‘Shouldn’t bolt it so,’ says Jim, ‘but never mind, I got a pill here, soon cure that.’
‘Where?’ says Knucker.
‘Here,’ says Jim, and he ups with an axe he’d hid behind his back, and cuts off his head.
That’s all, but if you goos through that liddle gate there into the churchyard, you’ll see Jim’s grave.
Current oral versions often re-interpret the tale in interesting or amusing ways. Some seek a rational explanation, saying, for instance, that there was a nunnery in Lyminster, linked to the church by a tunnel, and that the nuns invented the story of the dragon to scare soldiers away from this tunnel at the time of the Conquest. Others, that ‘the wicked barons of Arundel Castle used to come down to Lyminster and have their fill of the local maidens, after which they would kill them and throw their corpses in the Knucker Hole’. Others made a joke of it: ‘There was once a dragon in the Knucker Hole which used to eat all the local virgins, so the Duke of Norfolk [in Arundel Castle] offered a reward for killing him. A local boy went off with a poisoned pie – and was never seen again, though the dragon is still there. That’s why there are no virgins in Lyminster.’
The pool itself remains a topic for storytelling, even though it is no longer accessible to the public, having been fenced off to make private fishponds in 1973. It is said that back in the 1920s a man set out from Lyminster towards Arundel one misty morning, driving a horse and cart, and they all tipped into the Knucker Hole and vanished without trace; only, in 1969, a diving club exploring its bottomless depths brought up half a cartwheel and some broken bits of harness. Another informant was sure that some sort of curse clings to the pool, so that it is ‘extremely unlucky’ to catch fish in the new ponds that are fed by its water (just as children of past generations were forbidden to eat watercress from nearby cress-beds), though whether this curse is due to a local ghost or to the lingering power of the dragon, she did not know. She added that ‘there is a man on guard in a hut to stop people taking home any fish they take there’; this shows how fast folklore can adapt to new circumstances, for she was speaking in 1975, a mere two years after the fishponds were made.
4
Graves and Ghosts
The fascination death holds for the imagination is reflected in innumerable tales of haunted houses, churches, churchyards, crossroads, woods and battlefields, of which Sussex, like every other county, has a goodly stock. Not that it has as many now as it once had; even in the 1860s, Lower was commenting on how many had been forgotten since his boyhood days, when:
Nearly every unfrequented corner had its demon in the form of a black dog, while under every sequestered wooden bridge an old woman without a head was supposed to be engaged with her spinning wheel. In the droveway between Kingston (near Lewes) and the marshes of the Ouse, one ‘goblin damned’ was doomed to a penance more hopeless even that that of Sisyphus, or the Danaides, or of him who had to make a rope of sand; for his ever-unaccomplished labour was, under the figure of a black calf, to spin charcoal incessantly!
But though they may be fewer now, ghost stories are with us still and seem unlikely to die out. What is noticeable is a certain change in fashions: it is safe to say that such grotesque horrors as spinning calves and capering skeletons (see p. 124) are now extinct, that black dogs and headless horsemen are getting rarer, and that the general trend for many decades has been towards more dignified and elusive phantoms – footfalls and tappings, bodiless voices, dim shapes or intangible presences – towards the ‘psychic manifestation’, in short, and away from the robust rural taste for the horrific.
An account of a ‘psychic experience’, if given at first hand by the person concerned, with full belief and with the aim of accuracy, cannot of course be called a folktale; the shaping force of tradition has not had time to influence it, and (in theory at least) the teller is not trying to impress or entertain, or to ‘make a good story of it’. On the other hand, a personal account might sometimes become a starting-point for the growth of a local legend; passing from mouth to mouth, it might acquire shapeliness and dramatic force, and as the original ‘experience’ faded into the background, the story based on it might come to conform more and more to some general pattern of what a ghost-story should be. Moreover, since the idea of ghosts is still accepted by many as credible, it might at any moment be reinforced by some fresh ‘experience’. In short, this is a sphere in which one man’s tale may be the next man’s truth. In selecting from the available material, I have chosen tales which show signs of having circulated long and widely, and particularly those which show traditional motifs and story-patterns.
