Memorials of old Derbyshire

by Unknown

DERBYSHIRE FOLK-LORE

By S. O. Addy, M.A.

Every English county, one might almost say every English village, has preserved some fragments of a vast body of traditional lore which, before the age of printing, was common to the whole people. Such fragments may still, like coins on the sites of Roman towns, be picked up, some in better condition than others. Unfortunately, those who have written on this subject have preferred for the most part to limit their researches to old books. For instance, Brand, in his Observations on Popular Antiquities, first published in 1777, has given us a collection of scraps drawn from a thousand authors. It was very entertaining, no doubt, but the work would have been more valuable had its author collected from the lips of the people the ballads, legends, tales, and other portions of belief and custom which in the eighteenth century were far more abundant than they are to-day. It was a great opportunity neglected. But in the eighteenth century there was excuse for such neglect, because the value of such things was not then understood. Nor was their importance seen until the publication of such works as Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, and an English translation of Grimm’s Popular Stories in 1823. Even then English students did not begin to collect traditional remains systematically.

Although in these days the word folk-lore has become part of the common speech, and the subject is in some degree familiar to everybody, little original research is done. Even the Folk-lore Society, instead of collecting fresh material—and there is plenty to be had—has been printing, under the name of County Folk-lore, a farrago of material from local histories and guide-books, of which not one item in twenty was worth reproducing. Far different is the work of such men as Kristensen, whose labours in Denmark should have been taken as a model of what should be done in England. Not every day could a man be found to dine on potatoes or sleep on the table of a workman’s cottage, as Kristensen has done, in order to secure a ballad or a tradition. But at least it should be possible to make some effort to collect the lore which is passing away from us for ever. The old books are not likely to perish; the men and women who know the old tales are dying every year. But where you have one man ready and willing to collect folk-lore or dialect, you find a hundred who want to advance theories or to write little grammars. The armchair of the study is so much more comfortable than a rush-bottomed chair in a cottage.

In Derbyshire we have folk-lore which is common to other parts of Great Britain, just as Great Britain has folk-lore which is common to other parts of Europe. But every country has preserved items which are to be found in no other, or which, if found elsewhere, appear in such a modified shape that they contain much that is new. For folk-lore has been compared to a mosaic which has been broken and scattered, some fragments lying here and others there. In Derbyshire we have the garland or ceremony of the May King, which is performed at Castleton on the 29th of May—an ancient rite which seems to have survived in no other part of Great Britain.[99] And then we have the Derby Ram or Old Tup, which may occur in other counties, but which, at all events, is so much associated with Derby as to have taken its name from that town. It is remarkable that these ceremonies are connected with ancient boroughs, for there were burgage tenements both in Castleton and Hope in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.[100] In Castleton there was Peak Castle, older than the Norman Conquest; in Hope there was the Roman town of Burgh or Brough.

In giving the title “Hugh of Lincoln” to the Derbyshire version of the ballad which follows, regard has been had to the precedent set by others, for the ballad is usually so entitled. The Derbyshire version, here first printed, is valuable not only for the literary beauty which two or three of its lines display, but for the association of the story of the Golden Ball with that of the Maid saved from the Gallows. I have added the words “Or the Rain Charm” to the title, because I believe that such is the subject of the ballad. But the reader will be able to distinguish tradition from inference, and to form his own opinion. I would add that a better version of the ballad may yet exist at Wirksworth or in some other part of the county. We may regret that in its present form it is corrupt; indeed, no two versions are alike. But it is the duty of the collector to write down such things as he finds them, without altering a syllable. He may conjecture, if he likes, that such a phrase as “playing at ice and ball” requires emendation, but he is not at liberty to alter the spoken words.

Hugh of Lincoln; or the Rain Charm

In the summer of 1901 the following fragment of a ballad was dictated to me by Mrs. Johnston, then aged 55, the wife of the landlord of the “Peak” Hotel at Castleton, in Derbyshire. Mrs. Johnston says that she learnt it from her mother, Mrs. Fletcher, who resided at Wirksworth, in the same county, when she was young, and died in 1904. Mrs. Johnston does not remember that the ballad had any title, or was sung to any tune:—

It rains, it rains in merry Scotland,

It rains both thick and small:

There were three little playfellows

Playing at ice and ball.

