North Yorkshire Folk Tales

by Ingrid Barton

  Over the south door of York Minster there is a series of canopied arches in the centre of which, not too long ago, the statue of a fiddler once stood. It was put there by Archbishop Lancelot Blackburne to celebrate a stolen fiddle.

  Lancelot was born in the middle of the seventeenth century and grew up in the wild and wicked times of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. As a second son, he was destined for the Church and was sent to Cambridge to study theology.

  Life as a student in those days was – believe it or not – rather more exuberant and violent than it is now. Betting, drinking matches, horseracing, duelling, fighting, rioting and general laddishness were the pleasant pastimes of many of the richer students, despite their all being intended for holy orders. Lancelot took to this delightful life with gusto; he played the fiddle well and was a popular addition to many a raucous party. So enthusiastically did he embrace the riotous life that, before his first term was over, he found himself ‘gated’ (forced to be in by 7 p.m.) for missing church.

  Such a restriction was to Lancelot like a red rag to a bull. Already unhappy with the boredom of the university’s teaching he decided that he did not want to stay at Oxford any more. What use was education when there was a world to explore? One afternoon he walked out of his rooms intending to run away to London. He had already exhausted the allowance from his parents and was just considering how he would earn his bread when he passed his tutor’s open door. There on the table was a fine violin. Lancelot’s own fiddle was a poor cheap thing, fit only to play at drunken parties, but this was a different instrument altogether. It seemed to reach out to him begging to be taken. So he took it, hiding it in the voluminous folds of his cloak. It was this superior violin that provided him with his meal ticket every night, as he busked in inns on his journey to the metropolis.

  London in those days was many times smaller than it is now, but it was still large and bustling enough to daunt anyone arriving for the first time. Luckily for Lancelot he had been born and bred there, so he already knew many of its ways and secrets. Instead of going home to face the wrath of his father he survived by staying with friends and hanging around on the fringes of the court. There he managed to pick up small (usually shady) jobs from court officials. It was hard to make enough to live on though, and when he nearly died from the cold, he realised that he would have to do something more positive. He had always fancied going to sea, though he did not want to join the Navy, and so he got himself bound as an apprentice on a Newcastle collier, Fair Sally.

  It was not really a very good way to see the world as the collier just went up and down the east coast between London and Newcastle, but then one day something happened that changed his life. Fair Sally was captured by the privateer schooner Mack Broom. Its captain was no less a person than the Irish pirate, Redmond of the Red Hand, dreaded throughout at least several of the Seven Seas.

  Seeing in Lancelot a likely lad, Redmond persuaded him to join his crew and soon Lancelot was indeed seeing the world. Among other places, they visited the West Indies, newly developed for growing sugar cane, and coasted along its shores looking for rich French or Dutch ships to rob. They had a successful cruise and returned for a while to England where Lancelot, well dressed and wealthy now, swaggered around all his old haunts spending money.

  One day one of his court connections told him that the king would like to see him. Filled with curiosity he was brought into the royal presence. Years first of poverty and then of debauchery were beginning to tell on Charles by this time. His eyes were pouchy and bloodshot and his moustache obviously dyed. He was keen, however, to hear about Lancelot’s exploits. ‘Should have turned privateer myself,’ he said. ‘What things you must see! West Indies, eh? Tell me, is it true what they say about the women there …?’ But he was also interested in what Lancelot could tell him about the activities of the Dutch, with whom England was sporadically at war, for Charles was a shrewd ruler, despite his relaxed manner. He knew how to recognise and make use of clever people. Soon he had enlisted the young buccaneer as one of his spies to send him occasional reports of the activities of the Dutch and the French, who were becoming distressingly powerful.

  Lancelot returned to the sea and in a few years was captain of his own privateer, Black Broom, sweeping the seas from Cyprus to Cape Wrath in fine style and amassing a comfortable fortune.

  Being a pirate was a risky business, as Lancelot knew at first hand. Too many of his friends eventually ended up hanging in Execution Dock, while three tides flowed over them. He decided to retire early and enjoy his wealth in peace, so he changed his surname from Muggins to Blackburne (in memory of his ship), bought himself a gentleman’s estate and settled down with a wife.

  For an active man like Lancelot the charms of rural life were soon exhausted. He was still young and ambitious. Why could he not still achieve something in a more important sphere of life? The choice of employment for a gentleman was not wide in those days: politics was a dubious and expensive business; the army too dangerous; all that remained for a gentleman was the Church. Lancelot’s decision was already made for him. He would take up his old studies and become ordained.

  Having friends in high places is always a help in one’s career – especially at the end of the seventeenth century when influence or bribery was really the only way to get on. Lancelot employed both and soon the newly ordained churchman was shooting up the professional ladder.

  We are used to the idea of churchmen being badly paid. This was not so in the past when everyone had to pay tithes (a tenth of their income) to the Church. The local vicar was usually one of the richest men in a village. Being ordained provided as good an opportunity of getting rich as any other option.

