A case could be made for James Orchard Halliwell (later Halliwell-Phillipps) as a first, since his Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of 1849 included a sheaf of seventeen “Fireside Nursery Stories.” Halliwell was feverishly active in the antiquarian societies of the mid-nineteenth century, and some of his voluminous productions spilled over into folklore. While he gleaned such tales as “Jack and the Giants” and “Tom Hicka-thrift” from chapbooks, others he obtained from oral recitals in Yorkshire and Oxfordshire. Halliwell did not name his storytellers or follow their words literally, but he realized “how very desirable it would be to procure the traditional tale as related by the English peasantry.”
The most complete collection of traditional tales gathered in England was made by Robert Hunt in Cornwall. Hunt began noting local stories some thirty years before he published two volumes of them in 1865 under the title, Popular Romances of the West of England; or, The Drolls, Traditions and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. As a child Hunt penned wild Cornish legends in his notebooks; in 1829 he spent ten months in a walking tour across Cornwall, deliberately ferreting out “romances” and “drolls”; in the following years he listened sympathetically to the tales of miners and peasants in his capacity as secretary of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society; and in 1862 he even engaged an itinerant postmaster and poet to scour the countryside for remaining traditions. Other, lesser collectors turned over their hoards to Hunt. This long-range, intensive, and systematic folktale quest still stands alone in the history of English folklore. Hunt states that even in the span between 1829 and 1835 traditions had vanished, and by 1862 his postmaster-collector found only slim pickings. He himself set out just in time to encounter two of the old “droll-tellers,” as the wandering minstrels of Cornwall were called.
Cornwall offered a particularly attractive hunting ground for an English folklorist in view of its isolated position as the southernmost county, separated from the rest of England by the river Tamar, and, in Hunt’s youth, still traversed only by primitive conveyances. In addition, the Celtic character of the Cornish, with their recently vanished language, added mystery to the quest; Hunt believed that the Cornish giant was a “true Celt,” showing affinities with Scottish giants, and in the older traditions he imagined he was recapturing the ancient Celtic mythology. Modern tales were colored by the Cornish occupations of fishing and tin mining.
Hunt made some advances from the literary and romantic treatment of Mrs. Bray, whose work he knew. He kept the portrayal of the landscape under partial restraint and he arranged his contents as a series of individual traditions, divided under main headings—Giants, Fairies, Tregeagle, Lost Cities, The Saints, Holy Wells, Demons and Spectres, King Arthur, Mermaids, Fishermen and Sailors—with his first volume devoted to mythic and his second to historic traditions. The legends, however, are elaborated and paraphrased; the concept of the oral text is not yet recognized, nor are storytellers identified.
This wide cache of 337 stories and items of superstition contains nothing but believed traditions and traditional beliefs. The fairies loom large, with twenty-nine entries devoted to them. Ghosts, demons, witches, and bogies abound, and historical personages are cast in the role of sorcerers and wizards, whether the wicked landlord Tregeagle, or the diabolic hero Sir Francis Drake. Landmarks localize the traditional incidents, which cling to rocks, wells, lakes, churches, and castles. These stories have nothing in common with the Märchen of the brothers Grimm, although Hunt calls them, rightly, the “genuine household tales of the people.”6
Only one collector other than Hunt broke with the conventional pattern of the county fieldbook to concentrate on tales. This was Sidney Oldall Addy, an Oxford graduate resident in Sheffield, who had published a glossary of Sheffield words for the English Dialect Society, interspersed with folklore items (1888, 1891), and a history of local antiquities, The Hall of Waltheof, or The Early Condition and Settlement of Hallamshire (1893). These interests led him deeper into the collecting of local traditions, and after some six years of foraging Addy brought together his texts in 1895 under a title obviously indebted both to the Grimms and Tylor, Household Tales with Other Traditional Remains. Collected in the Counties of York, Lincoln, Derby and Nottingham. Most of the fifty-two narratives fell into the category of the brief, localized legend rather than the European popular fiction, and dealt largely with the fairies, witches and wizards, and the Devil or the Old Lad.
