The devil of Croyden Hill

[Goswin_van_Eyck]

The devil of Croyden Hill : kinship, fiction fact, tradition
John B. Smith

"We all remember the terrible exclamation of the dying profligate,
when a friend, to destroy what he supposed the hypochondriac idea of
a spectre appearing in a certain shape at a given hour, placed before
him a person dressed up in the manner he described. "Mon Dieu!" said
the expiring sinner ..., "il yen a deux!" " (Scott n.d., chap. 22,
177).

The aim of this essay is to bring together a number of scattered West
Country traditions that appear to have much in common. Each makes
perfect sense when seen in isolation, but will nevertheless benefit
from being viewed alongside its analogues, since detailed comparisons
will then become possible. Family relationships will for instance
become apparent, as will incompatibilities and inconsistencies. For
the purposes just outlined, it will be best for us to allocate a
bracketed upper-case letter of the alphabet to each "type," together
with a distinguishing number for each of the stories apparently
belonging to it. Such numbers have no precise chronological or
genealogical significance. For instance, a variant given the number 6
must not necessarily be seen as younger than or as a direct
descendant of one numbered 5.

We begin with a story, (A1), once told by the Revd Hawker of
Morwenstow in north-east Cornwall. This was about the clerk of that
parish, whose wife used to wash the parson's surplices. Taken to task
by his wife for a prolonged visit at the village inn, the clerk
threatened in dudgeon to return to his potations, and did indeed set
out again with this in mind. Meanwhile, donning one of the parson's
surplices to disguise herself as a ghost, the wife took a short cut
and confronted her husband on his way. Terrified, he turned back.
Making use of her short cut again, the wife got home first, and was
calmly ironing another surplice when her chastened husband arrived
(Ditchfield 1907, 237).

What is in effect the same story, here identified as (A2), was known
in the Blackdowns of the Somerset-Devon borderland. A wife in despair
about her husband's drinking habits eventually decides to play on his
superstitious nature, pulls a white nightgown over her dress, and
goes to hide in a hedge by a crossroad where he is to pass on his way
home one night. Groaning, and with arms waving, she confronts him.
Once he has gathered himself a little, he solemnly intones: "Avoid
thee, Satan. I be a ringer and a zinger, and a bass-viol player up to
(Woodycombe) Church theaze last forty year. Avoid thee, Satan!"
The "ghost" then swiftly returns home by a short cut, and is calmly
sewing by the fire when joined by her husband, now destined to be "a
sober, stay-at-home man" for the rest of his life (Mathews 1923, 74-
5).

Another story from Cornwall, (B1), thematically if not genetically
related to the ones from Morwenstow and the Blackdowns, is known
as "The White Bucca and the Black." Here, an old lady of Raftra in St
Levan has a prank similar to those in (A1) and (A2) played upon her,
but she is not taken in. Her stepdaughter, wishing to stop the old
lady's gallivantings, persuades a serving-man to dress in a white
sheet and intercept her on her way home one dark night. Undaunted by
the apparition, she greets him with the words: "Hullo! Bucca-gwidden
['white spirit'], what ... dost thee do here, with Bucca-dhu ['black
spirit'] so close behind thee?" The white "spirit" is terrified at
the thought of the black one behind him, runs off as fast as his legs
will carry him, falls into a fit, and is never again right in the
head (Briggs 1970-71, part B. vol. 1, 38).

This tale does not stand alone. Compare for instance (B2), a Dorset
variant known as "The Netherbury Churchyard Legend," which appears in
Udal's Dorsetshire Folk-Lore of 1922. In it, the old parish clerk and
sexton of Netherbury, repeatedly disturbed by a half-witted girl
singing psalms outside his house at night, wraps himself in a sheet
and rises up before her in the church porch. Far from nonplussed, she
asks him whose soul he is. She then exclaims: "Souls be about
tonight! For there's a black 'un too and he's trying to come up to
the whir' un." Wild with fear at this, the sexton takes to his heels.
Glancing back, he does indeed fancy he sees a dark figure behind him,
which, Udal tells us, "was probably that of his own shadow in the
moonlight." The sexton's tribulations continue once he is within his
own four walls, since he is then affected by a serious illness that
causes him to "peel" from head to foot. Like her Cornish counterpart,
the idiot girl is no longer molested (Udal, 1970, 168-69; Briggs 1970-
71, part B, vol. 2, 276; Westwood 1987, 72-3).

