘Gypsy caravan’, a one-roomed dwelling

mounted on a horse-drawn cart, originated

among fairground showmen of the early 19th

century, and was adopted by *Gypsies around

1850 Its multicoloured paintwork, covering

every inch of the exterior and much of the

internal ﬁttings, constitutes a distinctive

art-form with scrolls, ﬂowers, and horses as its

typical motifs; though such waggons were

made by specialist ﬁrms, they were

exclusively used by two marginal social

groups, showmen and Gypsies, and

pro-claimed their identity

Another working group using mobile

homes was the canal bargees and their

fam-ilies, and they too compensated for cramped

quarters by colourful decoration Canal boat

art, ﬁrst described in 1873, combines

geo-metric designs with ﬂowers and romantic

landscapes, applied not only to the boat but to

all its furnishings, and even utensils such as

basins and pails The artists were generally the

boatbuilders, but sometimes the bargees

themselves

Peter Brears, 1989; Lambert and Marx, 1989; Averil

Colby, Samplers Yesterday and Today (1964); Anne Sebba,

Samplers: Five Centuries of a Gentle Craft (1979); John

Gor-man, Banner Bright (1973); M FitzRandolph, Traditional

Quilting (1953); Rosemary Allen, North Country Quilts and

Coverlets (1987); C H Ward-Jackson and D E Harvey, The

English Gypsy Caravan (1972); Tony Lewery, ‘Rose, Castle

Arthur Arthurian literature is beyond the

scope of the present work, as is the problem ofArthur’s historical setting One theme, how-ever, the belief that Arthur is not dead and willreturn, remained rooted in the popular mindthroughout the centuries The earliest refer-ences come from *Celtic areas—a Welsh poemwhich remarks cryptically, ‘A mystery untilDoomsday is the grave of Arthur’; a mention

of a ﬁght which broke out at Bodmin wall) in 1113 because some Frenchmenlaughed at a local man who assured themArthur was alive; allusions to an obstinatebelief among Bretons that he would return

(Corn-By the time Malory wrote, in the 1460s, thetomb at *Glastonbury containing a coffinalleged to be Arthur’s was famous, but he doesnot mention it Instead, he first says that aship full of fair ladies bore Arthur away to ‘thevale of Avilion’ to be healed, but then thatthey returned that night with a corpse, andasked a hermit to bury it; finally, he says therewere many tales, both written and oral, and hecannot decide between them:

No more of the very certainty of his death I never read, but thus was he led away in a ship wherein were three queens [These] ladies brought him to his burials but yet the hermit knew not in certain that it was verily the body of King Arthur Yet some men say in many parts of England that Arthur

is not dead, but had by the will of Our Lord Jesu into another place, and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the Holy Cross I will not say it shall

be so, but rather I will say, here in this world he changed his life But many men say that there is

written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus,

Rex quondam Rexque futurus [‘Here lies Arthur, former

King and future King’] (Morte d’Arthur, book 21,

chapter 7).

Part of this derives from *Geoffrey of

Mon-mouth, who says Arthur was taken by boat to

*Avalon, an island paradise where nine queenswould heal him Folk tradition, however,claims he is sleeping in some secret cavernwith his knights round him until his countryneeds him—a tale told of great kings and her-oes throughout Europe It is localized at sev-eral places in Britain, the main English onesbeing *Cadbury Castle (Somerset), RichmondCastle (Yorkshire), and Sewingshields Castle(Northumberland) It tells how a farmer, or apotter, happens upon a secret entrance in thehillside, leading to an underground chamberwhere Arthur and his knights lie sleeping,surrounded by weapons and treasures, includ-ing a sword and a horn At this point, the man

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arum lilies 10

blunders; either he draws the sword but fails

to blow the horn, or he runs away without

doing either He can never ﬁnd the entrance

again

Arthur’s name is attached to a number of

other sites, sometimes in such a way as to

imply that he was imagined as a *giant There

is a huge crag called Arthur’s Seat near

Sew-ingshields, a megalith called Arthur’s Quoit at

Trethevy (Cornwall), and another called

Arthur’s Stone at Hereford, with dents said

to be the marks of his knees There are also

places linked to events in the medieval

romances, either in the old texts

them-selves, or by later speculation For instance,

it is said that Excalibur was thrown into

either Looe Pool or Dozmary Pool (both in

Cornwall)