This circumstance merely reinforced the folklore theories Addy derived from his countrymen. He had independently reached Hartland’s conclusion that fairies, witches, and ghosts overlapped and coalesced, and pointed back to savage superstitions. In the believed tales, and the scattered beliefs about the natural world and calendar year he placed under “Traditional Remains,” Addy thought he perceived much evidence to support the doctrine of survivals. Approvingly, he quoted from the Quarterly Review a definition of the “modern word folk-lore” as “the geology of the human race.”7 He cites Hartland’s The Science of Fairy Tales and the Stallybrass edition of Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, and is in correspondence with “Dr. Tylor of Oxford.” All their ideas confirm his findings. Folklore does indeed preserve the relics of pagan ritual and worship. The Morris dance suggested an original dusky race. Three tall, thin women with hourglasses in their hands, seen by a Derbyshire villager, standing in a line on the common at Cold-Aston, must be the Norns or Fates, foretelling a death within three hours. Miners in north Derbyshire who leave a hundredweight of coal each week for the fairies are but one instance of modern worshipers offering firstfruits to local divinities. Jack Otter in a Lincolnshire legend is Odin, the hated one, and so is Robin Hood—and by the etymological equations dear to the Victorians, Addy correlated Robin Hood’s merry men with the Norse pantheon. Again, Old Tup in the comic ballad of “The Derby Ram” is none other than the giant Ymir in the Edda.
So reasoned Addy. On some points we can agree. The merging of the fairy, witch, and ghost concepts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been elaborated in rich detail in our time by Katharine Briggs. And the intertwining of community legend, supernatural experience, and popular superstition is today well recognized. But the analogy of peasant with savage beliefs, so prized by the Victorians, no longer wins acceptance.
From the viewpoint of method, Addy made definite advances, although he still falls short of modern requirements. He took all his texts from oral tradition, but some were written down for him by the tellers, and he made a few verbal changes, such as introducing the hallowed phrase “Once upon a time”—a more serious addition than one might suspect, since such a formula introduces a Märchen but not a legend. Addy gave the village provenience of the tales, but did not name informants or seek hard for parallels.
While Hunt and Addy collected chiefly legends and beliefs, the typical Victorian clergyman, or his wife, who was busily assembling the county fieldbooks sought all scraps of lore surviving within the district. A number of these fieldbooks were printed in the second half of the nineteenth century, becoming vademecums for the library theorists; all contained some legendary tales, usually in paraphrase. The three earliest came from the north: William Henderson’s Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866); John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson’s Lancashire Folk-Lore, illustrative of the Superstitious Beliefs and Practices, Local Customs and Usages of the People of the County Palatine (1867); and Charles Hardwick’s Traditions, Superstitions and Folk-Lore (chiefly Lancashire and the North of England) (1872). Others followed, larger and bulkier, with chief acclamation going to the Shropshire Folk-Lore of Charlotte S. Burne in 1883. All held to the same pattern, offering chapters on such matters as omens and auguries, dreams and divinations, fairies and bogles, ghosts and devils, witchcraft and magic, superstitions of plants and animals, common usages and holy day ceremonies, well-worship and divining rods. They bore the air of fondled scrapbooks, pasted together with loving care from earlier manuscripts, newspaper clippings, field jottings, and literary cutouts. All these volumes continued and confirmed the English emphasis on local custom and local tradition.8
The constant desire, nevertheless, to emulate the Grimms’ Märchen is seen in an appendix to Henderson’s collection titled “Household Tales” and prepared by the prolific Sabine Baring-Gould, an Anglican clergyman. After making his deference to the Grimms, he plots out “story radicals,” or skeletal synopses of various international folktales. For example, the story of Jack the Giant Killer is placed under this heading:
