These Our Monsters Page 14

  What then were they? Despite Annie’s ‘Equation’ in the story (‘Winged Insect – Winged Fairy – Hominin – Human’), they were not usually thought to be related to humans. The rare fairy–human marriages, like that of Anglo-Saxon ‘Wild Edric’ with a fairy maiden he met near CLUN CASTLE, almost always ended tragically. Some medieval scholars guessed that they were really low-ranking rebel angels, cast out of Heaven together with Satan by Saint Michael. Not quite bad enough to descend with him to Hell, they’d got stuck halfway on ‘Middle-Earth’ (a term used many centuries before Tolkien made it famous). But what eventually happened to them? The 17th-century Anglican clergyman and wit Richard Corbet, who himself claimed to have once been ‘Puck-led’ on a journey, joked in his Fairies’ Farewell that they were leftovers from the Roman Catholic ‘Old Profession’. Tolerated in the easy-going pre-Reformation world, they’d then been banished by the stricter Christianity of the Puritans:

  Witness those rings and roundelays

  Of theirs, which yet remain

  Were footed in Queen Mary’s days

  On many a grassy plain

  But since of late, Elizabeth

  And later, James came in

  They never danced on any heath

  As when the time hath been

  By which we note the Fairies

  Were of the old Profession.

  Their songs were ‘Ave Mary’s’

  Their dances were Procession

  But now, alas, they all are dead;

  Or gone beyond the seas;

  Or farther for Religion fled;

  Or else they take their ease.

  The pioneering archaeologist John Aubrey, writing in about 1690, thought rather that the spread of literacy had ‘put all the old fables out of doors, and the divine art of printing frightened away Robin Goodfellow (Puck) and the fairies’.

  Darwin’s own scientific theories, matured at Down House, must also have damaged belief in fairies. Yet tales about fairies (of the traditional, rather than the Victorian Christmas-tree variety) were still seriously credited well into the 20th century, especially in rural areas such as the Welsh Borders. And even now, and even in cities, one distant and degraded descendant of the alarming and powerful beings of folklore still maintains a precarious existence – the Tooth Fairy, first referred to in 1648.

  ‘Goibert of the Moon’ – Hare Witches and the Henge

  The teller of this story (and who’d dare to contradict him?) clearly knows a great deal about the international folklore surrounding the hare. He’s aware that ‘Hare-women are not always goddesses … and they are not always benevolent … many of the old suspicions that surrounded the hare in British folk culture seem to come from her association with the witch.’

  Not all witch-hare stories date from the very distant past. One from near LONGTOWN CASTLE in Herefordshire, recorded in 1909, relates that a witch in hare form was warned by her grandson: ‘Run, grannie, run, the hounds be after thee.’ Bitten by a hound as she disappeared through the keyhole of her cottage, she was of course found doctoring a wound in her leg. But not all witch-hares were caught, and some had fun with their pursuers. The most circumstantial account, ‘affirmed a certain truth by many of the inhabitants … upon their own knowledge’, was told to the local MP Gervase Holles at BOLINGBROKE CASTLE in the 1630s. Before its demolition during the Civil War, local finance administrators held an annual meeting at the castle. But it was ‘haunted by a certain spirit in the likeness of a hare, which at the meeting of the auditors doth usually run between their legs and sometimes overthrows [trips] them’.

  Pursued into the castle courtyard, it disappeared into a cellar which had no means of escape (‘not having the least chink or crevice’); yet though they ‘most narrowly’ examined every corner, the searchers could never find it. At other times they ‘sent for hounds, and put them in after it, but after a while they have come crying out’. This Lincolnshire hare, tacitly assumed to be a witch who disliked tax collectors, was never tracked down – unlike the dancing hare in the story.

  Though the storyteller instinctively feels that the dancing hare must somehow be connected with STONEHENGE, recorded folklore makes no direct link between hares and the famous stone circle. Julius Caesar wrote in about 50 BC that Iron Age Britons regarded eating hares as taboo, but kept them as pets ‘for amusement and pleasure’. Perhaps they were really more of a sacred or prophetic animal, since before her uprising in AD 60 Boudicca (Boadicea) released a hare from her robes, and rejoiced when it ran in a ‘lucky’ direction. But that was a very long time after Stonehenge had been abandoned, and many centuries before the first recorded stories about it began to appear.

