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

English Place Names

I often drive through a town or village and wonder about its name. There are some strange ones out there - Chapel-en-le-Frith, Stoke Poges, Egremont, Kingston Bagpuize, Ashby de la Zouch... 

Also odd are the ones that aren't pronounced anything like they should be. Happisburgh in Norfolk, for example. Yep, that's right, it's pronounced Hazeburra. Oh I know, let's not even get started on the boroughs, and burghs, some of which are pronounced burra, and some bruff! (Although I shall return to them later and maybe clear up the confusion.)

With a lot of place-names, it's easy to break them down into their constituent parts and work out what they mean.

The OE (Old English) place names seem to be are straightforward. In an earlier blog post about Wulfric Spott I mentioned his mother, Wulfrun, who gave her name to Wolverhampton.

Her personal name forms the first part of the town name, and the rest consists of ham and ton:~

Ham = farm, settlement, homestead (ON Toft) but we'll see that this is not quite so straightforward...

Ton = enclosure
So it would seem that many place names contain elements of OE or ON (Old Norse) which are simply words to denote topographical or geographical features.

Wic (OE)/By (ON) = market

Thorpe - secondary settlement
Leigh/ley (OE) = woodland clearing- so my fictional village of Ashleigh in Alvar the Kingmaker is 'clearing in the ash forest'
Thwaite (ON) = clearing in Old Norse
Ing (OE) = people

As you can see, the above village name has the elements ing and ham. Great Massingham is in Norfolk. In Cumbria there are a lot of place names with ON origins : Kirkby Lonsdale, Kirkby Thore, Seathwaite.

So far, so straightforward. But all is not as it seems. In her Signposts to the Past, Margaret Gelling dispels a lot of the accepted thinking.

To go back to the element ham:~ Another OE word was hamm, which was not connected. Kingsholme near Gloucester does not mean king’s home, but Kyngeshamme, a water meadow on the royal estate.

“The uncompounded name Ham offers no problems, as it always derives from the topographical term hamm, which has been considered to mean ‘land in a river (bed), promontory, dry ground in a marsh, river-meadow. It may be used on its own, as in East and West Ham, or in a first element, as in some instances of Hampton, but it occurs most frequently as a final element. The habitative term hām, (village, estate) is not used as a simplex place-name and only occurs as a first element if the name derives form a compound appellative like hāmtūn, hāmstede.”

Another pair of similar words which cause trouble are būr (bower) and burh (fort) - and we need to distinguish beorg, from burh, and its dative byrig. Had they been differentiated in Middle English beorg would give berrow or barrow, and burh would mostly give borough while byrig would give bury. Archaeological evidence is needed in these cases to establish exactly how the place-names developed.

Burh can mean not only a hill fort but also a defended manor house as well as the later 'town'.

In the country as a whole, Bury is more common than Borough, Burgh or Brough. The OE final -h could develop into -f in pronunciation but not spelling, as in laugh and tough, and this led to burh becoming Burf as in Abdon Burf, and sometime Berth.

Later on there are instances of byrig meaning manor house:~ Bibury, from Beage, daughter of Leppa, and burh meaning monastery. In the case of Fladbury, this is probably derived from Flæde’s byrig, possibly a manor house built by a widow. In the case of the element ing, it had always been assumed that newcomers took what land they chose, and that places such as Hastings (followers of Hæsta) and Reading (followers of Réad) were believed to mark those settlements. But Gelling says these were not 'primary settlement' place-names but actually came much later.

Ing sometimes has no filial relationship at all – Clavering in Essex comes about from the element ing being added to clœfre (clover) to give place where the clover grows. The same construction applies to Docking in Norfolk, from docce, the place where dock grows.

There has been a suggestion in recent times that some names came about because the Anglo-Saxons settlers mispronounced the Celtic names they discovered, much as the English in WWI pronounced Ypres as Wipers. Gelling is not convinced that the newcomers had such poor linguistic skills, and she points out that this was not the fate of all the Celtic place names.

Some tun names might have come about because of the Mercian administrators who might have been in the habit of describing places which had Celtic names as the ea-tun (river settlement) and that these names eventually stuck, but this is only a theory.

Where the Celtic, or Pre-Celtic names have been preserved, it is largely in the names of rivers. 

The use of the word walh to mean slave is probably a misconception, and it's more likely that it means ‘a Celt’; however, the reality is that most slaves would have been (descendants) of British who had that status under the Romans. 

