North Yorkshire Folk Tales

by Ingrid Barton

  ‘Who will free us from these curses?’ people ask each other. ‘Our young folk seem doomed!’ They pray and they ring the church bells to drive off evil, but nothing stops the ravages of the two spirits. The little granddaughter falls ill. Her grandfather calls a meeting of villagers.

  ‘There is only one person who can help us,’ he says. ‘We have tried the holy ways, now we must try the unholy ones! Let us go and see the Spaewife of Fylingdales!’

  The Spaewife is a witch, white, possibly, but many people fear her strange appearance and cryptic utterances. It is decided that the village elders will approach her. They take a suitable gift and cross the moor to her lonely hut.

  After they have explained their problem, her sharp black eyes regard them silently from under her thick white hair. Then she says ‘Tane to tither!’ and shuts her door on them. Not another word do they get out of her.

  The villagers discuss the possible meanings of these three words for days. Some think one thing and some another but no one agrees until the old grandfather suddenly understands. ‘We should make t’ane fight t’ither!’

  Now everyone can see it. Only a strong spirit like Gytha’s can defeat the gytrash.

  ‘But how do we get them to fight? Only the Spaewife knows anything about these creatures.’ Back to see her they went.

  The Spaewife is pleased that they have solved her riddle. She decides to help them further. ‘Gytrashes are corpse-eaters, grave-haunters. Give gytrash a burial, he’ll be there. Not churchyard, though. Killing Pits. An unbaptised bairn.’

  The villagers look at each other in horror; they have no dead babies in the village and if they did, none would be unbaptised, but they dare not argue.

  ‘What of Gytha?’ asks the grandfather.

  ‘The pale maid? She’s gytrash’s sworn enemy. Lure her with honey, fix her with wheat and salt. Then you’ll see her come.’

  They go home to lay their plans. As they have no real dead baby they make a corn-mell baby (a doll made from the last wheat sheaf at harvest), wrap it in a shawl and lay it in a little white coffin. The village sexton digs a deep grave at the Killing Pits (lumps and bumps of an ancient village a little way outside Goathland).

  When the anniversary of the death of Gytha and Julian comes around again the villagers take honey and smear it here and there along the path from the castle to the Killing Pits. They strew grains of wheat and salt along the way as well. Then they wait for evening.

  There is a solemn procession walking along the track to the Killing Pits. Hymns are being sung and a small white coffin is carried shoulder high. In its secret lair beneath the castle, the gytrash lifts its horrible head.

  The procession reaches the grave and lowers the coffin into it. Prayers are said, though the ground is not consecrated, then the sexton fills in the hole. The mourners melt away, not back to the village but into hiding places in thickets and bushes round about. They wait.

  Night closes down. The waning moon gives little light. Owls begin to hoot. A cold wind streams down from Julian Park towards the villagers and with it the distant gleam of flickering flames: the gytrash! Now its fiery eyes light up the path, the flames of its horns stream back over its shoulders. It keeps turning its head searching for the grave. It catches sight of the freshly turned earth and springs onto it. It begins to dig with hooves and horns. It is strong and fast. The waiting people begin to hold their breath. What if it realises it has been tricked before Gytha comes? They can hear its hooves grating on the little coffin. The church bells strike midnight.

  But no! Another light is drifting down the road. The emaciated form of Gytha, enveloped in a greenish glow, floats past them towards the grave. The moment she sees the gytrash her blue eyes blaze and her skull-like face contorts as, no longer weeping, she screams her fury. In her hand is her spindle, its deadly thread unspooling as she moves. With the speed of a whip, it wraps itself around the gytrash, binding it to the grave as a spider binds a fly. The gytrash howls and struggles. Its powerful limbs are entangled in the thread; it cannot escape. The sides of the grave begin to cave in upon it. The pile of earth it has dug out slides and topples down, drowning its howls and burying it completely. The ground shakes for a while as the gytrash fights its fate. At last, all is still.

