'By Fynnon Ddu' - a short story by Katherine Langrish

This story first appeared in the Sussex Folklore Centre's journal 'Gramarye', Issue 5, Summer 2014.  It is set on the hilly border between England and Wales, around the year 1090AD, and is a prequel to my novel 'Dark Angels' which is set about a hundred years later and contains some of the same characters: because they are not mortal.

"BY FYNNON DDU"

The hearth-hob of the place called Hen Gaer crouched in long soaking grass at the edge of the old well, Fynnon Ddu, watching for frogs.

            Hen Gaer wasn’t much.  It was a tumble of stones, a cluster of hawthorns growing on a rise between the river ford and the old stone road that the Welsh called Sarn Helen. It was brambles, and sudden pockets of bog, and the sound of hidden water.  It was parched lines in the turf on a summer day. For a thousand years folk had come here and built their huts and houses, lived and left and been forgotten. And now new people had arrived and set to work.

From his hidden spot beside the well, the hob could hear them – out of sight but not out of earshot – chopping, hammering, shouting, whistling, talking. They’d been at it for days, grubbing up bushes, digging a bank and a ring ditch all around Hen Gaer, with a palisade on the top. Now they were flinging up a mound at one end of the site, layers of stone and raw red earth rising higher and higher. Buildings sprang up like mushrooms: sheds, storehouses, the timbers of a great hall. Cartwhips cracked, mules strained and slipped. The rutted tracks were axle-deep in mud.

 “At last,” the hob murmured, rubbing his fingers. “Soon there’ll be housen and hearth again. Hot food a-cooking and warm ashes to sleep in. Ahh!”

He hugged his tattered rabbitskin around him and peered into the well. It was a long, narrow pool, lined with leaning mossy stones.  At one end a spring bubbled up under a rough rocky arch and trickled out at the other into a little deep-cut brook,  and the dark water was full of weeds, cress and frogspawn.  A small frog plopped into the pool and pushed through the skin of the water in a series of fluid kicks. The hob stiffened all over like a hunting cat. He shot out a hairy arm.

There was a swirl and a heave in the depths. The spring gushed up in a burst of fierce bubbles. The frog vanished in a fog of sediment.

“What did you do that for?” yelped the hob.

A slim, transparent hand slid up out of the water and wagged a finger at him.

“T’aint fair, missy!” The hob was really upset.  “Tis hard enough a-catching they little critters, without you a-helping them. You got plenty!”

A face looked up through the brown water-glass, framed in drifting clouds of hair which spread away in filmy tendrils. The eyes were great dark blurs, the pale-lipped smile both shy and wild.

“You doesn’t even eat,” the hob groused on. “You doesn’t know what ‘tis to have an empty belly.”

The water spirit slipped upwards. Her head emerged from the water, glistening. In air and daylight she was difficult to see: a slanting glimmer, like a risen reflection. She propped narrow elbows on the brink and offered him a handful of cress.

“Lenten fare. That an’t going to put hairs on me chest,” said the hob sulkily, but he stuffed it into his mouth and chewed.

A new bout of hammering battered the air. The water spirit flinched, and the hob nodded at her. “Yus.  Men.  They’m back again at last.”

She pushed her dripping hair back behind one ear and spoke in a voice soft as a dove cooing in a sleepy noon. “Who?”

The hob snorted, spraying out bits of green. “Who cares who?  S’long as they has fires, and a roof overhead, and stew in the pot –”

“Is it the Cornovii?”

“You allus asks me that.”  The hob glanced at her with wry affection and shook his head. “They’m long gone,” he said gently.  “They don’t come back. Times change and so do men.”

“Was it such a long time?” She was teasing a water-beetle with a tassel of her hair. “I liked the Cornovii. They used to bring me toys.”

“Toys?”

“Things to play with.”  She looked up at him through half-shut eyes. “Knives and spearheads, brooches and jewels. Girls and boys. I’ve kept them all.”