They threw it high, they threw it low,

They threw it rather too high,

They threw it into the Jew’s garden,

And there the ball must lie.

“Come in, come in, thou little palarp,[101]

And thou shalt have thy ball.”

“I won’t come in, I daren’t come in,

Without my playmates all.”

They showed him apples as green as grass,

They gave him sugar so sweet,

They put him on a dresser ta’

To stab him like a sheep.

“O hangman, hangman, stay thy hand,

A little before I die,

I think I see my father coming,

Hastening through yonder sty [path].

O father hast thou brought my ball,

Or hast thou bought me free,

Or art thou come to see me hung

Upon the gallows-tree?”

“I have not brought thy ball, my dear,

I have not bought thee free,

But I have come to see thee hung

Upon the gallows-tree.”

[The father and the mother then appear upon the “sty,” when the same request is made to the hangman in respect of each of them, and when they both declare that they have not brought the ball, etc. At last comes the sweetheart, who says:—]

“I have brought thy ball, my dear,

And I have bought thee free,

And I have brought a coach and six

To take thee away with me.”

During the same summer, I heard in Castleton this fragment of a story:—

Once upon a time a little girl had a golden ball bought her. One day her parents had gone away, and before going they told her if she lost her ball the magician who gave it her would hang her. After they had gone she began playing with the ball, and, as it happened, it went into a brook at the back of the magician’s house. She cried till she thought she would tell her father she had lost her golden ball. When she met him she began saying:—

Father, father, have you brought my golden ball

Or have you come to set me free,

Or have you come to see me hung

Upon that gallant tree?”

[The same question is repeated to the mother, brother, and sister, and cousins, and last of all to the sweetheart, who says that he has not come to see her hung, and stoops down and kisses her. They were married and happy ever after.][102]

No fewer than eighteen other versions of the ballad here printed have been published.[103] With one exception, these other versions omit the lines about the hangman and the child’s escape from the gallows. But in other respects they substantially agree in the story which they tell. A number of children are playing at ball, when one of them accidentally throws it into a Jew’s garden. The Jew’s daughter entices the boy to come in and fetch the ball. He is then laid on a dressing-board, and stabbed to the heart with a penknife, “like a swine,” or, as four of the versions have it, “like a sheep.” His body is then encased in lead, or in “a quire of tin,” and thrown into a draw-well. His mother goes forth to seek him, when he answers from the well, and bids her make his winding-sheet. The scene is variously laid in “merry Scotland,” in the city of Lincoln, in “Mirryland town,” in “Maitland town,” and in “Merrycock land.”[104] In version F of Prof. Child’s collection the time is “a summer’s morning,” and in version N we are told that the deed was done “on a May, on a Midsummer’s day.”

In a story called “The Three Golden Balls,” reported from Romsey, in Hampshire,[105] three girls called Pepper, Salt, and Mustard have each of them a golden ball. They play with the balls, and Pepper loses hers. Her mother is angry, and Pepper is hung on the gallows-tree. Next day her father goes to her, and she says:—

“Oh, father have you found my ball,

Or have you paid my fee,

Or have you come to take me down

From this old gallows tree?”

This Hampshire version is much degraded, but it mentions three girls, and is also important as showing that the one who was chosen for sacrifice might be ransomed, as in the Derbyshire version, and so escape death, if her father or her sisters would pay the proper fee. They refuse, however, and the girl is redeemed by her sweetheart. In this respect the Hampshire story resembles the Derbyshire metrical version, in which the child is at last “bought free.” I shall refer to the subject of redemption further on.

The concluding part of the Derbyshire version appears at first sight to be inconsistent with the first part, inasmuch as the child’s death seems to have been caused both by stabbing with a knife and by suspension on a gallows. The version, however, is quite consistent with itself, for the child was first stabbed and then suspended with the head downwards.