The seventh-century king of the Magonsæte, who appears in my latest novel, Cometh the Hour was Merewalh, which has been translated as 'famous Welshman'. That being accepted, it seems unlikely that walh meant 'slave'. 

If the Angles and Saxons had problems with the place-names they encountered, the same was certainly true of the Norman invaders.

The initial sound Y was a problem for the Normans, so Yarrow became Jarrow, Yesmond became Jesmond. These are fairly easy to spot once armed with the knowledge that the letter J was not in use in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet. So too the letter Z, which appears in names such as Belsize.

The initial sound in words such as thorn was unknown to the Normans, and they replaced it with T so that Tilsworth probably would have developed into Thilsworth had the conquest not happened.

Wic, the element identified as meaning market, was borrowed from Latin vicus. Before it was used as salt-working centre and ‘dairy farm’, it might have been used by the earliest English speaking people to refer to Romano-British settlements, or to Roman administrative units.

Gelling points out that more than 75% of the instances of places called wīchām were situated directly on or not more than a mile from a major Roman Road.

Often  tūn (ton) developed where an estate was once part of a larger demesne. An estate given to a thegn named Wulfgar came over time to be called Aughton (Aeffe’s estate, Aeffe being Wulfgar’s widow. Likewise an estate granted to Sibba becomes Sibton. Some ton names are more general, Preston (priests), Charlton, (ceorla-ton, enclosure of the the ceorls).

Grim is a nickname for Woden, but not all Grims- are of this origin. Grimr was a common ON personal name. So we cannot assume that all Grims are the devil.

And speaking of personal names, they aren’t all. Whitchurch could be Hwīta’s church, but it could also simply be the white church. 

Another key place in my new novel is Oswestry, universally believed to have developed from Oswald's tree, the site of his killing. But Warburton developed from Wærburg’s farm or estate, where the religious house was dedicated to St Werburgh, probably because the name suggested it, and the same logic should, according to Gelling, be applied to Oswestry, where the dedication of St Oswald probably arose from a place name which did not originally refer to the saint.

Sometimes the ON and OE elements are hard to differentiate.
Brunum or Brunnum in ON corresponds to burna (OE), which gives us the modern burn. Similarly, Lythe could be from ON lith, (slope) or from OE hlith, with the same meaning.

Beck - ON

But there are some words which have no English cognate. Going back to Cumbria we find Wasdale and Watendlath, containing vatn (lake,) Fossdale containing fors (waterfall,) and thveit, (thwaite -clearing.)

Many Scandinavian settlement names of eastern England can be divided into three main categories -by, -thorp, and those combined with English tun combined with a Norse personal name.

PH Sawyer argued that Norse place-names did not denote the settlements of a victorious army, but more likely inferior land. Older villages were probably already on the best sites.
Alford, for example, is much larger than the surrounding places with -by and -thorpe names.

Kirby/Kirkby generally denotes a church village, and is usually borne by places with desirable locations and it is likely that it replaces an older English, or perhaps Celtic name. It might have simply been that kirkby was an appellative applied to any village with a noteworthy church.

Mitchelgate (gate=ON gata - road) in Kirkby Lonsdale

Moving into the the post-Conquest era brings us the wonderful place-names such as Ashby de la Zouch and Egremont. But many of the French names were just stereo-typical descriptions, giving us beautiful seat, beautiful place, beautiful hill. (Belvoir, Beaulieu, Beauvale, Beaumont)

So, next time you drive past a place-name sign, don't assume the obvious; there may be more to the story of the name than meets the eye... 

Why Not the Anglo-Saxons?

I was privileged to attend a lunch a couple of years ago with, amongst others, Sarah Waters and Fay Weldon. They were kind enough to ask me about my writing and when I told them that my first three novels were set in Anglo-Saxon England, Sarah Waters said she knew little about the period and Fay Weldon commented that their costumes "Weren't very sexy."

A dear friend of mine concurred, adding that the Anglo-Saxons all wore brown sacks instead of dresses. She said that when she reads a novel set in Tudor England, she can envisage the scenery and the costumes.

