South Yorkshire Folk Tales - Simon Heywood - E-Book

South Yorkshire Folk Tales E-Book

Simon Heywood

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Beschreibung

With origins lost in the mists of time, these lively folk tales reflect the wisdom (and eccentricities) of South Yorkshire's county and people. Amongst the heroes and villains, giants and fairies, knights and highwaymen, are well-known figures, such as Robin Hood and the Dragon of Wantley, as well as lesser-known tales of mysterious goings-on at Firbeck Hall and Roche Abbey. These enchanting tales, many never before recorded in print, will bewitch readers and storytellers, young and old alike.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

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SH

For Shonaleigh and Isaac

I’ve telled my tale,

Thee tell thine.

***

DB

In memory of Roy and Reg

Wordsmiths, fibbers, allotment enthusiasts,

and keepers of forgotten lore.

May these words prompt many questions

from the grandchildren you never met.

When the legends die, the dreams end;

there is no more greatness.

Attributed to Tecumseh (1768–1813), Shawnee chief

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Map of South Yorkshire

Introduction

1    Beginnings

•  

Carconan on the Don

•  

The Battle of Brunanburh

•  

Deadman’s Hole

•  

The Black Raven

2    The Forests

•  

The Forest of Elmet

•  

Roche Abbey

•  

Barnburgh: Cat and Man

3    Robin Hood of Barnsdale

•  

Robin Hood’s Birth and Outlawry

•  

Robin Hood and Guy of Gisburn

•  

Robin Hood and the Potter

•  

The Gest of Robin Hood

4    Monsters and Miracles

•  

St Francis of Conisbrough

•  

The Dragon of Wantley

•  

St William of Lindholme

•  

Lindholme Willie

5    Legends of the Halls

•  

The Homecoming of Leonard Reresby

•  

Haworth Hall

•  

The Green Lady of Firbeck Hall

•  

The White Deer of Parkwood Springs

•  

The Madness of Thomas Wortley

6    Legends of the Roads

•  

The Hangman Stone

•  

Swift Nick Nevison

•  

Swift Nick’s Name

•  

Swift Nick and the Highwaymen

•  

Swift Nick’s Death

•  

Swift Nick’s Praise

7    Sheffield Household Tales

•  

The Farmer and His Man

•  

The Old Man at the White House

•  

The King in the Forest

•  

The Woodsman and the Hatchet

•  

The Broken Pitcher

•  

Hob Thrust

•  

The Card Player and the Devil

•  

Simmerdale

8    ‘Lighten i’ the Morning’: South Yorkshire Life

•  

Laughton-en-le-Morthen

•  

The Swallow’s Nest

•  

Hell Hole, Whiston Meadows

•  

The Natives of Whiston

•  

William Lee of Sheffield

•  

Blind Stephen

•  

Tommy Taylor of Kimberworth

•  

Aron Allott of Thorpe Hesley

•  

The Vicar of Cawthorne

•  

Betty of Dore

•  

Two–Nowt

•  

Martha and Albert

•  

Gorgonzola

•  

Potatoes

•  

The Grocery Trade

•  

Pickling in Thorne

•  

Simmie and the Cart

•  

The Kilkenny Devil

•  

Nesbitt and the Snowman

•  

The Lamb in the Crib

9    ‘Tomorrow for Thee’: South Yorkshire Death

•  

The Ghost Army of Roche Abbey

•  

The Abbot Monk of Conisbrough

•  

Hickleton Church

•  

Jasper the Whistler

•  

The Thieving Milkmaid

•  

Thorpe Hesley Boggart

•  

The Ludwell Wife

•  

The Grey Lady of Auckley

•  

Aston: the Rectory Ghosts

•  

Sheffield: The Campo Lane Barguest

•  

Old Moult

•  

Firbeck Ghosts

•  

Mary on the Black Pig

•  

Cortonwood Pit

•  

The Ghost of Wath Main

•  

A Bier of Stones

•  

Born Again, Never to Die

•  

The Three Sisters

Selected References

Copyright

MAPOF SOUTH YORKSHIRE (NOTTOSCALE)

INTRODUCTION

In June 2012, the Sheffield band Reverend and the Makers appeared live on BBC Breakfast Time, to promote a new release. The presenter, Bill Turnbull, was curious about this successful band’s reluctance to relocate to London. What was it about their Sheffield home, he asked frontman Jon McClure, that made it so special?