  Almost certainly the earliest account of Stonehenge was written by Henry of Huntingdon in about 1129, listing ‘Stanenges’ among the wonders of Britain, ‘where stones of amazing bigness are raised in the manner of gateways, so that gateways seem to be set over gateways. Nor can anyone find out by what contrivance such massive stones were raised to so great a height, or for what reason they were erected there.’ Less than a decade later, Geoffrey of Monmouth provided answers to both questions in his History of the Kings of Britain.

  The British king Aurelius Ambrosius, Geoffrey tells us, wanted a new and distinctive building to stand forever as a memorial to Britons massacred by the Saxons. After a conference of masons and carpenters from across the land failed to produce any ideas, Aurelius was advised to consult Merlin, as renowned for his ‘mechanical contrivances’ as he was for true prophecies. If Aurelius wanted something really special, said Merlin, he should send for the Giants’ Circle Dance (Chorea Gigantum) on ‘Mount Killaurus’ in Ireland (a circle of enormous stones which no man then living could erect) and set it up on Salisbury Plain.

  How could such a massive structure, mocked Aurelius, be moved from a distant country? And weren’t there enough stones in Britain big enough for the job? Annoyed, Merlin told him more about the Giants’ Dance. Long ago, it had been brought by giants from the remotest corner of Africa, because it had mystic medicinal powers. Whenever the giants were ill, they poured water over its stones into baths, which would cure any disease: if mixed with certain herbs, such water would also heal all wounds.

  Fired with enthusiasm, the Britons sent an army to Ireland to fetch the stones, and defeated an Irish force which tried to protect them. But when they got to Mount Killaurus, neither the strength nor the ingenuity of all the army’s young men could shift the stones one inch. When he saw what a mess they were making of the task, Merlin laughingly set up his own gear (we’re not told what this was) and dismantled the circle ‘more rapidly than you would ever believe’. The stones were then carried on boats to Britain and set up on Salisbury Plain, arranged exactly as they’d been in Ireland. All this happened, Geoffrey estimated, in about AD 475 (actually Stonehenge was completed some 3,000 years earlier). Later, not only Aurelius but also his brother Uther Pendragon were buried within the circle.

  Where did this extraordinary story come from? Mainly, no doubt, from Geoffrey’s notoriously fertile imagination. Yet it does include some genuine history, and possibly a now-forgotten belief about the stones. Aurelius Ambrosius was probably a real person, though a Romano-British commander rather than a ‘king’, and some of Stonehenge’s stones (the bluestones from the Preseli hills) were actually brought from far away, though from West Wales rather than Ireland. Astonishing engineering skills, equal to Merlin’s, were indeed also needed to set up the original circle. It’s also conceivable that water poured over the stones really was once believed to have healing powers.

  Geoffrey’s ‘historical novel’ – which also introduced the tale of Arthur’s conception at Tintagel – was hugely popular and immensely influential. It remained the generally accepted account of Stonehenge’s origins for over 500 years, with the variant that Merlin transported the stones from Ireland by magic (rather than, as Geoffrey says, using boats and his practical engineering skills).

  Not until the early 17th ce
ntury did alternative theories begin to appear. Scholars found it impossible to believe that the great monument could really have been built by ‘Ancient Britons’: Inigo Jones called them ‘savage and barbarous people … who squatted in caves, tents and hovels’, and insisted instead that Stonehenge was Roman. Vikings, Phoenicians and (until it was proved that Stonehenge is older than Mycenae) Mycenaeans from Classical Greece were all in turn firmly identified as the real builders of the circle.

  The 17th-century John Aubrey was much nearer the mark. He agreed that the ordinary Ancient Britons were only ‘two or three degrees less savage than the Americans’ – meaning what he would have called ‘Red Indians’ – but believed they also had a learned priesthood called the Druids. So for Aubrey, and in the 18th century for the influential researcher William Stukeley, Stonehenge became a Druid Temple. Though in reality the Druids flourished some 2,000 years after the circle was abandoned and had nothing to do with building it, they were at least British, and Aubrey’s theory established the basis for research on Stonehenge that continues to this day. Any summary of it, to quote the title of Julian Richards’s English Heritage publication, is only ‘the story so far’.