One of the interesting things about (B1) and (B2) is that we are left
poised between a supernatural and a natural explanation. Is the Bucca-
dhu alias black soul really a spirit, or is it the victim's own
shadow? As we have seen, Udal is keen for us to embrace the latter
explanation, although the actual text of his narrative leaves the
matter unresolved. In another Dorset variant, (B3), "Varmer Brickell
and the Ghost," in which the said farmer is the only main character,
and a drunken one at that, naturalism has unequivocally gained the
upper hand, and it is made quite clear that what he takes to be
a "divil-ghost" is indeed his own shadow (Knott 1976, 122-4). Such
late versions of the story are jocular tales, but there can be little
doubt that some of their earlier predecessors were true legends. In
these, the black ghost that pursues the white "ghost" is not his
shadow, but an avenging spirit, bent on punishing a mortal who
pretends to supernatural powers. Moreover, the intended victim, who
first espies the black ghost and thus turns the tables on his or her
tormentor, is often portrayed as a "simple" person, whose handicap is
offset by the ability to see and commune with such spirits.

Whereas in the jocular tales we are detached observers, in the know
about what is "really" going on, in the legends we are participants,
sharing for a moment at least the beliefs and fears inherent in the
text. To demonstrate the difference, we may cite a West Somerset
legend from Wiveliscombe, (B4).The scene is a crossway "about two-
thirds of the way up Jews' Lane" and "leading down to Greenway Lane."
Here was buried a suicide named Tytibye, with a stake driven through
him:

"A poacher belonging to a party who frequented the then open commons
on Maundown declared that, passing the eerie spot, he saw a
motionless figure standing on Tytibye's grave. His companions
determined to play a trick on his fears, and one of them, arrayed one
night in a bullock's hide, went previously to the place and waited
until the rest came up. Soon the others arrived at the crossway, and
one of them said to the ghost seer, "Now, do you see anything
there?" "Oh yes," said he, "there's the devil and Tytibye looking
over his shoulder." At this the fellow in the hide gave a loud yell,
flung off his horns and tail, and ran away for his life after his
companions, who rushed helter-skelter down the lane into the town!
All of them were thoroughly scared, but the man who had seen the
ghost of Tytibye took to his bed and did not recover his health for
months afterwards (Hancock 1911, 251)."

It is to be assumed that, in the last sentence, "the man who had seen
the ghost of Tytibye" is the would-be trickster, who disguised
himself in a bullock's hide. At least, this is what comparison with
(B1) and (B2) would suggest. The same disguise is adopted by a
similar character in another West Somerset story, (C1), which could
on the face of it belong to the same tale-type. There is, however,
nothing supernatural about the way this character is so drastically
punished, and it may be that the whole is a dimly remembered
historical event that happens to fit into our framework. We may
summarise as follows. Since the small village of Rodhuish, situated
near Croyden Hill in the northern Brendons, had no blacksmith,
farmers had to take their implements to Roadwater for repairs. One
dark evening, four ploughboys met at Roadwater forge. One was on
foot, and carried a coulter that needed sharpening. The other three,
who were having their horses shod, played on the superstitious fears
to which the pedestrian was prone, telling him he would be sure to
meet the Devil as he passed through the wood on his way home. One of
the three then quickly rode to his own cart-linhay to fetch a
bullock's hide that was drying there. Wearing this, he went and sat
on a gate in a wood through which the lad with the coulter must pass.
When the latter reached the gate, there was our horned figure,
barring the way. "Be 'e the Devil or ba-an't 'e?" said the lad with
the coulter. Receiving no answer but groans to this reiterated
question, he raised the coulter and brought it down on his
tormentor's head, splitting his skull. Although the perpetrator was
allegedly tried for manslaughter, we are not told whether he was
acquitted. What we are told is that at the age of ninety-eight he
still believed he had "killed the Devil" some eighty years before,
maybe in the 1840s. The impression is given that the anonymous author
of the piece obtained all this information in a personal interview
with the Devil-slayer, whom he refers to as "my old friend"
(Anonymous 1925, 80-4).