Sect. III.—Men in Conflict with Supernatural Beings
A. Men obtain the Mastery by Cunning
I. Jack the Giant Killer root
1. A man is matched with giants or devils.
2. He deceives them by his superior cunning.
3. He makes them kill themselves.
Baring-Gould thus ingeniously anticipated the Type-Index of the Folk-Tale, which Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson would issue in 1928 as a system for identifying the widely diffused folktales of Europe. However, the slender stock of English popular fictions could scarcely provide the launching platform for such a catalogue, eventually constructed from Germanic and Finnish texts and their analogues. Nor were all the sixteen tales, largely from Yorkshire and Devonshire, true Märchen; four were legendary, one was a parrot anecdote, another a riddle-tale (see No. 43, “Mr. Fox’s Courtship” in this volume), and yet another a lying tale. Baring-Gould would have been on firmer ground if he had attempted to classify local legends.
When a cycle of tales did come to light in the county collections, it took the form of anecdotes attached to a local personage. In Ella Leather’s The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire (1912), to which Hartland contributed an introduction, a cluster of brief stories dealt with Jack o’ Kent, who may or may not have existed as a fugitive on the Welsh border. He emerges as a wizard outwitting the Devil in various partnerships and bargains. But in characteristic English fashion, these familiar international tales are sharply localized in Kentchurch, where people were wont to say, “As great as the Devil and Jack o’ Kent.”
Besides the county compendiums, such periodicals as Notes and Queries and Folk-Lore occasionally carried English oral tales. The second volume of Folk-Lore (1891) offered a glimpse of hidden treasures, in “Legends of the Cars,” a swatch of ten oral narratives from north Lincolnshire, collected by Marie Clothilde Balfour, an aunt by marriage of Robert Louis Stevenson. Before they were drained, the Cars of Lindsey in the Ancholme Valley had been wide swamps bordering small streams, desolate and dreary, and cut off from the modern world. Their inhabitants, grave, long-featured, suspicious and superstitious, speaking in almost pure Saxon, related wild and rambling histories of heathen rites and the powers of “woe-women,” in which they seemed still to half-believe. In the tale of “The Stranger’s Share,” a dweller in the Cars recalls how an older generation had neglected the “tiddy people” by going to church, and forgetting to lay out the first fruits of the harvest for them on flat stones, or to drop a crumb for them on the fireplace. So the Strangers took away their favors from the people of the Cars. “Tha men’d took to th’ gin, an’ the wimmen to th’ op’um; tha favers shuk ’em allers, an’ th’ brats wor yaller ’n illgrowed.” This indeed was their condition. These powerful legends (see “The Green Mist,” No. 12 in this volume) pointed to unsuspected currents of narrative lore.
In recent years the cause of English folklore, depressed between the two world wars, has regained momentum. The investigation of fairy lore was continued in two notable studies by Katharine M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck (1959) and Pale Hecate’s Team (1962). Although the first dealt primarily with the fairy belief and the second with witch beliefs, the two works are complementary, both derived from the author’s doctoral dissertation at Oxford. Dr. Briggs scoured the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for evidence of folklore, examining popular sources like chapbooks, ballads, court trials, and magic tracts; learned authors like Reginald Scot and Robert Burton; and Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists from Shakespeare to Drayton. As Keightley developed The Fairy Mythology from the concept of popular antiquities, and Hartland based The Science of Fairy Tales upon the theory of uniform cultural evolution, so Briggs has conceived The Anatomy of Puck from the premises of intellectual history. Beliefs are related to the dominant ideas and cosmology of the period; literature is viewed in its social setting; the historical forces of church, state, court, university, and manor are taken into account. Briggs cleverly pursues the interaction of learning and lore; the mixing of pagan, Christian, and folk elements; the merging of supernatural creatures as fairy glides into ghost, ghost into demon, demon into ogre. Literature dips impartially into classical mythology and country traditions. Astrology and alchemy hover between science and sorcery. The magician and the witch, the fairy and the goddess shuttle between the natural and supernatural worlds. Each generation, she writes, accounted for the decline of the fairies by the victory of its dominant form of belief.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries intrigue the folklorist, for the covert lore of the countryside was then bursting into public view, with the relaxing of the Church’s restraints and the emergence of the yeoman writer. The evil witchcraft controversy, to which King James I contributed his Daemonologie (1597), incited polemical tracts and court proceedings strewn with folklore notions. In Elizabethan times every Englishman was basically a countryman and comprehended, if he had not actually imbibed, the supernatural lore of the village.
