Nottinghamshire Folk Tales E-Book

Pete Castle

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Passed down from generation to generation, many of Nottinghamshire's most popular folk tales are gathered here together for the first time. In the popular imagination, Nottinghamshire means Sherwood Forest, outlaws, wicked sheriffs, wild beasts and Robin Hood. All these feature in this selection of folk tales compiled by storyteller Pete Castle, but there are also stories of the Men of Gotham; of fairies, witches, ghosts and vampires; as well as noble lords and thwarted lovers. These captivating stories of love, loss, heroes and villains have been written to recreate the oral tradition that made these anecdotes popular, and are brought to life through unique illustrations and vivid descriptions that have survived for several generations.

Leseprobe

To disciples and followers of Robin Hood everywhere; and to everyone who loves a good story.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due once again, to Sue who continues to put up with me both sitting at the computer and gallivanting off on singing and storytelling trips. She’s also a fount of ideas and an indispensable critic and proof reader.

To Roy Harris, for the citation, various bits of information, and for being my mentor all those years ago.

To Stephen Best: man of Nottingham, friend, and source of advice and information on this subject.

To Lewis Brockway for the rear cover photo.

To Jenny Ball for the loan of books.

To the staff at both the Nottingham and Derbyshire (Matlock) local studies libraries for help with finding and copying material.

To all the many storytellers and folk musicians I’ve worked with over the years.

To all the many people who’ve sat in my audiences.

To you for buying this book.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

One:

THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM

The Men of Gotham and the Cuckoo

The Men of Gotham Drown an Eel

The Men of Gotham and the Sheep

The Men of Gotham and the Cheese

The Man of Gotham and His Horse

The Men of Gotham and the Hare

The Men of Gotham and the Candle

The Men of Gotham Cross a River

The Women of Gotham

The Men of Gotham: The Truth (Allegedly)

Two:

STORIES ABOUT GOOSE FAIR

How Goose Fair Began

The Young Man’s First Visit to Goose Fair

The Bachelors of Derby go to Goose Fair

Old Jackey Peet: The Greediest Man in Nottingham

Three:

NOTTINGHAM FIGHTERS

Bendigo the Boxer

Fighting Noblemen: Jack Musters and Sir Thomas Parkyns

Four:

WORKING CHILDREN

Edward Pepper

Robert Blincoe

Five:

FAIRY TALES

The Little Watercress Girl

Jack and the Buttermilk

The Witch and the Buttermilk

The Weaver’s Wife and the Witch

The Witch and the Ploughman

The Bewitched Horses

The Wizard of Lincoln

The Good Magpie

The Good Fairy and the Bad Fairy

Six:

LOVE STORIES

Lovers Reunited

The Legend of St Catherine’s Well

Love Across the Divide

The Shoemaker of Southwell

The Fair Maid of Clifton

Seven:

TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE

The Gypsy Boy

A Tale from the Great North Road

‘Swift Nick’ Nevison

The Stranded Travellers

The White Lady of Newstead Abbey

The Haunted Car

The Black Dog of Crow Lane

The Bessie Stone

Beware the Devil Throwing Stones!

Eight:

IN THE GREENWOOD

The Rufford Park Poachers

The King and the Miller of Mansfield

Nine:

THE STORY OF ROBIN HOOD

Robin Becomes an Outlaw

The Archery Contest

Robin Hood and Little John

Robin Meets Will Scarlet

Robin Meets Friar Tuck

Robin Hood and Maid Marian

Robin Hood and the King

The Death of Robin Hood

Ten:

NOTTINGHAM CASTLE

The Legend of Mortimer’s Hole

The Trip to Jerusalem

Eleven:

THE ENDLESS TALE

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Old Mr Snotta built himself a hutta

By the side of the River Trent.

It was a very pleasant spot in the forest deep

And pretty soon he was collecting the rent.

Oh, the castle grew and the factories too

As the people came from miles around

To buy their food and sell their goods

In Mr Snotta’s little town...