McClure did not hesitate.

‘Understatement,’ he replied firmly.

Understatement seems to run deep in South Yorkshire. For much of its history, the place hardly existed – in official terms. An old name, Hallamshire, refers to a loosely defined area on the right bank of the River Don, but the southern reaches of Yorkshire were always part of its West Riding. The county of South Yorkshire, comprising the metropolitan boroughs of Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield and Rotherham, was created in 1974. It now appears as a historic centre of mining, metalworking and other industries, garlanded by legend-rich beauty spots, including the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales, the Vale of York, the North York Moors, and Sherwood Forest, which can seem to outshine its own wealth of landscape, tradition and history. The understatement, however, is deceptive.

Traffic along eastern Britain has always had to skirt round the head of the Humber, fording or bridging its tributaries. The landscape drained by these smaller rivers – including the Don, Dearne, Sheaf, and Rother – forms a natural barrier to north–south traffic. It is therefore no coincidence that local historians1 have long recognised the area now known as South Yorkshire as a frontier zone. Nor is it chance that the frontier has lasted longer than any of the territories and peoples it has divided. It has separated prehistoric tribe from prehistoric tribe; Celt from Roman; province from province, in Roman Britain; Dark-Age Briton from Dark-Age Saxon; and medieval English from conquering Vikings. Today, the same boundary divides the northern English county of Yorkshire from the counties of the English Midlands.

This durable frontier has, in turn, left its own marks on the landscapes that defined it. The name of the village suburb of Dore means, as it sounds, a door, or threshold. According to the great nineteenth-century folklorist Sidney Addy, the River Sheaf, which gives Sheffield its name, bears a name that similarly means boundary. The Red Lion Inn at Gleadless is still said to straddle the county line, and the stream that marked the county boundary, the Shirebrook, ran through the pub’s cellar. Legend reports that late drinkers in modern times would cross the room to avail themselves of Derbyshire’s more liberal licensing hours.2

But, paradoxically, the main thoroughfare of eastern Britain has always run right through the area. Over the centuries, the main route seems to have oscillated, like a gigantic plucked bowstring, up and down the Don Valley: from the Ermine or Icknield Streets that the Romans paved, to the Great North Road (now the A1) that Robin Hood watched, and back today to the route of the M1.

So South Yorkshire has always been – so to speak – less ancient boundary than ancient checkpoint. Such places tend to be fought over. Sheffield’s history began with Celtic and Roman fortresses, overlooking the lower Don river crossings. In 1966 archaeologists announced that earthworks at Butcher’s Orchard, North Anston, were, in fact, the remains of a medieval house, or maybe some seventeenth-century fishponds. There was disappointment in the local community at this announcement, because the earthworks had long been regarded as marks of an ancient battlefield.3 In context, this was a fairly reasonable supposition.

The terrain is hilly towards the west and flatter towards the east. Heath, woodland and wetland form its natural cover. Sheffield, indeed, remains one of the leafiest cities in Europe. The region’s first prehistoric farmers largely kept to the uplands; later, when the wildwoods were cleared, the plough conquered the valleys. But throughout the Middle Ages there remained a great deal of managed hunting reserve: that is, forest, in the original sense of the word – outdoor playgrounds for the rich, sometimes, but not always, thickly wooded. We read that Barnsdale, Robin Hood’s favoured haunt, was not a forest in this sense, but was instead a remote tract of waste woodland. Sherwood, by contrast, was, legally, a forest. It existed as such by 1130 (Mitchell 1970: 16). There were many other forests and chases nearby, partly because local princes and great landowning families dominated the area’s early history. Then came the medieval church, and the great landowning abbeys of Roche and Beauchief.

But when these great abbeys were ruins, South Yorkshire’s rivers began to lend water-power to the knife-grinding and metalworking trades, and the area’s centre of gravity shifted westward back towards them, from the medieval towns of Conisbrough and Doncaster to the well-watered hills. From the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Sheffield’s Cutlers’ Company came to preside over a self-reliant, well-organised, confident and cohesive working community, whose backbone was the independent craftsmen, or little mesters, whose tradition of workmanship has lasted till the present day – just about. Thereafter, industrial production in the area was destined to be organised on an even larger scale. Wood- and then coal-burning industry created substantial working and middle classes. Later, trade unionism inherited the area’s old instinct for social cohesion and tight community. Other expressions of the same instinct, meanwhile, took many forms. In the earlier 1800s, in most English cities, blind street musicians were buskers or beggars, but in Sheffield they were an organised and prosperous guild, a central pillar of the rapidly burgeoning urban community. The sinking of pits and the spread of pit villages across the coalfields – a recent process, not complete until well into the twentieth century – sealed modern South Yorkshire’s character as an industrial centre. The county’s central place in the modern labour movement – lately expressed in an unofficial and affectionate title, the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire – was therefore grounded in old community traditions.