There is nothing that makes so good a focus for a legend as a conspicuous grave, particularly if there is something eccentric about it, or about its occupant. One excellent specimen is the Miller’s Tomb, which stands in splendid isolation on the flank of Highdown Hill, west of Worthing. It was built by John Oliver, an eighteenth-century miller, in his own lifetime, and the proud owner used to visit it daily, allegedly to meditate. Local opinion, both then and now, is divided in its judgement of him; some take his piety at face-value, but many hold that he was a rogue, in league with smugglers, and used the hill as a look-out post, the mill as a means of signalling, and the famous tomb as a hiding-place for contraband. Be that as it may, when he died in 1793 he had a flamboyant funeral (the coffin was carried by young girls in white, a custom normally reserved for the burial of very young and hence incontestably sinless children!); his elaborate tomb, engraved with many verses, has remained a favourite picnic spot to this day.
Two legends have developed round the Miller’s Tomb. One is that John Oliver arranged to be buried upside down, because he believed that at the Last Judgement the whole world would turn topsy-turvy, and he wanted to be the only man facing the right way after this upheaval. This weird idea is known elsewhere in Sussex too; north of Pulborough stands Toat Tower, a tall, isolated folly built in 1827, and a local story alleges that there is a man buried under it upside down, together with his horse, which is also upside down.
The second legend about the Miller’s Tomb is that if you run around it seven times, John Oliver’s ghost will jump out and chase you; it is even asserted that the verses on the tomb (now very worn) say that this will happen. In fact, of course, they say nothing of the sort, but are simply the ordinary type of pious verse popular at that period. One group, on the end slab, is surmounted by a carving of Time and Death, the latter shown as a skeleton, and contains the lines:
Why start you at that skeleton?
’Tis your own picture that you shun;
Alive it did resemble thee,
And thou when dead like that shalt be.
Clearly, these lines and the accompanying picture served as a starting-point for this not very serious tale of ghost-raising, which is still passed on by Boy Scouts camping on Highdown Hill and families picnicking there. In July 1983 two Worthing schoolboys told the press they had actually seen the ghost after running round the tomb twelve times at midnight: ‘It was an old man with a pale face, and I think he had a moustache. He was losing his hair and was quite short.’
In November 1982 vandals smashed the tomb, destroying many of the inscriptions on it and causing a flurry of comment in local papers on the facts and stories surrounding John Oliver. Some people (myself included) hoped that during the repairs it could be opened to see whether the coffin really was upside down, but the idea was dropped for fear of causing offence. However, Mrs Anne Induni of the Worthing Archaeological Society tracked down some documentary evidence, namely a contemporary press report of John Oliver’s funeral which describes all its eccentricities with relish, yet says nothing about upside-down burial; this virtually proves this feature to be fictional. The idea may have been inspired by a real, well-documented instance of such a burial, that of Major Peter Labellière on Box Hill in Surrey in 1800, not many years after the Miller’s own death.
Rumours about the tomb continue to flourish. One informant told
me that the verses on it are a code, giving clues as to where the Miller, who was really a highwayman, had buried stolen jewels and other loot worth thousands of pounds. Another said there was gold in the tomb itself, the proceeds of his wicked career as both smuggler and wrecker (the latter is implausible, given that the Sussex coast is not prone to shipwrecks). Yet another had been told by her grandmother in about 1940, that the latter’s own two great-uncles had opened up the tomb and removed the body to make a cache for the contraband they themselves were smuggling; the informant’s grandmother was convinced this was true, and felt ashamed of the bad behaviour and illegal activities of her great-uncles. However, it seems most unlikely that any of these stories can be accepted as accurate.
Equally picturesque and equally baseless is the story attached to the odd burial-place of ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller in Brightling churchyard. Fuller, who died in 1834, was a rich and colourful eccentric, kindly, but with a reputation for wildness; one of his pet pastimes was building obelisks, mock temples, spires, and other follies. He had a mausoleum built for him in his lifetime, in the form of a huge pyramid, an unchristian design which may have been thought shocking. At any rate, tradition firmly maintains that his mummified body is sitting bolt upright inside it, on an iron chair, with his top hat on, and with a bottle of claret on a table in front of him. Some people add that the floor is all covered with broken glass, so that if the Devil should come to fetch him away he could not get near, for fear of cutting his hoof. But Mad Jack’s ghost is not said to walk; with the claret to keep him happy, why should he bother?