Other beliefs, more rarely recorded, are that

Arthur leads the *Wild Hunt, and that he lives

on as a *raven

See also *names, *unbaptized babies

Radford, Radford, and Hole, 1961: 27–30, 172; Opie and Tatem, 1989: 72–4.

bargest, barguest This is the name for a

particularly alarming shape-changing *bogeyanimal in the folklore of Yorkshire, Lanca-

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17 barring-out

shire, and other northern areas, which might

be encountered at stiles and in dark lanes, or

near churchyards Sometimes it was only

heard, not seen; it howled and shrieked, and

to hear it was an *omen of someone’s

approaching death—possibly one’s own If

vis-ible, it might be ‘a frightful goblin with teeth

and claws’, a headless man, a cat, a rabbit, or

most often a *Black Dog, whose coming would

set all the real dogs in the district chasing after

it and howling

Thomas Wright, English Dialect Dictionary, s.v., and

quota-tions given there; Henderson, 1866: 239.

Baring-Gould, Sabine (1834–1924)

Or-dained in 1864, he served in several parishes,

but in 1881 he appointed himself rector of the

estate of Lew Trenchard (Devon) which he had

inherited in 1872, and he remained there as

squire and parson till his death In a long and

busy life, he was involved in numerous ﬁelds

and wrote over 200 books, including 40

novels, travel books (West Country, Iceland,

France, etc.), archaeology, hagiography,

mythology, history, biography, folklore, and

folk-song, in addition to hymns (including

‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, c.1864), sermons,

and numerous articles, and in his day was a

tremendously popular author Perhaps it is

inevitable that in scholarly terms his output is

more notable for its quantity than its quality,

but in this as in everything his achievements

were erratic, ranging from the excellent to the

not very good

Baring-Gould’s interests roamed over many

aspects of folklore, but it is in his folk-song

collections that Baring-Gould made a lasting

contribution He was one of the ﬁrst of the

Victorian folk-song enthusiasts in the ﬁeld,

commencing his collecting in 1888, and

pub-lishing Songs of the West (1891) and A Garland of

Country Song (1895) His books inspired others,

such as Anne *Gilchrist, to take an interest,

but his cavalier attitude to both texts and

tunes gave him a bad name with other

col-lectors Nevertheless, he was one of the few of

his generation who showed an interest in the

singers as well as the songs, and he left several

descriptions of the old men and women from

whom he collected and whom he manifestly

loved for their own sake He commented, in

his Reminiscences: ‘To this day I consider the

recovery of our Westcountry melodies has

been the principal achievement of my life’

(quoted in Dickinson, 1970: 123) He also had

an extensive knowledge, and collection, of

*broadsides and *chapbooks which he put togood use in his historical notes Cecil *Sharptook Baring-Gould in hand for a revised edi-

tion of Songs of the West in 1905, the edition

which is now accepted as the best, and the two

men also collaborated on English Folk Songs for

Schools (1906) His other song venture was the

six-volume English Minstrelsie (1895–7), a

meandering collection of art, popular, andfolk-song, with his valuable and authoritativenotes on the songs and often on the perform-ers of bygone days Baring-Gould left a mass ofmaterial when he died and his vast manu-scripts are only now being identiﬁed andmade available

DNB; Bickford H C Dickinson, Sabine Baring-Gould: son, Writer and Folklorist (1970); Harold Kirk-Smith, Now the Day is Over: The Life and Times of Sabine Baring-Gould (1997);

Squar-William E Purcell, Onward Christian Soldier: A Life of Sabine

Baring-Gould (1957).