Well indeed were those old traditions called radical. Sheffield town stood with Parliament in the Civil War. When Royalists dug themselves in at Sheffield Castle, the castle was captured and razed. Little trace of it now remains above ground. In the 1790s, Sheffield would throw a street party, and roast an ox to divide among the city poor, whenever the revolutionary French armies won a battle (Mather 1862: xx). In the Yorkshire coalfields, the miners’ old enemy, Winston Churchill, was never quite accepted as the irreproachable figure he is often presumed to be elsewhere.4 In more recent times, community activism saved a Sheffield suburb, Walkley, from demolition, and also stopped the construction of an inner-city bypass through the suburb of Heeley; Heeley City Farm was created instead. Most spectacularly, there were the miners’ strikes, culminating in the great strike of 1984–85. The coalfields celebrated unabashedly when Margaret Thatcher died in 2013. It is easy to feel that Robin Hood of Barnsdale would have done likewise.

The region’s storytelling traditions bear witness to all these currents and conditions. The earliest stories of South Yorkshire were recorded mainly by the educated and powerful; they tell of warlike kings and miraculous monks, as one might expect. Tales of knights, saints and marvels endure today in villages like Barnburgh and Hickleton. Radical Sheffield added more recent ghosts to the mix, like Old Moult of Wickersley Grange. Tales abound still of the exploits of striking miners against the police, or highwaymen against the judge, or forest outlaws against the sheriff; and stories of ghosts and portents haunted the pits until the end – just as they haunt the notorious accident blackspot at Stocksbridge bypass to this day, in the shadow of the steelworks.

The more recent material is naturally more plentiful. Some of it was recorded by interested scholars and educated people, from Abraham de la Pryme in the seventeenth-century to Sidney Addy in the nineteenth, or David Clarke in the present day. Radical and Victorian Sheffield saw a flowering of local and topical literature, with writers and poets including Joseph Mather, Ebenezer Elliott, Joseph Woolhouse, and Sidney Addy; other tales were written by local historians researching their own communities, such as John Chessman, Cyril Wilson, and Charles Colley Bailey. An increasing wealth of older, out-of-copyright material is now freely available online – work by local writers such as C.J. Davison Ingledew and John Tomlinson for instance. Rotherham Archives and Local Studies also stocks a wealth of newspapers and news sources and will be noted in sources as RALS. Of increasing value, too, as primary sources, are blogs and social media sites such as the Sheffield Forum and Sheffield History. In some cases we have had the privilege of collecting stories by word of mouth or personal correspondence. Sadly, but inevitably, we have not always been able to give due credit to all of the original storytellers, but we have never lost sight of the fact that this book is little more than a homage to their often understated expertise.

The collection that follows is, of course, necessarily selective. The traditional tales of South Yorkshire include some long tales; but many are short. Such snippets of story have a label in academic jargon: they are ‘dites’, or sayings – a ‘dite’ being ‘a statement that implies but does not recount a narrative’ (McCormick and White 2011). The landscapes of South Yorkshire, both ancient and modern, are saturated with such sayings. We might, indeed, call them narrative understatements.

With regret, nevertheless, we have had to set aside many of South Yorkshire’s notable characters and reported spectres and apparitions. We have done this partly for considerations of space, but sometimes because we were simply unable to find out enough about them. We have not found enough to say about King Harold Godwinson, said to have lived at Kiveton Park;5 or Martha Hatfield, the eleven-year-old Wise Virgin of Laughton-en-le-Morthen;6 or the Indian prince said to haunt Scholes Lane, between Thorpe Hesley and Greasbrough;7 or ‘Lindum Hall … where there was a barn full of white sparrows,’ besides other ‘giants and queer characters’ whose tales were told in the West Riding even before ‘those collier chaps … started calling it South Yorkshire’;8 or the poet Thomas Gray, who, some say, composed his famous Elegy at Aston;9 or Dance David, the hermit of the Delfs in Hill Top.10 Neither have we had much to say about South Yorkshire’s wealth of traditions beyond its stories: its calendar customs, well dressings, mischief nights, or seasonal ceremonial plays and customs such as the Harthill Tup.11