The carving upon one tombstone in Rye churchyard, showing a woman sitting upright in her coffin, is said to commemorate a remarkable event. It is said that she was liable to fall into periods of deep unconsciousness, one of which was so prolonged that she was judged to be dead and was laid in her coffin, which, for some reason, was placed in a room of the old Flushing Inn while awaiting burial. This room was above the kitchen, and the rising warmth aroused her; she got out of the coffin and went down into the kitchen, saying she felt rather cold. When everyone had recovered from the shock, she was taken home and lived for several years longer. Such, at least, is the tale; one suspects that the tomb carving actually shows a dead person rising from a coffin on Judgement Day, but that this was misinterpreted by later generations as a warning about the risk of premature burial.
Until well into the nineteenth century, suicides and hanged criminals were refused Christian burial. Suicides had to be buried in the middle of a public road (often, though not necessarily, at a crossroads), and a stake was sometimes driven through them as a public warning to others – but probably also (unofficially) as a precaution against haunting. The bodies of criminals were taken down after hanging, coated with tar as a preservative, and hung up once more in an iron cage on a gibbet at some conspicuous roadside location, preferably near the scene of their crime, where they remained till they fell to bits. The skull and gibbet-cage of John Breads, a murderer executed in 1743, is still displayed in Rye Museum. At Shoreham it is firmly maintained that Tennyson drew the inspiration for his poem ‘Rizpah’ (1880), about a mother who repeatedly visits her son’s gibbet to gather up the disintegrating bones and take them secretly to a churchyard, from the fact that a certain James Rook of Shoreham, the son of a widow, was hanged and gibbeted in Goldstone Bottom in Hove in 1793 for theft.
Understandably, the sites of gallows and gibbets and the unhallowed graves of suicides and criminals are eerie places. A former coaching road from Lancing to Steyning, passing Cissbury Ring, is said to be haunted by a highwayman who waylaid travellers there and was hanged nearby. Repeated attempts were made to bury his corpse in the middle of the road, but each time it was found next morning poking up ‘like a dreadful jack-in-the-box’, for he had sworn that he would never remain in the ground. It is unclear what became of it in the end, but it is said that his ghost is still to be seen nearby, on horseback; that a phantom coach can be heard; and that carters and drivers taking that road after dark feel their wheels bump over some invisible obstacle, presumed to be the grave.
According to M.A. Lower, writing in 1854, a miller at Chalvington hanged himself in his own mill because business was bad, and was then buried at a crossroads with an oak stake driven into him. The stake took root and became a tree, though a sinister one: it produced only a single shrivelled branch, which stretched across the road like a gallows. At Warnham there is a mound near the roadway which all agree is an unmarked grave, though opinions differ as to whether it contains a hanged sheep-stealer or a young soldier who killed himself for love. Either way, there was a custom (possibly still current) for the mound to be kept planted with flowers, and/or to have cut flowers laid on it; local people said it was a mystery who was doing it – children, possibly, or passing gypsies, or the local road-mender.
On the northern outskirts of East Preston is a pub called The Roundstone, near a crossroads. Legend says that a criminal, or suicide, was buried there, with a heavy millstone laid on top and a stake driven through the hole in the middle of it, to prevent his ghost walking; some say it was brought (or rolled down of its own accord) from John Oliver’s mill on Highdown, which overlooks the spot. In the 1960s and ’70s the sign outside the pub showed a skeleton struggling to lift a millstone, and in the hallway was a striking painting of the skeleton prone under the stone, and staked. Sadly, the painting was stolen in 1976 and the exterior sign has also changed.
The most ancient visible graves in the county are, naturally enough, the prehistoric burial mounds here and there on the Downs, some being Neolithic long barrows, and others Bronze Age round barrows. In a few cases, folk tradition has preserved an awareness that such mounds were burial-places, but it is always wildly astray in its ideas as to who was buried in them, when, and why. It may think of them as graves of giants who lived ‘once upon a time’ (see pp. 26, 28), or of men killed in some relatively modern battle. For instance, the barrows on Mount Harry, near Lewes, are said to cover those who fell in the battle between Henry III and Simon de Montfort in 1264; and two separate groups of barrows at Uppark are said to contain, one the men, and the other the horses, killed in a minor fray during the Civil War.