Barley-Break A popular chasing game,

men-tioned often in literary sources of the 16th to18th centuries, played either by children oryoung people of both sexes The gamereconstructed by the Opies involved threemixed-sex pairs of players One pair stood inthe middle of the playing area (called ‘hell’),and one pair stood at each end The two endpairs had to change partners, without beingcaught by the middle pair, and the latter had

to hold hands throughout An alternativename was ‘Last Couple in Hell’

The earliest mention of the game is found inHenry’s Machyn’s Diary of 19 April 1557: ‘Thesam owre master parsun and entryd in-tohelle, and ther ded at the barle breyke withalle the wyffe of the sam parryche’ Otherearly references include Sir Philip Sidney

(Arcadia, written in 1580s), Shakespeare and Fletcher (Two Noble Kinsmen, iv iii, 1634), and Robert *Herrick (Hesperides, 1648) Other

descriptions imply different ways of playingand suggest that it derives its name from ori-ginally being played in the farmyard aroundthe stacks

Opie and Opie, 1969:128–30; Gomme, 1884: i 21–3; Hazlitt, 1905: 28–9.

barring-out A widespread custom, up to

the 19th century, was the ‘barring-out’ of theschoolteacher by his pupils On a day sanc-tioned by custom (but varying from place toplace), the pupils contrived to bar the doorwith the teacher outside, often with his con-nivance, and refused to let him in until he

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barrows 18

agreed to their terms, which were usually for a

half-holiday, or something similar By the 19th

century the custom was relatively controlled,

but in previous generations had been much

rougher On at least one occasion, in Scotland

in 1595, a magistrate who was helping the

teacher gain access to the school was shot

dead by one of the pupils Not surprisingly,

local authorities waged a continual war

against such activities and gradually

suc-ceeded in taming and, eventually, eliminating

the custom

Rex Cathcart, History Today (Dec 1988), 49–5;

Cham-bers, 1878: i 238–9; Brand, 1849: i 441–54; Hone, 1832:

653–4; N&Q 187 (1944), 37, 83–4, 218–19.

barrows Prehistoric burial mounds

com-monly attract legends The fact that they are

graves was often correctly remembered (or

guessed?), but the dating would be

inaccurate—they might be linked to Vikings,

medieval heroes, or men killed in the Civil

War Long barrows naturally suggested the

idea of a giant’s grave, as at Castlecarrock

(Cumbria) The idea that *fairies live inside

them is much rarer in England than abroad,

but see *Willy Howe; at Pixies’ Mound at

Stogursey (Somerset) it is said a passing

ploughman once mended a broken tool for the

pixies and was rewarded with a delicious cake

*Treasure legends are numerous,

encour-aged no doubt by occasional ﬁnds of

pre-historic gold, and of money buried in later

centuries for safety; local names such as

Money Hills (Hampshire), Goldenlow

(Bedford-shire), and Dragonhoard (Oxfordshire) refer to

this, even where the tale itself has been

forgot-ten But it was also thought that to dig into a

mound brought supernatural retribution,

either immediately in the form of violent

thunderstorms or fearsome apparitions, or in

long-term bad luck and illness; tales about this

seem to be particularly common in Devon

Grinsell, 1976.

Barwick-in-Elmet maypole The site in

Yorkshire of what was previously claimed to

be the tallest *maypole in the country (86 feet),

but Ansty in Wiltshire erected a new one (96

feet) in 1982 Every three years the maypole is

lowered and removed from its central village

site and carried to a nearby ﬁeld for

refurbishment The stripes are repainted, and

the garlands made of cloth rosettes, ribbons,

and artiﬁcial ﬂowers are repaired or replaced

The villagers elect three Polemen who take

responsibility for this work and for the erection of the pole On Spring Bank Holiday(previously Whit Tuesday), after an afternoon

re-of games and music, the maypole is carried inprocession back through the village and putback where it belongs Traditionally, a youngman would climb up the pole to release theropes and spin the weather vane with a ﬂour-ish, but modern-day safety and insurance fearshave made this less acceptable

Dalesman 47 (Jan 1986), 849–50; 58 (Apr 1996), 51–2;

Shuel, 1985: 34; Kightly, 1986: 162; Sykes, 1977: 58–9.

bats These feature surprisingly little in the

standard folklore collections of the 19th and20th centuries There is nowadays a generaltendency to associate bats with witches, theDevil, and vampires, although this stems morefrom modern horror ﬁlms than from trad-itional lore Nevertheless, Ella M Leatherreported that ‘witches change themselves intothe form of animals, usually bats or black cats’(Leather, 1912: 52) A bat ﬂying against a win-dow or, worse, into a room, is counted as veryunlucky or even a death *omen The mostcommon notion about bats, however, is theiralleged tendency to get entangled in women’shair, with the extra problem that the hair has

to be cut off to extricate the animal

Wootton, 1986: 75–7; Opie and Tatem, 1989: 14; N&Q 160

(1931), 46, 86, 124, 159.

