Essex Folk Tales E-Book

Jan Williams

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 274

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The Essex coastline has endured invasion by plundering and bloodthirsty Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, and this mysterious landscape is still haunted by their presence. Their spirits, and countless others, have oft been reported – not least by smugglers determined to keep intruders away from their secret hideouts. Even more dramatic stories of the supernatural lurk inland: accusations of witchcraft have been screamed around many picturesque market towns, dragons have terrorised the community, and a violent White Lady has struck at Hadleigh Castle. Indeed, it is the women of Essex who have stirred the imagination most – from brave Boudicca and beautiful Edith Swan-neck to the adulteress Kitty Canham. Amid the county's infamous pirates, highwaymen and desperados, Essex can even boast a lady smuggler.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to recognise the hard work of Essex local historians and societies in preserving folk tales – thank you to Douglas Carter of Boxford; Peter Gant at the Manningtree Society; Phyl Hendry of St Osyth; Keith Lovell of Tollesbury; the Thaxted Society; the Mersea Museum; the Leigh-on-Sea Society; the Harwich Society; Barbara Tricker of Great Bentley; Winifred Beaumont of Wormingford; and Margaret Leather of Rowhedge. I was introduced to Essex folk songs by Adrian May and his group Potiphar’s Apprentices.

There is a huge pleasure in telling stories in good company and I would like to acknowledge the inspiration and companionship of the Essex Storytellers, who originally included Peter Maskens and Carl Merry. After Peter’s death, we were joined by Andy Jennings. With this combination of talents, we were able to secure funding for the storytelling production of the tale of Byrhtnoth from Maldon District Council, the story of the Mersea Barrow in the production ‘Scratching the Surface’ from Arts Council East, and the tales of the witches of Manningtree in the production ‘Green Mist Rising’ from Heritage Lottery. This sponsorship made it possible to bring our stories to audiences all over the county, and to research and develop them in considerable depth.

I would like to thank Barbara Maskens for the inclusion of her husband Peter’s story ‘The Last Mountain in Essex’, Carl Merry for his retelling of ‘The Heart of Thorns’ and Andy Jennings for his description of the Roman centurion crossing the Strood.

I would also like to thank the staff of the local studies library in Colchester, Saffron Walden Library, and especially my local library, Brightlingsea, for their long-suffering help in tracking down obscure books.

Finally, I would like to express my appreciation for the help and support of Sylvia Kent, Malcolm Burgess and Alison Barnes. I am especially appreciative of Margaret Hawkins’ editorial skills, and Val Johnson and Peter Fowler for their patient encouragement and useful comments.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Foreword

One

HEREBE DRAGONS

The Coccodil’s Story (Wormingford)

The Glass Knight (Saffron Walden)

Strange News out of Essex (Henham)

The Flaming Dragon (St Osyth)

The Drawswords Serpent (Great Bentley)

The Barbary Serpent (East Horndon)

Two

BATTLES LONG AGO

Boudicca’s Last Stand (Ambresbury Banks)

The Battle of Maldon (Northey Island)

The Viking who Lost his Ships (Benfleet)

The Dane’s Skin (Hadstock)

Edith Swan-neck (Waltham Abbey)

The King’s Standard Bearer (Thundersley)

Three

HEROOR VILLAIN?

The Pirate’s Heart (Fingringhoe)

A Strange Funeral (Leigh-on-Sea)

The King of Smugglers (Paglesham)

The Best of the Smugglers’ Tricks (The Essex coast)

The Highwayman and the Fairies (Romford)

Sixteen-String Jack (Theydon Bois)

Dick Turpin’s Last Rant (Hempstead)

Black Bess (Epping Forest)

The Widow’s Rant (Loughton)

The Horse with no Ears (Leigh-on-Sea)

Four

THE DISCOVERYOF WITCHES

The Wicked White Cat (Hatfield Peverel)

Skeleton House (St Osyth)

Enter Master Hopkins (Manningtree)

Rebecca West (Lawford)

The Disappearing Witch (Betty Potter’s Dip)

The Sea-witch (Leigh-on-Sea)

