FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Ringing of the Bluebells

Well it appears that often seemingly mythical beast, the British Summer is finally here! The temperature is up, the sun is shining, and it's the perfect time to pop out for a pleasant stroll in the countryside. Now one of the great attractions of the British countryside at this time of the year is to take a walk in some bluebell woods. And this seemingly mundane activity has been something of an unofficial annual ritual for a lot of folks for many generations. Such is the popularity of going to see such swathes of blue, that not so long ago special trains would be laid on to carry visitors to the woodlands, or meander passed vistas showcasing the vistas clad in blue. For example, a service of "bluebell trains" once used to run through the Chiltern Hills through the blooming woodlands, and this natural floral display helped earn the designation of "An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty". While in East Sussex, one particular stretch of tracks is still known as the Bluebell Railway.  Many nature parks and stately homes still make a point of advertising when their woodland will be carpeted with a stunning sea of gently nodding little blue flowers, and the National Trust even has a page telling you where the nearest bluebell wood is to you.

It is thought that the humble bluebell - that the Hyacinthoides non-scripta taxonomy fans - first appeared in Britain not long after the last Ice Age, and indeed the presence of a carpet of bluebells is often a signifier that a forest is a surviving tract of ancient woodland. However the little nodding flowers have not only been admired for their beauty but have also long been revered for their useful properties. In the Bronze age, our ancestors attached flights of feathers to their arrows with a glue made from bluebells, while the Tudors used a starch extracted from crushed bluebell roots to stiffen their iconic ruff collars. And for several centuries bookbinders have used bluebell derived adhesives to make and repair tomes. 

In the modern era we have discovered that bluebells contain at least 15 biological active compounds that the plant utilises to repel insect and animal pests. And it would seem our forebears knew something of this, for general folklore has long asserted that bluebells are poisonous to eat, and one of the uses of bluebells recommended by herbalists, was treating spider bites. However folklore ascribes to them other more esoteric properties, such as being a good remedy for leprosy, and as a treatment for tuberculosis. However there is also a good deal of magic associated with the little flowers too, as demonstrated by the various folk names the flowers have garnered over the centuries such as witches thimbles and fairy flowers. 

Firstly, as they begin to bloom towards the end of April, they have been long associated with St. George as that saint's day falls on the 23rd of that month, while in the language of flowers created by the Victorians, bluebells symbolise constancy, humility and everlasting love. And these associations may well be derived from older folklore charms, for two well-known pieces of bluebell lore reflect these properties: it was said that if you wore a wreath of bluebells you would compel a person to tell the truth. And if you turn a bluebell flower inside out, you will win the heart of your true love.

More generally, bluebells were considered useful flowers in other ways too. For example, the Encyclopedia of Folkore and the Occult Sciences Vol 2 by Cora Linn Daniels and C. M. Stevans, published in 1852, tells us -   

If you see a bluebell, pick it and repeat the following words: "Bluebell, bluebell, bring me some luck before to-morrow night;" slip it into your shoe and you will get good luck

Folklore also seemingly draws on their repellent qualities as well, for it was said that bluebells may be used to prevent nightmares, Simply place some in or under your pillow, or just hang them near the bed and bad dreams will be kept at bay. Possibly this particular belief might be related to their long usage as an adhesive, but it is possible it may be derived from an older common strand of bluebell lore. For in many places, the little flowers have a strong association with the faeries, and as such it was dangerous to be messing about in bluebells woods. 

It has been said that faeries hang their spells on bluebells to dry and hence disturbing the bluebells may unleash wild magic upon you, or just bring down the wrath of the faeries. Less whimsically, it was thought that walking in bluebells may lead you to become 'pixy-led' - that is to say, dazed by enchantment and unable to find your way out of the woods. And darker still in some corners of the country,  it was said that a child who picks a bluebell will be snatched away by the faery folk, never to be seen again. Unsurprisingly many folks held it was foolish to pick bluebells or bring them into the house.