At the present day an English butcher who is about to kill a sheep lays it on a trestle. He then sticks a knife into the jugular vein, and leaves the sheep for a short time on the trestle until it is quite dead. Afterwards he skins and dresses it, and then he passes a piece of wood through the sinews of the hind legs. From this piece of wood it is hung, by means of a hook, head downwards from a transverse bar. In former times a transverse wooden bar appears to have been used instead of an iron bar, and to have been called the “gallows-tree” (the gallows being the two upright posts), just as the transverse bar from which the cauldron was hung in the kitchens of old houses was called the “galley-balk.” On turning to the word “gallows” in the New English Dictionary, I find three quotations from modern books, in which slaughtered sheep or cattle are described as being hung on the gallows. The first is from Lady Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand, 1866 (x. 64), in which the gallows is described as “a high wooden frame from which the carcasses of the butchered sheep dangle.” The third is from Boldrewood’s Colonial Reformer, 1891, p. 350, where the “gallows” of the colonists is described as “a rough, rude contrivance consisting of two uprights and a cross-piece for elevating slaughtered cattle.” One can hardly doubt that these colonists were adopting a practice once followed in the mother country, and, accordingly, the apparent inconsistency between the concluding part of the Derbyshire version and the first part of that version disappears. The child was first stabbed “like a sheep,” and then hung, as a sheep was, on a gallows-tree or transverse piece of wood. This suspension was identical with crucifixion on a Tau-cross, or crux commissa.

Amongst the versions of the ballad given by Prof. Child is a fragment, numbered L, which was supplied to him by the late Canon Venables, Precentor of Lincoln, and which came from Buckinghamshire. It was told to Canon Venables about the year 1825. On this, Prof. Child remarks, in a note, that “the singer tagged on to this fragment version C of the Maid freed from the Gallows given at II., 352.” The portion of the story which Prof. Child calls “the Maid freed from the Gallows” can hardly have been “tagged on.” It is found in Derbyshire and Buckinghamshire, and the metre of both portions is the same. And the lost ball occurs in both.

It remains to show for what reason the child was sacrificed. Ten of the versions published by Prof. Child begin by mentioning the falling rain—a thing which at first sight appears to have nothing to do with the matter. Thus in the Shropshire version we have:—

“It rains, it rains, in Merry-Cock land,

It hails, it rains both great and small.”[106]

And in the copy taken by Prof. Child from Brydges’s Restituta, we have:—

“It rains, it rains in merry Scotland,

It rains both great and small.”

The Derbyshire version, as we have seen, begins by saying that the rain is falling “both thick and small.”

Now it is remarkable that seven of the versions given by Prof. Child refer to the victim’s blood, as it flowed from the wound, as being both thick and thin. Thus in the version taken from Percy’s Reliques, we have:—

“And out and cam the thick, thick bluid,

And out and cam the thin.”

Obviously the falling rain, which seems at first sight to enter so needlessly into numerous versions of the story, would have a great deal to do with the matter if the shedding of the child’s blood were intended to be an act of imitative magic simulating, and hence producing, rain. In Central Australia men are bled with a sharp flint, and “the blood is thought to represent rain.” And “in Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground.”[107]

We know from other traditions that children were sacrificed, if not in Great Britain, at least elsewhere, with the intention of once more filling the dry beds of rivers. The Rev. Joseph Hunter (1783–1861) has recorded these lines about the English river Dun, or Don:—

“The shelving, slimy, river Dun,

Each year a daughter or a son.”[108]

The Rev. W. Gregor has told us that the Scottish river Spey “is spoken of as ‘she,’ and bears the character of being ‘bloodthirsty.’ The common belief is that ‘she’ must have at least one victim yearly.

