And Mas’ Meppom was right, for about a year ahtewuds he died, poor man, sorry enough dat he’d ever intarfered wud things dat didn’t consarn him. Poor ol’ feller, he lays buried in de churchaird over yonder – leastways, so I’ve heerd my wife’s mother say – under de bank jest where de bed of snowdraps grows.
This story of the sweating fairies was very widely known. Mrs Latham, writing in 1878, says it was the favourite Sussex fairy tale in the days of her youth, and gives a version from Washington in which the spying farmer offends the little people simply by crying out, ‘Well done, my little fellows!’ But his punishment is less drastic than poor Jeems Meppom’s – the fairies simply vanish, and refuse to help him again.
Or again, there is a variant given by the Revd W.D. Parish of Selmeston in 1875, of which the hero is a carter, as told him by a Downland man:
I’ve heerd my feäther say that when he lived over the hill, there was a carter that worked on the farm along wid him, and no-one couldn’t think how ’twas that this here man’s horses looked so much better than what anyone else’s did. I’ve heerd my feäther say that they was that fat they couldn’t scarcely get about; and this here carter he was just as much puzzled as what the rest was, so ’cardingly he laid hisself up in the steäble one night, to see if he could find the meaning an’t.
And he hadn’t been there very long before these here liddle farises they crep’ in at the sink hole; in they crep’, one after another; liddle tiny bits of chaps they was, and each on ’em had a liddle sack of corn on his back, as much as ever he could carry. Well! In they crep’, on they gets, up they climbs, and there they was, just as busy feeding these here horses. And prensley [presently] one says to ’tother, he says, ‘Puck,’ he says, ‘I twets; do you twet?’
And thereupon this here carter he jumps up and says, ‘Dannel ye [drat you],’ he says, ‘I’ll make ye twet afore I’ve done wid ye!’ But afore he could get anigh them, they was all gone, every one on ’em.
And I’ve heerd my feäther say, that from that day forard this here carter’s horses fell away, till they got that thin and poor that he couldn’t bear to be seen along wid ’em, so he took and went away, for he couldn’t abear to see hisself no longer, and nobody ain’t seen him since.
The fairies might well manifest themselves in farm dairies as well as in barns and stables. Here too they would, if left to themselves, be willing to be helpful, but if they were sneered at or spoken ill of, they would turn mischievous and revenge themselves by such antics as smashing cream-pans, preventing the butter from ‘coming’ in the churn, or turning cattle loose. Moreover, the fairies would disappear if the wrong sort of reward was offered them, just as their counterparts in other regions, the brownies and pixies, were said to do; a dish of milk was welcome, but a gift of clothes would put them to flight. A story collected by Miss Candlin tells how a helpful fairy named Dobbs always wore a tattered hat; the grateful farmer set out a new one for him one night, and heard him exclaim: ‘New hat, new hat! Dobbs will do no more good!’ – after which he never came again.
‘Dobbs’ is a widespread name in Sussex for these domestic drudging fairies, and there was a common saying, ‘I see Master Dobbs has been helping you’, which was used to someone who has got through a piece of work unexpectedly fast. Dobbs was particularly invoked by women when their butter would not ‘come’ properly; he would help them, if they repeated this charm three times:
Come, butter, come!
Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate,
Waiting for a buttered cake.
Come, butter, come!
Fairies were also said to reward hard-working servant girls by slipping a small silver coin into their shoes while they were asleep – presumably it was their mistress who saw to it that this belief was kept up! In the same way, nowadays, young children are encouraged to let their mothers pull out their loose milk-teeth with the promise that if they are good about this, and if they put the tooth under the pillow, they will find in the morning that the fairies have taken the tooth away and left a coin there instead.
