by Peter Hill
Wash, and prepare a plaster of green ointment from chemist. Lay the dust of a puffball about the thickness of a sixpence or shilling. Rub the dust into the ointment, and put the plaster over the sore for nine days. Then take off and wash. Apply proper salves to complete the cure.
Gypsies visiting the county were seen to have a predilection for a certain animal that many ordinary folk would have found distasteful, yet it certainly had its uses. In 1846, a former gravedigger of Castor reported:
...they were fond of hedgehog both for food and medicine. The roasted flesh was always described as delicious. The fat was regarded as a valuable specific for rheumatism.
Perhaps we might also add frivolity and merriment, with the use of disdain and contempt, as a way of dealing with disease. The following little ditty comes from the Oundle carpenter and workhouse overseer John Clifton, who recorded it in his diary during a particularly virulent outbreak of the contagious, disfiguring disease smallpox. The diary makes fascinating reading and vividly portrays eighteenth-century life in the area:
Poll Muckason Joins us tonight, she’ll Tip us a Jorum of Diddle
Small Pox is our Delight, and we’ll foot it away to the Fiddle!
Fol lol de rol, lor rol lol lol!
And the Small Pox we have got,
Not one shall appear on our Faces,
Forty Five Sir, we thinks a Good lot,
And they shall all come out in our A – – – s! Fol lol lol!
Spring water was widely used for healing or curing, as well as for drinking and for ritual purposes such as baptism. The main kind of water used was chalybeate – impregnated with iron salts – which gave it a reddish colour and ferric taste. This was used internally as a tonic and restorative, which was said to be particularly good for anaemia, and applied externally to treat ailments such as rheumatism and afflictions of the eyes. Though it was used whenever it was needed, there were certain occasions – such as on a saint’s day, at sunrise or at noon – when it was considered to be extra powerful. For instance, 1 May was the day to visit the Kingthorn spring at Green’s Norton.
Powerful healing water could be obtained from many wells all round the county. In Robinson’s Grounds, among the hills and hollows of Elkington, the water was said to be ‘very effective especially for the eyes’. St Loys Well at Weedon Lois was stated to be ‘the best in the west of the county’ and it was said that ‘even the blind and leprous went there and were infallibly cured’. Guilsborough had a petrifying spring near the Grange which was ‘good for several diseases’ and Nether Heyford had several medicinal springs including Holy Well. It was also possible that the water could prolong life, as at Maidford, where one woman, Elizabeth Smith, lived until she was 122 years old!
At Broughton, hidden among the trees of Under Hill Woods and close to Pytchley Brook, is another famed spring for curing eye complaints. Children knew if their eyes were sore and were bathed there, they would be better. It had always been used but was rediscovered in the eighteenth century by a woman staying at the rectory. For many years, she had suffered from sore eyes but had been unable to alleviate the problem until she applied the spring’s water and obtained a complete cure. In gratitude, she had a monument erected – a protective stone archway covering the spring. A similar arch-covered spring can be seen in a spinney at Boughton near Northampton.
When spas started to become fashionable again in the seventeenth century, the county proved a magnet for health seekers. Wellingborough was especially popular after a visit by Charles I and there were thirty-five wells recorded there in 1830, including Hemmingwell, Whytewell, Hartwell, Red Well and Hollywell. The water was also used for mineral waters and in a very popular stout made by one of the town’s brewers, Dulley & Woolston.
At Kings Sutton, two springs were particularly efficacious, attracting visitors from far and wide. One of these, St Rumbold’s Well, was advertised in 1668 as being beneficial for disorders of the internal organs, nerves, muscles and even the brain. Another noted spa was in the parish of Kingscliffe; it had been widely used since around 1670 after being ‘publickly recommended’ by a physician, Dr Thomas Browne, who lived in the village. In his unpublished 1829 history of the village and its environs, Revd Henry Key Bonney, rector of the parish and later an archdeacon, described the quality and content of the water:
It both smells and tastes of iron. It will deposit a white sediment with oil of tartar, and with galls it precipitates a purple sediment, but turns of an opake red with logwood, and of a deep green with syrups of violets ... it has been used with great success in disorders from obstructions, and in eruptions of the skin; it has also cured several lame persons.