“Down at the bottom there? How deep do it go?”  Hackles bristling, but fascinated, the hob craned his neck and tried to peer past his own scrawny reflection.

“Come and see.” She reached out her hands with an innocent smile, but he drew hastily back. “No thanks!”

She looked hurt.  “I wouldn’t drown you.”

“No, but you’d give me a good ducking, I know your tricks. An’ I’m wet enough as ‘tis. I don’t remember the Cornovii.  Before my time, I reckon. I come here with the soldiers what builded the road. They made a way-fort here. Sirontium, they called it. Had me own little nook in the commander’s house,” he boasted.  “Lovely, t’was. Pretty patterned floors, with tunnels under ‘em, all warm like.”

“I remember the soldiers. They put the stones here.” Proudly she patted the rim of the well. “They gave me things too. They threw coins to me for good luck, and I gave it. I always kept the spring running and the water clean. They knew I was here, they made me a little altar and carved my name into the stone, although they didn’t get it quite right, the sillies.” She laughed. “They called me –”

“Well,” said the hob after a moment. “What did they call you?”

“They called me – ach!” Spray flew as she smacked a petulant hand on the water, and the hob ducked: “Oy, stop it!”

“I can’t remember! No one’s spoken my name for, oh, so long.”  A frown furrowed her brow like a ripple in water. “Hob – what was it?”

The hob bit his finger. His eyes slid away. He coughed. “Dunno. Dunno if I ever heard. Um. Olwen?”

She shook her head.

“Flavia?”

“No.”

“Elen?”

“No.”

“Edith?”

“No.” She sounded angry and a little frightened.  “You must have heard it!”

 The hob shrugged, uncomfortable. “So?  What’s a name? Look at this place.  Sirontium, t’was, and then it tumbled down and they called it the Old Fort, Hen Gaer, and then no one was here but you an’ me and the badgers till Cerdic come and built the farm. And then it was Swein’s and Osmund’s and Leofric’s, and then it burned and the name went back to Hen Gaer again. And now it’s rebuilding, and they’ll call it summink different, and me as well, I shouldn’t wonder. What’s a name? Look at me! I’ve had plenty and owned to none. Lar, bwbach, hob – I an’t particular.”   

“Oh, you,” she cried scornfully, “you’re different. You live in housen.”

“And that’s a sight better’n living in a pond,” the hob huffed. “All or nuthin, that’s your trouble. Adaptable, that’s me.  I an’t proud, I an’t hanging on for giftës and toys. I’ll earn my keep, I don’t mind a bit o’ sweeping or what not – s’long as I gets a piece of sausage or a dish of cream now and then.”  

“You don’t understand. Oh, you’re too like a mortal. What’s a name to them?  It doesn’t shape them. They come and go like mayflies. I don’t belong in housen, I belong here!” She twisted her fingers together. “If no one remembers me… if I don’t have a name…if I’m all forgotten…” There was terror in her gaze. “That’s me – all of me! I’ll dwindle. I’ll dwindle!”  She beat the surface like a swan thrashing its wings. “I was more than this, once!  I was – I was, oh, who?”

“Wait!” The hob skipped, snapping his fingers.  “I got it!”

“You’ve remembered?”  She sank into the rocking water and clung to the edge of the well, gazing at him with wide black eyes. “Oh clever hob – you shall have all the frogs!  And all the watersnails – whatever you want.  Tell me, tell me!”

“Now don’t get yerself into a pickle, missy,” the hob growled. “I never said I remembered your name; I don’t believe I ever knew. But din’t you just tell me them soldiers carved it for you?  Mortals come and mortals go, but writ in stone lasts forever. It’ll be here somewhere. All we got to do is look.”

“Oh, lovely soldiers!  It was here!  Right over the spring, I think…”

The rocky arch protecting the spring was deep in spongy moss, and grown-over with grass and turf creeping down from above. The water spirit flung herself at it, clawing off the moss in chunks. She scratched and scrabbled, and grooves gradually appeared in the stone: short lines, joined to other lines, green with age.

“Here it is!  Here’s my name!” she cried, and kissed the wet stone. 

