Norfolk Folklore Society - February 2024 Newsletter
A note from Siofra
Hello Folklore Friends,
I hope you all had a visit from Jack Valentine this week! I’m writing this little note on St Valentine’s Eve and Jack has been, but I’m being good and saving my gift for tomorrow.
I was lucky enough to have another folklore adventure this month. I went off to Oxfordshire for a long weekend. We stayed in a village with an excellent name…Shipton-under-Wychwood. I mean, can you think of a better named place for me to stay! The village church is home to an excellent example of a bale tomb. This style of memorial is quite rare. I read that the are only about a hundred examples left, and about ninety of those are all within 10 miles of Burford.
But, the highlight (other than celebrating my sister’s birthday!) was a trip to and visit to the legendary Rollright Stones. I’ve wanted to visit them for ages so I was very happy to find out they were just down the road from where we were staying.
The legend of the stones goes like this (taken from www.rollrightstones.co.uk):
The Stones take their names from a legend about a king and his army who were marching over the Cotswolds when they met a witch who challenged the king saying, “Seven long strides shalt thou take and if Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be”. On his seventh stride a mound rose up obscuring the view, and the witch turned them all to stone: the king became the King Stone; his army the King’s Men; and his knights the Whispering Knights (plotting treachery). The witch became an elder tree, supposedly still in the hedge: if it is cut the spell is broken the Stones will come back to life.
Another legend says:
Legend has it that it is impossible to count the King’s Men. It is said that the man will never live who shall count the stones three times and find the number the same each time. It is also said that anyone who thrice counts the same number will have their heart’s desire fulfilled. (It is harder than you might expect!) A baker swore he could count them and, to prove it, he baked a number of loaves and placed one on each of the stones. But each time he tried to collect them up some of the loaves were missing, spirited away either by the Devil or by fairies.
The stones were beautiful and magical. People still use the area for magical purposes. The were trees draped with ribbons and offerings of all sorts. I hope to go back and spend some more time with the stones.
Siofra 💚
A note from Stacia
I was so excited this month to know that Siofra was going to the Straw Bear Festival that I didn’t even overload her with requests for merchandise (mainly because I bought it all last year). I think I speak for both of us when I say that if you haven’t been before, please remedy that situation as soon as possible. We must all follow the Straw Bear (it’s the Whittlesey motto), it’s a rite of passage. Failing that, can we bring him to Norfolk?
The NFS has a huge number of projects to look forward to this year that are already keeping me very busy and they’re on a selection of random subjects that sees me darting from book to book for snippets to add to my notes. I catalogued all my folklore books a few months ago which at the beginning seemed like an amazing idea until I was drowning in a sea of books and full of utter rage and regret. It’s useful now, though, as I can smugly leaf through the list to see what I own. And everyone needs an entire section of a bookshelf for ghosts, right? And one for witches/stones/creatures/UFOs/mysteries etc etc? To paraphrase Jaws, I’m gonna need a bigger house.
January’s NFS talk from Spirited Lucy and Rachel Duffield about The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall and spirit photography was a real treat and I’m glad those of you that didn’t make it will get to hear it on our podcast. The story of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall (along with first- person accounts from the photographers) is on our website HERE, there’s a Sandringham link to the same story HERE and a link to her at Houghton Hall HERE. Never let it be said that we don’t run with a theme.
Happy February,
Love from Stacia
Norfolk Folklore Society - January Talk
Thank you so much to Lucy and Rachel for delivering an excellent talk on the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. You can listen below.
Website highlights
Have you read our story about the phantom food flinger of RAF Mildenhall? “A manager saw baloney (a kind of sausage) fly out of a meat case and insisted that it had been propelled out of the case with force, rather than just fallen. “I have always believed that there was something out there, it didn’t make me believe or disbelieve, it just was,” said a member of staff. Read more HERE.
Our What’s On page of things to do in Norfolk is HERE.
The interactive Norfolk Folklore Society Map of the Strange is HERE.