It was noticed above that the Burlow Castle mentioned in the first story recorded by Lower is a conspicuous medieval earthwork. This is by no means the only case of fairies being thought to live in a spot marked out by some perplexing ancient feature. It is said, for instance, that they can be seen at midnight on Midsummer Eve, dancing on Tarberry Hill and on Cissbury, both of which have hill-forts at the summit; also that a fairy funeral was once seen on Pulborough Mount (i.e. Park Mound, which has the ruins of a Norman motte); and that Harrow Hill near Patching, which has flint mines and earthworks on it, was locally believed to have been ‘the last home of the fairies in England’:
They had a troubled time of it for many years, and got dissatisfied with the ways and goings-on of modern people, and at last when scientific diggers came, and cold inquiries were made, and some of them proclaimed their cold unbelief and sniffed when the word ‘pharisees’ was mentioned, the little people could stand it no more, and all have left.
Despite the feeling, once so prevalent, that fairies are best left alone for fear of offending them, there are one or two prescribed rituals by which those who wish to catch a glimpse of them can do so. There is, however, a certain prettiness about these procedures which probably indicates that they belong to a more recent layer of tradition, where belief in fairies was fast declining into a charming fancy for children.
One, already mentioned, is to go on Midsummer Eve to one or other of the places which they are said to haunt; another is to find a ‘fairy ring’ in the grass, and run round it nine times on the first night of the new moon, whereupon you will hear their laughter and music coming up from underground. The third is more elaborate, and its provenance is curious. In 1952 a contributor to the Sussex County Magazine described the stories and lore with which her nanny had fascinated her in childhood; many of these tales concerned a certain Mrs Jasper whom the nurse had known in her own childhood, who had been reputed to be a witch. This Mrs Jasper had boasted of having a charm to make fairies come, and had demonstrated it to the little girl who later became the nanny:
You had to do it on a moonlight night when the pollen was just ripe on the catkins… She stood a few yards away [in a woodland clearing] with two small branches in her hands. I saw the gold dust flying from the catkins as she waved them gently, and she sang a little song over and over in a low drawlin’ husky voice – just as though she was coaxin’ ’em:
Come in the stillness,
Come in the night;
Come soon,
And bring delight.
Beckoning, beckoning,
Left hand and right;
Come now,
Ah, come tonight!
Finally, an amusing tale which Mrs Latham declares was a popular favourite in Sussex nurseries about a hundred years ago:
There were once two men who stole a fine pig from a farmer’s sty, crammed it into a sack, and set off to carry it home. Their way lay up the steep slopes of Beeding Hill. The day was hot, and the pig was heavy, so half way up the hill they put the sack down and stopped for a rest – but they had laid that sack just on top of a fairy’s hole. Presently they set out again, and before they had gone very far, the man whose turn it was to carry the sack saw a tiny little figure running along by his side, and heard it call out in a shrill and doleful little voice, ‘Dick, Dick, where be you?’
The man was already startled enough, but then he was terrified to hear another voice, from inside the sack:
In a sack,
Pick-a-back,
Going up Beeding Hill.
He threw down the sack, and he and his mate ran off as fast as they could. The two fairies nipped back into their hole, and as for the pig, he was already well on his way home to his own sty, back to the farmer – who was a man who was always on good terms with the fairies.
6
The Devil
Satan, so some people say, rarely ventures
into Sussex because, knowing that good Sussex cooks will make puddings out of pretty well anything, he is afraid of being made a pudding of. All the same, he has left a good many marks on our topography. There is the Devil’s Ditch, a six-mile bank and ditch running from near Halnaker to near West Stoke; the Devil’s Bog, in Ashdown Forest; the Devil’s Road, a local name for the stretch of the old Roman Stane Street that passes through Billingshurst, so called because it is the only flint-made road for miles around, and because it runs so unnaturally straight; the Devil’s Dyke, of which more will be said below; the Devil’s Book, an earthwork in a valley at the foot of the Caburn; the Devil’s Humps, a group of four Bronze Age barrows on Bow Hill; and the Devil’s Jumps, a similar group of five barrows on Treyford Hill. As to how these last got their name, the following story is told in the district:
In the old days, the god Thor was fond of sitting on the top of Treyford Hill for a rest. One day the Devil came by, and, seeing the five barrows, he took it into his head to amuse himself leaping through the air from one to another. All this thumping and jumping disturbed Thor, who woke up in a temper, and shouted: ‘Go away!’