  The people of Goathland breathe again and come out of their hiding places. Gytha stands on the new grave. She looks back once towards her former friends and neighbours, and then, throwing her spindle far out over the moor she slowly rises into the air and disappears into the night.

  The villagers never see either of them again.

  5

  HOBS AND SUCH

  ON HOBS

  Western Moors

  A list of all the hobs (or hobmen, or hobthrushes, as they are sometimes called) that live in Yorkshire would be a long one. Mulgrave Wood, Runswick Bay, Castleton, Obthrush Roque (Hobthrush Rock!) all had a hob and Pickering was positively infested with them; there was the Leaholme Hob, Hob o’Hasly Bank, t’Hob o’ Brakken Howe, the Scugdale Hob and no doubt many more just called t’Hob.

  But what are hobs? The study of hob-lore is esoteric and yet curiously satisfying as they are cheery little creatures with little malice in them – except, like us, when unappreciated. They are related to hobbits – though they tend to dismiss these as ‘Nowt but posh southerners’. They are small, brown, active and, usually, naked (in the Yorkshire climate this implies a considerable degree of toughness).

  Like all hob-folk they are hole dwellers, though a few (like the Runswick Bay hob) live in caves. However, whatever hole they live in, they nearly all work in nearby farms, for they enjoy being useful and like the company of humans, with whom they have a pleasantly symbiotic relationship. Hobs excel in farm and domestic work, requiring human payment in the form of a dish of cream or some other food. Money means nothing to them, although they often make the farmer for whom they work rich. Though they themselves are seldom seen and many jobs are done, seemingly at night, any farm where they live is a lucky one where everything always goes well.

  It appears that hobs are immortal; though there have not been any reliable studies on this, possibly because they outlive those who study them. They are a sub-branch of the Fair Folk by whom they are regarded as very primitive, principally because of their nakedness (‘So Palaeolithic!’). A hob’s greatest ambition is to acquire clothes, lovely colourful clothes. Only when he – and hobs all seem to be ‘he’ unless, like dwarves, the sexes are indistinguishable, which seems unlikely when one considers their nakedness – only when he has got such clothes will he be regarded as having made it to the big time. Then he will no longer have to hear the scornful fairy cry of ‘Here comes the grubby old hob with never a stitch to cover his ****’. He will instead become a hob aristocrat and never have to work again but spend eternity propping up the bar in fairy hills or footing it featly at fairy balls with his mates.

  It was this desire to acquire bright clothes that, far back in the mists of antiquity, must have inspired the first hob to venture on a relationship with humans. No doubt there were hobs working on Greek and Roman farms, hoping perhaps, to gain a tiny chiton or embroidered tunic. As both nations made slaves do all their work it would have been slaves who benefitted most from hob assistance. No doubt it was they who began to make offerings of food to these useful little household gods. The desired clothes, however, were not so quickly forthcoming and so other strategies had to be developed over the centuries.

  Humans are pretty stupid, according to hobs, but if you wait long enough they will eventually get the message. Hobs themselves are extremely patient and quite willing to wait hundreds of years for a result. One of them told me that the secret of success is for the hob to wait until there is a particularly sympathetic human, often a child, living on the farm and then to show himself ‘accidentally on purpose’. The person is so shocked at the wretched nakedness of the hob that he or she goes away and makes some clothes for him. When the hob finds them the next night, he pulls them on wit
h a merry whoop and disappears never to be seen (by the donor) again. I pointed out that the kind giver was rather badly repaid for his or her kindness, but I was told, hey, they had got all that work for centuries for the price of an evening bowl of cream, so what was their problem?

  Very occasionally, the human gift of clothes will fail to meet hob standards. They are particularly insulted if given tiny copies of peasant smocks made of hemp. That will lose you your hob very quickly. At Sturfitt Hall near Reeth and Close House in Skipton-in-Craven the hobs left in a huff to find less class-ridden employment, crying:

  Gin hob mun ha’e nowt but a hardin hamp

  (If a hob has no more than a hempen smock)

  He’ll come nae more to berry or stamp!

