These Our Monsters Read online

  ‘Naturally,’ Louisa continued, ignoring this, and feeling the ribbons frantically rippling at her neck, ‘Tristan escaped on the way to execution, and snatched Iseult from the jaws of danger.’

  ‘Hooray,’ cried Dorothy, and swept her arm dramatically over the sea’s horizon, the effect reduced by the sudden change of bright summer weather into a cool greyness announcing rain, as if all Cornwall’s phantoms had clustered to observe them.

  Not waiting for any questions – it was obvious that her audience was lost in the expectation of tea – Louisa explained that Tristan, finally, if reluctantly, had agreed with King Mark to yield Iseult and leave the country.

  She had first read the legend in a large, illustrated book in her father’s voluminous library, but she had soon lost her childish attraction to the knight who gave up his loved one.

  A surviving carved fragment of the castle’s doorjamb suddenly and theatrically, as if not quite by chance, lay under her hand, a tear in the clouds sweeping it into view. It seemed astonishing, it seemed to drag her deeper into the impossibly distant past. The pinkish surface of the pockmarked relic reminded her of something: their chaperone Uncle Jack’s fleshy face. Slow-witted Hugh (Louisa had never diagnosed him thus, as it were, until a few seconds ago) abruptly sat down on the cement steps and clamped his eyes shut, shivering. The wind had dropped, leaving their ears clearer.

  William seemed to agree with her. He declared that he considered the knight to have been disgustingly weak; Hugh – eyes still shut tight – was cautiously supportive, but Dorothy objected: had Tristan refused to yield to King Mark’s demands the young lovers would have been executed, which would have been too dreadful. ‘Now may we have our tea and scones?’

  The recently constructed path to the refreshments cabin rounded a corner of the cliff-face where almost immediately they entered a relative quietude, as if stepping into a church. To either side were shivering, secretive patches of bluebells in dips in the terrain. It occurred to Louisa how dull their lives were, so dull she felt embarrassed to be in the presence of these rocks and clifftops and crashing waters, which had serious duties to fulfil. Beside her Dorothy remarked how much more heroic and noble those times were. Louisa nodded. ‘Such brave fellows in those days,’ Dorothy sighed, glancing at William and Hugh. Hugh was apparently set on planting his feet with slow, intense accuracy and made no comment.

  ‘Your hand is unusually fine-boned, Lou,’ Dorothy pointed out.

  Maybe I am growing quietly ill, Louisa thought. She herself had never mused upon the shape or size of any of her friends’ hands before – for a start, she had never tried drawing them as anything more than an attached detail. Perhaps the fine quality of her own, she reflected, was to do with her being an artist, a painter, albeit a strictly amateur one. She certainly preferred that to physical decline, to falling quietly ill. Consumptive, perhaps. On the threshold. She suddenly pressed her fist against her cheek, then heated it with her lips, as she had done with her two late and cherished twin nieces, who had turned into angels aged six, liberally scented with orange blossom powder.

  William stopped and pointed up at the sky. He said he had spotted a species of broad-winged eagle. Louisa looked up, too, failing to find the bird. Within moments her knees were buckling. The rushing clouds had brought a giddiness that, completely to her surprise, seemed to be physically forcing her legs away from the vertical and towards some nebulous state that appeared attracted to the waves below.

  But there was Dorothy’s sudden, firm grip on her arm. The handrail was mostly air, its metal merely sketched on the empty vastness of creamy stuff beyond. Dorothy was the anchor, with her broad hands. Louisa was on her knees now, shaking. ‘I am King Arthur’s faithful steed,’ she quipped, embarrassed, ‘whose name I have forgotten.’

  William rushed up but was similarly gripped by dizziness and had to sit down. She was relieved that someone else had been caught out by the place, its endless swaying and crashing. That it was solid rock made it worse. ‘Dizziness is catching,’ she said. But no one heard her, as the wind had started gushing through a rip in the rocks somewhat like a giant keyhole. The land had suddenly become little different from the sea. She felt ready to slide off into the plunging uncertainties all around them, despite the grip of her friend’s hand.

  Then suddenly there was Hugh.

