by Kai Roberts
Although no such place as ‘Wantley’ exists in the county, the name is generally agreed to have arisen from a corruption of the village of Wortley and the nearby Wharncliffe Crags in South Yorkshire’s Don Valley, a supposition supported by the ballad’s correspondence with the topography of that area. The ballad relates that the dragon made its home amongst a hilltop escarpment, supposed to be Wharncliffe Crags, and from its den there ravaged the locality – devouring livestock, trees, houses and children, all whilst polluting the air with its hot, stinking breath. It often stopped at a well to drink, where it turned the water to ‘burning brandy’.
The folk of the vicinity were so traumatised by the dragon’s merciless assaults that they were forced to beg the aid of a ‘furious knight’ known as Moore of Moore-Hall. The ballad makes Moore himself sound like a scarcely less terrifying prospect than the dragon; a bawdy, hell-raising type who once in anger swung a horse by the tail and mane until it was dead, and then proceeded to eat its carcass! Still, there was probably no better hope to defeat such a beast as the dragon and Moore assented, on the sole condition that he was sent a sixteen-year-old girl to ‘anoint him’ overnight before the combat and dress him in the morning.
Wharncliffe Crags above the Don Valley, once home to the famed Wantley Dragon. (Kai Roberts)
Despite his formidable strength, Moore realised that the dragon was more than an equal to him in might alone, so decided to rely on cunning to defeat it. To this end he had the steelworkers of Sheffield forge him a suit of armour covered in spikes so that the dragon could not grapple with him, and then hid in the well from which the beast was wont to drink in order to ambush it. Despite Moore’s element of surprise, the two opponents were evenly matched and their struggle lasted for two days and a night, with neither receiving so much as a wound. Finally, however, Moore delivered a lucky blow to the only vulnerable spot on the dragon’s body – noted in earlier, less sanitised versions of the ballad as its anus – at which the monster fell down and expired.
Whilst this ballad displays all the classic themes of a Yorkshire dragon narrative, many scholars have erroneously stated that the ballad is not an authentic local legend but actually a polemic against a historical landowner. The suggestion originates with Godfrey Bosville, a correspondent of Bishop Percy, whose theory was included as a footnote in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Bosville asserted that the ballad satirised a late sixteenth-century legal case in which Sir Francis Wortley and his tenants were embroiled over payment of tithes. According to this reading, Sir Francis is personified as the voracious dragon and Moore of Moore-Hall as the lawyer sent by the tenants to do battle with him.
Later, in his 1819 History of Hallamshire, the esteemed antiquarian Reverend Joseph Hunter conjectured that the ballad could refer to another dispute earlier in the sixteenth century, which arose when Sir Thomas Wortley attempted to depopulate Wharncliffe Chase to create a personal hunting ground. Yet whilst these theories have been uncritically repeated by commentators on the legend ever since, doubt was cast as early as 1864 by the local historian John Holland. Although it might be true that there was considerable antagonism between the Wortley family and their tenants during the sixteenth century, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that the ballad is meant to satirise these conflicts, beyond the jesting tone of the lyrics and much wishful thinking.
Considering that the story of the Dragon of Wantley is identical to a dragon-slaying narrative associated with various locations across Yorkshire (with minor local variations), it would be an insult to the skill of any balladeers to suggest that they could not have been any more inventive. It seems far more probable that this migratory legend was already attached to Wantley, along with many other sites in the county, and the composer took his inspiration from it. Whilst this does not necessarily rule out the possibility that the ballad displays satirical intent, the narrative is simply too consistent with a wider dragon-slaying tradition to suggest that it was invented solely for that purpose.
It is particularly damning to Bosville’s case that the Moore family had left Moore Hall (located near Wharncliffe Crags in the Ewden Valley) half a century before the legal case the ballad is supposed to parody, and not one member of that line was ever recorded as a lawyer. Indeed, the connection between the Moore family and dragons appears to be much older than the sixteenth century. The family was associated with the area from the Norman Conquest at least and a dragon was featured on their family coat of arms. Meanwhile, there is a prominent stone effigy of a dragon in the medieval Church of St Nicholas at High Bradfield – of which the Moore family were patrons.
A dragon also features on the coat of arms of the Latimer family whose ancestral home was located at Well near Ripon, and there is a vague local legend to the effect that one of their ancestors slew such a beast at a spot between Well and Tanfield. This association between heraldry and dragons may well offer a clue as to the origin of some local dragon legends, casting them as back-formations designed to explain the choice of that particular motif in a noble family’s coat of arms. Dragons were commonly employed in medieval heraldry as a symbol of power and an association with dragon-slaying was especially favoured in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the cult of St George was at its height in England.
As such, folklorists agree that a number English dragon stories represent ‘charter legends’ – narratives which arose to justify the origin and persistence of some social custom. In these cases, tales of dragon-slaying may have evolved to explain why a local landowning family were entitled to hold their position: namely that one of their ancestors had displayed great courage and valour in slaying a dragon which preyed on their tenants’ livelihoods and children. Such a story painted the noble family as men of character, with the implication that the local community should continue to be thankful that such men had saved them from a ravening menace and remained in a position to do so again in the future, should circumstances demand it.