Strange Events at Canewdon

The Poacher and the Mawkin (North Essex)

Five

WOMENIN LOVE

Bushes and Briars (Essex folk song)

The King of Colchester’s Daughter (Colchester)

The Three Big Sillies (Finchingfield)

The Romantic History of Matilda Fitzwalter (Little Dunmow)

Love at the Ferry (Maldon)

The Heart of Thorns (Hadleigh)

The Smell of Violets (Canvey Island)

Jacky Robinson (Essex folk song)

Six

THINGSTHATGO BUMPINTHE NIGHT

The Legend of Barn Hall (Tolleshunt Knights)

The Thirteenth Reaper (Mersea Island)

The Robbers and the Baker (St Leonard’s Church)

Wry Neck Sal (Hadleigh Castle)

Lament for a White Lady (Mersea Island)

Black Shuck (Tollesbury)

Spider (Stock)

The Moat Farm Murder (Clavering)

The Tale of Kitty Canham, her Two Husbands and Three Ghosts (Thorpe-le-Soken)

Seven

THE CABINETOF CURIOSITIES

The Bad-Tempered Brownie (Stansted Mountfitchet)

Funny Man! Funny Man! (Springfield Place)

Remedies of a Wise Woman (Wormingford)

How Saffron got into Saffron Walden

The Coggeshall Jobs (Coggeshall)

The Amazing Waistcoat (Maldon)

My Hat! (Wivenhoe)

A Lost Dream (Rochford)

The Dunmow Flitch (Great Dunmow)

The Last Mountain in Essex (Abberton)

Tally Ho! (Bradwell and Foulness Island)

Eight

HOLY WAYS

The Mersea Barrow (Mersea Island)

Burial of a King (Prittlewell)

The Homecoming (Bradwell)

The Strange Case of the Headless Saint (St Osyth)

The Wild Man of Orford (Coggeshall)

The Loyal Sacrifice (Colchester Castle)

Lost at Sea (All Saints’ Church, Brightlingsea)

The Battle of the Flags (Thaxted)

The Knowing Cat of Canvey (Canvey Island)

The Philosopher at Brightlingsea (All Saints’ Church)

Bibliography

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

The striking cover design is by Katherine Soutar and is based on the dramatic story of ‘The Poacher and the Mawkin’. The illustration captures the drama of one of the county’s darkest tales.

The delightful lino cut prints are the work of talented Brightlingsea artist Simon Peecock. It’s been a pleasure to tap into his inventiveness and lively sense of humour.

The other illustrations are listed below:

The Henham-on-the-Mount serpent (‘Strange News out of Essex’ booklet, 1664)

The woods outside Ambresbury Banks

Byrhtnoth outside All Saints’ Church, Maldon

Dick Turpin on Black Bess

Only known likeness of Kitty Canham, which used to be in the Bell at Thorpe-le-Soken

Edward Bright (Eighteenth-century print)

The Flitch Chair

All Saints’ Church, Brightlingsea

FOREWORD

Essex is a place of dark secrets and haunting tales. It is a romantic county for those who have the determination to plunge into its rural heart. It has taken me thirty-five years of living in one of Essex’s most beguiling villages, Brightlingsea, to really explore both the county’s landscape and its heritage. I am still discovering treasures.

A glance at the map shows that the county’s most obvious feature is the ninety miles of coastline facing the North Sea, indented with creeks, navigable rivers and backwaters. Down these waters have come Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans to plunder and pillage and eventually settle. Boudicca, Byrhtnoth and Haesten all put up a brave fight here and inspired tales of epic proportions. Later, these very same creeks were to be the inspiration for the wildly inventive tales of smugglers determined to hide their booty. Their usual weapon was a rattling good ghost tale to keep the curious at bay.

