Where Dragons Soar: And Other Animal Folk Tales of the British Isles
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No animals were harmed during the research for this book
Illustrations by Pete Castle
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As always thanks must go to my wife Sue for support, patience and practical assistance, and for just being there.
To Anni Plant for the back cover photo.
To Alan Wilkinson for permission to quote from his ‘Hartlepool Monkey’ song.
To The History Press and my editors for making the production of this book so easy.
To all the singers and storytellers who’ve influenced me over the years and to all the audiences who’ve supported me.
To the long line of storytellers who made and preserved these stories over countless millennia.
To my Facebook friends who suggested stories and subjects, some of which were used and some rejected.
CONTENTS
Title
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Here Be Dragons The Knight and the Dragon
• A Sussex Dragon
• The Two Warring Dragons
• The Lambton Worm
• Assipattle and the Muckle Mester Stoorworm
• Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster
2 Man’s Best Friend Greyfriars Bobby
• Gelert, the Faithful Hound
Black Shuck and Other Spectral Dogs
• The Suffolk Black Dogs
• The Aylesbury Black Dog
• The Black Dog of Lyme Regis
• The Black Dog of the Wild Forest
3 As Wild as a Wolf, as Wily as a Fox Wolves
How Wolf Lost His Tail
• The Wolf of Allendale
Werewolves
An Almost Human Beast
• The Derbyshire Werewolf
• Reynardine
Old Daddy Fox
Chanticleer and Pertelote
• The Fox and the Cock
• The Fox and the Bagpipes
• Old Daddy Fox
• The Fox and the Pixies
• Scrapefoot
4 A Game of Cat and Mouse Alien Big Cats
• The King o’ the Cats
• Why the Manx Cat Has No Tail
• The Cheshire Cat
• The Cat and the Mouse
• The Tale of Dick Whittington’s Cat
• The Pied Piper of Franchville
• The Four-Eyed Cat
5 Down on the Farm The Roaring Bull of Bagbury Farm
• The Black Bull of Norroway
• The Farmer’s Three Cows
• The Dun Cow of Durham
• Four Animals Seek Their Fortune
6 Bread and Circuses Stories of Showmen and Their Animals
• The Flying Donkeys of Derby
• Who Killed the Bears?
• The Congleton Bear
• The Hartlepool Monkey
• The Man, the Boy and the Donkey
• Jack and the Dead Donkey
• The Parrot
• The Frog at the Well
• Love Frogs
7 We Three Kings How the Herring Became the King of the Sea
• Windy Old Weather
• The King of the Fishes
• The King of the Birds
8 Here Comes the Cavalry The Lion and the Unicorn
• Grey Dolphin’s Revenge
• The Horse Mechanic
9 Hares, Horses and Hedgehogs Oisin and the Hare
• The Heathfield Hare
• Hare or Human
• The Kennet Valley Witch
• The Hedgehog and the Devil
10 Magical Transformations The Small-Tooth Dog
• The Seal Wife
11 Exotic Animals The Woman Who Married a Bear
• Alligators
• The Wonderful Crocodile!
• The Tale of Tommy the Tortoise
• The Lion Says His Prayers
• The Two Elephants
• The Knight and the Dragon (reprise)
Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Stories are slippery creatures. You can’t trust them.
They’ve been jumping on and off the page and into the mouths and ears of storytellers ever since time began. They’ve probably shared our hearths for far longer than dogs or cats or any other of our domestic animals. They don’t stay put in one place either. If a group of people move you can guarantee that some stories will smuggle themselves away and move with them. Even if it’s only a lone traveller visiting foreign parts, you can be sure a few stories will, like fleas, accompany him, and different ones will come back, so it’s impossible to pin them down as belonging to any one particular place or people. As soon as you try – as soon as you say ‘this story is native to this particular area’ – then you are sure to find a very close relation to it living happily in another community, in another country, or even on another continent!
If you are a storyteller you might think stories are like cats – you don’t choose them, they choose you! There were several stories I considered for inclusion here which refused to be pinned down. I offered them a home, but they just didn’t want it. They slunk away.
This is a collection of British folk tales but how long they’ve been British, or whether they’ve always been British, is a matter for scholarship and debate. At the end of the last Ice Age Britain was empty, so we, and our stories, are all immigrants. We gradually moved here at different times from different places and brought our stories with us. It’s impossible to draw a line and say the stories that came to Britain before that date are British and those that came after are imports, nor can we limit ourselves to stories that were invented on these shores because almost all stories are based on an idea from an older one.