  ‘Shall we go back for tea?’ he suggested, seemingly imbued with a new physical confidence. All that rugby, thought Louisa. The sweet, slow boy was a blessing, Louisa realised, if only for that single suggestion.

  They began along the path towards warmth and refreshment and her companions seemed similarly relieved. She herself tried not to look anywhere but straight ahead, tasting the salt sprinkled on her cold lips from the endless churn below. Behind them the Cornishman trailed, clearly unable to comprehend them as they began again to natter and laugh like gulls over a putrid catch.

  Not that the handsome indigens is the least bit interested in anything we say, Louisa reflected with a secretive smile that only Dorothy caught with a casual glance – and apparently failed to understand.

  Myths, Legends

  and Folklore of

  English Heritage Sites

  Charles Kightly

  THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND includes that of its legends, myths and folklore, which tell us how people saw themselves and the world about them, of their fears, hopes and preoccupations. Below is a selection of these stories: those that relate directly to the legends and myths which inspired the authors in this collection, followed by others from across the country. English Heritage sites appear, at first mention in each section, in capital letters.

  ‘These Our Monsters’ – Not of Our World

  The tale of the Green Children of Woolpit – the Suffolk village whose name really does come from the ‘wolf pits’ once there – has two medieval sources. The longer and more detailed version was written in about 1198 by the Yorkshire chronicler William of Newburgh, who at first didn’t believe it, until he was ‘overwhelmed by the testimony of so many and such credible witnesses’. A slightly different variant was recorded during the 1220s by Ralph of Coggeshall, who was based nearer Woolpit at the Essex monastery of Coggeshall, and claimed to have known the family of Sir Richard de Calne, the knight in the tale.

  One summer during the reign of King Stephen (1135–54), villagers harvesting at Woolpit were amazed to discover two children, a boy and his sister, emerging from one of the pits they used for trapping wolves. Though otherwise resembling human children, they were dressed in clothes of a strange colour and unknown material, and their skin was completely green. They were clearly terrified when the Woolpit reapers seized them, but nobody could understand a word of their language. Many people came to see the amazing sight, and (says Ralph) they were taken as a curiosity to the manor house of Sir Richard de Calne, six miles away. At first starved (says William), they were offered bread and ‘other victuals’, but though ‘tormented by hunger’ they tearfully refused them. Then, happening to see some new-cut broad beans on their stalks, they eagerly grabbed them – but desperately sought for the beans within the stalks, not in the pods. When someone opened a pod for them, they gulped down the beans – and lived only on beans for months after.

  Eventually they were baptised (presumably a precaution in case they were demons), and learnt both to speak English and to eat bread, gradually losing their green skin colour altogether. The boy soon died, but the girl, now ‘differing not a bit from the women of our own country’, lived for many years as a servant in Sir Richard’s household, where (reported Ralph) ‘she was rather loose and wanton in her conduct’. William was told that she married a man from King’s Lynn, and was still alive a few years before he wrote, ‘or at least, so they say’.

  Often asked about her original homeland, she said that it was called ‘Saint Martin’s Land’: it was a Christian country with churches, but wrapped in continual twilight, never getting lighter than just before dawn or just after sunset. Another,
luminous, land could be seen from it, across a wide river. According to Ralph, not only the people but everything else in that land was green. When feeding their father’s flocks there, the children heard chiming bells – like those of BURY ST EDMUNDS ABBEY, four miles from Woolpit. Then they were either suddenly carried in a trance to the Woolpit harvest field or led by the chimes into a cavern, from which they eventually emerged into the blinding light and warmer air of 12th-century Suffolk.

  Among the most famous and intriguing of all English legends – if that is what it is – the story of the Green Children has given rise to endless speculation. The children have been ‘identified’ as (of course) lost extraterrestrials; left-over ‘Ancient Britons’; refugees from one of medieval East Anglia’s Flemish-speaking enclaves; sufferers from the deficiency disease chlorosis (‘green sickness’); and a whole lot of other things. Some modern inhabitants of Woolpit (never actually named, naturally) are even said to be their direct descendants. As William of Newburgh tactfully ended his story: ‘Let everyone say as he pleases, and reason on such matters according to his abilities.’