  Rulers come and go. Charles died and was succeeded by his niece Mary and her husband, and then by her sister Anne. Lancelot managed to avoid being involved in the various political troubles of the times and maintained his connection with royalty. When Queen Anne died, he was made personal chaplain to George I. He got on well with the new German king, entertaining him with anecdotes and the sort of jokes his pirate friends had enjoyed. Though a new ages of politeness was about to dawn, Lancelot continued to talk with Restoration frankness. He once congratulated the new queen on being a sensible enough woman not to object to the king’s mistress. Indeed, it is said that he had even officiated at a secret (and bigamous) marriage between that very mistress and the king!

  Honours continued to roll in. He was made Bishop of Exeter and then Archbishop of York. The only higher position in the Church hierarchy was Archbishop of Canterbury, but Lancelot seems to have been contented with York. The fine Bishop’s Palace at Bishopthorpe was now his and he could relax and smoke and drink and gamble to his heart’s content with very little to worry him.

  First, however, he had an old debt to repay. Through all of his troubles and successes the violin that he had stolen from his tutor had accompanied him. He had played it for rich and poor, for pirates and prelates. Now was the time to return it to its owner, Revd Lawrence Leatherhead. He did not send it on its own; it arrived encased in a costly and beautifully made case that also contained a paper appointing Revd Leatherhead to the lucrative archdeaconry of Holderness. Lancelot celebrated his own elevation to the archbishopric by ordering a statue of himself holding the violin and having it placed above the south door of York Minster.

  Though he was now an archbishop, any development of holiness was not apparent. Indeed, in Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics his behaviour is described as ‘seldom of a standard to be expected of an archbishop’.

  It was Sunday in St Mary’s church in Nottingham. Lancelot had just finished confirming some new young members of the church. He turned to the local vicar who had been helping him officiate and exclaimed, ‘Thank God that’s over, go and get me a pipe and some tobacco – and where’s the ale?’

  The astonished youngsters were now treated to the improving sight of their archbishop being beaten out of the church by their own vicar with shouts o
f outraged respectability.

  Lancelot was unperturbed – he hated vicars anyway and refused to ordain any in his last ten years. He continued to be a terrible, but apparently beloved, archbishop for the next thirty years. ‘He gained more hearts than souls!’ it was said. He lived openly with his mistress as well as his wife and his illegitimate son. In York, it was even said that Dick Turpin was, for a while, his butler.

  Archbishop Lancelot Blackburne died at the ripe old age of eighty-four, disgracefully unrepentant to the end. He was the last of a breed of hard-drinking worldly churchmen and a legend in his own lifetime. His fiddler statue was eventually removed as ‘unsuitable’ for a minster, but rumour has it that affectionate fans placed it in the undercroft. I have not looked, but perhaps (if it really exists) you will find it there …

  I do not want to ruin the income of those who make their living from York’s famous Ghost Walks, but the following are two particularly good stories you might hear if you went on one. They are brief but unlike many told in the past, they have enough of the ring of truth about them to be believed even by today’s sceptical folk.

  THE TREASURER’S HOUSE GHOSTS

  Harry Martindale was eighteen in 1953, working as an apprentice plumber. One day he was told to go to the Treasurer’s House near York Minster to do some work on the central heating. This house was originally the home of the minster’s treasurers but it had been a private house since the last treasurer, William Cliffe, lost his post (and the treasure) at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1546. The building had been extensively and elegantly remodelled in the seventeenth century by subsequent owners, but heating was never a high priority, and although its last owner handed it over to the National Trust in 1930, there was little money during the Second World War to update it.

  Harry had been told to do some work in one of the cellars, which was about eighteen feet square with an arched ceiling and a ramp on one side. There was a sort of trench about eighteen inches deep in the centre and what Harry did not know then was that this was an archaeological excavation revealing the Roman road that lay below the floor.

  Because he had to knock a hole through the ceiling for some pipework, Harry asked the curator if he could borrow a ladder and was grudgingly given an old rickety one with several rungs missing. He started work on the ceiling at the edge of the wall.

  Just before lunchtime he heard what sounded like music – no, not music, rather one long note like a trumpet. This seemed strange because the cellar was a long way from anywhere music might be being played. The noise grew louder and louder, and suddenly he realised that it was coming from the wall on which the ladder was leaning. He was standing on the third rung and a movement below him made him glance down; there, just in line with his waist on the right-hand side he saw the top of a helmet come out of the wall.

  In alarm Harry stepped back and fell from the ladder, landing heavily on his behind. Uninjured but terrified he scrambled into the corner of the cellar. Whatever it was that had come out of the wall was between him and the door!

  It was a Roman soldier. He was clearly visible down to the knees, but it was only when he reached the excavation trench that the rest of his legs and his sandals came into view. He walked across the cellar at a slight angle to Harry. As his body cleared the wall, he was followed, even more alarmingly, by a large horse and rider.

  ‘Now I could see them exactly as I can see you now. They weren’t no wisp of smoke, they weren’t whirly, you know, the atmosphere didn’t change, they were human beings as came out of the wall except they were dressed as Roman soldiers. Because I could see that, I thought all they had to do was just look to where I was and I’d had it. This is fear, I mean, fear, it’s dreadful. I never went through as much fear in the police force in fifty years as what I did in that cellar.’ (Harry’s actual words.)