So when deciding what to include, or not, it comes down to common sense. It’s easy to make a case for including some ‘imports’ because they have become so well known that they are almost naturalised as British. The stories of the Grimms and other nineteenth-century continental collectors have entered our canon and are often better known to the general public than the work of, say, Joseph Jacobs in England. I’ve avoided those where there is an alternative, more local, version. There usually is!
I thought long and hard about whether or not to include any of the fables of Aesop. Everybody has heard of them and their morals; allusions to them or quotes from them have entered our everyday language (i.e. we all know of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’). They’ve been in print in English since they were published by Caxton in 1484 and have been retold over and over, but they are still known as ‘Aesop’s Fables’ and are considered to be Greek, so I decided against them. But a couple managed to get in. I told you they were sneaky!
We need a perpetual supply of new stories to counteract the trickle of stories that get lost. Some are literally forgotten, sometimes they date and become difficult to understand, or they become untellable because of changing attitudes and social mores. Therefore I’ve allowed myself to introduce a handful here, in the hope that they fit and take root.
I once read that animal stories are amongst the oldest stories in the world. That is not surprising. Our early hominid ancestors, hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa, were surrounded by other animals and once they had moved out of Africa and become meat eaters on the steppes and tundra they were dependent on animals for food and clothing, and sometimes fuel and building materials as well. I often picture the first story ever told was when a ‘caveman’
arrived back at his cave looking tattered and torn and told his family about the huge, ferocious beast he’d just escaped. In the way of ‘fisherman’s tales’ the beast probably grew in repeated tellings and a mythological creature was born!
When the idea of this book was first suggested I leapt at it. I felt it was something I could really get my teeth into and enjoy doing (and I have!). Before I started any serious work on it I thought there would be so much material that I’d be spoiled for choice, that it might easily develop into two volumes … or more. But once I’d started work I realised that wasn’t quite the case. It’s true that there are thousands of folk tales about animals and many of them are well known to everybody – both people who are fans of oral storytelling and the more general public. The question is, though, are there thousands which I could argue are British folk tales about animals and the answer to that is ‘no’. Many of those that instantly spring to mind are European, or African, or American and definitely haven’t been naturalised as British.
Bearing all that in mind, I hope you enjoy the selection I’ve made. I’ve striven for balance – balance of recent and ancient tales; balance of tales from different parts of the country (I’ve managed to include parts which often get forgotten, like the Isle of Man) and balance of all the different animals. An early idea I had was to restrict myself to ‘animals’, in the sense of mammals (with the odd dragon thrown in for flavour!) but I gradually realised that I should include fish and fowls as well – there is too much overlap not to. The only restriction I have kept to is that they should be stories about animals, not just stories in which animals play a small part. If there are no people involved so much the better!
I hope you approve of my selection. One of the first things I did was to ask my Facebook followers what animal legends they knew of; what towns had animals associated with them. Many of the replies mentioned three or four of the stories I have included here, but most were creatures associated with football teams which don’t have any real ‘story’ to go with them. One of the most mentioned was ‘The Derby Ram’, but you won’t find that here because I dealt with it at length in my Derbyshire Folk Tales book, where you can also find the story of ‘The Bakewell Elephant’. I have included two stories from that book again here, though, because they were too important to miss – ‘The Small-Tooth Dog’ is probably the only British version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and ‘The Derbyshire Werewolf’ is one of very few British werewolf stories I’ve been able to find.
Several of the other stories have appeared, probably in slightly different form, in Facts & Fiction storytelling magazine, which I have edited since 1999. You might have heard me tell several of them as well.
Pete Castle,
Belper, Derbyshire,
2016
1
HERE BE DRAGONS
THE KNIGHT AND THE DRAGON
Once upon a time a knight met a dragon.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ said the knight.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the dragon, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’
So he began:
Once upon a time a knight met a dragon.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ said the knight.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the dragon, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’
So he began:
Once upon a time a knight met a dragon.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ said the knight.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the dragon, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’
So he began:
Once upon a time a knight met a dragon.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ said the knight.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said the dragon, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’
So he began:
Once upon a time a knight met a dragon … and so on for as long as you can bear it!
The most obviously ancient-seeming tales found in Britain are those about dragons and other mysterious beasts. (The fact that they are ‘ancient-seeming’ doesn’t necessarily mean they are actually ancient, of course.) It seems logical to start this collection with a few of those.
Stories and legends about dragon-like creatures are found all over the British Isles, often just as fragments explaining, say, the circular ditches around a prehistoric hill fort (very likely called Worm Hill), but we tend to associate dragons mostly with Wales or Cornwall or the more remote parts of the north. ‘Silly Sussex’, then, is not the most obvious place to start this first section, but that’s what we’ll do. (Silly in this sense is from the Anglo-Saxon ‘sœlig’, meaning ‘blessed’.)