Strangely enough, it is the mud of the salt marshes which has provided the most dramatic backdrop to Essex stories. The great storyteller Charles Dickens said of Essex that ‘all about was stagnation and mud’, yet it was a landscape that inspired some of his most evocative writing. Similarly, Sabine Baring-Gould found that his ten years ‘on the mud’ of Mersea Island may not have been the happiest time of his life, yet in his novel Mehalah he wrote the most poetic description of the landscape:

A more desolate region can scarcely be conceived and yet it is not without beauty. In summer the thrift mantles the marshes with shot satin, passing through all graduations of tint from maiden’s blush to lily white. Thereafter a purple glow steals over the waste as the sea lavender bursts into flowers and simultaneously every creek and pool is royally fringed with sea aster. A little later the glasswort, that shot up green and transparent as emerald glass in the early spring, turns to every tinge of carmine. When all vegetation ceases to live and goes to sleep, the marshes are alive and wakeful with countless wild fowl.

The people who lived in the haunting landscape of the marshes often felt so isolated that their dreams were full of alarming shadows. These shadows developed into the weirdest stories. In these tales even the Devil makes his presence felt, and alarming black dogs and knowing cats prowl down country lanes. Ghosts are everywhere. In fact, the paranormal enthusiasts are kept busy with all manner of sightings all over the county. The ghosts’ favourite haunt seems to be the Redoubt Fort at Harwich, whose echoing corridors, built in Napoleonic times, have a special magic. If you stop at any ruin or picturesque pub in Essex you will invariably stumble across the well-worn tale of a haunting.

Some of the best tales were collected by the journalist James Wentworth Day. As a keen wild fowler, he met some wonderfully eccentric characters with grand tales to tell. It is through his books that I learnt about the Roman centurion crossing the Strood on Mersea Island, the Viking chief who lost his ships at Benfleet and the ostler who disappeared up the chimney of a well-known inn.

There is also another Essex, depicted on countless chocolate boxes and table mats. Constable painted Essex as much as he painted Suffolk and it is here, in central and north-west Essex, that you find the loveliest villages and richest agricultural lands. There are acres of wonderful wheat, thatched cottages, duck ponds and striking towered churches. Inevitably these make wonderful settings for romances. Did you know, for instance, that Maid Marian was an Essex girl? I suspect that you will at least have heard the story of the Dunmow Flitch, where a flitch of ham is awarded to a married couple who can live without quarrelling for a year and a day. Even today couples compete for it.

Essex’s churches are not just impressive architecturally, they are also steeped in history and legend. Thaxted must be among the most glorious churches in England, with one of the most colourful vicars of all. I have found Essex vicars an invaluable source for tales. In fact, the most solid work on Essex’s history was done by an eighteenth-century clergyman, Philip Morant, who also wrote The History and Antiquities of Colchester. In his day, he cut a picturesque figure with his powdered wig and golden cane, tapping his way as he searched for Roman urns, jewels and coins in the fields around Colchester. The nineteenth-century clergyman Philip Benton had a vast knowledge of wildlife and agricultural land. In his History of the Rochford Hundred he could not resist rambling into many folk tales, which are the base of several stories we tell today.

He would have known that agriculture has never been an easy way to make a living, with the constant fear of crops withering and livestock perishing. Out of these deep-rooted anxieties came Essex’s blackest stories of all. These were the fearsome accusations of witchcraft that seemed to lurk everywhere. In Tudor and Stuart times, no parish seemed to be without a witch. St Osyth and Manningtree had the dreadful misfortune of being home to local officials who were quick to take advantage of the legislation of the time. This was responsible for bringing countless old women to the gallows. They never questioned the bizarre evidence which came their way, but instead took a malicious pleasure in repeating every fragment of foul village gossip.

Another part of Essex where romance and the sinister mingle is Epping Forest. John Clare loved to hear the songs of the nightingale, red cap, sparrow and cuckoo, but for most eighteenth-century travellers the forest was a place of danger. Here were cutpurses and highwaymen swift to relieve the unwary of their belongings. The highwaymen Stephen Bunce and Sixteen-Sting Jack attracted admiration for going about their business with style and humour, but Dick Turpin and the Essex Gang were a criminal fraternity, deserving of total contempt for their viciousness.