Detecting the traditions of folklore in literary, learned, and popular sources requires a firm grasp of folklore science. For documentation Dr. Briggs provides the appropriate motifs in Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature, and she constantly cites texts comparable to her printed extracts of oral traditions collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; these she records in appendixes in both volumes. Thus from a work of 1674, Bovet’s Pandaemonium, or The Devil’s Cloyster, Briggs reprints an account of a fairy market seen by a traveler at Blackdown, near Taunton, in Somerset. Save that they were smaller than ordinary country folk, the fairies could have passed for farmers vending their wares. As the traveler approached, they became invisible, although he felt their buffets; on the other side of the market, he again saw them from afar; ever after he found himself lame. Three centuries later Ruth Tongue heard of a similar experience befalling a farmer at the same hill, save that this one fared well (see No. 10, “Pixy Fair” in this volume). Tales such as these all belong to legendry, or what the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow has called the memorat, the personal account of an experience with the supernatural.
Briggs distinguishes four main species of fairy beings, thus doubling Keightley’s categories: the trooping fairies, who always appeared, even in their frolics, as a disciplined and motivated group; the rough hobgoblin; mermaids and nature fairies; and giants. Of these, the last two kinds were rarely reported in England. This broad classification covers more than merely diminutive beings, and the assumption is that all these anthropomorphic creatures originally descended from pagan deities.
In these rich puddings of folklore scholarship, the affinity between legend and belief and the continuity of supernatural lore from the ancient past to the present day are brilliantly outlined.
Organized collecting does not exist in twentieth-century England as in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Even the string of county fieldbooks assembled by devoted amateurs has ended. But some striking examples of English oral narrative have nevertheless come to light. In 1938 Edward M. Wilson, of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, who had been active in the Eastern Counties Folklore Society, published in Folk-Lore more than a score of tales he had taken down from local people in Westmorland. These he presented as exact texts. Many proved to be international types, but not Märchen; rather they were short humorous anecdotes and trickster stories. A cycle of special interest revolved around “Tales of Masters and Men,” that is, the small farmer and his unmarried hired laborer, whose relationship provided a natural theme for artful dodges and come-uppances. One cante-fable, “The Hungry Mowers” (No. 83 in this volume) includes a long drawn-out verse sung by ill-fed laborers; when their diet is improved, they change to a lively rhythm as their work speeds up. The same tale was known among Southern slaves in the United States, where the plantation owner and his favored house slave also exemplify the master and man relationship.
Then in 1963 and 1964 the long drought ended with two astonishing volumes of local folk history, Tales from the Fens and More Tales from the Fens. These fifty-seven traditional memories were written down by a gifted Fen storyteller, W. H. Barrett, and edited with historical notes by Enid Porter, curator of the Cambridge and County Folk Museum; but there is no question of their oral nature, and Dr. Briggs has tape-recorded three of Barrett’s stories for the present book (Nos. 23, 55, 91).
No traditions could be more highly localized than these public-house yarns set in the grim swamp country of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, where a hard-luck but hardy people contended against a hostile environment and oppressive landowners. Cherished and familiar in the Fens, these chapters of oral history would have no reason to wander across the Fen borders, even when they were recounted to sympathetic Cambridge dons, or gregarious strangers like Mark Twain. True, Mark’s own American tall tale is still remembered in the Fens (see No. 91 in this volume), but only in the context of his visit. Supernatural motifs of haunted spots and gypsies’ curses, witches’ maledictions and prenatal birthmarks recur, for they were part of the Fenman’s life, but it is the life itself, in its terrible and comical moments, that gives body to the narrations. In the reminiscence called “Hunger in the Fens,” a wry account of a regal dinner prepared for a starving Fen family from the head of an emaciated cow and lumpish leftover flour, the social historian can find meticulous details of famine conditions in the 1840’s. Yet the note of social protest is muffled; when outsiders attempt to organize, Fenmen and landlords join to run them out of town.
