Hampshire Folk Tales for Children

by Michael O’Leary

  This is a little story, but it is good to have a story that represents an act of humanity and kindness in a troubled time.

  Before Swithun died it is said that he made it clear that he didn’t want to be buried in Winchester Cathedral, but outside, where the rain would fall on his grave. The monks didn’t think it was right that the Bishop of Winchester should be buried outside, so they buried the body in an ornate crypt inside the cathedral. Saint Swithun was so cross, that he caused the rain to pour down in torrents, and the people were in danger of losing the harvest. So they buried the body outside after all, and the rain stopped, the sun came out, and the birds sang in the trees.

  Since then it has been said that if it rains on Saint Swithun’s Day, which is the 15th July, it will rain for forty days after, which will be very bad for the harvest.

  Saint Swithun’s Day if thou dost rain,

  For forty days it will remain.

  Saint Swithun’s Day if thou be fair,

  For forty days ’twill rain no more.

  6

  THE

  PLAGUE

  PART ONE

  THE VICAR OF VERNHAM DEAN

  Before the twentieth century, London must have seemed a long way away from Hampshire, but the presence of this great city, lurking just over the horizon, was still strongly felt. The nineteenth-century writer and traveller, William Cobbett, called London ‘the great wen’, and the word ‘wen’ means ‘cyst’, or puss-filled spot. People in the countryside often thought of London as a wen, or as a great big steaming gone-off stew. So when the plague hit London, there was always great fear in Hampshire, and a great suspicion of strangers, strangers who might be escaping from London Town, and who might be infected.

  Such a stranger may have passed through the village of Vernham Dean, a village that nestles in a valley, amidst the high downland hills of north-west Hampshire, hills that stretch into Berkshire and Wiltshire.

  The plague took root in Vernham Dean, and the vicar was overcome by horror.

  ‘What to do? What to do?’

  The vicar realised that he was the person who had to decide; the responsibility fell upon his shoulders.

  He knew the story of Eyam in Derbyshire – in Eyam the plague-stricken villagers had cut off all access to the outside world to avoid infecting anyone else, and so they had all died together. Surely, Vernham Dean could do the same. But the vicar didn’t have the plague himself, and he was terrified of it. Well, who wouldn’t be? The thought of those horrible swelling buboes appearing in his armpits was beyond description.

  So he took the villagers up the hill, to a remote and lonely track called Chute Causeway – an ancient Roman Road that, unusually for a Roman Road, curves around the hill – way up on the high wind-blown slopes of the Downs. There, next to Chute Causeway, by Tidcombe Long Barrow, they set up camp.

  The vicar, however, didn’t stay with them. There was no source of water up on the hill, and the villagers would need food, so the vicar said, ‘I’ll bring you up food and water, I’ll keep you supplied.’

  … and he really meant it. He wasn’t trying to deceive them, he really intended to toil up the hill and bring them provisions on a regular basis.

  But when he was back down in Vernham Dean, he looked up at that hill – and he thought of all those plague-stricken people, and of how they might infect him, and he shivered with disgust and trembled with fear. He knelt in the church and prayed for them, but it didn’t do them much good. Up by Tidcombe Long Barrow, the villagers died of thirst and hunger, and, of course, the plague.

  But the vicar himself had already contracted the disease, and so he too died, down in the village, and there was no one to look after him.

  It is said that ever since then, should you be walking Chute Causeway on a moonlit night, you might see the ghost of the vicar of Vernham Dean, trying to bring food and water up to the plague-stricken villagers, but he can never quite make it far enough.

  Oh dear – that’s not a very nice story, but then the plague wasn’t very nice. I’m glad of all those developments in medicine and hygiene that have made the plague a thing of the past.

  PART TWO

  THE PLAGUE TREASURE OF PRESTON CANDOVER

  In another part of Hampshire, in a village called Preston Candover (we do like our villages to have two-word names!), everyone was horror struck when a plague victim arrived from London Town.