A similar moral can be detected in the story of Sir William Wyvill, a fourteenth-century landowner who reputedly slew a dragon that tormented the region of Slingsby in the Vale of York. However, the only narrative in which the connection between dragon-slaying and ancestral estates is made explicit is the legend of the dragon of Handale in Cleveland. This monster liked to ‘beguile young damsels from the paths of truth and duty, and afterwards feed on their dainty limbs.’ It was killed by a local lad called Scaw, who subsequently married an Earl’s daughter he rescued from the beast’s lair and thereby eventually came into possession of her father’s lands. Yet, ironically, Scaw does not seem to have been an historical individual and the name may instead have been derived from a local toponym.
Nonetheless, a stone coffin supposedly belonging to Scaw was once shown in the ruins of Handale Priory and such alleged memorials are another common feature of dragon legends in Yorkshire. A similar stone coffin lid can be seen in the Church of St Edmund at Kellington, near Pontefract; it is said to commemorate Armroyd, the shepherd who with the help of his dog dispatched a sheep-killing dragon in that region. The stone appears to feature representations of a serpent and a dog, whilst a weathered carving of a cross was once thought to represent his shepherd’s crook. Supposed effigies of dragon-slayers can also be seen in the churches at Slingsby and Nunnington. In both cases, the legend attached to the effigy is the same and given the geographical proximity of the two villages, it is agreed that the legends probably stem from a single source.
Effigy of Sir William Wyvill in Slingsby Church. (Kai Roberts)
The Nunnington version of the legend is given in more detail and relates that a dragon made its home on a nearby hill until it was opposed by a local knight named Sir Peter Loschy. As with Moore of Moore-Hall, Loschy was forced to rely on his cunning to defeat the beast and so he wore a suit of armour studded with razor blades so that it could not wrap itself around him and squeeze him to death like a boa constrictor. He found, however, that every time he injured the dragon, its woun
d immediately healed and so the battle dragged on. At length, he managed to sever part of the creature’s body, whereupon his faithful dog took the piece in its jaws and carried it off to the church over a mile away. This process was repeated until the dragon was completely hacked to pieces and drew its last breath.
Although he defeated the dragon, the legend has an unhappy ending. When Sir Peter bent down to congratulate his hound, the animal licked his face and so transferred some of the dragon’s poison, from which both soon expired. A tombstone in All Saints’ Church at Nunnington shows the effigy of a knight resting his feet on a dog and locals have long held that this was Loschy’s resting place. However, there is no record of anybody called Sir Peter Loschy being buried in the church and antiquarians have identified it as the grave of Sir Walter Leye who died in the early fourteenth century. The same story is told about a similar effigy in All Saints’ Church at Slingsby, the only difference being that the identification of the tomb with Sir William Wyvill is correct. In both cases, the so-called hound at the knight’s feet is more likely to be a lion – another common heraldic motif.
Such memorials are clearly a significant aspect of dragon lore in Yorkshire and nearly all examples are connected with some relic. After the milk-drinking serpent of Sexhow was slain by an anonymous knight who rode away without seeking any reward, the villagers skinned the beast and carried its pelt to the church at Stokesley, where it hung for many years. Although no such item can be seen there today, it is thought an artefact supposed to be a dragon’s skin could indeed once been seen in the church. The most likely explanation, however, is that it was actually the hide of a crocodile. As the Jenny Haniver phenomenon attests, such misattributions were not uncommon amongst the uneducated in earlier centuries.
Sometimes the memorials are seen on a much larger scale in the landscape itself. This was especially true of Wharncliffe Crags: Bishop Percy recorded the testimony of a man who around 1720 had been shown the cave in which the dragon had once made its den and the well from which it drank – sites which are still marked on Ordnance Survey maps today. Meanwhile, Loschy Hill near Nunnington and Scaw Wood near Handale were supposedly named to commemorate the eponymous heroes’ victories over dragons in those places. Similarly, legend maintains that a tract of land called Armroyd’s Close near Kellington was given to the titular shepherd and his heirs to reward his triumph.
These are not landscape legends in the same sense as we find associated with giants or the Devil. The stories do not explain how a particular feature of the landscape came to be the way it is with reference to the activity of some supernatural or primordial being. Nor is the landscape personified as the fallen body or mark of such entities. Yet, whilst they might not be landscape legends in the truest sense, such stories nevertheless perform a similar function: connecting people to their environment through narrative. The outcome of this function is that the topographic references are then held up as proof of the legend’s veracity. As Jacqueline Simpson astutely comments, these memorials represent ‘a stimulus for the first invention of the legend, a focal point for its development and a memento which helps to preserve it through following generations.’
There is only one instance in Yorkshire of a landscape feature being perceived as the body of a slain dragon; namely, Filey Brigg. The legend attached to that particular locality is unique in several respects; not least in that whilst it may have originated on the Holderness coast, it was actually collected in Somerset. In narrative terms, it is the only legend in Yorkshire which does not correspond to the lone dragon-slayer model. In this case, the demise of the monster is initially an accident and the job finished off by the community as a whole. It is also more of a droll than a legend. Although it may purport to explain the origin of Filey Brigg, its primarily humorous intent is clear.