The hob cheered, his hair on end with excitement. “Look at that, safe as housen all these years! Neat as bird-tracks in mud!”

She turned to him, eyes like dew in the sun.  “Now: what is it? Give me my name again. Make the marks speak!”

“Ah.” His face fell.  “We an’t no further forward, then. I thought you’d know it when you saw it. I an’t got the skill. I dunno how, missy.”

“You don’t know how? But…” The water spirit traced the grooves with a finger. “This is my name, locked up in stone. What is the magic?”

“Mortal magic, missy,” he mumbled. “I an’t no scholar.”

Tears sprang from her eyes. The water bubbled up around her waist, and she struck and splashed at the stone.  “Give me my name,” she wailed. “Speak, speak!”

A voice called, “What was that?”

The hob craned his neck, sitting up like a squirrel to peek over the tall grass. “There’s men a-coming!” he whispered.  “Men!  And missy, missy” – his black eyes suddenly brightened – “that’s who we need. Men made the marks, men can read them!”

She gazed at him, pale lips parted.  “But will they?  Will they?”

“A-course they will. Bound to!” The hob shook both fists in triumph. “Now you’ve scratted that moss off, they’ll see the marks an’ read your name. Din’t I tell you? Good times is coming, for you as well as me. You’ll be known again. They’ll need you. They’ll want the water clean and clear. Hush now. Hide and listen.”

They came trampling through the bushes, careless and noisy. “Did you hear that splashing? Sounded like a duck. There’s water somewhere near.”

“It’ll be the well, my lord. I was told there was one. A holy well, the natives say.”

Frogs scattered ahead of their feet. The hob crept into the long grass, the waterspirit sank silently down under the overhang of the arch.

“Here it is!” Boots swished within inches of the hob’s nose. Two men stood with their backs to him, staring at the water. One wore a good green cloak over a mailshirt and sword, the other a long woollen robe, kilted up to show brawny calves and bare feet in sandals. 

“It’s some kind of an old cistern,” said the man with the sword. “You can see those stones have been worked.”

“Foh,” said the other in disgust. “It’s full of frogspawn.”

“Oh, once we pull up the weeds and clear it out, it’ll run clean enough. It’s deep, look. This’ll save us some labour. And right next to where we want the stables. I wonder who built it? A holy well, did you say? To which saint?”

“Some local one you’ve never heard of, I expect,” said the bare-legged man dismissively. “If it’s even true. This is a benighted country. I swear they make them up. Wait. My lord Fulke, look there!  Letters! An old inscription.”

The hob sucked in a breath.

“Where?  Oh, I see. Someone’s been here already, scratching at the moss. Well, well: perhaps we’ve found our saint after all. I hope this doesn’t cause trouble, I promised I’d dedicate our chapel to Saint Martin. Can two saints under one roof agree? You’re my mass-priest, Gilbert. Read it. What does it say?”

The hob bit his lip gleefully and rubbed his hands together.

“Let me see. It’s not that clear. If I can reach…”  There was a squelch and a splash as his foot slipped, and the other man laughed. “Wet to the knee,” said Gilbert crossly.  “It’s Latin, all right. Oh dear! This is no saint! ‘NYMPHA FONTIS…’ ‘To the nymph of the fountain.’”

“Nymph?”

“A pagan spirit!” said Gilbert in a disgusted voice. “A fairy, an elf – a demon! Wait, there’s more. Uh… ‘ET GENIUS LOCI’.  ‘To the nymph of the fountain and the spirit of the place.’”

“But her name – her name!” whispered the hob, clenching his fists.

“I see.”  Fulke sounded grim.  “And that’s all there is?”

“I think so. No.”  Gilbert tore away more moss.  “More letters here, on the left.  Ah, this could be her name –”

“Don’t pronounce it!” Fulke yelped. “Heathen stuff. Unlucky. I’ll have the stone smashed up, to be on the safe side.  It can go as infill for the chapel floor. We’ll replace it with a plain slab.”  He clapped Gilbert on the shoulder.  “Come along.”