February folklore
The 12th to the 14th of February are said to be “borrowed’ from January – it these
days are plagued by storms, the year will be filled with good weather but if they are fine, the rest of the year will be foul, so goes the folklore. The last three days of March were said to be borrowed from April, too
The Anglo Saxons called February Sol-Monath or ‘cake month’. Do you need more
cake? Visit www.assemblyhousenorwich.co.uk 😉
Always plant your radishes at February’s new moon
February 13 is Shrove Tuesday, ‘pancake day’. The flipping of the first pancake
should be carried out by the eldest daughter of the household
February 16 is often Pully Lug Day when it is lucky to pull someone’s ear lobe before 12 noon
Whatever the weather is on February 22 is said to foretell the future for the next 40 days
Women are ‘allowed’ to propose to their partners at Leap Years on February 29. Gee, thanks.
The cruel Lenten tradition of the Stócach at Shrove
In Ireland, it wasn’t just delicious food which people gave up for Lent: once, it was all pleasurable things that were forsaken for God, including wedding nights (and weddings). This meant that Shrove Tuesday became one of the most popular days of the year for marriages and priests would regularly have a queue of couples keen to pledge their troth before the iron curtain of Lent came down.
With a focus on marriage, Shrove Tuesday also became a day which shone a light on those who were not married and who were unlikely to marry. And, with human nature often being a fairly horrid thing, a practice began which involved large sections of the community mocking those who hadn’t married with a series of pranks which ranged from light-hearted to downright unpleasant.
At one end of the scale would be chalking the back of a bachelor’s coat as they went to church to mark them out as potential suitors. At the other, were the Stócach scarecrows.
Folklorist Shane Lehane has gathered tales of the Stócach after being told about them as he gave a lecture in County Cork. An attendee explained that a stócach was “…an effigy of a man placed on the roof of a house of anyone unmarried at this time of year. Equally, it was sometimes the outline of a man painted with tar on the wall of the house.” Another man, Pat O’Hanlon, told Lehane about seeing what he called a scarecrow hanging from the telegraph wires in front of the house of two unmarried ladies.
His mother told him the effigy was “an old man to take to Skellig with them”. This refers to another (frankly terrifying) Irish ritual: Skelliking or Skellig Day (Skeleton Day) when boys were given free licence to chase girls, corral them with ropes, tie them up and drench them with cold water.
With prohibitive Lent rules outlawing certain food and drink and sex, the name was thought to come from the medieval island of Skellig Michael off the Country Kerry coast, which once kept a different calendar to the mainland. This meant that Easter and Lent were later on the island than elsewhere and therefore people could marry – and party - later in the year after Lent had begun on the mainland.
The earliest reference in history to the Skellig Islands dates back to 600AD. During the time of the Penal Laws, Skellig Michael and Little Skellig became a haven for many Catholics whose beliefs and rights were being suppressed. The largest of the Skelligs is Skellig Michael (Sceilg Mhichil) and was home to one of the earliest monastic settlements in Ireland.
The monks of St. Fionan’s monastery led simple lives and lived in stone, beehive shaped huts. They would descend the 670 steps early every morning and fish for the morning’s breakfast and would spend the rest of the day praying in the church, tending to their gardens and studying. The huts, which are round on the outside and rectangular on the inside, were carefully built so that no drop of rain ever entered between the stones.
The monks left the island in the thirteenth century and it became a place of pilgrimage. According to an 1895 account: “All the marriageable young people, men, and women, in any parish, who are not gone over to the majority at Shrovetide, are said to be compelled to walk barefoot to the Skellig rocks, off the Kerry coast, on Shrove Tuesday night.”
NFS A-Z: L is for Lantern Man
In the dark of night, the ghost lights of the Norfolk marshes flicker.
There have been accounts of Will o’ the Wisps twinkling over the county’s fens and marshland for centuries, eerie cold flames in wetlands that were said to lure travellers to a watery grave.
First mentioned by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1563, the author described the green, yellow or white lights as “death fires”, and ignis fatuus – “…foolish fire that hurteth not but only fooles.”
Shakespeare and John Day referenced the dancing marsh-lights in the early 1600s and 100 years later, scientist Isaac Newton wrote about the cold fires of the fens in his 1704 opus, Optiks.
In John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost of 1667, which charts the biblical story of the Fall of Man, the poet writes of Will o’ the Wisps: “A flame, which oft, they say, some evil spirit attends, hovering and blazing with delusive light, misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way to bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool; there swallowed up and lost…”
Bram Stoker’s classic character Dracula tells Jonathan Harker, as he drives him to his castle in the dark of night, that the lights he sees outside the carriage are a marker to where treasure is buried: a greedy reason to follow the lights into danger.