As you move further south, you enter the towns that are on the fringe of London and have become swallowed up by an urban life where few folk stories survive, although Southend and Leigh-on-Sea have some interesting tales. Indeed, Essex is a county that seems almost to be five separate worlds – the coast, the marshes, the farming land, the pretty villages and the towns dominated by London. Part of the pleasure of writing this book has been discovering the lesser-known corners of Essex. I have been fascinated by the marshes around Tollesbury, the romantic villages that cluster around Saffron Walden, the coastal inlets around Paglesham and the pubs of Leigh-on-Sea. It’s amazing how few people really explore these areas. They are well worth a leisurely visit.

I have to admit my own life in Essex has been centred around the Colchester area, but it has proved a fertile place for stories. When I first began telling traditional oral stories with the Essex Storytellers, we worked on projects to do with the islands of Essex, the Battle of Maldon, the Mersea Barrow and the witches of Manningtree – and were amazed at the amount of unknown material we discovered.

The heritage of Essex is Saxon, for, as the name suggests, it is the land of the East Saxons. Its patron saint is St Cedd, who inspired the building of the evocative little stone chapel St Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell. There is also a fascinating wooden church from that time at Greenstead. The most exciting archaeological find in recent times has been the burial chamber of a Saxon king at Prittlewell in south-east Essex, whose importance has still not been fully appreciated.

Equally inspiring is that great epic poem The Battle of Maldon, which makes a hero of a man who lost a battle! Unfortunately, many of the folk stories that were told in the medieval period have been lost. The problem was that no one had systematically gathered these tales, except for local historians. Sadly their work is often hidden in local libraries in thin booklets, which tend to disappear down the back of dusty shelves. One of the most useful local histories is the attractively presented Boxted: Portrait of an English Village by Douglas Carter, because it shows the wealth of stories within one village. I feel that I have been on a quest to unearth hidden treasure and, amazingly, sometimes I have found it.

When I was first invited to put together a collection of Essex folk tales, I was a little concerned about the number of dark stories of witches, ghosts, murders and devils, but as I began researching the full range of tales I made all sorts of interesting discoveries. I found six dragons, an Anglo-Saxon king’s burial chamber, and a lovely lady known as Edith Swan-neck. There were various White Ladies, a headless saint, a bad-tempered brownie and a magic scarecrow … read on to find out more, for it is Essex’s diversity which makes it fascinating.

I found that breaking the stories into themes made it simpler to track down material and get a firmer understanding of what the tales were trying to convey. In telling these stories I have sometimes kept close to historical sources or told traditional tales, but in others I have used mere fragments of tales and history and woven them into a very personal yarn. Surely this is the storyteller’s privilege? Much depends on the audience. The tale you tell in a pub is not the same as the epic you tell in a lecture theatre. Sometimes I want to make people laugh, sometimes I want to make the listener think about the human condition, and at other times I want to preserve precious relics of the past.

Always (as the old storytellers used to say) there is an apple for whoever listens to the story, there is an apple for whoever tells the story, and an apple for the storytellers of the past who have stood and whispered their tales in our ears. Peter, I owe you a lot of apples, for you are always my most faithful listener!

One

HEREBE DRAGONS

Roll up! Roll up! Today we present, for your special delight, six of Essex’s finest dragons!

Essex’s dragon stories concern real villages in Essex, which still take pride in these whimsical tales. Often the stories are unknown in the rest of the country. Saffron Walden has the most frightening dragon of all because it is a basilisk, which can kill simply with a glance from its eyes. Wormingford’s dragon is a crocodile and East Horndon’s is a snake newly arrived off a ship.

The dragon stories were once so popular that villages competed for their ownership. The Essex village of Wormingford and the Suffolk village of Bures both claimed the same dragon. Wormingford (once called Withermundford) actually went one step further, for the village’s name was developed from the word ‘worm’, a medieval name for a dragon. Wormingford Church has a splendid stained-glass window with the ‘coccodil’ busily swallowing a plump pair of legs, watched by a knight in armour on a horse and a fleeing maiden.

Essex folk are eager to tell you that, according to a document at Canterbury Cathedral, an unusual fight broke out near Little Cornard on the afternoon of Friday 26 September 1449.