This is a dangerous task I attempt! Having already written Derbyshire Folk Tales in this series of county folk tales books for The History Press I am now going to attempt Nottinghamshire Folk Tales. The two cities (and, I suppose, the two counties) are great rivals. The only man who has been able to unite them in the recent past was Brian Clough via his achievements with Nottingham Forest and Derby County football clubs. Now the two cities are literally joined by the Brian Clough Way – the name given to the stretch of the A52 between the two cities. However, in the more distant past there were many other links – even the famous Sheriff of Nottingham was, in fact, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Derby until Elizabethan times (therefore at the time of Robin Hood!) As you read these tales you will find other things the two counties have in common as well.

I’m not from Nottinghamshire. I was born a Man of Kent and I have lived in Derbyshire since 1987 but, back in the 1970s, I lived in Arnold, on the outskirts of Nottingham, for a few very influential years. For the last thirty-plus years I have worked professionally as a folk singer and storyteller, but without those few years spent in Nottingham my life would probably have taken a very different direction and I would not be writing this now, for it was during those years that I first began to take a serious interest in folk songs and folklore. I owe an awful lot to those years in Nottinghamshire.

I had discovered folk music whilst at college having played and sung in rock bands when I was at school, and I’d been toying around on the fringes of folk music – singing songs by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon as well as my own compositions (deeply influenced by the Incredible String Band) for several years by the time we moved to Arnold. In the 1970s, Nottinghamshire was one of the foremost areas in England for folk clubs and bands. (Several of the stories in this book gave rise to the names of clubs or groups—Bendigo’s, Hemlock Stone etc.) We hadn’t been in Nottingham long when I happened to go to a meeting which led to me starting a folk club in Arnold and then, a year or two later when it folded, I joined the committee of the very successful Carlton Folk Club which continued to run into the present century, long after I’d left. Whilst playing as a resident at Carlton I became more and more interested in traditional songs. I learned many and also wrote a few ‘imitation’ folk songs, the most successful of which was probably the Goose Fair Song which was taken up, sung, and even recorded, by several other singers and groups.

Somehow my wife, Sue, and I also managed to get ourselves a series on Radio Nottingham called ‘Sing a Song of Nottingham’. It was a series of five programmes, each with a theme – Sherwood Forest, Coal Mining, People… etc – built around mainly local songs which we performed. I wrote the little song at the top as the theme tune. I suspect the series might have been fairly bad and very naïve, but it sowed a lot of seeds for the kind of work which I’ve done since, including six years running a local radio folk programme after we’d left Nottingham and moved down to Bedfordshire. It was whilst in Bedfordshire that I took the major step of giving up my job as a teacher and going on the road full time as a professional folk musician. A few years later I discovered storytelling and have been doing the two, in tandem, ever since.

ABOUTNOTTINGHAMSHIREFOLKTALES

When I wrote Derbyshire Folk Tales I had no trouble in finding stories from every part of the county, in fact Derby itself received but scant attention. I have found Nottinghamshire to be very different. Most of the stories look to Nottingham. Even if they are set elsewhere in the county, the participants are often going to or coming from the city. There are comparatively few stories which are rooted entirely in any of the other towns and villages. This is probably because until recently there were few other big settlements in the county. Newark and Southwell spring to mind but apart from those, there were only small market towns and hamlets scattered through the forest and, of course, the large estates of the nobility – the Dukeries. There are many stories about the gentry and nobility.

With its forests, its grand houses and its wide open spaces, Nottinghamshire, if it were on the Continent, would be an ideal setting for terrifying tales of wolves and vampires, evil Counts and little girls lost in the depths of the dark wood but, no, this is quiet, calm, middle England, where you are never far from the Great North Road and can soon escape to civilisation, so there are very few dark tales of that sort – although I have found some to include here.

In the eighteenth/nineteenth century, industry came to the county in the form of mining and factories. Tiny hamlets became pit villages which rose, and fell again when the pits closed in the 1980s, if not before. Nottingham became a manufacturing town but retained its literary and intellectual elite. I am well aware, and even feel slightly guilty, about the fact that I have not explored the folk tales of the mines and factories. I know there are a lot of customs and superstitions connected with both and I think there must be stories too, but it is a whole different world which I would have to explore and I haven’t had the time – perhaps that’s another book? Meanwhile, those traditions survive in songs and in the novels of writers as diverse as D.H. Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe.