  In the face of these scholarly, though mistaken, theories, folklore took a back seat at Stonehenge. The exception was the legend that the stones couldn’t be counted, which a series of celebrity stone-counters set out to disprove. On the run from Oliver Cromwell, the future Charles II found time to attempt the task in 1651; the diarist John Evelyn (having failed to break off a piece of monolith with a hammer) counted 95 stones in 1654; in the 1680s the matter-of-fact Puritan traveller Celia Fiennes, who had ‘told [counted] them often’, made their number 91. In the 18th century Daniel Defoe estimated 72 and William Stukeley 140 – both much farther off the now accepted total of 93 stones and fragments than their 17th-century predecessors.

  Thus, Stukeley proclaimed, ‘the magical spell is broke, which so long perplexed the vulgar’. Yet for many the spell of Stonehenge, and perhaps of its dancing hare, is not and never will be broken.

  For more about the folklore of stone circles, see below.

  ‘The Hand Under the Stone’ – Petrified Sinners

  Stone circles – like those which inspired this story – are the most perennially fascinating of prehistoric monuments. Though they exist in other parts of Europe and beyond, they’re most numerous and most spectacular in the British Isles and Brittany. British circles date from between the middle Neolithic (New Stone Age) period, about 3300–2900 BC, and the early to middle Bronze Age, about 2200–1000 BC.

  New discoveries about them are continually emerging, but it’s now broadly believed that the fashion for stone circles began in the north and moved southwards. Thus, the circles on Orkney and the Hebrides are among the oldest in Britain, and the earliest in England are the circles of Cumbria, which Monny in the story knew best – including CASTLERIGG; remote but well-preserved Swinside; and Long Meg and Her Daughters. There’s another grouping in the Derbyshire Peak District, including ARBOW LOW and the NINE LADIES (which Monny and her Aunty Ro visited). Midlands circles include MITCHELL’S FOLD in Shropshire and Oxfordshire’s ROLLRIGHT STONES. And, more numerous than in any other English region, the circles of the South West include the vast and complex monuments at STANTON DREW in Somerset and, in Wiltshire, AVEBURY and, most famous of all, STONEHENGE.

  ‘In the region of Oxfordshire there are great stones arranged as if by the hand of man. But at what time, or by what people, or for what memorial or significance this was done is not known.’ This anonymous 14th-century description of the Rollright Stones is quite exceptionally non-committal, resisting the compulsion to ‘explain’ such monuments which gripped most later observers. Often the interpretations mirror the preoccupations of the periods they belong to. Classically educated 17th- and 18th-century antiquarians such as John Aubrey and William Stukeley, having read Roman accounts of Druids, believed that stone circles were built as ‘Druid Temples’. (This still-persisting notion is quite wrong, since the Druids flourished at least 1,000 years after the last circle was abandoned.) More recently, circles have been ‘revealed’ as the focus of mysterious ‘ley lines’ or landing places for aliens; as masterpieces of geometrical expertise, built using a measurement called the ‘megalithic yard’; or (much more credibly, since some major circles are aligned to midsummer and midwinter sunrise) as sophisticated astronomical observatories. Today, again reflecting the preoccupations of the age, some suggest that stone circles were centres of prehistoric trading and commerce.

  Folklore offered other explanations, among the most common being that the circles were people magically turned into stone, usually as a punishment for some sin. The most frequent offence was ‘profaning the Sabbath’ by dancing: the Nine Ladies, the NINE STONES (Dorset), the Merry Maidens (Cornwall), Long Meg and Her Daughters and many other circles were all women (it was generally women) petrified for offending in this way. At the complex monument of Stanton Drew, an entire wedding party was transformed. According to the most complete version of the story, a human fiddler refused to play beyond midnight on a Saturday, but the Devil himself took over, and the wedding party danced on into the Sabbath and its doom. Sometimes individual stones within or outside the circle have distinctive characters. At Stanton Drew they’re the bride, groom, drunken parson and musicians, and at Long Meg and Her Daughters, where the outlier is much bigger than the rest of the stones and of a different material, it’s Long Meg herself.