  He’ll come no more to mow or thresh

  The day of the hob seems, alas, to be almost over. The advent of machinery on farms has rendered most hobs jobless. Has it put an end to their hope of ever getting clothes? Although they have always been country dwellers, it seems possible that they, like foxes, will have no choice but to move into towns. I can foresee the day when some harassed cleaner will arrive early at the office block she (or he) cleans to find the hoovering done, the computer keys dusted, and the sinks and urinals in the lavatories polished. Let us hope that he (or she) will feel grateful enough to leave a suitable present for the unseen helper, for hobs are sensitive to slights of that sort and have been known to punish the ungrateful – as can be seen in the following tale …

  THE FARNDALE HOB

  Jonathan Gray was a wealthy farmer who lived in Farndale, near Kirby Moorside. His grandfather had had the good fortune to gain the friendship – and free labour – of a hob. This grandfather had been farming for many years before making the hob’s acquaintance and had a particularly fine farm servant called Ralph who could shear or thresh or mow better than anyone else in the area.

  One cold winter’s day Ralph was caught in a sudden blizzard and frozen to death as he crossed the moor. Everyone in the dale was very sad and said that the farmer had lost the best thing on his farm.

  Not long after Ralph’s funeral, the farmer was awoken in the middle of the night by a thumping noise that seemed to come from the barn. He jumped out of bed wondering what on earth it could be; downstairs he met some of his servants who had also been woken by the noise.

  ‘What do you think it is? Is it ghosts?’ whispered one of the young farm lads who slept in an attic over the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t be daft, lad,’ said the farmer, but he was worried. ‘It sounds like someone’s threshing!’ They all listened in terrified silence. Soon the unmistakeable crack of a wooden flail on the stone floor of the barn was clearly recognised by everyone.

  ‘But who’d thresh at night?’ quavered the farmer’s wife, gripping his arm. ‘Oh my goodness, perhaps it’s our Ralph come back from the dead?’

  The farmer saw panic spreading. ‘Nonsense,’ he said firmly, ‘there’s no such thing as ghosts. Get off to bed, everyone, it’ll be one of the hands trying to get into my good books. Get to bed, I say!’

  In the morning he and his wife, who would not let him go alone, went down early to the barn. Something had certainly happened to the wheat stored there. The pile of sheaves heaped at one end of the barn had halved, while at the other end there were two new piles, one of shining brown wheat grains and the other, much larger, of all the husks and straw that had been threshed off, waiting to be turned into chaff for animal feed.

  ‘That’s never a right man’s work,’ gasped the farmer’s wife. ‘It’d tek ten men to do that much in a night. Even our Ralph couldn’t have done it!’ The farmer ran his fingers through the wheat and rubbed a few grains between his palms.

  ‘Wheat seems right enough, though.’

  ‘Do you think it’s Ralph’s ghost?’

  ‘Nay lass, Ralph’s in Heaven like the Good Book says – dinna you mind the parson? This is summat else. I reckon we’ve got us a hob!’

  And so it proved. The hob continued to work. Come hay-time he mowed half a field a night and carted it home too; at shearing he sheared as many sheep in one night as three farmhands could do in two days. At harvest he reaped and loaded a whole wagon by himself. The other farm labourers might have complained at losing paid work, but as the farmer could now afford to rent more land to expand the farm, they were all still employed. The whole place flourished.

  The farmer was a wise man and knew better than to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

  ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire!’ he said to his wife, so every evening she put out a big jug of cream for the hob, and every morning she found it empty (and washed and neatly turned upside-down on the draining board).

  Well, years went by and the hob went on working. The farm remained prosperous, the garden flourished and the workers always seemed lucky and cheerful. When the old man died, he passed the farm on to his son who continued to value the hob and never forgot his jug of cream. When the time came, he, in his turn, passed the farm on to his son Jonathan and his wife Margery. In his will, he reminded them never to forget to whom they owed the farm’s prosperity.

