I’ll clash his harns from his harn-pan.
In King Lear (III, iv), Edgar says:
Childe Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still, Fie, foh and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.
We have no verbatim report of this tale; it was embellished according to the fashion of the time; and therefore I have not included it in this book, but it is of such great interest that it is worth giving a shortened version of it here. The best full telling of it is to be found in Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales, where Jacobs has pruned some embroidery admittedly added by Jamieson. Childe is the old title given to a noble heir, and Jacobs suggests that we may find here some trace of the custom of Borough English, a custom we shall find touched on in The Apple-Tree Man.
Childe Rowland
There were once three king’s sons, the youngest of whom was called Childe Rowland, and they had a sister called Burd Helen. One day, as the boys were playing football, Childe Rowland kicked the ball over the church. Burd Helen ran to fetch it, but never returned. At length the eldest brother set out to find her, and went, by his mother’s advice, to learn from the Wizard Merlin what he should do. Merlin told him that when he got to Elfland he must chop off the head of anyone who spoke to him until he met Burd Helen, and that he must bite no bit nor drink no drop while he was in Elfland. He set out, but never returned. The second received the same advice, but fared no better. At length Childe Rowland, girded with his father’s good sword, set out by the same way. Following Merlin’s advice he cut off the head of the King of Elfland’s horseherd and cowherd, oxherd, swineherd, and henwife. Then he came to the green fairy knowe and walked round it three times widdershins, crying: “Open door! Open door!” The third time the door opened, and he found himself in the Dark Tower of Elfland, where there was neither sun nor moon and the walls shone with gems. There in the great hall he found Burd Helen, who greeted him sadly and told him that their brothers were dead. They talked long, and Childe Rowland grew hungry and asked for meat and drink. Burd Helen had no power to warn him, and she brought him what he asked for; but before he drank he looked to her, and remembered just in time. He dashed the cup to the ground, and with an ogreish cry the Elf King came into the hall. Childe Rowland drew his father’s good sword, and they fought together till he forced the Elf King to the ground, and made him promise to restore his brothers to life, and set Burd Helen free. The Elf King fetched a phial of red liquor, and anointed the ears and eyelids, nostrils, lips, and fingertips of the two Princes, so that they revived. Then he freed Burd Helen from her spell, and they went home together in great joy.
It will be seen that this is a variant of Tale Type 471, apparently a popular tale in Shakespeare’s time, for Peele uses a version of it in The Old Wives Tale. Milton’s Comus is founded on something of the same plot, the rescue of a sister by her brothers.
The Old Wives Tale is a treasury of references to tales which have now been lost. “The Grateful Dead” (Type 506) is now only known to Celtic storytellers in these islands, but Peele must have known it in some form. “The King’s Daughter of Colchester,” or “The Well of the World’s End” (Type 408), in which the three heads appear from the well, is another English tale with which he was familiar and which was still alive at the beginning of this century; W. H. Thompson heard a version of it from an English gypsy, Tommy Smith, in January 1915, and recorded it in his notebooks. Type 426, “Snow-White and Rose-Red” (Grimm, No. 161) is unknown to oral tradition in England, but it may have been known there two hundred years before the Grimm brothers found it in Germany, for the enchanted bear plays an important part in The Old Wives Tale.
In The Knight of the Burning Pestle (III, iv), the Citizen’s Wife speaks of a pretty tale of a witch who had a giant as her son, called Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire. I had imagined that this was a story lost past finding, but in the Archives of The School of Scottish Studies is a tale collected by Hamish Henderson from Bella Stewart of Aberdeen about a very similar creature. In this tale, which begins as a form of Type 1137, a sinister Brownie haunting Fincastle Mill in Perthshire is scalded to death by a girl who is saved from his mother’s vengeance by having called herself “Me Myself.” Later, however, the witchlike mother, Maggie Moulach, learns the truth and kills the girl. Sinister though this witch is she does real Brownie service at another farm, and the regular Brownie tales are told about her. It is worth noting that Meg Mollach is the name of the female Brownie recorded by Aubrey in The Remaines of Gentilisme.