We were similarly unable to make enough of a story about the ghosts of Monks Bretton Priory or Carbrook Hall; or the still-restless ghost of the sailor who survived all the perils of the sea, only to drown, with terrible irony, in the basement of the Ship Inn at Shalesmoor in the great Sheffield Flood of 1864; the Crying Boy, a supposedly cursed painting that was rumoured to start house fires in the houses where it was displayed (actually based on reports of a house fire in Rotherham in 1985, with the idea of a curse added by tabloid journalists in a successful attempt to add spice and interest to the story); or most of the many White and Grey and Green Ladies which abound in the county, as they do elsewhere; or the numerous mysterious sightings of UFOs, big cats, and other instances of the strange and paranormal in contemporary life. Armed police were called out to a sighting of a big cat near Rotherham in 1997;12 nor was this the first local sighting of a ‘massive black cat’ or ‘jet black creature with staring yellow eyes’.13 We have also left aside most rumours of tunnels, caves, and secret passages, which cling to sites such as Kirkstead Abbey Grange, Monks Bretton, Roche Abbey and Sheffield Manor – even though these rumours sometimes seem equally well founded. Cave systems were discovered under Maltby by workmen at Herne Hill in 1973,14 and tunnels by a twelve-year-old boy at Roche Abbey in 1977.15 Sheffield is said to be honeycombed with tunnels, particularly those which once connected Sheffield Manor with Sheffield Castle, in the time of the imprisonment of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, at Sheffield; as elsewhere in the county, these rumours are sometimes shown to be (so to speak) not without foundation.16 The part that tunnels (or rumours of tunnels) play in local legend is shown in one example we have given in full, that of Haworth Hall, although tunnels have also been mentioned in the case of Jasper the Whistler (see Chapter 8). Last but not least, we certainly wish we could have found more to say about Kilnhurst’s 1881 shower of frogs.17 The one report we have been able to find consists, in its entirety, of the following two sentences:

Carbrook Hall, Attercliffe

A shower of frogs fell on Kilnhurst Railway Station during a thunderstorm. Officials took some time to clear them all off the platform.

Now that – one might say – is understatement.

We have also left out some stories, including well-known cases like Springheeled Jack, and the Stocksbridge Bypass hauntings, purely because they have already been recorded by other writers, such as David Clarke, Liz Linahan, and Jenny Randles. Finally – and also with regret – we have not considered the storytelling traditions of the post-war immigrant communities to the region’s urban centres. We know from personal experience that the name of Anansi, the Afro-Caribbean spider-trickster, is remembered on the streets of Pitsmoor in Sheffield. Perhaps Akbar, or Birbal, or Pan Twardowski,18 or other heroes of world folklore, have joined the Kilkenny Devil and the witch of Semerwater among the many bequests of immigrants to South Yorkshire’s storytelling. We hope so.

The Cholera Monument, Sheffield

In this region of well dressing, interest in wells and witchcraft has remained lively. Sidney Addy, in the late nineteenth century, recorded that children were afraid to fetch water from the Sparken Well at Dore, because it was inhabited by a spirit. Another well by Roche Abbey had, he said, the reputation of granting wishes. At Jordanthorpe – now a council estate – there grew a rowan or ‘wiggin’ tree that had been planted ‘to keep the witches out of the churn’ – spoiled butter being commonly blamed on witchcraft in South Yorkshire and beyond, and rowan being an equally common charm against witchcraft. Belief in witches is evidenced in the county. Joan Jurdie of Rossington was twice investigated for witchcraft by the Mayor of Doncaster in 1605.19 The Jordanthorpe wiggin tree blew down in a gale in 1891, but almost a century later, Anston Town Well was restored, with ‘people still showing interest in drinking the water from the wells’ and samples of the well-water being recommended for analysis by local councillors.20 In the 1970s, some Anston residents had used the wells all their life.21 In 1976, a nineteenth-century well was rediscovered at Whiston and was remembered by the locals for its ‘definite aphrodisiac qualities’ as well as its efficacy against coughs and sneezes.22 In the same year, the Rotherham Star reported that a tenant had refused a council house on the grounds that it was haunted, and a council employee informed journalists that the complaint was not unique.23