In 2013, the author Sebastian Faulks was publicising the Chalke Valley/Penguin History prize for secondary school children. Youngsters were encouraged to write stories set in the following 'Periods of importance' : Norman Conquest to Wars of Roses (1066-1485) The English Civil War and the Restoration (1642-1685) The Napoleonic Wars (1798-1815) The British Empire (1759-1947) and the Cold War (1945-1991)

Now, I'm not going to argue that these periods were not important, but why narrow the field? Taken in isolation, these periods of history mean little. Can one really understand the significance of the Napoleonic period without first studying the preceding years, including the circumstances which led to the French Revolution? Periods of history are only important if you set them in context, if you know what's gone before.

1066? How can you realise its significance and the changes it wrought unless you know what England was like pre-conquest?

Is it true; does it simply boil down to the fact that it wasn't 'sexy' enough, that it can't easily be envisaged?

There are stories from the 'Dark Ages' that equal anything of later periods: the mighty Godwin family, the frankly feckless Aethelred the Unready and his struggles against the vastly superior Cnut. What about Alfred the Great, and his children, Edward the Elder and my favourite, his daughter, Aethelflaed, subject of my novel To Be a Queen? She ruled a kingdom and fought against the Vikings.

Did she not have a pretty enough dress? 

Is it just a case of bad press? Ultimately, the English lost out to the Normans. Does history favour the victor? In which case, why does the story of Arthur still resonate, with fiction and non-fiction books published year upon year. Is that down to the seemingly unsolvable riddle of whether or not he existed?

And why, if we don't care too much about losers, has such a cult grown up around William Wallace? Wasn't he just a defeated nationalist, like Harold Godwinson? Maybe being hung drawn and quartered is a more interesting way to be the ultimate loser than just attempting to get too close a look at the quality of workmanship that went into the making of a Norman arrow?

image twbrit.com

The Chalke Valley competition is a good thing - anything which promotes history must be welcomed. Faulks said that "History needs to regain its central place in schools."

I remember when my own children were choosing their GCSE options, that the school produced a list of subjects, and gave the teachers the chance to 'sell' their subject. Each was entitled "What can this subject give me?" Other subjects talked specifics, but history "Gives you everything you need for future study: analysis, argument, memory, understanding." I can't argue with that, but within the discipline itself, why are some periods deemed more important, or interesting, than others? 

So, why do the poor old Anglo-Saxons not come through history to us as sexy and interesting? As it says in 1066 And All That (W.C Sellar and R.J. Yeatman) the period suffered from a "Wave of Egg-Kings - Eggberd, Eggbreth, Eggfroth etc. None of them, however succeeded in becoming memorable, except in so far as it is difficult to forget such names as Eggbirth, Eggbred, Eggbeard, Eggfish etc."

At least he had a pronounceable name!!!

As I found when writing To Be a Queen, the names are tricky - to spell, pronounce, and identify. Those that survived became old-fashioned, for example, Ethel, Edith, Alfred, Edmund, Mildred, Audrey. They were not associated with the upper echelons of society, and that's also true of a lot of Old English words. Many of the words for everyday objects came to signify lowly things: a stool became something less than a chair. This idea of being the down-trodden vanquished persists so that today the period remains somewhat drear, uninteresting. 

But it is precisely because of that we need to look back and find out what was lost.

The Norman language, despite the lordly overtones, did not take hold; we do not speak a version of French. Nor, according to recent BBC research, did the Norman bloodline. Is is important to know about the Government of the Anglo-Saxons, their administrative systems, their laws and justice? I think so. When university undergraduates debate whether or not the Normans introduced the Feudal system at all, then there is an argument for saying that we should understand what it was that they were trying to replace, subdue, change. It's worth noting that whilst many people accept the 'truth' that in the middle ages, wives were legally beaten by their husbands and treated as his property, the Anglo-Saxon women were not.

So why don't we know more? Why aren't we taught more about it? Is it all just too far in the past?

But if that's true, why is the Roman period so popular?

Well, it is and it isn't. It's popular in the sense that there are many books, fiction and non-fiction, and telly programmes (Thanks, Professor Mary Beard!). But it's still not routinely taught in schools. The Tudors and the Egyptians are. So is the second World War. Diverse topics, spanning great distances in terms of years. 

So maybe it really does, as Fay Weldon said, come down to the costumes. In my Ladybird book, The Story of Clothes and Costume, the illustrations lump the Saxons and Normans together. There is nothing between this: (500BC)

and this:

apart from the Romans!

And the cover picture (of later editions) ? Yes, you guessed it - those wonderfully 'gussied up' Tudors ...

Maybe those Anglo-Saxons should have designed the bodice - then they could have them ripped!!