Ben Jonson is another source of folktale references. Among others, he knew a version of Type 1541, the tale of the foolish wife who gave away her husband’s savings to a tramp who called himself “Long Winter” or “Good Fortune,” or some such name.
The fact that these tales were known in England so early is of more than literary interest. Not only does it give us some notion of the distribution of tale types in the days before general literacy and the publication of folktale collections, but it prepares us to look for these tales, or hints of them, in modern oral tradition. An example I have already cited is Shakespeare’s “Mr. Fox.” The commonest surviving variants are those of the type of “The Oxford Student” (Halliwell-Phillipps) of which I give the Somerset version, “Mr. Fox’s Courtship.” One might suppose that this version was the nearest we were now to get, but the T. W. Thompson notebooks contain two, “The Cellar Full of Blood” and “The Hand,” which are much nearer to the earlier version. They were collected in 1914.
So much for the wonder tales. They are scarce and fragmentary in England. When we come to legends, or Sagen, we are on different ground. The distinction between legends and wonder tales is often a rather nebulous one. Broadly speaking, one may say that legends are tales or anecdotes told as fact, often about particular places or people, or about friends of the narrator, or his friends’ friends. Thus they are distinguished from other folktales of all kinds, which are told for entertainment or edification, with only a playful pretense of being factual. This distinction is clear in the main, but it does not necessarily affect the shape of the story. Exactly the same story might be told by two men, one of whom believed it and recorded it as a fact while the other told it purely as a good tale. A further difficulty is that it seems likely that legends of the origin of local features—standing stones and mounds and the like—were never really believed at all, but were playful exercises of imagination. Many of the Saints’ legends, too, may have been meant for edification rather than history. Yet these two subdivisions of legend have always been treated as its very essence. For these reasons I have put the legends next to the wonder tales in my collection, and not at the end of the book, as I might have done if I had followed the type index classification of the migratory legends of Reidar Christiansen.
Legends are much more common and more alive in England than wonder tales. If ghost stories are asked for at a Halloween or Christmas party an astonishing number of people can tell really good ones, which are not literary tales but experiences known in their own families or among their neighbours. Witch beliefs too have a wider acceptance than many people think. The modern practitioners of ritual witchcraft may draw more from literature than tradition, but in country places the traditional witch beliefs are obsolescent, not dead. “The Witch’s Purse,” told by Mrs. Falconer, is two generations old by now, but “Annie Luker’s Ghost,” heard by Miss Tongue in 1963, is of very recent occurrence. Even fairy beliefs can still be found, as a recent broadcast showed. Historical and local legends, too, are told of almost every village, but the guidebooks have got hold of most of them, and it is not easy to be sure, in this age of general literacy, whether the local tales are not a rehashing of the guidebooks. For this reason I have included only a small number of the lesser-known local legends, though I have been more liberal with the historical and quasi-historical traditions. These are of several kinds. There are the traditional comments on matters and characters of national importance, such as the loss of King John’s jewels and the execution of King Charles I; there are the local repercussions of historical events, such as the Somerset memories of the reign of terror which followed the Monmouth Rebellion, and there are real events of only local importance which yet remain clear in folk memory. Where facts can be historically checked it is of interest to note the increment of legend; that is why I have included “Jack White’s Gibbet” among the historical tales. As well as these there are the quasi-historical tales, often international tale types, which are claimed by many places and families as having originally happened to them. Of these tales “The Thievish Sexton” is a representative one.
One kind of legend which has not hitherto received very much attention is the modern legend, investigated by some of the American folklorists. This legend grows up in a more sophisticated society than did the earlier ones, but it has much in common with them. It is related as a true story, and is generally supposed to have happened to a friend of the narrator, or a friend’s friend. It is often plausible enough, but it crops up in various places and has slightly different details. Possibly, its source may be a real happening, or a magazine story. A good example is “The Stolen Corpse,” several versions of which have been collected by Stewart Sanderson of Leeds University.