Finally, it is pleasingly necessary to note that South Yorkshire has also been a major centre for folk tale research, from the early antiquarians John Harrison and Abraham de la Pryme, to Joseph Hunter (1783–1861) and Sidney Oldall Addy (1848–1933). Our sources of inspiration also include Professor John Widdowson, founder-director of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at Sheffield University and the Centre for English Traditional Heritage; Dr David Clarke, now of Sheffield Hallam University; and many others. We would like to extend a particular thanks to all those others who shared their stories and knowledge of South Yorkshire with us, and commented on early drafts, especially Catherine Bannister; Chris Coates; Alice Collins; Paul and Liz Davenport; Susie Doncaster; Leila Dudley Edwards; Dave Eyre; Gordon Ferguson; Ilan Fertig; Bob and Chris Fitt; Helen Frances; Alan Griffith; Dane Holt; Chris Ingram; Peter Loades; Chris Nickson; Pete Sandford; Shonaleigh; Jim White; and Mike Wild; as well as Daniel Loades, whose photography inspired the illustrations. We are delighted to acknowledge the invaluable help and professionalism of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield libraries. We are also indebted to colleagues in Creative Writing at the University of Derby, not only for introducing us to each other, but also for funding a period of research leave in autumn 2012. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation for our fellow-authors in The History Press’s Folk Tales series, particularly Amy Douglas, Maureen James and David Phelps, for inspiration and example.

This is a verbal portrait of South Yorkshire’s storytelling; it is not, so to speak, a verbal photograph of it. Where we felt the need to reshape fragmentary sources, to bring out what we hope is the tales’ essential spirit, we have done so. At other times, we have told the stories as they were told to us, often word for word. Apart from some silent minor editing to keep punctuation consistent, it should be clear where we have done what. We have done our best to give full references for readers who want to consult our sources directly, and we welcome correspondence from those wishing to discuss these stories in more detail. We hope that our portrait has done justice to its subject by affording some entertainment to the real artists and keepers of these tales: the people of South Yorkshire. If we fail, it’s our own fault.

Simon Heywood and Damien Barker

January 2015

1    ‘The district … has no historical unity, except that it is, and always has been, emphatically a border district’ (Armitage 1897: 1). The odd-seeming name of one South Yorkshire village, Wales, testifies (again, more or less as it sounds) to the persistence of British communities within Anglo-Saxon South Yorkshire.

2    ‘The Red Lion’, www.pub-explorer.com/syorks/pub/redlioninnsheffield.htm, accessed 15-4-2014.

3Morning Telegraph, 11-6-1966 (RALS).

4    The poet Ian MacMillan, from Darfield: ‘My mam and dad … venerated Churchill; … Round our way, of course, he was remembered for other things as well, like the authorising of the use of troops during a strike.’ www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/debate/columnists/ian-mcmillan-tomorrow-i-will-mourn-what-we-have-lost-continuity-collectivism-and-pride-1-5587149, accessed 4-9-2013.

5    See the letter by Charles Colley Bailey to Rotherham Advertiser, 22-7-1988 (RALS).

6Dinnington and Maltby Guardian, 21-9-2006 (RALS).

7Rotherham Advertiser, 6-12-1952, 20-12-1952 (RALS).

8    Kitchen, Brother to the Ox, 1981 (1939).

9The Star, 2-6-1959; Morning Telegraph, 4-4-1972 (RALS).

10  Sanderson, A Layman’s Look at the History, People and Places of Oughtibridge, Worrall, and Wharncliffe Side (1999)

11  Derek Leigh, in Harthill Parish Magazine, December 1979 (RALS).

12Rotherham Advertiser, 2-5-1997, 6-6-1997; Dinnington and Maltby Guardian, 30-5-1997 (RALS).

13Rotherham Star, 14-1-1994; Yorkshire Post, 15-1-1994 (RALS).

14Rotherham Star, 10-12-1980; Rotherham Advertiser, 23-6-1978, 27-3-1981 (RALS).

15Morning Telegraph, 28-5-1977 (RALS).

16  ‘Interesting Discovery of a Subterranean Passage in Sheffield’, Sheffield Independent, 20-5-1896 (Sheffield Archives and Local Studies).