Sometimes a story can be traced directly back to the eighteenth century, as a ninety-year-old narrator recalls hearing it from his father or grandfather. Historical happenings of a distant past are kept vivid by the Fenmen, who discourse of medieval monks, hired German soldiers, imported Dutch engineers, French prisoners, Irish workers, the escape of King Charles I. Recent excavations of a Roman site have apparently validated a Fen chronicle. Brutality and violence are commonplace, with impalings, crucifixions, gibbetings, and butcherings tossed off as natural occurrences in an older, harsher day. Trivial incidents and obscure characters alternate with great events and illustrious names. The historical tradition is one of the most neglected forms of folklore. In the Fen and the Car tales, England is seen to be as wealthy in this form as Iceland with her sagas.
Today folklorists are beginning to recognize the vitality of oral narratives other than the vaunted Märchen. Besides the local legend, memorat, and historical tale, several varieties of oral humor flourish in modern life. The joke, the shaggy dog, the tall tale, the numskull story abound among educated city folk and deserve acceptance in the corpus of folktales. Little attempt has yet been made to gather and examine these forms, although Eric Partridge did devote a book to The ‘Shaggy Dog’ Story, Its Origin, Nature and Development (1953). This humorous, modern story lore belongs not to regions but to a mobile society, and easily crisscrosses the Atlantic between England and America. Macabre legends also thrive in the modern metropolis. The newly uncovered modern legend of “The Stolen Corpse” (see No. 48 in this volume) was first reported in England in 1963, and within the year it had been recorded in the United States. The present volume testifies to the vigor of the English folktale, and to the strength of local tradition and popular jest in England’s country towns and industrial cities.9
RICHARD M. DORSON
In editing the notes of these folktales for the press, I have been greatly assisted by Hilda Webb, who performed the editorial work on Ernest W. Baughman’s A Type and Motif-Index of the Folktales of England and North America. The index has been prepared by Betsy Greenlee Stampe.
R. M. D.
Introduction
The fairy stories of the old-fashioned Märchen type have almost disappeared from oral tradition in England. A few, however, are still told, and those collected in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century are some of the finest in Europe. I have included in this collection a few of those which show all the signs of having been accurately transcribed in their local dialects. Perhaps “Tom Tit Tot” is the flower of them, but “The Green Mist,” told to Mrs. Balfour by an old Lincolnshire Fenman and much less known than “Tom Tit Tot,” is a good example of the weird Fenland imagination. “The Small-Tooth Dog” is a pleasantly homely version of “Beauty and the Beast,” a tale rather rare in England; “The Black Bull of Norroway” type is commoner.
From literary references we know that a great many of the International Tale Types were once known in England. Two quoted by Shakespeare we have been able to recover in their entirety. In Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare we find the story of Mr. Fox, with the catch phrase, “It is not so, nor it was not so, and God forbid it should be so,” quoted by Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing, I, i). The cumulative inscription carved over the doors and staircase in the same tale, “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,” was used by Spenser (The Faerie Queene, III, ii). Miss Tongue found a late version of “Mr. Fox” in Somerset, and it is scattered in various forms over the country.
“Childe Rowland” was given by Jamieson in his Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, published in 1814. He had heard it from an Aberdeen tailor in his youth about 1770, and Motherwell in his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern in 1827 said that it was still a nursery tale in Scotland. Scottish though it may be in its more modern form, it is clear that Shakespeare knew it in the heart of England. In the story Childe Rowland rescues his sister from the Dark Tower of Elfland, and when the Elf King comes in he cries out:
Fee, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of a Christian man!
Be he dead, be he living, with my brand
