“But, Hodge, had he no horns to push?”
replies—
“As long as your two arms. Saw ye never Fryer Rushe,
Painted on a cloth, with a side-long cowe’s tayle,
And crooked cloven feet, and many a hoked nayle?
For al the world (if I schuld judg) chould reckon him his brother;
Loke even what face frier Rush had, the devil had such another.”
The fairies frequented many parts of the bishopric of Durham. There is a hillock, or tumulus, near Bishopton, and a large hill near Billingham, both which used, in former time, to be “haunted by fairies.” Even Ferry-hill, a well-known stage between Darlington and Durham, is evidently a corruption of Fairy-hill. When seen, by accident or favour, they are described as of the smallest size, and uniformly habited in green. They could, however, occasionally assume a different size and appearance; as a woman, who had been admitted into their society, challenged one of the guests, whom she espied in the market, selling fairy-butter. This freedom was deeply resented, and cost her the eye she first saw him with. Mr. Brand mentions his having met with a man, who said he had seen one who had seen the fairies. Truth, he adds, is to be come at in most cases. None, he believes, ever came nearer to it in this than he has done. However that may be, the present editor cannot pretend to have been more fortunate. His informant related that an acquaintance in Westmoreland, having a great desire, and praying earnestly, to see a fairy, was told by a friend, if not a fairy in disguise, that on the side of such a hill, at such a time of day, he should have a sight of one, and accordingly, at the time and place appointed, “the hobgoblin,” in his own words, “stood before him in the likeness of a green-coat lad,” but in the same instant, the spectator’s eye glancing, vanished into the hill. This, he said, the man told him.
“The streets of Newcastle,” says Mr. Brand, “were formerly (so vulgar tradition has it) haunted by a nightly guest, which appeared in the shape of a mastiff dog, etc., and terrified such as were afraid of shadows. I have heard,” he adds, “when a boy, many stories concerning it.”
The no less famous barguest of Durham, and the Picktree-brag, have been already alluded to. The former, beside its many other pranks, would sometimes, at the dead of night, in passing through the different streets, set up the most horrid and continuous shrieks to scare the poor girls who might happen to be out of bed. The compiler of the present sheets remembers, when very young, to have heard a respectable old woman, then a midwife at Stockton, relate that when, in her youthful days, she was a servant at Durham, being up late one Saturday night cleaning the irons in the kitchen, she heard these skrikes, first at a great and then at a less distance, till at length the loudest and most horrible that can be conceived, just at the kitchen window, sent her upstairs, she did not know how, where she fell into the arms of a fellow-servant, who could scarcely prevent her fainting away.
“Pioneers or diggers for metal,” according to Lavater, “do affirme that in many mines there appeare straunge shapes and spirites, who are apparelled like unto other laborers in the pit. These wander up and down in caves and underminings, and seeme to bestuire themselves in all kinde of labour, as to digge after the veine, to carrie to-gither oare, to put it in baskets, and to turne the winding-whele to draw it up, when, in very deede, they do nothing lesse. They very seldome hurte the labourers (as they say) except they provoke them by laughing and rayling at them, for then they threw gravel stones at them, or hurt them by some other means. These are especially haunting in pittes where mettall moste aboundeth.”—(Of ghostes, etc., London, 1572, 4to, p. 73.)
This is our great Milton’s
“Swart faëry of the mine.”