17  ‘Looking Back: 100 Years Ago’, Rotherham Advertiser, 6-8-1981 (RALS).

18  SH is grateful to Grace Suszek for knowledge of this legendary Polish sorcerer and trafficker with the Devil.

19  Parkinson 1889: 150ff; Ewen 1933: 199ff; de la Pryme 1869: 288–89.

20Worksop Guardian, 24-10-1986 (RALS).

21Rotherham Advertiser, 30-6-1978 (RALS).

22Sheffield Star, 24-9-1976 (RALS).

23Rotherham Star, 4-6-1976 (RALS).

1

BEGINNINGS

CARCONANONTHE DON

Conisbrough Castle stands at the meeting place of two rivers, the Don and the Dearne. Old as the castle is, its foundations are older; there were other strongholds in the place before it.

The story of these strongholds ranges across many lands and generations, but it begins in the long dark years before Arthur ruled in Britain.

In those days, King Conan Meriadoc ruled in London. There were greedy and heartless men in plenty in Britain then – and kings were worse than most – but Conan was the worst of them all. He was an evil man – cruel and small-minded. It was Conan who built the first fortress on the Don, because his family had ruled there time out of mind. He named it after himself: Carconan, the stronghold of Conan.

Conisbrough Castle

Cruel as he was, King Conan was the commander of all the legions of Roman Britain. He treated them as a private army. As king and commander, he answered only to the Roman emperor himself, and he knew that the emperor was weak. The Roman legionaries themselves, too, were more British than the Britons, having settled in the island many generations ago, in the long years of peace; they knew no king, and no commander, but Conan.

And, in these dark days, it was good that Britain had Conan and his legions. The island was ravaged day and night by Saxon brigands, pirates and savages from out of the dark north. They came by night in carved longships, marching inland, burning and plundering. King Conan and his private army were the only protection against them.

But one island was too small an empire for Conan, and no sooner had he built his new fortress at Carconan than he abandoned it, and left Britain altogether in search of conquest and plunder overseas. And he took the legions with him, leaving the island of Britain utterly defenceless. The Saxons fell on Britain like a wolf on the fold. Amid the havoc, the fortress of Carconan, newly built though it was, fell into ruin. Conan, meanwhile, was lucky in his plundering, and he carved himself out a whole new kingdom along the western coasts of Europe.

Then, at last, he told his victorious armies that they were legionaries no longer, but settlers and family men. The north-western coasts of Europe were now their home, and he would see to it that the British tongue would be spoken in the new kingdom forever. This was the sort of detail that Conan thought important; he was happy to abandon his homeland, but he was going to force those around him to speak his own mother tongue.

Conan’s new colony now needed women and children, and so he remembered his island home again, and sent word, telling the lords of the Britons to send him unmarried women. He ordered new brides for his men by the shipload. They must speak British, he insisted, so that they could teach the British tongue to their children.

At this request, the Britons were aghast. Conan had already taken every able-bodied fighting man from the island. Now he wanted the women as well. It was as if he meant to make a desert of the island altogether. But still the Britons feared Conan’s anger, and so the free women of Britain were sent off to Gaul. Many even went willingly, thinking it would be safer to follow King Conan than to stay in Britain and face the Saxons.

Most of the women never arrived. Their ships were wrecked in storms and lost on the lonely coasts. Many drowned. Saxon pirates fell on the rest, and took them as slaves. There are many stories of the sorrows of those days.

So, in the end, Conan never got his brides from Britain. He did not let this deter him though. He simply ordered his legionaries to take wives from the local people. The British soldiers went courting among the tribes of Gaul, and made marriage settlements with the local families, as the custom was. The Gaulish tribes were happy enough to make friendly treaties with these powerful incomers. Soon every legionary who wanted a wife had one from among the Gaulish women.

And then, once this was done, Conan ordered his men to cut the Gaulish women’s tongues out. He did not want the Gaulish tongue spoken, he said, where the children of his new kingdom might hear it. He wanted them to grow up speaking British.

The thing was done. Conan’s legionaries were obedient men, and they willingly handed their new wives over to their king’s torturers. Some tore the women’s tongues out with their own hands. The women themselves had no recourse or protection from this treatment. By Gaulish custom, they could not appeal to their own families; and, in any case, the Gaulish chieftains could hardly defy Conan. In the weeks and months which followed, a strange silence seemed to settle over the western coasts.