Jocular tales have universal currency and proliferate everywhere. These can be placed under all kinds of headings; I have arranged mine according to the specimens I have chosen. One novel and possibly ephemeral type is the shaggy dog story. The absurdities have been with us since the seventeenth-century non sequiturs.
As for the sources of the tales I have chosen, a few are old. It seems fitting to include a tale from John Aubrey, the father of English folklorists. I have chosen one from his Bodleian Wiltshire manuscript; it has never, so far as I know, been published except in the appendix of one of my own books, Pale Hecate’s Team. After the seventeenth century, the two great periods for English folklore were the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century, or perhaps one should say at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the earlier of these two periods some valuable material was collected, but it was considered enough for the collector to be true to the bones of the story; he held himself free to embellish it with what detail he chose. We must not despise what was collected then, for it enables us to judge what tales were known before Grimm and Andersen caught the public imagination; but we would give much to know the actual words in which the stories were told. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, when the great folklorists were at work, the importance of verbal accuracy was beginning to be understood, and Groome, Addy, and Mrs. Balfour give us as nearly as they can the very words of the narrator. I include a few of these stories, but the bulk of those in my collection are more modern.
Miss Ruth L. Tongue of Somerset has made so large a contribution to this collection that I have placed her name with mine on the title page. She is in a curious position as a folktale collector, because some of her earlier stories may be said to be collected from herself. Miss Tongue’s father was for a time a minister at Taunton, and in Taunton Miss Tongue made the acquaintance of the people from whom she learned her folklore, particularly of a group of old men who used to watch carts at Taunton Market, and who taught her a large number of songs. She had one peculiar qualification as a recipient of folk material not usually confided to a stranger, she was a “chime child,” that is, she was born between twelve on Friday and cockcrow on Saturday, which was thought to make her able to see ghosts and spirits. This admitted her to the confidence of the old people, not only to the old men of Taunton Market but to a group of sextons, from whom she learned such traditions and legends as “The Open Grave.” Other sources of many tales were an old North Somerset groom and the old lady known to her as Annie’s Granny, the grandmother of one of her schoolfellows. Her later tales were gathered partly because of her knowledge of the earlier ones, partly because as a horsewoman and a herb doctor she had earned local respect. She has made a tape recording of her earlier material, and what has not been tape-recorded has been written down verbatim from her informants.
I have several times alluded to the T. W. Thompson Notebooks, which are now under the care of Stewart F. Sanderson of the Folk Life Survey of Leeds University. Mr. Thompson is one of the few remaining early members of the Gypsy Lore Society. He collected a number of tales, a few of which have been already published, in the north of England in 1914 and 1915. Some of these tales are only summarized, but they provide most valuable evidence of the survival in English oral tradition of some international tale types not otherwise known in this country. It is to be hoped that the whole collection may soon be published.
Another valuable source of tales is Mr. W. H. Barrett of the Fen country, whose recent books of Fen tales have contributed remarkably to our knowledge of folk life in that once isolated area. Mr. Barrett is now old and almost bedridden, but his intelligence and memory are as strong as ever, and he kindly consented to record some tales for me.
For the rest, the tales are gathered from scattered individuals whom I have to thank for their kindness in recounting them to me. I have also to thank Mr. Basil Megaw and Mr. Hamish Henderson and other members of the School of Scottish Studies whose hospitality allowed me access to their Archives, for very valuable comparison. I am also grateful to Mr. Stewart Sanderson for directing my attention to the Thompson Notebooks and for obtaining permission for me to reproduce “Mossycoat,” and to Miss Porter of the Cambridge Folk Museum for first giving me access to Mr. Barrett’s papers.
KATHARINE M. BRIGGS
Contents
I. WONDER TALES
1. The Small-Tooth Dog
2. The Green Lady
3. Tom Tit Tot
4. Mossycoat
5. Little Rosy
6. The Man Who Wouldn’t Go Out at Night
II. LEGENDS
ENCOUNTERS WITH UNNATURAL BEINGS
7. Fairy Merchandise
8. Goblin Combe
9. The Fairy Follower
10. Pixy Fair
11. The Fairy Midwife
12. The Green Mist
13. The Apple-Tree Man