Whatever the origin of (C1), it is matched in one way or another by
three further West Country stories. Our first, (C2), bears the
title "The Prank that Backfired" and runs as follows:

"When I was a child in the early years of the [twentieth] century, my
father often told the tale about the lad who lived at Maiden Newton
[eight miles NW of Dorchester in Dorset], and who was always
bboasting how he was afraid of nothing. One night when he was walking
home in the dark alone, the other village lads planned to play a joke
and catch him out. One of them dressed in a white sheet, lay in wait,
and popped up behind a hedge making a screeching noise. The lad, who
really wasn't afraid of anything, beat him over the head with the
hames from the horse harness he was carrying, and killed him. My
father would use this as a cautionary tale to warn me, and the other
children, not to play foolish pranks (Somerset Federation 1992, 71)."

One thing stressed by the narrator of (C2) is that the main character
is "afraid of nothing." Here we are reminded of AT 326 "The Youth who
Wanted to Learn what Fear Is," in some versions of which the hero
kills a person who, disguised as a ghost, has lain in wait with the
object of frightening him (Aarne and Thompson 1973, 114-15). There
can be little doubt, however, that the main debt of (C2) is to (C1).
In each of these the hero is plotted against by village lads; in
each, one of these appears to him as a ghost in order to try and
scare him; in each he kills his tormentor with an agricultural
implement (coulter, haines) he happens to be carrying. If anything
makes C2 stand out from C1, it is that the former has been shaped
into a cautionary tale.

Now consider the following text, (D), recorded as recently as 1986,
at East Harptree in the northern Mendips:

"That was an old man used to live on his own, he used to make spars
and baskets, and used to get drunk every night up at The Waldegrave
Arms at East Harptree. And he passed this big school where they used
to train young parsons. Taylor's school, at Summerleaze, it's called.
And she was the cook up there, you see, my aunt, my father's sister,
and 'course, this old Mr Taylor, the head man, he was very, very
polite, quite a gentleman, big beard down to here. And this old man
used to come down every night after 10 o'clock, cussing and shouting
to hisself and the language he used was summat awful, you see.

And he [Mr Taylor] said to my aunt, one night, he wished she'd go out
and try to frighten him. And she said, how could she frighten him? He
said, "Put a white table cloth over your head and make out you're a
ghost," you see, "and see if that will frighten him."

Course she went out, you see, with this [table cloth] when he came
down towards her, and he stopped and he said, "And, and who bist
thee?" And she said, "I'm the Devil," and he hit her across the head
with his walking stick, and she had to have stitches put in: he
nearly killed her."

Could this, like (C2), be a reflex of (C1)? Certainly there are major
differences between (C1) and (D). In (D), the person pretending to be
a ghost does so, not out of malice, but for what is presented as a
justifiable reason, since the person she aims to scare, far from
being an innocent wayfarer, is a constant source of annoyance to the
neighbourhood. Indeed, there is no way in which the dramatis personae
of (D), the head of a theological college (!), his cook, and a local
drunk, could have grown out of those we encounter in (C1). What (D)
does share with (C1) is the hardly unique idea of one person
objecting to another, trying to scare him, and coming to grief in the
process. The signs are, then, that in the East Harptree story (D) we
have genuine local characters in a genuine local anecdote that
happens to have roughly the same structure as (C1). Perhaps, however,
the ending of (D) does faintly echo that of (C1), for each shows us
the discomfiture of a putative Devil.

While it is hard to be certain about what, if anything, (D) owes to
(C1), the debt is plainly to be seen when we come to scrutinise
another tale, (C3), Ruth Tongue's "The Croydon [sic] Devil Claims His
Own." This shows every sign of being a retelling of (C1), down to
small details of topography. It also stands out from other tales in
her Somerset Folklore in being unattributed, a fact hardly calculated
to allay suspicions that it is an adaptation of (C1) rather than a
tradition in the true sense.

What does distinguish Tongue's text (C3) from (C1) is a series of
features that clearly bear her mark. At the beginning we are told
that the plough-boy's tormentor is "a local bully--a red-haired
butcher's boy." For Tongue, red hair is a recurring motif. Since the
Vikings and Judas had red hair, it is for her something negative and
suspicious. It is thus also well suited to a bully. The fact that the
bully is a butcher's boy is, presumably, calculated to make him even
less sympathetic, while conveniently giving him access to
paraphernalia such as bullocks' hides. But it is the ending, with the
information that, following his death at the hands of the
ploughboy, "the butcher boy was never seen again," that best signals
Tongue's intervention. In characteristic vein she continues: "On
stormy nights the butcher's boy can still be heard groaning and
shrieking, and when the Devil rides over Croydon Hill the butcher's
boy is among the souls that follow him." Tongue then finishes with
the observation: "This is said to have happened rather over a hundred
years ago. I have met people who knew the old man 'who had killed the
Devil' when he was a boy" (Tongue 1965, 125-6; Briggs 1970-1, part B,
vol. 1, 59-60). Here again she appears to be following C1, although
the casual reader is left with the assumption that the pronoun 'T'
refers to herself, and not to the author of her source.