There are a lot of what could be called ‘true stories’ in this collection – stories about people who have actually existed. How much of their stories actually happened though, is a different matter – they are collected from bits of gossip, tall tales, and legends. Whether Robin Hood fits into this category is open to discussion and is a matter of personal belief.

ABOUTSTORIESANDSTORYTELLING

This is not a book of stories I’ve created, and it is not a history book. Most of the stories in this book are traditional, and even where I have mentioned a source – a publisher or a book – that is usually the man who collected or published the story, not the man (or woman) who ‘made it up’, for they are folk tales and they are, by definition, anonymous. This book is a miscellany, a hotchpotch, a cornucopia of different sorts of stories from different sources. They come from all periods of history and all classes of people. You will find fairy tales, legends, tall tales, bits of gossip, jokes, and retellings of historical events. You won’t find real, accurate history. Where the events actually happened, or where the characters actually lived, it is the story which has been told, not the facts.

Folk tales inhabit a world of contradictions: on the one hand, they take an event and blow it up out of all proportion, then pass it on in a form in which it could not possibly have happened, and once the story has taken root it proves almost impossible for a historian to say, ‘No, it couldn’t have happened like that’. People’s reaction is to say that it did in the story so it must have! A quote I am fond of using to sum this up is, ‘When the legend becomes fact print the legend’ (words spoken by the journalist at the end of John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence). But that determination to remain unchanged also means that folk tales sometimes preserve, over thousands of years, information that has long been forgotten by scholars. Studying folk tales can almost be like archaeology; sometimes you can excavate a small gem of truth from a lot of rubble.

Most of these tales have existed in an oral form at one time or another. They were probably passed on by word of mouth for many years, perhaps, even, for many generations before they were written down. That is the case with all kinds of folklore – it moves from the mouth to the page and then back to the mouth, and each form influences the other.

I am a story teller. I was telling stories for decades before I was asked to write any down. Writing is a different art form to telling – you cannot successfully transcribe a story as it is told. Telling a story in a live situation involves using gesture and tone of voice, something which does not come across when it is written. Also, a live telling is told in a particular environment which can colour the telling; one of the reasons it is really enjoyable to tell a story in the place where it is supposed to have happened.

I started off trying to group the stories here like I did in the Derbyshire book, but they didn’t fit into sections like that so I thought I wouldn’t group them at all, I’d just let them run on from one to another – a ‘chain’ of stories, like I might do when telling them live. In a live telling you add introductions, say why you like the story and what it means to you – in other words, add a bit of yourself to the story. I have done that here. When I had finished the arrangement of stories I found that, rather than a random selection, they had actually grouped themselves, but under very different headings to the ones I had intended. Stories are like that, they have minds of their own!

The other big difference between the two books is, of course, the illustrations. For the Derbyshire book I asked an old friend, Ray Aspden, to do them, but when we were nearly finished I found myself asking ‘why didn’t I do them myself?’ When I was a boy I was always ‘good at drawing’, and my education took the path it did largely for that reason. I was going to do something to do with ‘art’ when I grew up. As it happened I ended up teaching in primary schools, although my main study at college had been art. Although I can draw, I’ve found that I can’t paint. After college I had a ceremonial burning of all my work and decided I wouldn’t do any more. I tried to paint again for a short time in the 1980s but was never happy with the results. I preferred songs and stories. However, I can still draw and I’ve really enjoyed getting back to some serious artwork for this book. I had to work at it but I hope you like them too.

The brief for this whole series of books is that they are folk tales, retold by working oral storytellers and we’ve all had to walk the line between the two art forms – story telling and story writing. I want the stories to work in the book, but I also want them to have the immediacy and informality of an oral telling. I would like nothing better than, in a few years time, to come across you telling a story and to realise that it was one you came across here. I would count that a huge compliment. They are stories for telling; please tell them.