  Other Sabbath-breaking crimes which merited petrification included the Cornish game of ‘hurling’, whose players became THE HURLERS, and even the seemingly innocent children’s game of fivestones, whose Sunday players (according to one version) became the Nine Stones, also endearingly known locally as ‘Lady Williams and Her Little Dog Fido’.

  Since most of these stories aren’t recorded until Elizabethan times, some folklorists link them to a post-Reformation Protestant horror of Sabbath-breaking. But they could well be much older than that. Medieval clergy also strongly discouraged dancing on Sundays and holy days, and the earliest ‘cursed dancers’ legend originates from 11th-century Germany. Revellers who persisted (after due warning) in dancing in a churchyard beyond midnight on Christmas Eve were supernaturally compelled to dance there for a year without stopping. When most of them died of exhaustion, a ring of stones was set up to mark their graves.

  Sabbath-breaking wasn’t the only legendary reason for being turned to stone. It isn’t now remembered what crime caused a band of ‘carles’ (‘churls’ or peasants) to be petrified into Castlerigg stone circle (alias ‘the Carles’). But at Mitchell’s Fold the transformed offender was a witch, who maliciously milked dry a fairy cow sent to succour people during a famine. The other stones in the circle were erected ‘to keep her in’. At the Rollright Stones, a complex site whose three separate elements developed over the course of more than 2,000 years, it was a patriotic witch who did the transforming: meeting a king marching with his army to conquer England, she turned him into the King Stone; his army became the King’s Men stone circle; and his conspiring courtiers the Whispering Knights chambered tomb. And Celia Fiennes, who visited Long Meg and Her Daughters in 1698, gave another reason than the usual dancing for their punishment: the Daughters (or Sisters), she says darkly, were rumoured to have been transformed for ‘soliciting Great Mag to an unlawfull love’.

  A no-nonsense Puritan, Celia had scant regard for legends. She didn’t think much of the stone circle, which she thought had really been erected simply to warn travellers that the surrounding area was marshy. As for the tale that the stones couldn’t be counted, that was pure nonsense: there were obviously not more than 30. In fact there are 69. Others took the widespread taboo against trying to count the stones in a circle more seriously. At Castlerigg and Swinside, the Hurlers and Stanton Drew, it was believed to be impossible to count the stones so as to get the same result twice, and at Stanton Drew an 18th-century investigator was warned that he might be �
��struck dead on the spot’ if he tried to sketch them. Stonehenge, the Hurlers, the Rollright Stones and the ‘Countless Stones’ of LITTLE KIT’S COTY HOUSE (the fragments of a chambered tomb rather than a stone circle) all share the tale of a baker who tried to count the stones by putting a penny loaf on each, and then calculating how many of a numbered batch he had left. But either the Devil gobbled up the loaves as they were placed, or the baker fell dead before he could announce the result. At Long Meg and her Daughters, as so often with this site, one legend’s different: if you can count the stones correctly twice over, and then put your ear to Long Meg, you’ll hear her whisper secrets. As Monny in the story did.

  If counting the stones was hazardous, trying to move or destroy them could be fatal. One labourer who did so at MAYBURGH HENGE in Cumbria went mad, and another hanged himself. When one of the Rollright Stones was used to bridge a stream, it took 24 horses to shift it and a man was killed in the process. Every night it flipped itself back onto the stream bank, crops failed and when eventually the unlucky stone was replaced, just one horse was sufficient to haul it. At Avebury (an immensely impressive site but oddly lacking in folklore) deliberate burial or breaking up of the great stones was done at intervals from the 14th century into at least the 18th, without recorded mishap. But in 1938 the body of a 14th-century barber-surgeon (identified and dated by coins and instruments in his purse) was discovered under a fallen stone. It was understandably concluded that he’d been crushed when undermining the stone. Recent reexamination of the body suggests that he was already dead when he was buried there. But who or what killed him?