Yarborough Camp[60]—according to popular belief—was made by Cromwell's soldiers, who are said to have sat behind the entrenchment when firing at their enemies.
Melton Ross.—Perhaps the most curious is the tale told by an old groom about the gallows at Melton Ross:—
Some hundred years ago or so three or four boys were playing at hanging, and seeing who could hang the longest on a tree, when a three-legged hare (the devil, sir), came limping past; off ran the lads who were on the ground after him and forgot their comrade, who when they came back was dead. The gallows was put up in memory of that. The true story is that there was a rivalry between the Ross family and the Tyrwhits, and to such a pitch had it grown among their dependants that the two parties meeting on a hunting excursion got to blows and many were killed. James I. being in Lincolnshire shortly after, and hearing of it, ordered a gallows to be erected where the fight occurred, and enacted that in the future any persons slain in an encounter of this kind should be deemed murdered, and the perpetrators of the crime hanged. A gallows is always kept on the spot and when the old one falls to decay a new one is erected.[61]
Page [125]. Permanent blood stains. Cf. those of Rizzio in Holyrood Palace; those in the Carmelite convent in Paris, said to have been made by murdered priests in the revolution; those at Cottele, on the banks of the Tamar, blood of the warder slain by the Lord of the Manor; those in Sta. Sophia, at Constantinople, &c.
[THE DEVIL AND THE THREE SLOVAK LADS. Erdélyi, ii. 1.]
Cf. Grimm, vol. ii. "The Three Apprentices," pp. 132, 418. Stier, No. 25.
A similar story used to be current among the schoolboys in Northumberland.