Bawming the Thorn ‘Bawming’ means

dec-orating, and the thorn in question is in thecentre of the Cheshire village of Appleton Thetree is duly adorned in late June or early Julywith ribbons, garlands, ﬂags, and so on, now-adays mainly by local children, who also pro-

cess and sing, but previously by the villagers en

masse Successive revivals and changes have

seen the custom tamed The present tree datesfrom 1967 when it was planted to replace apredecessor which had been blown down.Unsubstantiated tradition maintains that theﬁrst tree on the site was a cutting from thefamous *Holy Thorn at *Glastonbury

Kightly, 1986: 47; Hole, 1975: 81.

bay (tree) There were many uses, both

prac-tical and symbolic, for the aromatic evergreenleaves of bay (also called laurel); it was muchfavoured for festive decoration, but at funerals

it expressed the hope of resurrection, since itcan revive after dying back to its roots The

herbalist John Parkinson wrote in his Paradisus

Terrestris (1629), 426:

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19 beds

The bay-leaves are necessary both for civil uses and

for physic, yes, both for the sick and the sound, both

for the living and for the dead It serveth to adorne

the House of God as well as man, to crowne or

encircle, as with a garland, the heads of the living,

and to sticke and decke forth the bodies of the dead;

so that from the cradle to the grave, we still have use

of it.

In Pliny’s Natural History (ad 77), it is said

that laurel guards the doorways of great

men’s houses, and is never struck by

light-ning Both ideas passed into English lore; a

bay in the garden was thought to protect the

house from lightning and keep away witches,

the Devil, or (nowadays) bad luck (Opie and

Tatem, 1989: 14; Vickery, 1995: 28)

Occasion-ally bay trees wither for no apparent reason,

an *omen of death for rulers (Shakespeare,

Richard II, ii iv).

bears, see *blood sports, *straw bears.

Beast of Bodmin, see *alien big cats.

Beating the Bounds In former times, when

the parish was an essential unit of both

religious and local government organization,

it was imperative that the exact parish

bound-aries be generally known, agreed, and, most

important of all, remembered from

gener-ation to genergener-ation.The custom of

perambu-lating the parish boundaries, or Beating the

Bounds as it is usually called now, thus had a

very necessary practical purpose, and the

curious practices associated with the event

were also usually of practical utility

Perambu-lations usually took place at *Rogationtide and

involved both religious and secular ofﬁcials, as

the boundary custom had been grafted on to a

much older one of religious processions on

*Ascension Day Many other local residents

took part—each of whom would be able to

‘bear witness’ in any future boundary

dispute—and a number of boys were also

taken along, to ensure that the knowledge was

passed to future generations These

young-sters were useful in that they could be made to

clamber through hedges, wade streams, climb

over walls, and so on, to ensure that the whole

boundary was properly followed, and various

customs grew up whereby the boys were

bumped on to boundary stones or whipped at

key points, ‘to make sure they remember’

They were, of course, remunerated in some

way At other key points the clergy would

preach or lead a prayer—‘cursed be he thatremoveth his neighbour’s landmark’ (Deuter-onomy 27: 17) being a favourite text—and anumber of local Vicar’s or Gospel Oaks arememories of these places Once the practicalaspects of the perambulations faded, and theceremonial became increasingly meaningless,most of them died out, although there are stillsporadic revivals, especially at the time of cen-tenary celebrations or other important localdates A handful of places still perform thecustom on a regular basis, including St Marythe Virgin and St Michael in the Northgate(both in Oxford) and the Liberty of the Tower

of London

Shuel, 1985: 103–6; Kightly, 1986: 49; Angus Winchester,

Discovering Parish Boundaries (1990).