Today the spring can still be found, covered with foliage despite being cleared and relined in the 1980s and with its walls inscribed with nineteenth-century graffiti, lying in isolation in a field some distance from the village. The water was used both externally and internally and children would sometimes be asked to run across the fields with kettles and fetch home some of its water for making tea. One girl growing up in Victorian times described it as pinkish in colour and salty in taste!
It was not just spring water that was believed to be effective. If you visited Marston St Lawrence on Holy Thursday during the nineteenth century and it was raining, you would see the villagers performing an annual ritual of going around the streets and fields ‘in all directions’ to collect drops of rain as it fell. This day was seen as particularly auspicious and it was commonly believed that water collected at that time could cure all kinds of eye complaints.
Children at play
Children had a vast array of games to play, chasing, hiding, using a ball, rope, top or anything else they could get their hands on. Church towers and spires seem to have had a special attraction for boys in the county. On at least two occasions, the spire of the church of St Peter at Oundle was climbed by schoolboys, using the crockets which are spaced several feet apart. It is recorded that the reward for those who successfully completed such a daring, unsanctioned feat was a caning from the headmaster. At Geddington, children delighted in taking aim at the church steeple with their catapults; at one time, the tail of the weathercock on the tower was missing for many years as a result of one overenthusiastic barrage. At Boughton, a favourite pastime was to throw stones over the church tower without striking the building.
Children enjoyed making use of what nature provided around them. They created ‘fairy gardens’ in local fields by arranging stones in a set pattern and placing wild flowers and leaves inside the walls. Certain plants had attractions and qualities that could be used for amusement. ‘Keks’, also known as ‘sags’ or ‘segs’, were the hollow stalks of cow parsley, a non-poisonous member of the hemlock family, which children used as pea-shooters or to make musical pipes by cutting the stems below one joint and partially slitting them to the next joint. In the medieval period, the dried stems were packed with waste tow or flax from spinning and then soaked in tallow or wax. When lit, these would give a light, albeit very smoky, if folk had cause to venture out into the dark, unlit streets. These torches, known as ‘keckies’ gave their name to the plant. In the south of the county, children rubbed together stalks of figwort, a cleansing plant once much used for skin complaints, to produce a squeaky sound like a fiddle, chanting: ‘Fiddle de fiddle de fy fum, all the way to Sysham’. Another plant used in the county was Shepherd’s Purse, locally known as ‘pickpocket’, which children picked, chanting: ‘Pick pocket, penny nail, put the rogue in the gaol.’
Children relaxing and playing at Collyweston, c. 1906.
A game peculiar to Boughton in the nineteenth century was played by a group of boys who would choose a victim and blindfold him, after which they would make knots at the ends of their handkerchiefs. They would then surround the victim, singing a dirge-like song, after which they prodded, or ‘popped’, their fingers into the ‘cap’, or mask, worn by him, the favourite area being around the eyes. He was then asked to guess the identity of th
e companion who had popped him. If he failed to guess correctly, they would beat him with the knotted handkerchiefs until he got it right.
Not so much a game but certainly a profitable venture for older children, and a means of supplementing their pocket money, was to seek out certain animals considered by farmers or cottagers to be pests. They could be dead or alive. One villager recalls:
...the most popular way [to make money] was the selling of rats’ tails for a penny each, the tail of course was proof that the rodent had departed this life. And even more profitable was the sale of moleskins, for which, if they were in good condition and dried, we were paid the fantastic sum of 9d ... needless to say, moles were in very short supply.
ten
MUSIC, SONG AND DANCE
For his twenty-first birthday, John Clare purchased a bound book of blank pages at the cost of a week’s wages (eight shillings) from a bookseller at Market Deeping. He used this to copy down his best and earliest poems, the collection being entitled A Rustic’s Pastime (In Leisure Hours) and dated ‘Helpston 1814’. The manuscript is now housed in Northampton Library as MS1. These early efforts already show a sensitive mind and a good command of language, and reflect a great love of the nature flourishing in the Northamptonshire countryside. Several of the pieces are simply entitled ‘Song’ or ‘Ballad’, this form of verse reflecting Clare’s interest in music and folksong.