In a marshy field on the Suffolk/Essex Border, two fire breathing dragons engaged in a fierce hour long struggle. The Suffolk Dragon was black and lived on Keddington Hill, while the dragon from Essex was reddish and spotted and came from Ballington Hill, south of the river Stour. Eventually the red dragon won and both creatures returned to their own hills to the admiration of many beholding them.

So Essex won!

The source for the Saffron Walden story and the Henham dragon is a pamphlet published in 1669 called ‘The Flying Serpent’ or ‘Strange News out of Essex’. Strange news it certainly was! The stories were obviously concocted by William and Henry Winstanley. A jolly pair of jokers they seem to have been. William was a skilled conjurer, often fashioning dragon kites for his family. Henry built the first Eddystone Lighthouse and filled his House of Wonders at Littlebury with clockwork ghosts, robot servants, and trick chairs that suddenly whizzed people from the drawing room to the cellar or out into the garden. He even had Magic Dragons as a main attraction in his water theatre at Piccadilly. So it was simple for him to make a fake dragon.

Whatever their sources, these tales of Essex dragons make fine entertainment because of the undercurrent of humour. Yet you wonder. Could they contain an element of truth?

THE COCCODIL’S STORY

Once there was a king who was given an egg as a farewell present by the man he had fought for so long. How strange you say! Yet it is true. The great leader Saladin gave it to Richard the Lionheart when he left the Holy Land. The two may have been on opposite sides in the Crusade, but Saladin had a respect for the brave Englishman.

‘This will keep you safe,’ he said as he handed the English king the egg.

‘Really?’ Richard the Lionheart gazed down at the egg. It was a puzzle. There was nothing for it but to keep the egg as safe as he could in his saddlebags. Anything which kept him safe was to be treasured. His journey was going to take him through Germany, which he knew well enough was a place hostile to him. He had already disguised himself as a pilgrim to protect himself from possible robbers. It was not, however, to prove an effective disguise. Very quickly he found himself kidnapped by no less a person than Leopold, Duke of Austria.

In Richard’s prison cell, the egg hatched into what at first looked like a tadpole and then a baby dragon. It kept the King amused while ransom arrangements were being made. The King made cooing noises at it until he realised it was growing alarmingly bigger and bigger. By the time he reached England, it was enormous! The King felt it safer to put the animal in the menagerie at the Tower of London. The menagerie keeper knew immediately what it was and he called it a ‘coccodil’ in that funny medieval way of his. It would be called a crocodile now.

‘Majesty,’ the keeper said, ‘this coccodil is a fearsome creature. It will grow until it be twenty cubits long with a crested head, teeth like a saw and a tail extending to this length …’ He extended his arms to try to show the length, but his arms were inadequate.

‘How shall we take care of it? It could eat us all up.’

‘Build it a strong cage, and keep it well fed and locked up in chains.’

The keeper did what was asked of him, but, by the end of a year, it had grown so big that it lashed its tail against the bars with such force that the bars broke. With a mighty crashing it was free of its chains at last. Down into the Thames it slid joyfully and then up it went, splashing through rivers and sliding through muddy marshes. On and on it swam through Essex, always travelling at night. The only signs it left behind were the mangled corpses of young men and women foolish enough to be out after midnight.

Swimming, crawling and ravaging its way, it came to a village called Withermundford on the river Stour. Total panic broke out at the very sight of those long jaws opening and closing, revealing spiked teeth from which nothing could escape. The Lord of the Manor sent out his archers to kill the coccodil, but the arrows bounced off its back as if it had been made of iron or hard rock, and the arrows that fell onto the spine made a tinkling sound just as if they had fallen on a bronze plate. The animal’s hide was totally impenetrable.

Then, worst of all, came the rumour that the coccodil was demanding the flesh of virgins for its food, for even in the best-regulated community there is only a limited supply of virgins! The entire community wrung their hands in distress at the very thought of losing their sweetest maidens.

‘Send for Sir George!’ they shouted.