  Stories about underground worlds not very unlike our own – the children’s ‘St Martin’s Land’ had churches, even if they were green – sometimes occur elsewhere in English as well as Scots and Welsh mythology. Another was told by William and Ralph’s contemporary Gervase of Tilbury, in a book written to amuse his patron the German Emperor Otto IV, but scathingly dismissed by others as ‘a bagful of old woman’s tales’. It concerns dramatically sited PEVERIL CASTLE in the Peak District (one of whose 13th-century custodians, incidentally, is a possible candidate for Robin Hood’s traditional enemy, the scheming Sheriff of Nottingham). Peveril is recorded in Domesday Book as the castle of ‘Peak’s Arse’ after the vast cavern which lies almost beneath the spectacular castle crag. Also known as ‘the Devil’s Arse’ (and now more politely as Peak Cavern), this sometimes emits mysterious winds and was long believed to be an entrance to Hell.

  One bitter winter day, runs the tale, a swineherd working for the castle’s lord lost a sow about to give birth to piglets, and guessed she’d taken refuge in the ominous cavern. Not daring to tell his master he’d lost such a valuable animal, he plucked up his courage and ventured in. After long wanderings through dark tunnels, he was amazed to find himself in a broad open country bathed in hot sunshine where reapers were busy harvesting. He soon found the sow and her new-born piglets and, meeting ‘the lord of that land’, was given permission to leave with them. Emerging on the castle crag, he found it still locked in midwinter.

  Apart from the fact that the mysterious world beyond the Peak Cavern existed in the opposite climate – wishful thinking in midwinter Peveril, perhaps – there was nothing very alien about this underground world or its people. Back in medieval Suffolk, a much stranger quasi-human appears in another tale by Ralph of Coggeshall, this time set at newly completed ORFORD CASTLE during the reign of Henry II (1154–89). Fishermen working off the town caught in their nets ‘a wild man’, naked and rather bald but with a long beard and hairy chest. He couldn’t or wouldn’t speak, even when Bartholomew de Glanville, constable of the castle, strung him up by his feet and tortured him. He ate anything given him, squeezed the juice out of raw food. At first carefully guarded in the castle, he always slept from sunset to sunrise but, when taken into a church, showed no signs of religion or reverence. After a while they made him a place to swim in the sea, within a triple barrier of nets – he easily slipped under them, but came back of his own accord, staying in the castle for two months. Eventually his guards grew slack and he disappeared, never to be seen again. The chronicler didn’t know what to make of him: was he really human, or a fish who’d taken on human shape, or an evil spirit hiding in the body of a drowned sailor? Despite some later depictions of him at Orford, he certainly wasn’t a ‘merman’ with a fishlike tail: we’re told he was strung by his feet.

  The God-fearing villagers of Woolpit in ‘These Our Monsters’ would have been happier with the pious legends about ‘our saint’ – Saint Edmund of Bury St Edmunds Abbey. One of the very largest, wealthiest and most powerful monasteries in the country, it owed its name and prosperity to the burial there of the martyred Anglo-Saxon king Edmund of East Anglia. Edmund was the patron saint not only of the abbey, but also of medieval England, until displaced by the interloping St George. Defeated and captured in AD 869 by the invading Viking ‘Great Army’, Edmund refused to give up either his kingdom or his Christian faith. So the Viking leader Ivarr the Boneless had him tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. Ivarr then cut the ‘blood eagle’ in his back (bending the ribs away from the spine like an eagle’s wings) and finally – while he still called on Christ – had his head hacked off. The severed head was then thrown into a dense thorn thicket, so that his followers couldn’t find it. As they called out ‘Where are you?’, they heard a voice from the thicket replying ‘Here, here, here’. They discovered the miraculously speaking head clasped between the paws of a great white wolf, which had piously guarded it against desecration. It followed them until Edmund’s head and body were brought together, and then quietly vanished.

  Though first recorded by Abbo of Fleury over a century after the event, the tale of St Edmund’s miraculous head and the white wolf was based at two removes from an eyewitness account. Abbo heard it from St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury (AD 909–988), who had himself heard it from a very old man, once Edmund’s own young armour-bearer. He swore on oath that he’d been present on the fatal day and witnessed the wonder.

