Thursday 30 November 2017

Noises Off: Folklore & Ghostly Goings-On

What do Oliver Cromwell, Sunken Churches, Wolves, and Witches all have in common? Along with all manner of boggarts and beasties, they are all associated with folklore and ghost stories.

I recently had cause to research the tale about the supposed killing of the last wolf in England and thought that folklore, generally, would be a good topic for a blog post.

Well, yes and no. One book on my shelves is over 800 pages long, with about five or six tales or legends on each page!

I thought I'd narrow it down to my favourites, one related to each part of history, from pre-Roman times to the seventeenth century, all to do with people, rather than beasts. And all very noisy!

The Lost Warriors
Hockwold, in the East Anglian Fens, was a burial place for three separate hoards of pewter items dating from Roman times. They were crushed and dismantled, giving rise to speculation that they were deliberately buried as some kind of offering. 

They were discovered in the 1960s, but long before that time, the Hockwold Fens were said to be haunted by ancient warriors. Their battle cries could be heard, sounding loud across the fenland. Perhaps they were British warriors, Iceni maybe, fighting the Roman invaders?

Some of the Hockwold Pewter


The Shrieking Pits
Between 850 and 110o, iron workings between Aylmerton and West Runton Heath in Norfolk left depressions in the fields. Slag from the furnaces found their way into the walls of nearby Saxon Churches. Shrieks ring out in the dark night, near St John's Church, utterances of a ghostly woman who is searching among the hollows for the body of her baby.

Legend has it that her husband buried the child in one of the pits, as well as murdering his wife. She now wanders, searching, for she does not know which hollow contains her child. As she looks into each of the holes, she shrieks with despair as it reveals itself to be empty.

St John's Church, Aylmerton


Wild Edric
Sometimes it's not the spirits of dead people that inspire these tales. The Vita Haroldi, a glorified celebration of the life of Harold Godwineson, last English king of pre-Conquest England, suggests that Harold did not die at Hastings, and later sources suggest that he lived until he was over 150 years old. 

More fantastical yet, was Edric, a Shropshire man who did survive the Conquest, and fought William as a rebel. He, apparently, was still alive in the nineteenth century, living in the mines under the Shropshire hills. His noise was a knocking sound, which would tell the miners where the best lodes were. He would ride out to foretell war, and was seen riding with his wife, Lady Godda, just before the outbreak of the Crimean war.

Snailbeach, Shropshire - note the mine chimney. Photo Humphrey Bolton

Screams at Castle Rising
I've visited Castle Rising many times. I used to drive past it on my way to work. For a time, it was the 'home' of Isabella, wife of Edward II. Froissart, and fourteenth century chronicler, says that her son, Edward III, imprisoned her there, after the execution of her lover, Mortimer. 

It is said that she went mad from loneliness and that her screams could be heard as she wandered the battlements, lamenting her fate. In fact, she was not a prisoner, although she certainly lived there for periods, as it was one of her own properties, but she actually died in Hertford Castle. Her son allowed her £3,ooo, rising to £4,000 per year, so it's likely that far from wandering the Norman keep as a prisoner, she lived a comfortable life.

Castle Rising 


Footsteps at Husbands Bosworth
The ghost of a Protestant lady prowls the hall at Husbands Bosworth in Leicestershire and her footsteps can be heard loud and clear as she wanders, unable to settle. She suffers remorse for not allowing a Catholic priest to attend a dying servant. Elsewhere in the hall, a stain on the floor remains permanently damp, and it is allegedly there as a result of communion wine, or blood, being spilled when a priest escaped Cromwell's men. 

Whether this is a reference to Thomas Cromwell of the Reformation, or Oliver Cromwell who was responsible for the destruction of churches in the seventeenth century, is not clear. Our poor lady would have been more reluctant, one assumes, to summon a Catholic priest during the reign of the latter. But the former was known as Hammer of the Monks, so we cannot be sure who it was who would have taken punitive measures against her.

Bosworth Hall - photo Richard Williams

This is just a tiny sample of the tales that survive. They appeal to me because of their historical context, and because if I'm going to encounter a ghost, I'd like it to make some kind or warning sound first!

Further reading/bibliography:~
Froissart's Chronicle
Vita Haroldi
The Old Stories - Kevin Crossley-Holland
The Lore of the Land - Westwood & Simpson
Folklore of the Welsh Border - Jaqueline Simpson
Norfolk Ghosts & Legends - Polly Howat
Tales of Old Norfolk - Polly Howat
Norfolk - A Ghosthunter's Guide - Neil Storey
Folk Stories and Heroes of Wales, Vols I&II - John Owen Huws

Thursday 9 November 2017

Sun Dancing - Skellig Michael

Sun Dancing by Geoffrey Moorhouse is a book which has been sitting on my shelves, unread, for many years. 

I bought it during those optimistic years when I was at home with three small children, thinking I'd have plenty of time for reading, and in the days when the History Book Club sent a paper magazine out every month, featuring a selected Book of the Month. 

I bought many such books, mainly because one didn't have to do much, because they were sent out automatically. Little did I know how long it would take to get to a stage when I had the time to read them all.

But now, after all these years (my kids have all left home) I am finally clearing the backlog. 

Skellig Michael - by Jerzy Strzelecki

Skellig Michael has been making itself known to me recently in a number of ways: a recent programme about the coastland of Ireland, for example, and a song by Loreena McKennitt.

Skellig - Music, Lyrics & Images: Youtube

Sun Dancing is a book of two halves. The first is an imagining, a story of the founding of the Christian Monastery told through the centuries and through the eyes of various monks, beginning with Fionán in 588, who sets out to the rocky island to found the community and ending in 1222 when the brothers decide to abandon the community.



The second half of the book explains the background to the supposed events, drawing on the primary sources and explaining how the author has come to his conclusions, beginning with an exploration of the likely identity of Fionán, and going on to explain the daily lives of the brothers, the differences between the Irish and the Roman Church, the building of the boats that took them out to the island and introductions to such characters as Brian Boru and Olaf Tryggvason and how they fit into the story.

Having read this book so many years after purchasing it, I am now reading it as an author myself. As such, I found that the fictionalised chapters are perhaps lacking a little drama, but this is not supposed to be a novel. As a device for bringing the daily existence of the monks to life, it works really well.

How often have we all read historical fiction and wondered whether or not it was 'true'? With this book half the chapters are taken up with explaining the information on which the stories are based. 

We only stay with each character for a chapter, so it is hard to get to know them, but this was not the intention of the author. Rather it was to allow us to see these people as 'real', in a way that I think only historical fiction can do. So here we have the best of both worlds, both fiction and non-fiction. I might not have needed to know the minor details about monastic life (although much of it was familiar to me anyway) but what I did come away with was a sense of who these people were. Their treacherous journeys out to the island, their daily struggles for existence. 


The graveyard and oratory - by Jibi44

Look at pictures of Skellig Michael now, perhaps listening to the McKennitt song. It is an eerie place. Visit, if you can - it is some 12 kilometres from the Kerry coast and boat trips are available. Moorhouse's book allows us to visualise the people who inhabited the place for over half a millennium. (Some might also recognise it as a location in the Star Wars films.)

George Bernard Shaw, visiting in 1910, described the "incredible, impossible, mad place" as "part of our dream world...I hardly feel real again."  

To be given names, to read about daily lives, adds substance yet leaves the mystery, the sense of other-worldliness. 

I recommend reading this book if you want to get a sense of time and place and learn more about this intriguing island.