Being an avid collector of folk songs and ballads, he wrote several down in 1818 in an ‘oblong book’ under the title A Collection of Songs, Airs and Dances for the Violin (Northampton MS12). This included some of his own compositions such as ‘Cherry Cheek’d Patty’ and ‘Maid of Shy Light’, as well as well-known pieces such as ‘The Cuckoo’, ‘Oh Dear What Can The Matter Be?’, ‘The Disconsolate Sailor’ and another ‘Ballad’ with the opening lines:
A faithful shepherd courted me
He stole away my liberty
When my poor heart was strange to me
He came and sailed and stole it then.
When my apron would hang low,
Me he sought through frost and snow,
When it puckered up with shame,
And I sought him, he never came.
This theme of spurned love and illegitimate children is a common one in many folksongs of the era, and the image of the apron recurs in similar folksongs that travelled far and wide, such as ‘Careless Love’, ‘Make Me A Pallet On The Floor’ and ‘A Brisk Young Soldier Courted Me’.
Clare was also very fond of the fiddle and learned to play the instrument from the gypsies who came every year to the Castor Feast, a week-long celebration during which the hostelries were open all the time and continual fighting, dancing and fiddle playing took place. In a manuscript held at Peterborough Museum, Clare describes how he got to know them at their camps, particularly the ‘Boswell crew’, a popular tribe well known in the district and famous for their fiddlers and fortune tellers.
Fair Green in Rothwell was an open space in the nineteenth century, although it is now built over, where dancing traditionally took place every Saturday night to the accompaniment of a fiddler, one of whom, a Mr Field, was considered to be so good it was said he could go on playing if he only had one string left. The dancers would give him a penny or two and he would go home to his wife, tell her to hold open her apron, and pour all the coins into it.
Wadenhoe hosted some of the finest fiddler players in the north of the county. In the early years of the twentieth century, one of them, Jim Smith, was said to have walked along the street during one wet Christmas Eve, playing with damp strings. As he went along, things started to happen, as described by one villager:
Cling! – one went. It was th’ E. He carried on. We got half-way round; Ping! – the second one went. He finished up with the G-string. But he could still get the tune.
Another fiddler, named Curtis, would regularly walk from Pilton to Wadenhoe and play dance tunes, after which he made straight for the village pub. At closing time, he would return to the dance and be expected to play some more:
He’d walk in the room, put his foot round the leg of the chair and kick it halfway across the room, and then he’d sit down on the floor. And, boy, couldn’t he play! He’d play there the polka and he wouldn’t half make ’em do it. And there were some of the old gals that were getting on for sixty!
At Syresham in the nineteenth century, dances were held on the village green and even in the skittle alleys, such as the Bell Inn. Once again, music was provided by a fiddler, with the addition of a concertina player. Unusually perhaps, it was customary for anyone dancing to pay the musicians before a session, each player going round with a hat to collect a coin, a penny being the normal rate.
Part of the tune for the dance called Moll in the Wad.
A popular dance in the county, Moll in the Wad, was recorded by schoolmaster and writer Charles Wise of Warkton in around 1905. It was an eighteenth-century courtship dance that was often performed in one form at family parties but, like many others, had virtually disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century. It was of a lively nature, made even more so by exaggerated steps and added lyrics which were improvised, sometimes bawdily, by the younger men participating. The additions would have fitted in well with the theme and title, Moll being a generic girl’s name and Wad, a variation of ‘wold’, being an open space away from habitation, presumably for privacy, like Lovers Lane.