  Later, it struck Harry how small these men were but at the time he could only stare in frozen amazement. They all wore leather on top – perhaps leather shirts – and what he described as ‘a green material skirt with strips of leather going round’. Their helmets fastened under the chin and they had beards. On the right side they wore short swords ‘like an oversized dagger’ and one of them carried a large shield with a round boss in the middle (later recognised as an Anglian shield).

  As they crossed the cellar and disappeared through the opposite wall, Harry could hear their movements and the sound of the horse. There was mumbling but no speech that he could distinguish. Greatly to his relief not one of them looked in his direction.

  ‘I don’t know what I would have done if they had’ve done!’ he said later.

  When the last one had gone through and he could not hear or see anything else, Harry made his escape out of the cellar. He sat shakily on the steps for some time before the old curator came along. The moment he saw Harry he said, ‘By the look of you, you’ve seen the Roman soldiers!’

  When Harry finally told his tale, better-educated folk sneered. ‘Everyone knows that Roman soldiers had rectangular shields! Why were they not wearing loricas? Where were their sarcinas?’ Harry quickly learnt to keep his mouth shut.

  Then in the 1980s more began to be known about Roman soldiers of the later Empire. It seems that when the Empire began to decline and it became more difficult to get enough soldiers to protect its huge borders, small more-lightly armed bands of local men were organised. There were no longer the numbers to deploy the traditional Roman shield successfully. These British remnants of the once mighty Empire had round shields and lived off the land. Suddenly it seemed possible that what Harry had seen was one of these war bands – perhaps from the time after the withdrawal of official Roman troops – returning from some skirmish.

  THE DEATH PACT

  In the early years of our glorious Queen Victoria’s reign, I was on a visit to York Minster. I was accompanied by a numerous party, amongst whom were a gentleman and his two daughters. I was with the eldest of these ladies, exploring the curiosities of the building at some distance from the rest of our companions, when, on turning from the monument to which our attention had been directed, we observed an officer in a naval uniform advancing towards us. It was rather an unusual circumstance to encounter a person dressed thus in a place so far distant from the sea. I was on the point of making some trivial observation on the subject to my companion, when, turning my eyes towards her I saw a deathly pallor spread over her face. Surely some powerful and contending emotions had suddenly been excited by the presence of the stranger.

  As the officer drew nearer, and his figure and features gradually became more distinctly visible through the evening gloom and the dim religious light of the cathedral, the lady’s distress increased: she leant heavily upon my arm appearing painfully afflicted. Shocked at the change I had witnessed, but wholly ignorant of the cause and supposing her to be suffering from some violent and sudden indisposition, I called to entreat the assistance of her sister. The figure in the naval uniform was now immediately before us, and the eyes of the lady fixed upon him with a gaze of silent surprise and a painful intensity of feeling. Her half-opened lips were colourless and she drew her breath heavily as though from a full and overburdened heart. The form was close upon us (it approached her side), then it paused but for an instant. As quick as thought, a low and scarcely audible voice whispered in her ear, ‘There is a future state,’ and the figure moved onward, towards the door of the minster.

  The father of the lady arrived to help his daughter, and I, consigning her to his protection, hastened in pursuit of the mysterious visitor. No sound of retreating footsteps was to be heard on the echoing pavements of the cathedral and though I quickly left the building and searched on every side, no man in naval uniform was to be seen among flocks of the summer visitors who thronged the streets.

  Baffled in my attempt find the mysterious cause of such distress, I returned in some concern to my friends. The lady was weeping on the shoulder of her father but she avoided every inquiry about the nature of her illness.r />
  ‘It was slight; it was transient; it would immediately be over.’ She entreated the party to continue their examination of the building, and to leave her again in my protection. The request was granted. No sooner had she thus possessed herself of an opportunity to speak in private than she implored me, with a quick and agitated voice, to conceal for a little while the occurrence of which I had been a witness.‘We shall never be believed. Besides, it is only right that my poor dear father should gradually be prepared for the misery that he is destined to undergo. I have seen the spirit, and I have heard the voice of a brother, who exists no longer; he has perished at sea. We had agreed that the one who died the first should reappear to the survivor, if it were possible, to clear up or to confirm the religious doubts which existed in both our minds.’

  In due time her fears were realised: the brother was indeed no more. His death had happened on the very day and hour in which his form was seen by his sister and myself, in the north aisle of York Minster.

  NOTES

  Something to His Advantage

  The story exists in several versions, he most famous being the Pedlar of Swaffham. Similar legends can be found throughout Europe and the Middle East. The earliest version is one of the poems of the Mathanawi titled ‘In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad’, by thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. This poem was turned into a story in the tale from The One Thousand and One Nights: The man who became rich through a dream.

  The provenance of the writing on the pot varies; in some versions it is an old gypsy who translates gypsy writing, in others a Quaker.