At this point it is worth reminding ourselves that some of the
accounts we have discussed, namely those classified as (B), belong to
an international tale-type, AT 1676A, Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid
(Baughman 1966, 43; Aarne and Thompson 1973, 474), which is for
example represented by an Oldenburg story about the head servant of a
farm disguising himself as a ghost to try and frighten a stable-boy
looking after horses at night in a meadow. About to scare the boy,
the "ghost" becomes aware of being pursued by a black figure.
Likewise espying the black figure, the boy cries out: "Oh look, a
Black Man is running after a White Man!" On his arrival at home, the
head servant takes to his bed and lies ill for a long time (Smith
1942, 91).

Again, there are American variants. An authoritative synopsis of
these runs: "A man decides to frighten another (or his son or
servant). He dresses in a sheet; his pet monkey puts on a sheet and
follows him. The person who is doing the scaring hears the victim
say, 'Run Big 'Fraid, run; Little 'Fraid'll get you.' The scarer sees
the monkey in the sheet and runs home" (Baughman 1966, 43; Aarne and
Thompson 1973, 474). This synopsis does justice to the naturalistic
American variants, in which the role originally played by a "real"
ghost or devil is given to a pet monkey dressed in a sheet.
Everything points to such jocular tales being a late development
(Smith 1942, 89-94, but especially 93). Since, as such, they clearly
represent only one quite recent strand of the tradition, it is surely
appropriate to remark that the aforementioned synopsis needs to be
rewritten with older, European, representatives of the tradition in
mind. Some of these have already been discussed. If they could be
added to, we would perhaps be in a position to solve one or other of
the problems mentioned in this essay.

What we can say with reasonable certainty so far is that (B1), (B2)
and (B4) are unreduced versions of AT 1676A, in which a person
pretending to be a ghost and aiming to frighten another person
himself falls prey to what he takes to be a "real" ghost. Although
our stories labelled (C) show similarities with this pattern, an
important difference is that (C1) and (C2) at least--of (C3), more
anon--each has only two main characters: a person pretending to be an
apparition and that person's intended victim. The first of these two
characters is discomfited by the second, and not by a third party
assumed by the first to be a "real" ghost/devil. The signs are that C
is an independent tradition, perhaps restricted to the West Country.

Is there, however, a relevant tale-type that might help us test this
assumption? There is. It is AT 1676, Joker Posing as Ghost Punished
by Victim (Aarne and Thompson 1973, 474). On the face of it, this
fits (C) perfectly. What of the content, though? In tales belonging
to the type, there are two main characters. They are a plucky cobbler
who takes up the challenge to mend shoes while keeping a corpse
company overnight, and a joker who impersonates the corpse and, on
showing signs of life in the middle of the night, receives a fatal
blow on the head from the cobbler's hammer to the words: "If you're
dead, you'd better lie down."

No British examples of the tale-type appear to have reached a wider
public, except in Katherine Briggs's indispensable and wide-ranging
collection of British folk-tales. There, in her "Index of Tale Types
and Migratory Legends," she has three (Briggs 1970-1, part B, xxx).
To begin with her second, it is our (B2), "The Netherbury Churchyard
Legend." In fact, this is wrongly classified as AT 1676 rather than
as 1675A, and the mistake is rectified later in her work (Briggs 1970-
1, part B, vol. 2, 276). Her third example is a Wiltshire tale, "The
Idiot," which does not fit easily into the AT 1676 category and has
at least some similarity, as Briggs herself points out, with AT 1676A
(Briggs 1970-1, part B, vol. 2, 240). Briggs's first example remains
to be examined (Briggs 1970-1, part B, vol. 1, 59-60). It is our
(C3), "The Croydon [alias Croyden] Devil Claims His Own." Note,
however, that the very title of this disqualifies it from membership
of AT 1676, since the said Devil, hardly other than a gratuitous
addition of Ruth Tongue's, is the third dramatis persona that would
make the story into a representative, if of any type, then of AT
1676A. As will by now be clear, however, (C3) resists any such
classification. It is most likely a transmogrification of (C1), which
shows few signs of being a folk-tale unalloyed, and so cannot
strictly speaking belong to any tale-type. If we do try and match it,
it certainly shows little affinity with the representatives of AT
1676 or 1676A we have encountered earlier.