A SUSSEX DRAGON
St Leonard’s Forest is, today, part of the ‘High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’. It is a cosy, hospitable landscape which stretches from Surrey, through Sussex into Kent. It’s typical ‘Home Counties’, ‘Little England’, England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ personified. Above all, it is safe. But in the past it was the haunt of dragons!
Way back in the early years of the sixth century CE, St Leonard killed a dragon in the forest which was subsequently named after him. He was injured in the fray and lilies of the valley sprouted where his blood fell. (They still grow abundantly in some parts of the forest.)
He also banished all snakes from the area, but his cleansing was not absolutely perfect for, about a millennium later in 1614, a strange and dangerous creature was reported to be frequenting the overgrown hollows and ‘vaultie places’ of ‘unwholesome shade’ in the forest. Its home seems to have been near the village of Faygate but it was seen all over the area to within a few miles of the town of Horsham.
The creature was described as being a serpent or dragon about nine feet long, which left behind it a glutinous trail like that of a snail. The middle part of its body was thicker than the neck and tail, and there grew from its torso two large bunches ‘about the size of footballs’, which some people thought would eventually grow into wings. This suggests it was thought to be only a young dragon! The dragon was dark in colour, though the underneath tended to red, and round its neck it had a stripe of white scales. Descriptions are vague because the creature could only be seen from a distance.
Although it left behind it a snail-like trail it was by no means snail-like in its speed. If anyone dared to approach too close it would raise its neck and stare round, then, once it had spied its prey, it would race after them on its four stubby legs faster than a man could run. The dragon did not necessarily have to rely on its speed to catch his prey because from a distance of four rods (twenty metres) it could spit venom which caused the target to swell up and die. A man and woman who came upon the dragon by chance suffered in this way, as did the dogs set upon it by another man, as well as various cattle. Humans and cattle do not seem to have been the dragon’s favoured foodstuffs, however. Although it killed them, it left them uneaten and seems to have preferred rabbits.
No one seems to know what happened to this creature and it disappeared from legend, although as late as the nineteenth century children were warned to keep out of various areas of the wood for fear of ‘monstrous snakes’.
The source of this story is a pamphlet in the Harleian Miscellany with the wonderful title:
A True and Wonderful Discourse relating a strange and monstrous Serpent (or Dragon) lately discovered, and yet living, to the great Annoyance and divers Slaughters of both Men and Cattell, by his strong and violent Poison: in Sussex, two Miles from Horsam, in a Woode called St Leonard’s Forrest, and thirtie Miles from London, this present Month of August, 1614. With the true Generation of Serpents.
With a title like that they didn’t really need to write the story!
THE TWO WARRING DRAGONS
After a cosy, almost domestic, start in Sussex, let’s leap into classic ‘dragon lore’ for the next story. This is an ancient tale which has been told by many different people in many different times. Each telling is different and serves a different purpose – often political or nationalistic – depend
ing upon the teller and the age. This is my telling, put together from various sources, which sets out to have no purpose other than to make a good story.
Way back in the earliest days of Britain, when there was no sense of one United Kingdom covering the whole island and no king who could command all the country; when there were no English and no Welsh; no Anglo-Saxons and no Celts; when the Romans had yet to bring their roads and walls and their Christian religion. Way back then, in the time of myths, there were two brother kings. Llefelys ruled a kingdom across the sea, in what we now call France, and his brother, Llud, ruled what is now southern England. They were good kings who ruled their kingdoms well and remained good friends. But Llud had a problem.
On the first day of every May, when his people should have been celebrating the end of winter with the raucous, bawdy, spring festival of Beltane, his kingdom was brought to a standstill by hideous screams and shrieks. These noises rang through the skies all over the kingdom and were impossible to ignore. They were so loud that they made the worst thunderstorm you have ever experienced seem tame and harmless. They were so terrible that they caused brave men to go pale and lose all their strength; lesser men lay down and died; women miscarried and animals became barren; the very crops in the fields withered and the new, fresh leaves fell from the trees.
Every year as Beltane approached, Llud’s people grew scared and they shut themselves away where they hoped they wouldn’t hear the screams – but there was nowhere to escape. They hoped and prayed to their gods that it wouldn’t happen again this year, but it always did, and every year the kingdom fell further into rack and ruin. No one could explain the screams, or their effect, so no one knew what to do to counteract them.