  He arrived on horseback, and was far gone with the plague. The horse had bags full of money dangling from it; the man had taken as much of his fortune as he could – not knowing when he escaped the plague-ridden cesspit that was London Town that he’d already contracted the disease himself. Leaning forward on his poor old horse, as it hobbled through Preston Candover, the man died.

  The villagers stood around horse and corpse, at a safe distance, and wondered what to do. They were poor people and they wanted that money, but their terror of the plague was stronger than their desire for riches, so they shot the poor horse, dug a great hole, and pushed horse, man and treasure into it, before filling it in.

  There then grew up a story about buried treasure in Preston Candover, and the books about Hampshire legends tell us that ‘neither treasure nor bones have ever been discovered’. But then, if no one knows where the treasure was buried, how do they know that no one has discovered it?

  You see, someone did take it – but that leads to another story, and I need to start that story at the beginning, because it is silly to start a story at the end – that would mean telling it backwards. Before I start the story, though, I need to tell you about the Hampshire fairisies.

  PART THREE

  THE HAMPSHIRE FAIRISIES

  Hampshire people don’t talk with that old, strong, country accent any more, but when they did people in both Hampshire and the neighbouring county of Sussex would use something called ‘the reduplicating plural’.

  To use the plural means to talk about more than one. So, we can talk about one fairy, or two fairies. In Hampshire and Sussex, however, they’d say that plural twice, so they’d say ‘two fairisies’. When learned people came down from London to study folklore, and they wrote down dialect words in their special, leather-bound folklore collecting notebooks, they wrote down the word ‘fairisies’ as ‘Pharisees’. This caused endless confusion, because the Pharisees are a group of people in the bible, and when the vicar stood in his pulpit, giving a sermon, people didn’t know if he was talking about a religious sect in Biblical times or the local fairies.

  Anyhow, most English counties have particular areas that are favourite places for the fairisies – and in Hampshire it is the area around the town of Liphook, close to the border with Sussex, an area of woods, hedgerows, fields and low rolling hills. The fairisies are not often spotted nowadays because they hate road traffic, so you’ll never see them from the roads, but if you walk the paths, tracks and green lanes, you might occasionally get a glimpse of them. You only ever see them out of the corner of your eye, never directly – well that is except for a few special people. These people see the whole countryside light up and they get to see the other world, and all the fairisies going about their business. I’ve never had that experience myself; the one time I thought I had, it turned out that I was accidentally trespassing on the grounds of a conference centre, or some such place, and so all the intruder deterrent lights had turned on. The security man wasn’t at all happy when I said that I thought it was the fairisies.

  If you are one of the few unusual enough to see the fairisies, you will see that they are not the little winged, dainty creatures from Disney films, but that they come in all shapes and sizes, and some of them can be quite scary. They can also take the form of animals; one of these, often seen around Liphook, takes the form of a little white calf. If you follow it down the road, and the road crosses running water, the calf will shrink till it is just the size of a cockerel, and then – ‘pop’ – it vanishes.

  But then the fairisies delight in doing odd things – and anot
her of the fairisies in that area takes the form of a little boy who can play beautiful music on a little flute. And this leads me to the story that I was going to tell.

  PART FOUR

  The Shining City

  Once upon a time there was a preacher, and he had been preaching the gospel in Liphook, and was riding north-westwards towards Alton.

  Firstly he saw the fairy calf, but as he thought that belief in the fairisies was sinful, he tried to ignore it. It ran in front of him along the green way, until it disappeared whilst crossing the River Wey. Whilst he was recovering from this strange experience, he heard the sound of a flute, and it was the most enchanting music he had ever heard. There, just ahead, and a little to one side of his horse, was a boy, skipping along and playing the flute.

  The preacher called out to the boy, but got no answer. He had the distinct impression that the boy wanted him to follow, and so, like the Pied Piper in reverse, the preacher followed the child.