The Lord of the Rings’ Dead Marshes close to Mordor are teeming with Will o’ the Wisps and when Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee trek through the boggy land they are warned by Gollum who tells them that if they follow the lights, they will find themselves keeping company with the dead with “little candles” of their own. Harry Potter’s JK Rowling calls her Will o’ The Wisps Hinkypunks.
But whether you call them Will, Hobby Lanterns, Friar’s Lanterns, Jack o’ Lanterns, Death Candles, Fire Faeries, Elf-fire, Corpse Candles, Merry Dancers, Kitty Candlesticks, Jenny Burnt Tails, Star Jelly, Wandering Fire or – as in Norfolk – The Lantern Men – one thing is certain: you should never follow the mesmerising lights into the marshland.
Poor Joseph Bexfield of Thurlton ignored the warnings and paid the ultimate price. He drowned on August 11 1809 at the age of 38, leaving behind a grieving widow and two children, a victim – it is said – of The Lantern Man.
His gravestone in All Saints Church in Thurlton reads: “cruel Death that would not spare, A Father kind and Husband dear, Great is ye loss to ye three he left behind But he they hope will greater comfort find.”
A wherry man on the River Yare, death by drowning was relatively rare for the men who made their living by ferrying goods along the Norfolk waterways, unlike their close colleagues who worked at sea.
But Joseph didn’t meet his Maker while at work: instead, his fear of upsetting his wife led to his demise when he left the warmth of the White Horse Inn at Thurlton Staithe to retrieve a parcel for her that he’d left on the wherry. It was a dark night and the mist was rolling in across the marshes, swathing the reeds, creeks and mud flats in a veil of grey.
No one in their right mind would wander far on such a night, not when the Lantern Man was on duty, and his friends begged him to reconsider and to bed down on one of the straw mattresses at the snug inn. They had seen the telltale lights flickering across the marsh, they knew the danger that lay ahead of Joseph but he simply laughed at their warnings, pointing out the Lantern Man was no match for an irate wife.
He knew the marshes like the back of his hand, he told them, he could navigate from wherry to home with his eyes closed: a dark misty night was no match for a river man like him. As his closest friend begged him to stay, he strode out into the night saying he could never be led astray by a “Jack o’ Lantern”. He was never seen again: alive, at any rate.
When Joseph failed to return home and did not appear for his shift on the wherry, his friends rallied to search the marshes but the wherryman was nowhere to be seen. His body was washed up between Reedham and Breydon three days later and was taken to Thurlton where it has remained ever since under a tombstone engraved with a wherry and those chilling words.
According to Fenland story spinner Jack Barrett, the “shadow figure” of Joseph can still be seen on misty nights on the marsh, wandering eternally towards the cold fire that had tempted him to his death.
While some believe the strange lights are the wandering spirits of the dead and others think they are a manifestation of the Devil – scientists, of course, have their own explanation that owes nothing to the spirit realm. They say the lights seen across the marshes are caused as methane in bubbles or marsh gas rises to the surface of a swamp and burns spontaneously in the air and that stories have been invented to protect people from wandering on shifting ground.
But we prefer to listen to Norfolk’s own Mrs Lubbock, the wise woman of Irstead who not only knew of the Lantern Man, she saw him in her village in the 19th century. She believed that the spirit was the ghost light of a man called Heard who had transformed into the Lantern Man and would haunt the village on misty nights and in particular in a place called Heard’s Hole.
Jack Heard was criminal who had committed some terrible deeds. He drowned in nearby Alderfen Broad – shortly afterwards, the Lantern Man appeared.
“I have often see it there, rising up and falling and twisting about, and then up again – it looked exactly like a candle in a lantern,” said Mrs Lubbock.
“If anyone were walking along the road with a lantern at the time when Jack appeared and did not put out the light, he could come against it and dash it to pieces; and that a gentleman who made a mock of him and called him ‘Will o’the Wisp’, was riding on horseback one evening in the adjoining parish of Horning, when he (Jack) came at him and knocked him off his horse.”
Whatever you believe we can agree on one bare fact: nothing good can come of straying across the marshes on dark and misty nights, just ask Joseph Bexfield.