The only George known to the worthy villagers was a local Lord of the Manor called Sir George from Layer de la Haye, son of Eustice, Earl of Boulouge. He was a brave fellow and came swiftly enough through the forest to the ford where the creature waited. The sight of the coccodil glaring at him made him nervous. Yet the people were shouting encouragement at him. He could not let them down, especially those lovely girls, with their hands over their mouths, suppressing their screams.

He advanced three paces at a time, then suddenly stopped. Carefully he lifted his lance high. The coccodil suddenly leapt up to reach for the knight’s plump left leg. As soon as its jaw crunched the armoured thigh, the pain of biting into plate armour was too much for the coccodil and it disappeared into the water, swallowed up in the mere, leaving behind a trail of bubbles and the cheers of lots of relieved people.

Even to this day many have noticed how the water of the mere gets agitated at times. Bubbles rise again to the surface. There is a whistling wind in the reeds and the strange water plants wave desperately. The wise nod their heads. They know what it is. It can only be the descendant of the mighty coccodil, cautiously seeking a plump virgin. Watch and see where the bubbles go!

THE GLASS KNIGHT

‘What’s happening?’ The people of Saffron Walden just could not understand it. Fruit was rotting on the tree. Birds were dropping dead from the sky. The rivers were poisoned. They were terrified. Soon there would be nothing left to eat or drink.

‘It’s the fault of that thing … that monster … that dragon,’ a local farmer moaned. ‘I have seen it in the fields and it’s terrible. It just opens its mouth and puffs out that foul breath and then everything living in its path dies …’ As he talked, fear got the better of him, and he could no longer speak properly.

In the end, the sheriff said, ‘Let’s go and see the wise woman. Maybe she can explain it.’ A small crowd gathered and followed him. They too wanted to hear what she had to say.

The wise woman was waiting for them on top of the hill. Her head nodded and nodded on her skinny neck as she greeted them. ‘Ah! You have come. I have been expecting this. I have seen the beast myself and know what damage it does.’ Very gently she patted the farmer’s arms and encouraged him to tell everybody what the dragon looked like.

‘It has the head and claws of a rooster.’ For a moment the farmer half expected the people to laugh at him but they did not. His terror was too obviously real. Encouraged by the fact that they were taking him seriously, the farmer babbled on. ‘It has the forked tongue of a serpent which swings backwards and forwards. It has the wings of a bat and a long arrow-shaped tail like … like the Devil. All over its body there are barbs.’

‘And what colour is it?’

‘Every shade of black and yellow, with a white spot like a crown on its head. And it walks upright on two strong legs with a mighty tail …’

This seemed to match the diagrams that the wise woman had found in her well-thumbed Book of the World’s Most Hideous Creatures. Then she drew breath and asked the question that was obviously the most important of all. ‘What are his eyes like?’

The farmer shook his head. He did not know. He had not looked into the dragon’s eyes.

The wise woman’s nods grew more and more frequent. She was growing increasingly agitated. ‘I knew it! I knew you could not have looked into his eyes. You would have been dead if you had. I must warn you all. This monster is a basilisk!’ she screamed. She waved her skinny finger at the crowd in warning. ‘Never look into its eyes, for its baleful glance will kill any living creature. The basilisk is the rarest and most dangerous of dragons.’

She began to give all sorts of magical descriptions, using proper technical terms. Not everybody present understood all this mumbo jumbo, but they could sense the danger they were in. The town’s sheriff advised that a knight be sent for, a knight with experience of rescuing other towns in danger.

‘Yes. Yes!’ the people all said.

The sheriff galloped off to see what could be done. Sighing with relief, the people went home to the safety of their warm beds.

It took a while to find a suitable knight. Sadly, some foolish people could not wait. They had to see the dragon for themselves and ventured into the street, only to be confronted directly by the dreadful eyes of the basilisk. One glance and death was immediate. The number of bodies lying in the street was alarming. If the killings were allowed to continue, there could be a severe decline in the population. The basilisk was such an enthusiastic maneater. Nothing seemed to deter him.