beds Numerous beliefs cluster round this

most important piece of household furniture,but only those concerned with getting out ofbed have been recorded before the mid-19thcentury, and by the documentary record, theothers are all quite recent The orientation ofthe bed is vital A belief reported so far onlyfrom the 20th century cautions against sleep-ing with the foot of the bed towards the door,which is explained by the fact that coffins arecarried out feet first Placing a bed across,rather than in line with floorboards or ceilingbeams was held to prevent sleep and, worse,

to prolong the death of a dying person (N&Q

4s:8 (1871), 322) This is reported regularlyfrom the mid-19th century and into the 1970s,although ﬁtted carpets and plastered ceilingsnow disguise the orientation of the woodwork

in the bedroom

Making the bed is also ruled by belief Themost–quoted superstition here is that it isunlucky to turn a mattress on a *Friday, or aSunday (or both): ‘Your mistress says that herbed last night was hard and full of lumps; I’mafraid you did not turn it yesterday.’ ‘Oh no,Ma’am! Yesterday was Friday: it would turn

the luck’ (N&Q 7s:4 (1887), 246) The predicted

result varies from having fearful dreams, orlosing your sweetheart, to illness and probabledeath Again, this is only recorded from 1851onwards, and would seem likely to have fadedout as sprung mattresses became the norm.The latest version quoted by Opie and Tatem,from a Hampshire woman in 1983, maintainsthat ‘if you change the sheets on Friday thedevil has control of your dreams for a week’.Several other strictures apply, for example ifyou sit on the bed of a sick person, you will be

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bees 20

the next occupant, and three people must not

take part in making a bed

As already mentioned, getting out of bed

correctly was important in earlier times:

‘Howe happily rose I on my ryghte syde to day,

or blessed me well this happye or lucky

day’ (Palsgrave, Acolastus, 1540: 90, quoted by

Opie and Tatem: 16), and there are numerous

17th-century literary references to the belief

(see Lean) A further belief was that it is lucky

to get out of bed backwards, provided it was

not deliberate The ﬁrst known mention is in

Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) and again there

are a number of literary references Two more

bed-related superstitions are included under

*feathers and *washing

Opie and Tatem, 1989: 15–17; Lean, 1903: esp ii 20–3.

bees In medieval, Elizabethan, and Stuart

times, bees were regarded as mysterious,

intelligent, and holy; their wax was used in

church *candles, honey was a biblical image

for God’s grace and the joys of heaven, poets

praised the hive as a model for the perfect

society, grouped around its ‘king’ (it was only

in the 1740s that English naturalists admitted

the large bee was female) Something of this

awe remains in a nursery riddle from the 16th

century, with the answer ‘a bee’:

Little bird of Paradise,

She works her work both neat and nice;

She pleases God, she pleases man,

She does the work that no man can.

(Opie and Opie, 1951: 82–3)

Folk tradition about bees stresses how easily

they might take offence, in which case they

would cease to give honey, desert their hives,

or die They had to be treated as members of

the household; in particular, they must be told

about deaths, births, and marriages in the

family, their hives must be appropriately

adorned, and they must be given their share of

the festive or funereal food They would then

hum, to show they consented to remain

The *funeral custom is frequently described

throughout the 19th century:

My mother, who passed most of her youth in the

village of Bakewell in Northamptonshire, tells me

that the belief in the necessity of telling the bees

everything was very strong there At the death of a

sister of hers, some of the cake and wine which was

served to the mourners at the funeral was placed

inside each hive, in addition to the crape put upon

each At her own wedding in 1849 a small piece of

wedding cake was put into each hive (Folk-Lore 3

(1892), 138)

The ceremony of informing bees of their owner’s death is in full force in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, Hin- ton, Wilts, and even in the highly intellectual city of Oxford The ceremony is the same in all these places Three taps are made on the hive with the house-key, while the informant repeats, ‘Bees, bees, bees, your master is dead, and you must work for ——’, naming the future owner A piece of black crape is then fas- tened to the hive Many bee owners think it politic to inform the bees of the death of a relation; but in this case they never give the name, but the degree of rela- tionship, as ‘your master’s brother, sister, aunt &c is dead’ On weddings the bees expect to be informed

of the auspicious event, and to have their hive

decor-ated with a wedding favour (N&Q 1s:4 (1851), 308)