Our argument, then, is that (C1) is an independent, perhaps
historical, tradition, and that (C2) and (C3) are its offshoots. As
for (D), it looks like a local anecdote. Any features it shares with
(C) will be secondary or coincidental. Finally, returning to (A1) and
(A2), we can say that it too is an independent tradition. It is the
only one of our "types" in which the make-believe ghost is on the
side of the angels, so to speak, and gets the better of her victim.
It does resemble (B1) and (B2), though, in featuring a heroine who
wins the day by dint of her resourcefulness and presence of mind.

Next for consideration is a Cornish story, (E), that deserves to be
included here because it has much in common with some of those
already discussed. It was told in Mawgan near Helston of a certain
Jan Jacobs of Polruan, whose uncanny powers, while a cause of fear to
his neighbours, enabled him to help them in various apparently
magical ways, but also to perform feats such as the following:

"Jan made a wager that he would go into the church tower without a
light at midnight and bring out a skull. A joker secreted himself
beforehand. Jan enters, gropes around, finds a skull, a fine big one,
round and "clane," will do very well. As he departs, a hollow voice
exclaims "That's mine." "Beg pardon, sir, I'm sure," says Jan, drops
the skull, and fumbles for another. He takes one, not so big, but a
tidy li'll skull, do very well. Again the hollow voice:
"That's mine!" "Damn 'ee for a liar," says Jan. "Never had but one in
your life!" (Phillipps 1995, 102)."

This nicely told tale has obvious counterparts, among them the
Oxfordshire "A Wager Won" (Briggs 1970-1, part A, vol. 2, 343),
allocated in Briggs's collection to AT 326 or a subtype thereof.
Already touched on in our discussion of (C2), representatives of AT
326 are generally protracted stories (Wisser 1924, 63-76; Ranke and
Brednich 1987, 584-93), in which the substance of our Mawgan tale
features only occasionally, as just one episode in the career of a
fearless individual. Thus in "The Dauntless Girl," from Norfolk, the
terms of a wager require the heroine to procure a skull from the
deadhouse at midnight, much as in our Cornish and Oxfordshire
versions. In the Norfolk version, however, the hidden joker who
unsuccessfully challenges her with "That's my mother's skull bone,"
and so on, is the village sexton, who ends up being locked in, and
dies of fright (Briggs 1970-1, part A, vol. 1, 204-6). This train of
events may remind us of one or other episode in our "type" (C), but
on the strength of this to argue a thoroughgoing genetic relationship
would not be justifiable.

So far we have been concerned with possible relationships among
stories, and what seems genuine or spurious. Equally, one might ask
what the stories are for. What role might they have played in the
life of a community? At one level they will have provided
entertainment. Some, as we have seen, will have aimed at social
control, portraying this or that behaviour as unacceptable. Stories
of the supernatural also provided a means, beyond the parameters of
conventional religion, of approaching the numinous. At the same time,
however inadequately from our complacent modern point of view, they
helped explain the inexplicable. Disorientated people had been pixy-
led; undeserved misfortunes came about through witchcraft;
unaccountable afflictions arose from otherworldly encounters. In our
final tale, (F), an illness reminiscent of that in which (B1), (B2)
and (B4) culminate similarly follows ill-considered attempts at
meddling with the world of spirits:

"There was a place, what they used to call Black Gate. A lot of
people said they could see a ghost there, see. One night they was
down Westport telling about somebody'd seen 'en when they come down
on; they reckoned this ghost was there. So one chap there picked up
his walking stick. He said, "I'll see if there's a ghost or no."
Course, he went up and this ghost was there, and he hit 'en with his
stick, see; going to give him whistipoop ["a smart blow"], like. The
stick went right through 'en! He went on and went to bed and every
bit of skin and hair on his body falled off, come off. You know all
the skin and hair, all of it. After that they reckoned it was 'cos
he'd knocked at this ghost. (Laughs) I ain't so sure, but ..."

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