They began to retrace their steps. “I’ll get the men to clean the well out tomorrow.  The sooner we can begin using it the better, it’ll save us taking the horses down to the river. By the way. We need a name for this place. I’ve been thinking, and it’s come to me.  The men are calling it ‘the red mound’, because of the colour of the soil. Let’s keep that up. We’ll paint the tower and the ramparts red, to impress the natives. How do you like the sound of ‘La Motte Rouge?’”

“Very much!” Gilbert bowed. “An excellent choice, my lord Fulke de la Motte Rouge!”

“I’m glad you think so.”  Their voices faded. “Names are important…”

The hob waited until they’d gone. Then he crawled down to the edge of the well.

“Missy?  Be you there? Come along, now,” he coaxed.

“Go away,” said a muffled voice from under the arch.

“Here’s pretty toys for ‘ee.”  He tossed creamy hawthorn florets into the water.  A quick hand plucked them out and sent them flying back.

The hob started to speak, bit it off, and sighed. “Do it matter? Your sweet face is worth a mort o’ names.”  He crossed one hairy leg over the other and tipped his head back to look at the sky.

“Nymph!” Her voice caught. “Demon!  Fairy!  Elf! What am I, hob?  You said the good times were coming, but no, never again. They hate me. They’ll break up my name and bury it and I’ll never know what it was. My name is lost, my name is lost.”

“Mortals come and mortals go,” the hob mumbled. “One day this lot will be gone too, and it’ll be just you an’ me and the badgers…”

She didn’t answer. Eventually he crept quietly away, lured by the savoury smell of roasting meat skewered over the campfires.  Behind him, the spring’s choked gurgle bubbled among the cresses.

It sounded like someone sobbing.

"By Fynnon Ddu" © Katherine Langrish 2014

Picture credits:
Undine by Heywood Sumner
Undine by Arthur Rackham

"Christmas with the Savages" by Mary Clive

It’s December already, and – scary thought – only two weeks to Christmas. So I’m not going to trouble you with a long post. If you're anything like me, you’re far too busy rushing around. Instead let me recommend a book which almost anyone should like – uncles, aunties, grandmothers, children. It is ‘Christmas with the Savages’ by Mary Clive (that's Lady Mary Clive to you and me), originally published in 1955 but written much earlier. Born in 1907, she lived to the age of 102, and this warm, lively and extremely funny book is a lightly fictionalised child’s-view of a pre-Great War Christmas in a big house, ‘based on the vast family gatherings of her maternal grandmother’.  You can find Mary Clive’s interesting obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/22/lady-mary-clive-obituary

‘Christmas with the Savages’ is as easy to read and as witty as anything by Edith Nesbit, but the children, ‘the Savage family’, are way more badly behaved than any well-meaning Wouldbegood. Though certainly not wicked, they bicker, squabble, tease one another and torment their nurses in a way both horrifying but understandable: these children are being brought up, not by their parents, but by servants who have no real authority over them. I suppose their often very naughty behaviour was one way of attracting attention – the ‘spoilt’ older boy Lionel is, we learn, miserable at his boarding school. No wonder he acts up in the Christmas holidays. ‘Can no one control that boy?’ cries one of the nurses as Lionel is ejected from the nursery tea-table after teasing his cousin Peter. Then:

Crash! ... Lionel ... bounced in upon us again screaming ‘Pumpkin-eater! Pumpkin-eater!’ 

The nursery maids rose from their places and chased him out, but as fast as they slammed one door behind him he rushed in at another. There were no keys, and he tore through the room again and again, the nursery maids trying to hold the doors but never knowing which he was about to attack next.  In the middle of the uproar, and just as Lionel had thrown a cushion into the midst of the food, there came a heavy knock on the door which led into the passage. 

Lionel hides under the table, and in comes ‘Father Christmas’. The children blanch. Is it Mr O’Sullivan dressed up? Or could it be really...?