The knight was terrified to be told of all the basilisk’s powers. The good people of Saffron Walden, it was clear, were in peril. He went to his room at the inn immediately to begin his preparations. Gloomily he polished his armour late into the night, going over and over the difficulties of fighting this sort of dragon. He was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he had taken on more than he could cope with. How could he kill such a ferocious maneater? How could he avoid the breath that burns all in front of it? It could not be defeated by a sword or a spear, for its poisonous blood would flow the length of the weapon like lighting, withering the body of the person holding it. There are some, however, who say that in this situation the herb rue can have healing qualities.

And those eyes! How hideous they were! It was curious that the beast only closed his eyes when he drank water from a pool. Did that hold a clue to its weakness? He was determined to find some way to help these people.

Right up until dawn, the knight tossed and turned; and you know how it is – sometimes in our sleep we get the answer to our most nagging problems. He woke to an early sun, feeling far more cheerful, yet he did not rush into action yet. He had something to arrange first. The people watched from behind their shuttered windows, getting more and more restless, but they had faith in the knight. Then one of the village lads caught a glimpse of the knight riding to the field where the basilisk lay.

‘He’s here. Hurrah!’

‘Whatever is he wearing?’

‘Whatever it is, I can see myself reflected in it.’

‘It’s a suit of armour made of crystal mirrors!’

‘Whatever good will that do? He’s got no sword. He’s carrying rue and a sprig of magic rowan.’

Silence fell. The people had lost their faith in the knight, but slowly they followed him through the trees that lined the road. Then they stopped when he stopped. The knight stood in front of the basilisk with his eyes tightly closed. The monster itself rose up on its legs and stared at the knight, its baleful eyes glittering with malice and then, with an almighty shriek of pain, the loathsome creature saw itself reflected in the armour’s crystal glass. The horror of the moment seemed to freeze him into complete immobility. The beast fell and was still; still in the finality of its death, caused by looking into its own toxic eyes.

No one moved. Then the knight rolled the basilisk’s corpse into a hole in the ground and scattered it with rue to eliminate any trace of poison. An almighty cheer echoed on all sides. Drums, tabors and fiddles began playing and the people danced. All day and all night they danced, some dancing as far as Thaxted, and some say the dancing still goes on when the people remember their lucky escape.

And if you still doubt this tale, then know that the knight’s sword was hung in Saffron Walden Church, and an effigy of the basilisk was set up in brass, with a table close by which told the entire story. Then, in the time of the Great Rebellion (or Civil War as some will call it), this was all taken down as being some monument to superstition. Lawless soldiers broke it into pieces.

Well, I say those fellows were no better than the basilisk for trying to destroy a fine thing! We should rebuild a monument to the crystal knight in today’s troubled times. Courage and inventiveness should always be celebrated.

STRANGE NEWSOUTOF ESSEX

Edgar never forgot the summer of 1669; the summer he was nine years old and the dragon came to Henham. Such a noise and chatter! Nobody could quite believe it. It was the strangest news ever heard in Essex. To think a flying serpent had come to Henham, lovely little Henham on the hill! Some called it a dragon. Yet I want you to listen carefully; there’s something about this tale that doesn’t quite hang together.

Edgar was most impressed with the story told by a fine gentleman wearing a splendid blue velvet suit and riding a grey mare. It may have been because the fine gentleman, riding out on that May morning, had caught the first glimpse of the Henham dragon. He announced to the villagers on his return, ‘I tell you, I have never been so frightened in my life. I was riding past the farm they call the Lodge, minding my own business, when without any warning the dragon came out of the meadow. It attacked me and my horse. It was quite, quite terrifying to see a creature of such monstrous size rise up in that way before us. I swear to you, I was convinced the horse and I were close to death. I gripped the mare firmly with my thighs, and spurred her homewards. As I galloped, I caught a glimpse of the farmer who owned the field where the beast sat. I shouted to him, ‘Quick! Quick! Get your cattle indoors. They’re in danger! The dragon will have them.’ I can tell you the farmer’s face was as pale as cheese. He did not hesitate. He crossed to his fields with his dog at his heels and his droving stick in his hand, and immediately directed his cattle up to his cowshed. I never stopped to see if he got there safely. I just wanted to get home and warn you all what I had seen.’