Such observations could be paralleled fromvirtually every part of England; many refer-

ences will be found in Folklore and N&Q, besides

regional books of folklore Some localities addminor details; in Shropshire and Somerset, forinstance, hives had to be lifted or turned as thecofﬁn left the house, while in some Yorkshirevillages bees were formally invited to funerals.Other common beliefs were that quarrelingand swearing would drive bees away, and thatthey must be spoken to in soft tones Theycould not tolerate the presence of an unchastewoman, or one who was *menstruating, butwould sting her In the north of England, itwas said they could be heard humming hymns

on Christmas Eve (Henderson, 1879: 311) Beesmust never be bought with ordinary money,only with a gold coin; they can, however, besafely acquired by gift, loan, or barter A singlebee or bumblebee entering a house meansgood luck, probably in the form of money.When bees swarmed, it was usual for thewomen and children of the household to fol-low them, making a clatter with pots andpans, which was supposed to induce them tosettle, and also let everyone know what washappening; it was accepted that in these cir-cumstances one could go on to someone else’sland without being charged with trespassing

It was a bad *omen if the swarm settled on adead branch, meaning death for someone inthe owner’s family, or for the person seeingthe swarm there

Hilda M Ransome, The Sacred Bee (1937; reprint, 1986),

211–32; Radford, Radford, and Hole, 1961: 38–40; Opie and Tatem, 1989: 17–21.

beetles Apart from *ladybirds, beetles do not

have much of their own lore in English ition The only belief regularly reported (fromthe 1870s to the present day) is that to kill one

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trad-21 bells

brings rain The beetle also turns up in

medi-cine, as for example in a report from Lindsey

(Lincolnshire): a small girl was sent by her

mother to ask that if anyone found a beetle—

by accident it had to be—could they keep it as

her sister had the whooping cough and they

wanted to tie it round her neck, so that as it

decayed the cough would go too (N&Q 3s:9

(1866), 319) It is more common in England to

ﬁnd spiders used in this context Udal also

reports a Dorset saying that if you kill a black

beetle, twenty will come to its funeral, but

again this is said of many insects (Udal,1922:

246–7) A letter in N&Q (2s:2 (1856), 83) hints at

another beetle belief that is otherwise

unrecorded Some countrymen in the New

Forest were seen stoning a stag-beetle to

death, and when asked why said that it was

the Devil’s imp and was sent to do evil to the

corn Unfortunately, no other information is

given

begging customs, see *display customs.

Bellerby Feast The remnant of the old-style

village *feast, the celebrations at Bellerby in

North Yorkshire now focus on one day of fun

and games The principal participants dress as

clowns and, accompanied by an accordion

player, drummer, and helpers, they go from

door to door round the village collecting

money, cakes, sweets, rafﬂe prizes, and so on

They also stop pedestrians, passing cars,

coaches, and whoever else they can ﬁnd to

exact contribution The edibles are distributed

to children and other villagers who gather for

the purpose around midday, and the money

goes to organizing a fête on the day and, later

in the year, a children’s disco and Christmas

party The custom has changed over the years,

and was several times in danger of extinction,

but local effort revived interest each time Its

date has moved from the Wednesday after

Whitsun to Whit Monday (in 1933) and later to

the Spring Bank Holiday The heavy drinking

previously associated with the custom has

been toned down, and the event made more

family oriented

Smith, 1989: 78–81; Sykes, 1977: 91–4.

bells The primary purpose of church and

monastery bells was, and is, to remind hearers

of a duty of prayer; in medieval times they

marked the ‘canonical hours’ for monks

(6 a.m., 9 a.m., midday, 3 p.m., 6 p.m., 9 p.m.),rang before Mass and at certain points duringMass, rang the ‘passing bell’ when anyone inthe parish was at death’s door, and tolled for