Father Christmas now raised his hand and began counting the children in a queer deep voice. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten ... ten?’ Here he stopped. As Lionel was under the table of course we were one short. ... Father Christmas pronounced in a slow, solemn voice:

'The child under the table,

I give you fair warning,

Will find nothing in his stocking

On Christmas morning.'

Quenched by this awful threat, Lionel emerges and ‘slunk on to his chair’, after which Father Christmas slips away. Needless to say, presents do appear for Lionel on Christmas Day. It seems that at least there were some imaginative uncles around...

The children fight, show off to one another, explore forbidden attics, set off fire extinguishers, paint pictures and write stories. At half-past six on Christmas morning, however, they all congregate in a single bedroom to open their stockings together, and they’re as reluctant as most children are to write the dreaded thank-you letters – especially Betty, the enfant terrible (based on Mary Clive herself): 

Betty’s godmother had sent her a postal order for 5 shillings with a letter saying she was afraid it would arrive late for Christmas. As a matter of fact it had come on Christmas Eve, and Betty had got into one of her contrary moods and said that she wouldn’t accept it.

‘If I write a letter, will you put “Love from Betty” at the bottom?’ said her mother.

‘No,’ said Betty. ‘I’ll put “Hate from Betty”.’

‘It’s no good,’ said Harry. ‘Nothing will make her change her mind now. But I’ll write “Love from Betty” all blotchy, and her godmother won’t know the difference.’

‘If you do,’ said Betty, ‘I’ll throw your bedroom slippers into the fire.’

 

Take my advice and buy ‘Christmas with the Savages’ for all your friends and relations. You won’t regret it. 

Lady Mary Clive, photographed for The Tatler, 1933

He rode at night with gilten spur and candle light...

Following on from my last post about lists of fairies and bogeymen, I can't resist sharing a marvellous passage in a book published in 1549 called The Complaynt of Scotland. The main aim of the anonymous author was to challenge Henry VIII of England’s attempts to marry the young Mary Queen of Scots to his son Edward and thus unite the two countries (in other words, annexe Scotland). So The Complaynt is a political work, but in the sixteenth century this means backing up your points with a great many stories, legends and allegories which demonstrate Scotland’s superiority to, and independence from, England.  In one chapter, a number of literate and thoughtful Scottish shepherds have been discussing philosophy, and one of them suggests they might all now relax and tell stories.  There follows an exhilarating list which deserves to be better known: here’s a version in modern spelling:

Some were in prose and some in were in verse: some were stories and some were short tales. These were the names of them as after follows: the Tales of Canterbury, Robert the Devil Duke of Normandy, the tale of the wolf of the world’s end, Ferrand earl of Flanders that married the devil, the tale of the Red Ettin with the three heads, the tale how Perseus saved Andromeda from the cruel monster, the prophecy of Merlin, the tale of the giant that ate men alive, ‘On foot by forth as I could found’, Wallace, the Bruce, Hippomedon, the tale of the Three-Footed Dog of Norway, the tale how Hercules slew the serpent Hydra that had seven heads, the tale how the King of Eastmoreland married the king’s daughter of Westmoreland, Skail Gillenderson the king’s son of Skellye, the tale of the Four Sons of Aymon, the tale of the Bridge of the Mantribil, the tale of Sir Ywain, Arthur’s knight, Ralf Collier, the Siege of Milan, Gawain and Gollogras, Lancelot du Lac, Arthur knight he rode at night with gilten spur and candlelight, the tale of Floremond of Albany that slew the dragon by the sea, the tale of Sir Walter the bold Leslie, the tale of the Pure Tint, Clariades and Maliades, Arthur of Little Britanny, Robin Hood and Little John, the Marvels of Mandeville, the tale of the Young Tamlane and of the bold Braband, the reign of the Roi Robert, Sir Egeir and Sir Grim, Bevis of Southhampton, the Golden Targe, the Palace of Honour, the tale how Acteon was transformed into a hart and then slain by his own dogs, the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, the tale of the amours of Leander and Hero, the tale how Jupiter transformed his dear love into a cow, the tale how that Jason won the Golden Fleece, Orpheus King of Portingal, the tale of the golden apple, the tale of the Three Weird Sisters, the tale how Daedalus made the Labyrinth to keep the monster Minotaur, the tale how King Midas got two asses lugs [ears] on his head because of his avarice.