  Medieval images of the wolf with Saint Edmund’s crowned head survive in several East Anglian churches, including Bury St Edmund’s Cathedral but not St Mary’s at Woolpit – though there is a painting of the saint on the rood screen there. But it’s the Green Children who have pride of place on the village sign. Today, Woolpit is rather proud of ‘Our Monsters’.

  ‘Great Pucklands’ – Puck and the Fairies

  Great Pucklands meadow, where this story begins, really was surveyed for insects and flowers by Charles Darwin and his children in the 1850s. Though not then part of Darwin’s gardens, it lies not far from the home of Charles Darwin, DOWN HOUSE, and was visible from his ‘thinking path’, the Sandwalk. Now in the care of English Heritage, Great Pucklands can be reached by a public footpath from Down House.

  Like 20 or more other English places with similar names, Great Pucklands probably takes its title from ‘Puck’, the most famous of all English ‘fairies’. Meaning ‘devil’ or ‘evil spirit’, versions of the name appear at a very early date not only in Anglo-Saxon but in Celtic and Scandinavian sources. He figures in Rudyard Kipling’s well-loved children’s novels, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), and of course in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/6). Shakespeare’s Puck, a rather sinister trickster, is nearer both in time and spirit to the Puck of folklore than Kipling’s 3,000-year-old Sussex countryman. But neither has much connection with the Christmas-tree confections of Victorian and later fairy stories, which Kipling’s Puck calls ‘that painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of impostors’. As Darwin says in the story: ‘Fairies weren’t always pretty mites. That was just tales people told for babies’.

  The fairies of English folklore are much more unchancy and potentially dangerous beings, not to be trifled with. They could be child-sized, adult-sized or occasionally even bigger, and though they could fly if they liked, they never had wings. Visible or invisible at will, they usually lived underground, sometimes in large prehistoric burial mounds like Willy Howe in East Yorkshire, from which (the local 12th-century chronicler William of Newburgh records) a man stole a fairy cup. Unlike most illusory ‘fairy gold’, it didn’t turn to leaves or ashes above ground, and still existed in William’s time. And like those seen near HOUSESTEADS ROMAN FORT, fairies loved dancing; but any human drawn into their dance might be changed forever, or find 50 years had passed when they were released.

  Thoug
h rarely really wicked, they delighted in playing tricks on humans. Puck’s speciality was leading travellers round in circles until they were irreparably lost. At Aymestrey, near Leominster in Herefordshire, a man who’d been ‘Puck-led’ in nearby Pokehouse (‘Puck’s House’) Wood left a legacy to pay for the ringing of a church bell every evening, to guide fellow victims safely to the village. Much worse, fairies sometimes stole away human babies, substituting fairy changelings. And the mid-17thcentury parish records of Lamplugh in Cumbria allegedly record three people ‘frightened to death by fairies’.

  But they could be kindly. When the Shropshire folk around MITCHELL’S FOLD STONE CIRCLE were suffering a famine, the fairies gave them a magic cow, whose milk sustained them until a wicked witch milked it dry. As a punishment she was turned into a stone, with a ring of standing stones set round her to keep her in. Fairies traditionally loathed witches, whom they regarded as trespassers on their magic territory.

  They were indeed intensely touchy, especially about what people called them – like Kipling’s Puck, they particularly disliked being called ‘fairies’. Since they were often invisible eavesdroppers, it was always safest to call them, even behind closed doors, something like ‘the good folk’, ‘the beautiful people’ or ‘the gentry’. As one fairy in a Scots poem warned a human:

  If ye call me imp or elf

  I warn you look well to yourself

  If ye call me fairy

  I’ll work you much harm

  If good neighbour you call me

  Then good neighbour I will be

  But if you call me ‘seelie wight’

  I’ll be your friend both day and night.

  ‘Seelie’ means happy, blessed or lucky: but it comes originally from the Anglo-Saxon saelig, meaning ‘holy’. ‘Holy’ in the usual sense fairies were not. Neither were they immortal, though much longer-lived than humans. Meeting ‘fairy funerals’ at night was a particular hazard in the English Midlands because those who saw them usually died soon afterwards. There was even believed to be a fairies’ graveyard near BRINKBURN PRIORY in Northumberland, some said housing fairies killed by hearing the priory bells ringing, to which they were notoriously allergic.