*funerals and the anniversaries of deaths Theyalso sounded in celebrations and thanksgiv-ings, to honour eminent visitors, at *weddings,and to mark holy days The choice of whichbell or bells to ring, for how long, and in whatrhythm, was a code indicating what hadoccurred Bells were widely believed to fright-

en away the demons of the air that causestorms and *thunder

Much of this continued after the tion Soon, the unique English skill of changeringing evolved, as set out by Fabian Stedman

Reforma-in his TReforma-intReforma-innalogia (1668) and Campanalogia

(1677) The tolling of a single bell was used as asignal to request prayers for a dying person(the ‘passing bell’), and also just before afuneral Parishes developed local codes for thelatter—three strokes for a child, six for awoman, nine for a man was common; butDidsbury (Cheshire) did eight for a child,twelve for a woman, sixteen for a man;Marsham (Suffolk) did three for a girl, four for

a boy, ﬁve for a spinster, seven for a wife orwidow, eight for a bachelor, nine for a hus-band or widower; some places then gave asmany strokes as the age of the deceased Pealswere rung for local celebrations, especiallyweddings, and for public festivals and nationalevents

Bell-ringing took on a secular role as theMorning Bell, rung in many places at 5 a.m insummer and 6 a.m in winter to summonlabourers to work, and the curfew at 8 or 9p.m to mark the day’s end There are numer-ous records of benefactors leaving a piece ofland to a church, for its rent to pay someonefor ringing peals and curfews; at Kid-derminster (Wiltshire), Twyford (Hampshire),and elsewhere, legend says the donor’s lifewas saved when the sound of a bell guidedhim or her home when lost Bells also sig-nalled the opening of markets, the momentwhen gleaners could enter a harvested ﬁeld,and the making of fritters and *pancakes on

*Shrove Tuesday

Many places have a legend telling how achurch bell fell into deep water, and couldnever be recovered In some cases it fell inaccidentally; in others, it was carried off bylooters, or demonic forces Rescue attemptsfailed because some *taboo was infringed, andthe bell sank back The tale usually concludes

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Beltane 22

by saying that it can still sometimes be heard

ringing underwater Legends about *churches

or wicked villages submerged or swallowed up

as a *judgement also often include this ﬁnal

detail; so do some traditions about real

medi-eval villages lost through coastal erosion, for

example at Dunwich (Suffolk)

Tom Ingram, Bells in England (1954); Camp, 1988.

Beltane This word, variously spelled and

meaning ‘bright ﬁre’ or ‘lucky ﬁre’, is the Irish

and Scottish Gaelic name for *May Day, and is

particularly associated with the custom of

lighting *bonﬁres on the eve of the feast, to

protect cattle from witchcraft May Eve

bon-ﬁres were also common in the 18th century in

Devon, Cornwall, Cumbria, and the Isle of

Man—areas where *Celtic tradition could have

survived The word ‘Beltane’ itself, however, is

never found in England (Hutton, 1996: 218–25)

Beowulf This Old English epic of 3,182 lines,

probably composed in the 8th century, is set

in Scandinavia 200 years earlier and alludes to

much semi-legendary history The hero, an

unhistorical ﬁgure of superhuman strength,

overcomes three monsters The ﬁrst two are

man-eating ogres (Grendel and his mother),

who emerge from a *bottomless pool to ravage

the Danish king’s halls; the third, a dragon,

attacks Beowulf’s own Swedish kingdom, and

the hero, by then an old man, kills it at the

cost of his own life These themes have

obvi-ous afﬁnities with folktales The burial

cus-toms described have been conﬁrmed by

archaeology

The poem was clearly intended for

recita-tion before an aristocratic Christian audience

with a special interest in Scandinavian

trad-itions; the style is that of oral formulaic

poet-ry, though the author presumably composed

in writing The story has left no trace in

Eng-lish folklore, except that ‘Grendel’s Pit’ and

‘Grendel’s Mere’ occur as minor place-names

in a few pre-Conquest charters (one each in

Devon, Middlesex, Staffordshire, Wiltshire,

and Worcestershire)

Michael Swanton’s Beowulf (1978; rev edn.