The Northampton Morris Men performing one of their Cotswold-style dances, 2002.
Morris dancing
Nothing today perhaps gives more of a taste of old England than morris dancing in the spring and summer. Though its origins are obscure, it is not based on an ancient fertility ritual but is probably of Arab origin, being part of a military training exercise with swords and dance-like movements to the beat of a drum. It was probably seen by knights in the Holy Land during the Crusades and consequently found its way back to Europe, where it gradually evolved into a dance at royal courts. Its modern form, known as Cotswold, has at least six morris men dressed in white, wearing ribbons and bells and waving handkerchiefs while performing intricate steps to the playing of a concertina or other instrument. The dance is part-pantomime and the role of its participants – who are based on traditional characters such as the Fool, Maid Marian or the Queen of May and a hobby horse – is usually, but not always, to mime traditional stories. Groups had, and still have, their own distinctive emblem or badge, usually depicting a real or mythological creature, such as a raven, eagle, dragon or, in the case of Northampton, a unicorn. The Northampton group now have a horse-like creature, introduced in 1979 by one of their members, Ian Philips.
The image of ‘The Oss’, which is incorporated into the design of the club badge of the Northampton Morris Men.
A early glimpse of a morris dancing group was given by Sternberg in 1851, when he described one of the characters as ‘a clown or tomfool’ with a feather in his cap, wearing an old quilt, covered with rabbit skins and holding a stick with an inflated bladder attached to the end by a cord.
The oldest surviving group in the county is at Brackley. Its roots lie in the seventeenth century, when semi-professional troupes usually performed under the patronage of local gentry. In 1603, another group, whose provenance is not recorded, performed at Althorp for James VI of Scotland, who was on his way to London to become King of England.
At the time of writing, there are eight groups based around the county: Moulton; Braybrooke; the Aynho Apricots, a female group; the Northampton Morris Men, founded in 1955; the Royal Oak, formed at Eydon in 1985; the Rose and Castle, a group that was formed at Blisworth in 1977 and uses a form of clog dance that originated in the north-west of England; the Witchmen, who perform a style called Border Morris and are based at Kettering, or ‘the Dark Side’ as they prefer to call it; and Queen’s Oak Morris, a female group formed at Potterspury in 1984 who also perform Border Morris dancing. This style of morris dancing, which comes from the English counties bordering
Wales, is believed to be pagan in origin and is more boisterous and flamboyant, with an emphasis on the spirit of the dance rather than intricacy. The dance favours the use of sticks instead of hankies and its participants wear dark clothes and, more often than not, perform with blackened faces, in traditional guising fashion.
The Witchmen, a Northamptonshire-based group of Border morris dancers, performing their unique form of the dance in dark garb and make-up at Ashton.
An old rhyme
A popular ditty that was once sung and played around parts of the county gives a colourful and humorous glimpse into the way in which our ancestors relaxed. It describes the vocal abilities of a group of participants at a village event:
Old Gamble bawls, his daughter squawks
Old Bodkin beats the time;
They make a noise and fright the boys
And spoil the doctor’s rhyme.
And Cooper Joe, he sings so low,
We hate to hear him crow, oh, oh!
Yet Baker Natt, he sings so flat,
And flatter still sings Matt.
Folk music
Most of the folk songs sung in the county were variations of tunes sung in other parts of the country. One renowned folk song, which was derived from a seventeenth-century Scottish ballad known as ‘Hame came our gude man at e’en’, is about a drunken husband returning home and finding another man in his bedroom. Asking his wife several questions about the man, he is told it that it is something else – not what he thinks it is. The ballad later appeared elsewhere under various other titles such as ‘Our Goodman’, ‘Four Nights Drunk’, ‘Drunkard’s Special’ and ‘Seven Drunken Nights’, the latter becoming a hit in the 1960s. The versions had different tunes and variations in the lyrics. The ballad even travelled across the Atlantic to the shores of America with new settlers, in a version known as ‘Cat Man Blues’, beginning with the lines: