Our neighbours, the Danes, when they piratically infested this country and plundered and burnt so large a number of churches, were sometimes caught in flagrante delicto, and their sacrilegious crimes were punished by flaying—their skins being nailed on church doors, as a terror to all other evil doers. The late Dr. Prattinton, of Bewdley, in his Manuscripts now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries, states that some old doors then in the crypt of Worcester Cathedral were covered with fragments of human skin said to have belonged to a man who had stolen the sanctus-bell from the high altar. Portions of this skin have been since examined microscopically by Mr. Quekett, of the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and pronounced decidedly to be human. I have myself examined some old doors in the crypt and found on them patches of a substance like leather, of which I have a specimen now in my possession; but if it ever belonged to a Dane it affords substantial proof that they could not have been a thin-skinned race.
Similar specimens have been discovered at Westminster Abbey, and the churches of Hadstock and Copford, Essex; and Pepys, in his Diary (1661) mentions having seen Danes' skins on the great doors of Rochester Cathedral.
Evesham Abbey is said to have derived its origin from the same means which have been assigned to many other religious establishments—namely, supernatural interposition. Eoves, a swineherd, was attending his pigs in the forest on the site of which Evesham now stands, when the Virgin appeared to him in a vision, which he communicated to his master, the Bishop of Worcester. The Bishop repaired to the place, and saw a repetition of the vision, the Virgin enjoining him not only to erect a monastery on that spot but to prepare an image of herself, which was to be worshipped at Worcester. This prelate, in atonement for the sins of himself and the people, bound himself with chains, locked them together, and threw the key into the Avon, declaring that nothing but Divine interposition should loose his chains. Then he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, where his servant, purchasing a fish for dinner, found in it the key which had been thrown away; and so they returned triumphantly to Evesham.
St. Kenelm's chapel, on the Clent Hill, near Stourbridge, has also its legend. Kenulph, King of Mercia, who died in 819, left his young son Kenelm under the protection of his sister Quendreda, who, however, being ambitious for the throne, procured her lover, Askobert, to take the youth out hunting, and there, in a secluded valley, he cut off his head, and buried him. However, a dove dropped a scroll on the high altar at Rome, whereon was written a couplet giving information of the murder:
"In Clent Coubath, Kenelm, kinbarne,
Ly'th under thorne, heaued bereaved."
The lovers accordingly met with their desert, the murdered King was canonized, and on the spot of his murder a chapel was erected, and a spring of holy water burst forth which for many centuries proved an undoubted specific for sore legs and eyes, and a tolerably good source of emolument to the ecclesiastics.
The old church of St. Clement's, Worcester, stood on the eastern side of the Severn, close to the city wall; and the legend says, that it was begun to be built on the side of the river where the parish lies, but that angels, by night, took away the stones to the place where the church was afterwards erected. Modifications of this old tale, as also of the following, may be met with in almost every town. The original spire of St. Andrew's church is said to have been erected by a wealthy individual, out of gratitude for having, on a certain foggy night, been preserved from walking into the Severn, in consequence of hearing St. Andrew's bells suddenly strike out.
It is a curious circumstance that while the vulgar mind has been at all times prone to attribute extraordinary or unaccountable results to Satanic influences, and to regard the evil one as the very essence of craft and cunning, a tendency has always been apparent to reduce his pretensions as a prudent or successful bargain-maker, especially in those instances wherein he was supposed to have come in contact with ecclesiastical antagonism, and he is almost invariably shown up in popular legends as being outwitted and frustrated in his diabolical designs, not less by expedients of the most simple kind, than by evasions as transparent as they are dishonest. We are told by Dr. Adam Clarke that Satan is far from excelling in knowledge, being more cunning and insidious than wise and prudent, and that we in general give this fallen spirit credit for much more wisdom than he possesses; an estimate of character which cannot be far from correct, if the following recollections of his doings in Worcestershire may be relied on: On the north boundary wall of Bromsgrove churchyard lies an old stone effigy of a man in the attitude of prayer, and it is said that the original of this figure sold himself to the wicked one for certain stipulations, one of which was, that when he died, he should not be buried either in or out of the churchyard; and the man accordingly gave directions to be buried under the boundary wall, and the effigy to be placed above it. This was a similar trick to that of the teetotaller, who, having taken the pledge not to drink liquors in or out of his house, compromised the matter to his own conscience by striding across the threshold and draining a jug to the bottom.
So the people of Bewdley were once saved from destruction by a drunken cobbler, who foregather'd with the man of sin, as the latter was travelling with a spadeful of earth to dam up the Severn, and thereby inundate the country. The devil had lost his way, and inquired of the cobbler, who, smelling sulphur, and foreseeing annihilation to all his customers at Bewdley, coolly assured the father of lies that the distance to that town was so great that he had worn out a whole lot of shoes he carried in a bag at his back. Whereupon the fallen spirit at once dropped the earth, and there remains to this day the hill called "The Devil's Spadeful," or "Spittleful." A similar legend prevails in many counties, especially in reference to the Wrekin and High Ercall Hills, Shropshire, and "Robin Hood's Butts," Herefordshire.
Near Little Shelsley grows a plant called "Devil's-bit" (Succisa pratensis), which it is said was given to heal any deadly wounds, but as the devil saw how many wicked persons were thus rescued from his grasp, he bit the roots off this plant, whereupon it miraculously grew without them, and follows up the habit to this day.