But Old Nick only laughed and jeered at him. ‘Poor old Thor!’ he said. ‘Don’t you wish you could jump like me? But you’re too old to go jumping about,’ said he.
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than Thor upped with a huge stone and hurled it straight at him. It got him full in the midriff, just as he was in the middle of his finest jump. So the old Devil, he gave a great yell, and he took himself off double quick. And he has never been seen there from that day to this, though of course the mounds are still there.
Here, as in many other legends, the Devil features as a powerful but comic figure who is thwarted but leaves his mark upon the landscape – but how did Thor get into the tale? The explanation lies in Surrey, where exactly the same story is told about three sharp little hills called the Devil’s Jumps at Frensham, about two miles from a village named Thursley. This place-name holds the clue: it comes from Old English Thunres leage, ‘Thunor’s grove’ – Thunor being the English version of the ancient Germanic god of thunder whom Scandinavians call Thor. But this should not be taken to prove that the Surrey tale goes back to Anglo- Saxon peasants; on the contrary, it looks like a playful modern invention by some educated person who knew about etymology and myths. It is unlikely to be earlier than c. 1900, because in 1895 the Surrey historian George Clinch explained the pagan origin of the name Thursley, but never mentioned Thor’s presence at the Jumps. We can safely conclude that the story did not exist in 1895, but that shortly thereafter somebody, probably inspired by Clinch’s remarks, invented it to fit the pre-existing place-names. From there, being apt and amusing, it must have spread in the twentieth century to Sussex, where it was re-applied to the barrows on Treyford Hill.
Satan’s contributions to Sussex scenery could be quite sensational. The conspicuously isolated Torbery Hill was formed from a spoon which he flung aside in anguish one day when he had burnt his lips sipping scalding hot punch from his Punch Bowl in Surrey. But the best-known of such legends is that of the Devil’s Dyke, a cleft in the Downs to the north of Hove, running south-west from near the village of Poynings towards the sea.
The Devil, so it is said, had been infuriated by the conversion of Sussex, one of the last strongholds of paganism in England, and more particularly by the way the men of the Weald were building churches in all their villages. So he swore that he would dig right through the Downs in a single night, to let in the sea and drown them all. He started just near Poynings and dug and dug most furiously, sending great clods of earth flying left and right – one became Chanctonbury, another Cissbury, another Rackham Hill, and yet another Mount Caburn. Towards midnight, the noise he was making disturbed an old woman, who looked out to see what was going on. As soon as she understood what he was up to, she lit a candle and set it on her window-sill, holding up a sieve in front of it to make a dimly glowing globe. The Devil looked round, and thought this was the rising sun. At first he could hardly believe his eyes, but then he heard a cock crowing – for the old woman, just to make quite sure, had knocked her cockerel off his perch. So Satan flew away, leaving his work half done. Some say that as he went out over the Channel, a great dollop of earth fell from his cloven hoof, and that’s how the Isle of Wight was made; others, that he bounded straight over into Surrey, where the impact of his landing formed the hollow known as his Punch Bowl; others, that he hurled the Goldstone into Hove as he flew away.
That, at least, is how most Sussex people tell the tale. But there are alternative versions which ascribe the saving of the Weald to a saint, though they disagree as to which one should have the credit. Hilaire Belloc, who retells the story with great verve in The Four Men, says that St Dunstan made the Devil agree to finish the work in one night, before cockcrow, and then by the power of his prayers caused all the cocks in the length and breadth of the Weald to crow all together in chorus, though the day had not yet dawned. A guidebook on sale at the Dyke, drawing on Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Ovingdean Grange (1879), gives the credit jointly to St Cuthman and a fictitious nun, Ursula de Braose, whose prayers afflicted Satan with cramps and whose blessed candle tricked him. Indeed, as early as 1837 there is an allusion in the Penny Post saying that he was foiled by a holy hermit and the power of the Cross.
It may be added that two small rectangular mounds at the lower (i.e. northern) end of the Dyke, which are in fact the foundations of disused ox-steddles, are known as the Devil’s Grave and the Devil’s Wife’s Grave – so it would appear that some story-tellers claimed that the fiend died of his exertions. More remote variants are that the reason the Devil was digging into the hill was simply that he had dropped a sixpence there and was desperate to find it; and that the cleft was not made by digging at all, but by the impact of his fall when he was cast out of Heaven. In these versions there is of course no trick with a candle or a cock.