Perhaps as a result, Conan’s new kingdom somehow got a strange new name. People began to call it the Half-Silent Realm.

And all this time, the old stronghold of Carconan on the Don still stood silent and derelict. But then a strange thing seemed to happen. People who lived on the banks of the rivers – people who knew nothing of Conan’s adventures across the seas – began to fear the ruined fortress. Anyone who lingered nearby by night, so it was said, would hear women’s voices echoing eerily, weeping and mourning in the empty ruin. There were strange words to be heard in these voices, words which could not be understood. The place got a bad name, and for many years nobody set foot in it at all.

The years passed. Conan prospered. He lived long, and died in his bed, and was buried in his new kingdom. In the years that followed, his descendants prospered, too. His children and grandchildren ruled across the narrow seas as princes, still speaking the British tongue. In Britain, the Saxon plundering went on, and the island fell into a Dark Age.

In the midst of the darkness, a new king arose over the Britons: one even worse, in his way, than Conan had been.

The new king was Vortigern the Thin, a weak and greedy man. The Britons hated him. He could raise no army to protect himself, and so, rather than lose his throne to British rebels, Vortigern took the Saxon pirates themselves into his service, as mercenary soldiers. It was a shameful thing for a king to do, to pay the enemy himself for protection, but the Saxons and their royal client were well matched: they would have fought for anyone who paid, and Vortigern would have paid anyone to do his fighting for him.

The Saxon chieftain was called Hengest, and he had a brother called Horsa. Hengest was a shrewd and practical man. King Vortigern offered him gold and silver, but Hengest laughed.

‘If you want me to fight for you, king, then offer me three gifts. Only three things. Such is the custom of my people. Give me a bull’s hide; and the knife that slaughtered the bull and flayed it, with the blood still on it; and as much land as I can hide within it. A hide of land is what we call it. Promise me a hide of land, and I will fight for you.’

Vortigern certainly thought this a strange request, but it seemed to him that Hengest was a strange and savage man, so he scratched his head, and promised Hengest that he would have his bull’s hide of land.

And on those terms, Vortigern and Hengest went to war against the British rebels. Hengest proved a master of war and a terror to his enemies, and when they returned to London, Vortigern was a king indeed, as great a king as any before Arthur; and all his enemies feared him.

When the wars were over, and the victory feast was in preparation, Vortigern remembered his promise to Hengest. He sent his bemused servants out to the paddock, to kill and flay the nearest bull, and to bring him the hide and the bloody knife. Then, before the whole court, when the feast was at its height, Vortigern presented Hengest with the hide and the bloody knife, and invited him to choose his land – and hide it in the bull’s skin, as the Saxon saying put it.

And Hengest took the hide and the bloody knife, and with them he travelled the whole of Britain through, looking this way and that, until he came to the place where the Don meets the Dearne. There he lifted his eyes up, and looked for the first time on the haunted ruins of Carconan.

Hengest knew nothing of the strange stories that surrounded the place, and he liked the look of it. So, taking the bloody knife in one hand, and the hide in the other, he cut carefully at the hide, cutting it into a long spiral strip, as thin as a thread and many miles in length, like greasy gossamer. And then, one morning not long afterwards, some miles from the ruined fortress and with his warriors and followers watching, Hengest drove a wooden stake into the ground, and fastened one end of his leather thread to it.

Then Hengest set off walking. He paid out the thread as he went, pegging it out behind him, walking in a great curve mile after mile, all day until evening.

At evening he came back to the place he had started, and fastened both ends of the leather strip to the same post.

And everything within the long loop he claimed as his hide of land. It was a huge estate indeed, in fact a small kingdom: the whole valley of the Dearne and many miles beyond it. The Saxons cheered, and hailed Hengest as king, and Hengest’s brother Horsa clapped him on the shoulder.

‘You have hooked a big fish today, brother,’ he said.

‘Then the Hook-land is what I shall call it,’ Hengest replied, and the land he had taken he called England, which is Hook-land in the Saxon tongue. It was the first place in Britain that was ever called England and the name stuck. Hengest made England a kingdom for himself, and a homeland for his Saxons, and he built himself a great wooden longhouse over the ruins of Carconan: a place where a chieftain could feast with his warriors and heroes, and hear old tales told. He called it Thancaster, the Stronghold of the Leather Band, and it was the second fortress built on the hill where the rivers meet.