The legend tells how a tailor named Billy Biter lived in the vicinity of a dragon-haunted ravine and one misty morning tumbled over the edge into the beast’s lair. Just as the dragon was about to consume this hapless individual, Billy dropped the parkin (a type of treacly gingerbread favoured in Yorkshire) he was carrying and the dragon bit down on this instead. Finding the delicacy much to its liking, the dragon spared his victim and sent him back to his cottage to fetch more. But when the henpecked Billy arrived home and told his wife the story, she refused to believe him and insisted on delivering the parkin herself.
So drunk was Billy’s wife that when she reached the ravine, she too plunged over the precipice and this time, the dragon gobbled her up along with the parkin. As the dragon chewed, a morsel of the sticky cake became lodged in its teeth ‘clinging so loving as an ivy-bine’ and so forced the beast to attempt to wash it off in the sea. Seeing their chance, the cowed townsfolk assembled a mob with ‘sledgehammers and pitchforks and axes’ to prevent it returning to land. At length, a great wave came along and drowned the monster, whose bones formed the rocky reef of Filey Brigg which can be seen stretching out into the North Sea today.
Although this story was originally recorded as ‘Billy Biter and the Parkin’, Billy is only an inadvertent hero and a circumstantial protagonist. He may have been freed from a greedy dragon and a dipsomaniacal wife in the same day, but both his own role and the dragon-slaying are incidental to the narrative, which seems to be as much about the perils of shrewishness and the propensity of parkin to stick in one’s teeth. It seems that the story was never intended to be taken seriously in the form in which it was recorded (except perhaps by children) and the existence of an alternative origin story for Filey Brigg concerning the Devil tends to support this supposition.
Nonetheless, it is an artful narrative which subverts the expectations of an audience perhaps overly familiar with tales of chivalric dragon-slayers. Billy Biter falls into the class of commoner protagonists in these legends, along with Armroyd of Kellington and Scaw of Handale, who may have gained land as a consequence of their victories, but started out as ordinary individuals. It is a notable contrast to Sir Peter Loschy, Moore of Moore Hall, Sir William Wyvill and the anonymous knight who vanquished the dragon at Sexhow. Possibly this divergent tradition arose later as a deliberate reaction to tales of the dragon-slaying gentry, offering audiences the message that they too could accomplish heroic deeds and free themselves from adversity, with the right amount of fortitude or just plain luck.
However, both these strands may ultimately have performed a similar function. As Jacqueline Simpson concludes in her study of British dragon legends:
They foster the community’s awareness of and pride in its own identity, its conviction that it is in some respect unusual, or even unique. That the lord of the manor should be descended from a dragon-slayer, that a dragon should once have roamed these very fields, or, best of all, that an ordinary lad from this very village should have outwitted and killed such a monster – these are claims to fame which any neighbouring community would be bound to envy.
Many naturalistic theories have been mooted to explain dragon legends over the years, in particular that they are allegories for some historical occurrence, such as the defeat of paganism by Christianity, conflict between the Saxons and Vikings or a simple land dispute. Yet the Victorian notion that folklore necessarily encodes and preserves the memory of ancient events and beliefs has long been doubted. Simpson’s emphasis on the power they had to bind a community – both to its immediate topographic environment and to its social institutions – seems a far less fanciful account of their evolution.
Complete with their medieval tombstones and heraldic associations, Yorkshire dragons probably emerged from the conditions of the late Middle Ages, when new communities and social institutions were being forged and stabilised. Like so many motifs in English folklore, the dragon represented an outside threat to the stability of those communities and institutions, a destructive force beyond their control which must be overcome through virtues such as selflessness and courage if the community wished to survive. The threat of the hostile ‘other’ is still exploited today for
such purposes, and whilst these outsiders may be portrayed more subtly than a dragon, they are often every bit as imaginary.
FOUR
GIANTS
In English legend, there are typically two categories of giant: the landscape-shaping oaf and the murderous ogre. Neither type is particularly intelligent; whether they are engaged in terrorising local villages or some colossal construction, their schemes are often characterised by clumsiness and stupidity. As a result, it can seem that by the time they were first recorded, such legends were not taken very seriously. Perhaps they were told as drolls for the benefit of credulous travellers or bedtime stories with which to subdue unruly children. However, these roles are often the final function of narratives that once had a more serious purpose, and beneath the whimsical veneer, they often have much to tell us about the way past generations perceived the world in which they lived.
To deal first with the landscape-shaping variety of giant, it is no surprise to find that Yorkshire is fertile territory for these legends, especially in the north and west ridings. Distinctive landscape features invariably accrue an enduring glut of folklore and the uplands of the Pennines or North York Moors bristle with such vistas. Characteristically, these tales purport to account for the origin of certain topographic prominences and it may well be that these narratives were the sincere product of the pre-modern mind’s tendency to anthropomorphise its environment. Long before even the most basic principles of geology had taken hold in the popular psyche, the grit stone crags and ancient megaliths which strew the Yorkshire countryside must have seemed the work of some titanic race that stalked the land in days gone by.