A striking site reputed haunted as a result of ‘battles long ago’ is Kingley Vale, north-west of Chichester. Here a narrow coombe is filled from end to end by a magnificent grove of sombre yews, some exceedingly old, while above, on the crest of Bow Hill, stand four large Bronze Age barrows called either the Kings’ Graves or the Devil’s Humps. These kings, so the tale goes, were leaders of a Viking warband wiped out by the men of Chichester – a battle between men from Chichester and marauding Danes is in fact recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 894. The Vikings, or at any rate their leaders, are said to lie in the barrows, and the grove of yews to be descended from trees planted to mark the battlefield. Indeed, many versions of the story prefer to ignore the barrows on the hill, and say that the Danes lie where they fell, under the roots of the yews, and that their ferocious ghosts haunt the dark and silent wood. Others, while agreeing that the wood is haunted, say that its ghosts are those of Druids, and that somewhere, amid all the yews, there stands a single sacrificial oak. And there are yet others who add that in the night the trees themselves can come alive, and move and change their shapes.
These beliefs offer opportunities for jokes and hoaxes. A certain Jack Upperton was hanged and gibbeted near Burpham in 1771, for attempted highway robbery; the site of the gibbet, now thickly wooded, was reputed eerie and people were said to get hopelessly lost if they tried to go that way at night. Back in the 1880s, it is said, a Burpham woodcutter overheard a party of visitors saying, in the woods, ‘Somewhere just near here is where the last highwayman was hung in chains, and it is said his ghost walks these paths at night.’ ‘And here he is, too!’ shouted the hidden woodcutter, to the dismay of the visitors, who fled. Again, in the 1920s, two smart young Londoners were challenged by the locals to visit the gibbet site on a dismal Oct
ober night; arriving there, rather drunk, one of the Londoners boldly enquired, ‘Well, how are you tonight, Jack?’ ‘Wet and cold! Wet and cold!’ replied a hollow voice, and very soon the Londoners were ‘heading for Chichester at a hundred miles an hour’.
Many ghost legends reflect the potted version of history, both national and local, which has survived in the communal memory. A Sussex list would include the following, besides the Danes of Kingley Vale: a Roman centurion haunts the Castle Inn, Chichester; at Chanctonbury Ring, one can raise Julius Caesar and his army by counting the trees, or see an old white-bearded man variously explained as a Druid or as a Saxon killed at the Battle of Hastings; on the site of this great battle, the ground runs red with blood after every shower of rain, and the ghost of the first man killed rides across the field on the anniversary; famished children that beg in the streets of Bramber are said to be the grandsons of the medieval Baron William de Braose, who were starved to death while held hostage at Windsor by King John; at the former Priory of the Hospitallers at Poling, now a private house, one can hear ghostly organ music and Gregorian chant; at Winchelsea, George and Joseph Weston, notorious local highwaymen hanged at Tyburn in 1782, now haunt their former haunts; in the attic of the Red Lion Inn at Hooe, phantom smugglers still mill snuff from contraband tobacco. Doubtless many others could be added to the list.
But ghosts of historical personages, interesting though they are, are not usually very striking in their manifestations, nor do they seem ever to have caused much fear. Some purely local ghosts are described far more vividly, and seem to have once caused considerable alarm, even if only within a few miles’ radius. Early in the nineteenth century, for example, there was said to be a most unpleasant spectre in St Leonard’s Forest; it was a headless phantom which would lurk among the trees at dusk waiting for some horseman to pass by, and would then spring up behind him, wind its skeletal arm round his neck, and cling to him in spite of all his struggles and pleadings until he reached the further side of the Forest. Howard Dudley, the first writer to mention the ghost, in 1836, says it was locally called ‘Squire Paulett’, and Lower suggests, very tentatively, that this name may refer to a Captain William Powlett who died in 1746. Lower also notes that genuine belief in the ghost was fading in his time (1861), and so we may safely assume that although this spectre continues to live on in guide-books, it is many generations since it was a real cause of fear to travellers in the Forest.
Folklore of Sussex Page 5