  They went uphill and down dale, across fields and along remote tracks, through wild woodland and open heathland, for mile after mile, until the preacher had travelled a whole day and a whole night. Early in the morning the preacher found himself by some gravel pits near Preston Candover. As he looked at the little musician, the boy shrank and disappeared, just like the fairy calf had done.

  The preacher realised that there was something special about the place where the fairy boy had disappeared, so he marked the spot, and returned the following day with a spade.

  Well, he worked hard, and he dug and he dug, until he came across the bones of a human and a horse, lying where they had been buried by the villagers of Preston Candover two centuries before. Lying amidst the bones and the gravel were bags of gold coins, now surely free of the plague.

  His next problem was what to do with them. He was a preacher, a man of God. He felt that the gold was a gift from God, even though he had been led there by the fairisies, and he thought about the Golden City. He knew his bible well, and in the Book of Revelations, in the New Testament, the bible speaks of a city of gold – and long had he dreamed of this celestial city.

  So he invested the money, and then he married a rich merchant’s daughter from Mapledurwell, and he passed the dream on to his son. It was several generations before the dream was realised. His descendants were instrumental in using this money to build a real golden city, a wondrous and marvellous place: Basingstoke.

  Some people call Basingstoke doughnut city, because it has so many roundabouts, and indeed it is a place where drivers can very easily get lost – they say that there is one Morris Minor that has been driving around since 1969 looking for a way out.

  However, the town of Basingstoke wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for the preacher, and the preacher would have never found the gold if it hadn’t of been for the fairisies, and the gold would never have been there if it hadn’t of been for the plague, spilling out of London Town. So Basingstoke is built upon London’s overspill.

  7

  THE

  BLACKSMITH

  OF TWYFORD

  PART ONE

  THE FATHER OF THE CRAFTSMEN

  The blacksmith always used to be a very important person in a community – and yet, somehow, a little bit disapproved of. People tended to be scared of him, this rough man in his forge of fire, sparks, and ringing, metallic noises.

  Maybe this goes right back to the Iron Age – when metal was newly discovered, and the smith was creating new materials of incredible strength and power, so he might be viewed as a god or a devil. Of course the smith could be making objects that can be used for evil or good: swords or ploughshares.

  Perhaps the story of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone goes right back to the process of casting a sword blade – whereby white-hot liquid metal is poured into a stone mould – and when the cooled blade is drawn from the stone, it looks almost magical. If King Arthur did draw the sword, Excalibur, from a stone, it must surely have been in Hampshire, because Arthur’s round table hangs in the great hall in Winchester, and that means Winchester must be the site of Arthur’s legendary court, Camelot. I would say that, of course, because I live in Hampshire – really there are lots of places that claim King Arthur as their own – that’s how stories work.

  There was a great king in Winchester, though, and we’ve already met him in another story, and that was the Saxon king of Wessex, Alfred, and people often confuse Alfred with Arthur.

  So here is a story that begins with King Alfred and a great feast. Now King Alfred held quite a lot of great feasts, which is one of the reasons why people rather liked him, not least because he didn’t just invite the posh people.

  Alfred decided to have a feast for all the craftsmen in his kingdom – and he decided to give a reward to the one who would be described as ‘the father of all the craftsmen’.

  Well – they all rolled up; the tailor, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the blanket-maker (very important in a draughty castle with no glass in the windows), the curtain-maker (important for the same reason), the stone mason, the chef, the brewer, the butcher, the baker, the wheelwright, the scribe, the cooper, the bagpipe-maker – and the blacksmith. Everyone kept a bit of a distance from the blacksmith, because he wasn’t very clean, and he was scruffy and angry-looking. Sometimes he reminded people of those old gods, or the gods of those terrible, raiding Danes – Thor with his hammer, beating sparks from his anvil in the sky.

  Well, they all sat down to the feast – and Alfred, king and scholar, sat at the head of the great table. He looked truly royal, because he was dressed in a gorgeous new gown, made for him by the tailor. The gown was lined with fur, and decorated with pictures that told of the events of Alfred’s reign, from the burning of the cakes to the final great victory over the Danes at the Battle of Edington.