1997) conveniently prints text and translation

on facing pages

Berkeley, the witch of The medieval

chron-icler William of Malmesbury, writing in the

1120s, tells how, in 1065, a woman living at

Berkeley (Gloucestershire) who was skilled in

witchcraft was warned by her pet jackdaw

that death was at hand She begged her family

to protect her body by sewing it up in a stag’shide and laying it in a stone cofﬁn fastenedwith three chains, which must stand in thechurch for three nights, after which it could

be buried But the plan failed; each night onechain was broken by demons, till ﬁnally theDevil dragged her out of the church and sether on ‘a black horse with iron hooks pro-jecting over the whole of his back’; she van-ished, but ‘her pitiable cries were heard fornearly the space of four miles’

Some elements here point towards folklorethemes; the jackdaw may be an early example

of a *familiar, while the sinner tortured by ing a demonic horse has links with the *WildHunt

rid-Betley Window A painted glass window,

formerly in Betley Hall, Staffordshire, but now

at Leigh Manor, near Minsterley, Shropshire,and dated between 1509 and 1536 The win-dow has twelve roughly diamond-shapedpanels which portray, in colour, six dancers, amusician, a hobby horse, a friar, a fool or jest-

er, a female character, and a maypole with thewords ‘a mery May’ across it The window’scontent was ﬁrst brought to the attention ofscholars by George Tollett, who contributed adescription to Johnson and Steevens’s inﬂuen-tial edition of Shakespeare published in 1778,

as a note to Henry IV part 2 It was long thought

to be one of the most important pieces ofvisual evidence regarding the early history of

*morris dance, the *hobby horse, and the *Maygames, but the nature of this evidence is,however, problematic Some of the ﬁgures onthe window are so similar to those on a work

by the 15th-century Flemish engraver Israelvan Meckenhem as to call into serious ques-tion their relevance to England, and *Dean-Smith deplores the false conclusions based onthe assumption that the ﬁgures are English

E J Nicol, JEFDSS 7:2 (1953), frontispiece, 59–67; Margaret Dean-Smith, Folklore 79 (1968), 161–75.

Bible divination Reported by folklorists all

over the country in only slightly differingforms, the Bible and Key was a popularmethod of divination In the version collected

by Ella M Leather in 1909 (1912: 65–6), it isused for three purposes—to discover a lover’sname, to name a thief, or to remove a spell Toﬁnd a lover, place the key in the Bible on thepage containing Ruth 1: 15, with its text

‘Whither thou goest I will go’ Close the book

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23 birds

and bind it with string Two people hold up

the Bible with their foreﬁngers under the key

As the names of probable lovers are recited,

the key will turn at the right name The only

difference when trying to discover a thief is

that Psalm 1: 18 is chosen For removing a

spell, place the key on two crossed sticks—one

of yew, the other of mountain ash, place them

on the text Ephesians 6: 13–15 ‘Put on the

whole armour’ Read these verses nine times

and at each repetition a small tear is made in a

piece of white paper Fold up the paper, sew it

into the clothing of the person who is

bewitched, without their knowledge

Leather’s informants showed an ambivalent

attitude to this procedure They certainly

believed its efﬁcacy but were worried that the

forces used may not come from the right

quar-ter and that the Church authorities would

hardly approve of them using the Holy Book in

such a manner The antiquity of the custom is

shown by references in Opie and Tatem,

which date back to 1303 Compare also *sieve

and shears

Less complicated, but still relying on the

Bible’s innate powers, was a *New Year

morn-ing custom whereby people who wanted to

know about the coming year opened the Bible

at random, placed their ﬁnger on a verse,

without looking of course, and read out the

selected chapter Those assembled then

inter-preted the prognostication This could be done

at other times, for example when starting on a

journey A variation was to take the Bible to

bed on New Year’s Eve, and open it in the dark

when you ﬁrst wake (after midnight), mark

the place, and read it in the morning (Gurdon,

1893:136–8)

Alternatively, place the Bible ‘under your

pillow with a sixpence clapt into the book of

Ruth (verses 16 and 17, chap.1) and you will

dream of your future husband’ (Lean 1903: ii

371), or the last chapter of the Book of

Prov-erbs can be used to divine certain things: each

verse indicates the disposition or fortune of

the persons born on the number

correspond-ing to the days of the month

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