How diverse these stories are! Scottish of course, with Wallace, the Bruce, Young Tamlane, the bold Leslie – classical, with Perseus and Andromeda, the Minotaur, Midas – French, with Arthur of Little Britain and Lancelot du lac – English: the Canterbury Tales, Bevis of Southhampton, Robin Hood,  Mandeville’s Travels – and probably also Scandinavian, with the now unknown story of Skail Gillenderson.  Many more are also now unknown. ‘The Three-Footed Dog of Norway’ for example, just might be a version of ‘The Black Bull of Norroway’, but we’ll never know. And ‘The Wolf at the World’s End’ sounds a little bit like ‘The Well at the World’s End’ – but then a well is very different from a wolf.  John Leyden, who edited the Complaynt of Scotland in 1801, suggests the tale ‘of the Pure Tint’ may be ‘Rashycoat’, the Scots Cinderella – though he doesn’t say why. (Did he perhaps know a version in which the maiden’s fine complexion was a key to her identity?)  ‘The tale of the Three Weird Sisters' is also unknown - though perhaps Shakespeare knew it! It may have been a story about the Fates or perhaps the Norns.  For me the most haunting line is the one about Arthur. You really need to say it in the Scottish way to get the real lilt and the internal rhymes: ‘Arthour knycht he rade on nycht/With gyltin spur and candil lycht’.  John Leyden says of it:

This romance, of which these lines seem to have formed the introduction, is unknown, but I have often heard them repeated in a nursery tale, of which I only recollect the following ridiculous verses:

‘Chick my naggie, chick my naggie!

How mony miles to Aberdeagie?

Tis eight and eight, and other eight,

We’ll no win there wi candle light.’

It’s a great pity this is all Leyden could remember of the tale, but it sounds very similar to the English nursery rhyme:

How many miles to Babylon?

Three-score miles and ten.

Can I get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again:

If your heels be nimble and light,

You may get there by candlelight.’

So perhaps the story wasn’t so much a story as a lullaby? And aren’t lullabies often mysterious and a little sad? At any rate, this I love this candle-lit vision of Arthur flashing through the night with his golden spurs, possibly at the head of a ghostly troop like Herla or Herne.  ‘Fire and fleet and candlelight…’

Picture credits

The Wild Hunt by Johann Wilhelm Cordes, Wikimedia Commons
Wild Hunt (engraving) Wikimedia Commons

The 'man in the oke' and others

 

I love lists, especially lists of mysterious creatures like the oft-quoted one by Reginald Scot in his book debunking witches, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), in which he takes the robust and sceptical line that even if witches, ghosts and fairies might exist, most actual instances are a load of old rubbish. ‘One knave in a white sheete hath cousened and abused many’ he declares; ‘Miracles are knaveries, most commonly’. In Chapter XV comes his famous, breathlessly delivered list of supernatural creatures fit to be believed in only by those who ‘through weaknesse of mind and bodie, are shaken with vain dreames and continuall feare’:

But in our childhood our mothers’ maids have so terrified us … with bull beggars, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, Kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadows: in so much as some never fear the divell but on a darke night; and then a polled sheep is a perilous beast and manie times is taken for oure father’s soul, specialie in a churchyard… 

This may or may not be a true indication of the range of creatures the Elizabethan populace actually believed in (satyrs, fauns, nymphs? Really?) but it’s a magnificent rant. It’s as though Scot has thrown together every single supernatural entity he can possibly think of: you can see how one suggests another. The classical ‘satyrs, pans, fauns, syl[v]ans’ run together easily, while ‘Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine’ seem more homely night terrors. While many of them are still familiar, others are not. Bull beggars? Spoornes, calcars? What on earth are they?