There used to be a Devil’s Chimney in Sussex, a tall pinnacle of chalk rising from the sea off Beachy Head, but it collapsed in the 1920s. There, the story was that the Devil had built this chimney in order to smother the earth with smoke from Hell, but just as he was finishing it a ship sailed by, and the cross formed by its mast and yard frustrated his evil plan.
Another highly popular legend about Satan in Sussex revolves round his epic encounter with St Dunstan at Mayfield; its ultimate source is Eadmar’s Life of St Dunstan, written around 1120, but it has of course grown during the centuries. At the time when Dunstan was Archbishop of Canterbury, Mayfield was his favourite country residence, and it is said that, being a skilled metal-worker, he had a smithy of his own in the palace grounds. One day, as he was at work making horseshoes (or, some say, a chalice), the Devil came to him disguised as a lovely girl, who began by discussing her spiritual problems, but soon passed on to flirting and amorous advances. Dunstan, guessing the truth, just kept on working quietly at the forge, while she sidled closer and closer. As soon as she was within arm’s reach, he snatched his red hot tongs out of the fire, and caught her by her pretty little nose. She shrieked, and all at once changed into a hideous monster; again and again she changed her shape, each form being more terrifying than the last, but still the saint held on. At last Satan, beaten, appeared in his own form, Dunstan released him, and the wretched fiend flew off as fast as he could to Tunbridge Wells to cool his nose in the waters. They have had a reddish colour and a curious flavour ever since. As for the tongs, they can be seen in the Old Palace at Mayfield (now part of a convent school) to this very day.
But others say that the Devil flew off while the tongs were still on his nose, and that as Dunstan would by no means let go of them, he too was whirled through the air until he reached the spot known as Dunstan’s Bridge, not far from Tunbridge Wells, where he at last relaxed his grip, fell to earth unhurt, and dipped his glowing tongs in the springs at Tunbridge Wells. Others again claim that the Devil cooled his nose in the Roaring Spring, a
bout a mile away from Mayfield, and that once a year these waters roar in memory of the event. There is even a tale that the village of Tongdean, near Brighton, is the place where the tongs fell from Satan’s nose, though this is many miles from the scene of action, even as the Devil flies.
Needless to say, Satan could not be expected to accept defeat meekly, and there are two further tales of his attempts to be avenged on Dunstan. The first, about how he tried to spoil the church at Mayfield, has been told already (p. 17). The second tells how he did his best to destroy the village itself.
One day, when the Mayfield Convent had just been built, the Devil met St Dunstan and told him that he was going to knock down every house in the village. The saint bargained with him, asking whether he would be willing to leave standing any house that had a horseshoe on it. Now at that time the custom of nailing horseshoes over doorways was quite unknown, so the Devil laughed, and said he would willingly promise that. But Dunstan was a blacksmith, and he knew a thing or two. He rushed round from house to house fixing up a horseshoe on each one, and as he kept just one step ahead of the Devil all the way, Old Nick could do no damage after all.
It must be many centuries since legends such as these commanded any serious belief, but the next group of stories forms a rather different category, being jokes to most, but of more weight to others, particularly children.
For instance, there is a taboo, still fairly widely upheld, against eating blackberries after 10 October, because, they say, during that night the Devil goes by and spits on every bush – that, at least, is the polite version, for less polite children used to say that he pisses on them. It was at one time thought that to break the taboo would bring death or disaster before the year was out; nowadays, it is generally simply said that the berries never taste nice after this date. It is indeed a fact that the fruit tends to become watery and flavourless at about this time, because of the night frosts. However, the precise choice of date must go back to the period when the English calendar was adjusted by eleven days in 1752, for 10 October in the new reckoning corresponds to 29 September in the old, and this is Michaelmas Day, a feast celebrating the primeval war in which St Michael the Archangel hurled Lucifer out of Heaven and down to earth.
Folklore of Sussex Page 7