“The rhyme about the [Scottish] rivers Dee and Don and their victims is:—

“‘Bloodthirsty Dee,

Each year needs three;

But bonny Don,

She needs none.’”[109]

There were German rivers which required their victim on Midsummer Day,[110] and this, as we have seen, is the very day mentioned in one of the versions of our ballad. In nine of the versions given by Prof. Child, the body of the little victim is thrown into a draw-well, after having been rolled, as some of the versions say, in a “case,” or “cake,” of lead. The throwing of the body into a well was doubtless intended as a further rain-charm, just as, to give a single example, the man who gave the last stroke at threshing in the Tyrol was flung into the river.[111] It appears from the Annals of Waverley,[112] that the body of Hugh of Lincoln was first thrown into a running stream, and ejected by the stream. It was afterwards thrown into a drinking well.

A few words must be said about the Jew, or Jew’s daughter, mentioned in the different versions of the ballad and in the chronicles. We ought not to overlook the fact that the Jews at an early period of their history sacrificed, and at a later period redeemed, their first-born children, as many passages in Exodus and Numbers plainly indicate. But to say, as Matthew Paris does, that the Jews of Lincoln stole a boy named Hugh, and scourged, crowned, and crucified him, as a parody of the crucifixion of Jesus, is to make a very large demand on our credulity. The Jews of Lincoln were not at all likely to have risked their lives and property by such an act of wanton and hideous cruelty. Nor is the evidence afforded by the different versions of the ballad sufficient to establish the fact that the Jews sacrificed children in Great Britain for any purpose or in any way. These different versions seem to have all sprung from the same original, and the thing to be tested is the credibility of that original. Its value as evidence against the Jews in Britain is impaired by the different places in which the deed is alleged to have been done, and, moreover, we have seen that the prose version from Castleton speaks of a “magician,” not a Jew. Still more is the evidence vitiated by the existence of that well-known popular hatred of the Jews, which gave rise to all sorts of libels and slanders. A good example of this hatred appeared in London as late as 1758, when a man—

“published a sensational account of a cruel murder committed by certain Jews said to have lately arrived from Portugal, and then living near Broad Street. They were said to have burnt a woman and a new-born babe, because its father was a Christian. Certain Jews who had arrived from Portugal, and who then lived in Broad Street, were attacked by the mob, barbarously treated, and their lives endangered. A criminal information was granted, although it was objected that it did not appear precisely who were the persons accused of the murder.”[113]

What the evidence does suggest is the former existence of a custom of sacrificing children to make rain. It is not even alleged that the Jews sacrificed children to the Spey, the Dee, or the Don.

There is, however, a document of much greater evidential value than ballads and chronicles, which declares that a boy was crucified by Jews at Lincoln. In the Hundred Rolls for 3 Edward I. (1274), a sworn jury found that “certain land in the parish of St. Martin [in Lincoln], which belonged to Leo the Jew, who was condemned for the death of a crucified boy, and which land was then in the tenure of William Badde, was forfeited to the King as from the year 1256.”[114]

That Leo the Jew was condemned for the crucifixion of a boy will hardly be doubted. That the sentence was just and founded on sufficient evidence is quite another matter. There may have been as little evidence against the Jews of Lincoln in 1256 as there was against the Portuguese Jews in London in 1758.

Although the evidence against the Jews with reference to the subject which we are considering cannot be admitted as valid, we must not conceal the fact that this people at an early period of their history sacrificed their firstborn children. The story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son Isaac should lead us to suspect the early existence of this custom. Dr. Frazer says that “the god of the Hebrews plainly regarded the firstborn of men and the firstlings of animals as his own,” the firstborn of men being generally redeemed.[115] And he asks the question: “If the firstborn of men and cattle were ransomed by a money payment, has not this last provision the appearance of being a later mitigation of an older and harsher custom which doomed firstborn children to the altar or the fire?” He then discusses the Passover, and suggests that “the slaughter of firstborn children was formerly what the slaughter of firstborn cattle always continued to be, not an isolated butchery, but a regular custom, which, with the growth of more humane sentiments, was afterwards softened into the vicarious sacrifice of a lamb and the payment of a ransom for each child.”