  Unfortunately, after a few years Margery fell ill and died when the children were still quite small. As was the custom in those days, Jonathan soon married again in order to provide his children with someone to look after them. The new wife seemed a pleasant enough woman, never unkind to the children, but she had come from a hill farm where strict economy was essential for survival. She was used to keeping a tight hand on the purse strings. When Jonathan told her about the hob’s cream she could hardly believe her ears. A whole jug of cream that might have been made into butter, wasted! She did not want to offend her new husband so she grudgingly put out the cream every night, but it pained her careful mind sorely.

  One evening it was too much for her. At the market that day she had seen how expensive butter had become and that she could have made a handsome profit if only she had had more of it to sell. That night she put out a jug of whey (the thin watery stuff left over from butter making, normally given to the pigs).

  The very next day all luck left the place; the tireless hob stopped working. There was no more help with the shearing or mowing or threshing. Worse still, lots of things that had gone well before began to go badly. The hob who had worked so hard for the farm’s prosperity now began to work for its destruction. The butter would not come, no matter how long the dairymaids churned; the wife’s nicely fattened hens were carried off by a fox; the mould on the cheese was a thick blue fur so that no one would buy it; the ale brewed and the bread baked were all spoiled by some strange unpleasant yeast.

  Now you might think that if the farmer’s wife had started to put out the cream again the hob might have come around. But not she! On the contrary, she was so angry and upset at what was happening that she swore by the Bible that the hob would never have another mouthful of cream from her.

  ‘He’s nobbut an evil boggart!’ she declared to her alarmed husband. ‘Don’t you try to change my mind. I’ve sworn on the Bible!’

  No one likes being called a boggart.

  ‘I’ll boggart them!’ thought the hob and he began to act like one.

  Soon the house was almost unbearable to live in. No one could sleep for the banging of kettles, the clashing of pewter plates, the crashing of pottery and the clanging of fire irons. The house echoed every night with groans, howls, rude noises, thumps, rattles. People were tripped up; beds were lifted and then dropped with a bone-shaking crash; candles were blown out; people were pinched black and blue. It was not long before no farmhand would stay anywhere near the farmhouse.

  Jonathan and his wife endured this for a few months, but the farm was going to pieces; they were both at the end of their tether. Nearly all the money made by Jonathan’s father and grandfather had gone. They were forced to give up the tenancy their family had held for so many generations and take another on a much smaller farm.

  ‘It will be harder work for us, but at l
east we’ll be free of that hob!’ said Jonathan.

  The family packed up, with many tears from the children, very unhappy about leaving their home. The old carthorse was put between the shafts of their last remaining cart, which was piled high with all the furniture that remained after the family had paid off its immediate creditors.

  They still owed the landlord part of the year’s rent, but there was no way they could pay it so they left the farm late one night, doing a ‘moonlight flit’ to avoid being seen by the landlord’s bailiff.

  Jonathan looked back at the place where his family had been so happy.

  ‘Enjoy yourself!’ he shouted to the hob. ‘Make someone else’s life a misery, why don’t you!’ Then he turned away and shook the reins.

  At the bend in the road, they met one of Jonathan’s neighbours who had been out late with his dog, shooting rabbits.

  ‘Hey Jonathan!’ he said. ‘What are you all doing at this time of night?’

  Before Jonathan could reply, from the top of the furniture piled on the back of the cart, came a strange gravelly voice:

  ‘We’re flittin’!’ it said, gleefully.

  ON FAIRIES

  One day, when I was about twelve, one of my pencils began to walk across the floor. I did not believe it at first. I got out of bed and went over to it. It was definitely my pencil – I could even see the toothmarks on it where I had chewed the end, ‘Wow!’ I thought, ‘So magic really does exist!’

  I bent down to get a better look; a little frightened but wondering what it would do next. Then, as though someone had flicked a switch the vision of the pencil disappeared and was replaced with that of a large, crawling hawkmoth caterpillar (I had been raising them). It was not just a matter of my imagining the pencil: my eyes had actually seen it. Brains interpret the information the eyes send them as best they can, according to what the owner knows about and what is expected.