Pete Castle, Belper, 2012

For more info please visit:www.petecastle.co.uk and www.factsandfiction.co.uk

ONE

THEWISEMENOFGOTHAM

Three wise men of Gotham

Went to sea in a bowl;

If the bowl had been stronger

My tale would have been longer.

It seems fitting to start this collection of Nottinghamshire stories with a smaller collection of stories, a collection of tales which might well be the oldest ones in this book, the tales of the ‘Wise Men of Gotham’. Most, if not all, of these stories had been circulating orally for several centuries before they were published in 1540 in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham’, by a writer using the pseudonym A.B. of Phisicke Doctor. His booklet contained twenty tales about the exploits of the inhabitants of this small village, which lies just a few miles south-west of Nottingham. The pamphlet remained in print into the nineteenth century and some of the stories are still amongst the best known of all Nottinghamshire, even British, folk tales. It’s hard to find a collection in which one or two don’t crop up. The tales were so well known in America, that Washington Irving used Gotham as a satirical name for New York City, and DC Comics continued that idea with the name for the city where Batman lived.

So, for centuries the ‘Wise Men of Gotham’ (or the Gotham Fools) has been a byword for stupid, silly, or eccentric behaviour. Other people from other places have done strange things too, but you can be pretty sure that the men of Gotham did it first or better. For example, the famous Wiltshire story of the moonrakers actually began with the Gothamites. Here follows a selection of their other doings.

THEMENOFGOTHAMANDTHECUCKOO

The men of Gotham noticed that the arrival of the cuckoo was a sign that summer was on its way. So, they put their heads together and used their formidable intelligence to come up with a plan that might prevent the cuckoo from flying away again. They thought that if the cuckoo stayed all year then summer might stay all year too. A good idea! They waited until a cuckoo landed in a tree in the middle of the village, and then they quickly built a high wooden fence around it. But when it wanted to leave the cuckoo just flew over it, of course. ‘Oh dear,’ lamented the men of Gotham, ‘we didn’t build it high enough. Next year . . . ’

This is, quite possibly, the best known Gotham story and is celebrated by the sign on the village pub: The Cuckoo Bush.

THEMENOFGOTHAMDROWNANEEL

In the old days, Lent was a time of strict fasting and everyone solemnly kept to the diet that the Church prescribed: no meat, no eggs, no fat and so on. The main food they ate during Lent was fish: salted fish, dried fish, white herrings, red herrings, kippers and all kinds of fish.

On Good Friday, when the fast was over, the men of Gotham got together to decide what to do with the spare fish they had not eaten. They decided that the best thing to do was to throw them into the pond so that they could breed again, ready for next year. So that is what they did.

The following year, when Lent approached, the men all went to the pond to catch a new supply of fish but all they could catch was a large, fat eel. ‘He’s eaten all our fish,’ they cried. ‘We must punish him. What shall we do with him?’

They suggested all kinds of punishments but the one they liked best was to drown him. So they threw him back into the pond.

THEMENOFGOTHAMANDTHESHEEP

A man from Gotham was going to Nottingham to buy sheep. He arrived at a bridge just as another man from Gotham, who was coming from Nottingham, arrived at the other end of the bridge. ‘Where are you going?’ asked the one coming from Nottingham.

‘I’m going to Nottingham to buy sheep,’ came the reply.

‘And which way will you bring them back?’

‘Why, I’ll drive them across this bridge, of course.’

‘Oh no you won’t!’

‘Oh yes I will, and if you don’t let me drive them cross the bridge then they’ll jump over the stream.’

And the two men started to act out driving the imaginary sheep. One man herded them across the bridge and the other waved his arms to stop them and send them back the way they’d come.

Soon, a third man of Gotham came along carrying a sack of meal from the mill. He stopped and watched the two men herding invisible sheep and then asked them what they were doing. When they told him he thought for a minute and then emptied his sack into the river. ‘Now tell me,’ he said, ‘how much meal is there in this sack?’

They told him there was none, the sack was empty.

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘there’s just as much meal in this sack as there are brains in your heads.’