In her Dictionary of Fairies Katharine Briggs says there is or was a ‘Bullbeggar Lane’ in Surrey which ‘once contained a barn haunted by a bull beggar’. It is probably some variant of bogeyman. ‘Kit with the Canstick’ or ‘candlestick’ may be a variety of will o’ the wisp, leading travellers astray, but there are no folktales about it and if I were writing one I might be tempted to turn it into a domestic spirit, and a sinister one at that. What is a ‘calcar’? I’ve no idea, unless it could by some stretch be a corruption of the Gaelic ‘Cailleach’ – divine hag or old woman. What ‘the spoorne’ might be, no one knows. (Spawn?) The ‘mare’ is the night-mare. The hell-waine is the Devil’s wagon in which he carries souls to hell. In my children's fantasy 'Dark Angels' there's a  hill called Devil's Edge, loosely based on Stiperstones in Shropshire (and pictured at the top of this blog); it has earned its name because:

Up on the very top ... there was a road.  A road leading nowhere, a road no one used. For if anyone was so bold as to walk along it, especially at night, he’d hear the clamour of hounds and the blowing of horns, the cracking of whips and the rumbling of a cart.  And out of the dark would burst the Devil’s own dog pack, dashing beside a black wagon drawn by goats with fiery eyes, crammed full of screaming souls bound for the pits of Hell.

As for the ‘man in the oke’, Katherine Briggs tells of '…scattered reference to oakmen in the North of England, though very few folktales about them…. Most people know the rhyming proverb “Fairy folks live in old oaks”; the Gospel Oak or King’s Oak in every considerable forest had probably a traditional sacredness from unremembered times, and an oak coppice in which the young saplings had sprung from the stumps of unfelled trees was thought to be an uncanny place after sunset…'

There was a huge and ancient Chêne Jupitre or ‘Jupiter Oak’ in the Forest of Fontainebleau when I lived near there in the 1990’s, but it died and was taken down. It’s hard to see how anyone could be frightened by the dimunitive Tom Thumb whom we know of from the fairy tales, but perhaps in the 16th century he was more of a plaguey fairy nuisance like Puck. At any rate his name seems to have suggested ‘Tom Tumbler’ of whom we know nothing.

I’m sure this list (which of course he knew) was behind the list of evil creatures which CS Lewis names in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, who gather behind the White Witch at the Stone Table to kill Aslan:

Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won’t describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book – Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horror, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses and Ettins. 

Still more exuberant is a list of supernatural creatures compiled by Michael Aislabie Denham (died 1859) a well-read Yorkshire merchant who collected and published various ‘Rhymes, Proverbs, Sayings, Prophecies, Slogans, etc.’ as well as pamphlets and anecdotes. Denham goes even further than Reginald Scot, whose list is incorporated – one might almost say buried – in the midst of his own: many of the creatures he names here appear nowhere else, but one must assume that they were once genuine traditions. Some are ancient. 'Portunes', for example, are to be found only in a single instance in the De Nugis Curialium or Courtly Trifles of 12th century man-of-letters Walter Map, who describes them as tiny fairy creatures like little old men who toast frogs in the hearth-ashes at night. It's highly unlikely Denham found any live oral tradition about them in the mid-19th century, and there's little chance of the name leaking back from the written to the oral tradition, as Map's Latin text was not published till 1850, nor translated into English until MR James's edition of 1914. So Denham is certainly overstating the case when he suggests that 'portunes', at least, were generally believed in ‘seventy or eighty years ago’. At this time, he claims,

... the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, Bloody Bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, spectres, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles, korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost. Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its spectre, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and crossroads were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit! 

You will have noticed the 'hobbits', about two-thirds of the way through?  All I can say is that here, indeed, is scope for the creative imagination.

Picture credits:

Witch and familiars: by Arthur Rackham
The fairy 'Yallery Brown': by John Batten
Aslan in the power of the White Witch: by Pauline Baynes 
From 'Goblin Market': by Arthur Rackham