The evidence which we have been examining does not mention the firstborn. But it tells us that the child devoted to sacrifice could be redeemed on payment of a “fee.” It is probable that those versions of our ballad which end by the throwing of the body into a well, represent the actual custom of early times when no redemption was possible. The father and mother may have regarded it as a duty that their child should become a victim, on the ground that it was better that he should die than that a whole tribe should perish of drought and famine.

No tale has been more popular among English children than that which is usually called “The Golden Ball.” In some form or other every collector has heard it.[116] However much this tale may have been worn down in the course of ages, it is still repeated with emphasis. If ever there was a time when the blood of little children was shed, or when their dripping bodies hung from a gallows-tree, to make the rain fall, how could the memory of such a horror, and of deliverance from such a death, fail to be preserved in ballad or in story?

The Glass House[117]

There was a little girl selling oranges, and she went to a lady’s house, which was made of glass. It had glass doors, and everything was glass. The girl asked her if she would purchase of her oranges, and the lady said she would have them all if her mother would let her come and be her little servant. So her mother let her go. One day she was cleaning the glass window, when it broke. Then she broke the floor, and when her mistress went to change her dress the little girl ran outside to the gooseberry tree, and she said:—

“Gooseberry tree, gooseberry tree, hide me

For fear my mistress should find me,

For if she does she’ll break my bones,

And bury me under the marble stones.”

And the gooseberry tree said, “Go to the butcher’s.” And when she got to the butcher’s, she said:—

“Butcher, butcher, hide me,” etc.

But the butcher said, “Go to the baker.” And when she got there, she said:—

“Baker, baker, hide me,” etc.

And the baker said, “Get into this bread box.” And she got in, and he nailed it up. While she was at the baker’s, her mistress had been to the gooseberry tree, and it told her it had sent the little girl to the butcher. When her mistress got to the butcher’s, he said he had sent her to the baker’s. So she went to the baker’s, and he told her to go away; but she said she would let his house be searched, and she commenced. But when she came to the box that was nailed she shivered, and she made him undo the nails, and out came the girl. So her mistress took her with her, and as they were crossing a river the girl’s mistress was leaning over a bridge, when the girl gave her a push, and she fell over and was drowned. And the little girl went singing merrily till she got to the glass house, and kept it as her own.

Peggy with the Wooden Leggy[118]

Once upon a time there lived together a very rich gentleman and his wife, and they had a young and beautiful child—one of the fairest earth had seen. She had bright golden hair. Her eyes were blue, and her teeth like pearls from the ocean. Her parents loved her very dearly, and if in their power would grant her every wish that she asked. But Peggy fell down and broke her leg, and her father bought her a wooden one. And with Peggy having a wooden leg, the children called her Peggy Wooden Leg, and her father didn’t like that name. And at last, thinking that something was wrong with her, he bought her a cork one, and then they called her Peggy Cork Leg. And going into a shop one day, she asked the shopman if he could change her leg for a golden one. At last she was taken ill, and died, and the butler of her father’s house, thinking it was a sin to let her be buried in her golden leg, stole it, and hid it in his box. He was asleep one night, and he thought he heard a knock, knock, knocking at the door. He said, “Now, bother me, what’s that? No ghosts here.” On turning the bedclothes down he lay aghast, for there at the foot of the bed stood the ghost of beautiful Peggy, not as he had seen her the day before, beautiful as marble, but with features without flesh, sockets without eyes, head without hair, and mouth without teeth. He was terrified, but he thought he would speak to her, and he says, “Peggy, is that you?” And she replied, “Yes; ’tis I.” Then he says, “Peggy, where are those beautiful blue eyes of yours?”

She said, “They are worm-eaten and gone.”

And he said, “Where are those beautiful pearl teeth of yours?”

She said, “Worm-eaten and gone.”

And he said, “Where are those beautiful golden locks?”

And she said, “Worm-eaten and gone.”

Then he said, “Where is that beautiful golden leg of yours?”

And she said, “You—have—got it!!!” and vanished through the floor.[119]