  At the end of the feast Alfred stood up, resplendent in his gown, and, using the embroidered pictures as illustrations, told stories of the battles between Saxon and Dane. He then declared the tailor to be the father of all the craftsmen, and all the other craftsmen, with the exception of the blacksmith, felt that there could be no argument with this, because who else could make a wondrous gown that could tell the story of the Kingdom of Wessex?

  The blacksmith, however, stood up and growled. He was the only one with the courage and independence, or maybe foolhardiness, to do so.

  ‘None of you would be anywhere without me,’ he snarled, ‘not one of you, including you, your majesty.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath from everyone at that, speaking disrespectfully to the king; and the guards’ hands went to their sword hilts.

  ‘You would use those swords, would you?’ sneered the blacksmith, ‘Swords made by me.’

  ‘You push things too far, blacksmith,’ said the king. ‘You dwell in a kingdom where there is peace for you to do your work and make more than swords. You have displeased me; leave us and go back to your forge.’

  And so that is what the blacksmith did. All the other craftsmen lived within the city walls of Winchester, but the forge was outside the city in a hamlet by the river, a meeting place of two fords, something which gave it its name of Twyford. The smith went back there and sulked. He sat down underneath a yew tree in the churchyard and muttered, ‘To hell with them – I’ll starve – I’ll do nothing – I’ll let the forge fire go out – I’ll leave the bellows alone and see if all the hot air that comes out of Winchester can work them.’ So the blacksmith went into a black sulk, and glared at his own boots.

  There was no problem at first, but then Alfred’s horse threw a shoe, and there was no one to put on a new one. The tailor’s pins started to wear down, and there was no one to make new pins. The baker’s shovel wore through and he couldn’t get a new one for putting loaves into the oven. The shoemaker needed a new awl, the butcher needed a new knife, the carpenter needed a new saw, the stonemason needed a new trowel, the wheelwright needed new rims for the wheels, the cooper needed new bands for his barrels – the only one
who had no problems was the bagpipe-maker, but then it was generally other people who had a problem with him.

  So they all went to the blacksmith’s forge in Twyford, and tried to create these things for themselves. Firstly they thought they’d better shoe the king’s horse, but he kicked the cooper in the hoopers, then the tailor burnt his fingers, the butcher dropped a heavy piece of metal on his toe and destroyed a brand-new pair of clogs made for him by the shoemaker, the carpenter dropped a red-hot horseshoe on his toe and started to jump around the forge, shouting and swearing – they all crashed into each other, and then blamed each other, and then started to fight. BANG! They knocked the anvil over.

  This was when King Alfred arrived at the forge.

  ‘ENOUGH – you silly, moon-faced bunch of clods,’ he bellowed. ‘Bring the blacksmith back – he is the father of the craftsmen.’

  So they all went to the yew tree in the churchyard and brought the smith back to his forge, and to show there were no hard feelings, he made each of them a present. There was a baking tin for the baker, a hammer for the shoemaker, a chisel for the stonemason, nails for the carpenter, hoops for the cooper and the wheelwright, a knife for the butcher and some new needles for the tailor – oh, and a brand-new, shining crown for King Alfred’s wife, Queen Ealswitha.

  Then Alfred told them all to sing a song and the blacksmith sang a song called ‘The Blacksmith’s Song’. He sang it so loudly that he blew the crown off Queen Ealswitha’s head, but that is the way to sing a song properly – full blast, and none of that twiddling around and whining and moaning and pretending to be all sensitive.

  The tailor though, he was cross and resentful that the accolade of being father of the craftsmen had been taken from him, so he crawled under the table and snipped at the blacksmith’s apron with his scissors, and this is the reason why blacksmith’s aprons are all raggedy round the edges – something that really doesn’t bother blacksmiths one little bit.