However folklore is often very contradictory, and hence in some areas it was said that planting bluebells in your garden was a useful thing to do. Not only would it curry favour with the hidden faerie powers, but it was said that the bluebells would ring if unwelcome visitors approached your door. However once again these whimsical bits of bluebell lore appear to have older, darker roots. For more commonly, it was held that the faeries would ring the bluebells to call their kin to gatherings and meetings. And it was very bad luck to hear a bluebell ring, and in many instances it is said that to hear the chime of the bluebells was an omen of your own death, hence in some places these lovely little flowers gained the sinister name 'dead men's bells'... 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Autumn Leaves

In 1939, noted poet Louis MacNeice wrote a long work entitled Autumn Journal, a snap shot in verse of life in London on the eve of the Second World War. MacNeice's poetry very much reflected the times he lived in, as Philip Larkin put it "his was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the news-boys were shouting". However a few particular lines have often puzzled readers - 

  

The plane-tree leaves come sidling down

            (Catch my guineas, catch my guineas)

And the sun caresses Camden Town,

               The barrels of oranges and apples. 

Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice 

Many have thought that the odd refrain of "Catch my guineas, catch my guineas" is perhaps meant to echo of an old nursery rhyme, just as the following lines about oranges and apples recall "Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements". However, while it does allude to a very old source, we must look a little further than the nursery for its inspiration. 

While these lines don't appear to be an allusion to any older traditional rhyme or verse, it would seem to be an allusion to a widespread folk belief about falling leaves, and one that many generations of children have been familiar with. In Copsford (1952), author WJC Murray recalled that - 

As a small boy I had whimsically been taught that there was a magic in a falling leaf if you caught it before it touched the ground

Now this is somewhat vague, but undoubtedly it does make for a fun game in a sunny autumn afternoon. Delving into the annals of folklore, I discovered that in Cheshire it was said that to catch a falling leaf before it hit the ground on Halloween night entitled the catcher to make a wish. However there are many other versions of this little piece of autumnal lore. Most commonly, in many areas, it is simply considered lucky to catch a falling autumn leaf, and certainly this was the version that I was familiar with as a child growing up in the 1970s in the North of England. It is therefore not a huge leap of logic to suggest that Mr MacNeice's refrain recalls a similar tradition, in which it was said that to catch a falling leaf would ensure money and good fortune, and seemingly recalls a forgotten chant that accompanied the leaf catching. 

In 1878, the Folklore Society was founded to study such matters, and indeed to preserve these kinds of traditions, songs and rhymes. And in their first year of operations their official journal records the common folk belief that - 

If you catch a falling leaf, you will have twelve months of the happiness 

from Folk-Lore Record (1878)

But not all versions of this tradition were as quite as generous. It was said in Northampton, as late as the 1980s, that  if you catch twelve falling leaves during the autumn, you'll have a happy year; presumably each leaf caught ensures one month of good fortune. However childrens' author Alison Uttley, in her memoir A Year in the Country (1957), recalls a more exacting version - 

We try to catch a dancing leaf, for every leaf caught is a 'happy day', but how elusive they are, these fluttering alive things, which slip through the fingers and evade pursuit!

Now these variations in number perhaps are the result of this superstition spawning a game for children, with the increased goals making this autumnal activity something more of a challenge. In the 1950s, folklorist Iona Opie conducted a nationwide survey on superstitions, and a Welsh schoolboy in Bucknell, Radnorshire informed her that one needed to catch a whopping 365 falling leaves to ensure a lucky year - one can almost hear his breathless excitement at undertaking such a challenge! 

However the catching of falling leaves had other variations, and what's more were popular with grown-ups too. In The Encyclopedia of Superstitions (1949), Edwin Radford reports -

The peculiar belief mentioned in the first of the above superstitions was forcibly brought to the mind of the author one day in Hyde Park, London, in the autumn of 1946. A man and woman pretty well advanced in years stood looking up at an oak tree from which leaves were being blown by the wind. After making several attempts to catch a leaf, they at last managed to do so, the man first and the lady subsequently. They then walked away, apparently satisfied with the game. 

  A question to them elicited the fact that they expected to be free from colds in the head by reason of their performance. The author quoted to them the superstition in which they apparently believed. To this and a further question they announced that they were country bred, from the shires, and that since coming to London more than 20 years ago they had regularly caught falling leaves in the autumn. 'And we've never had a cold yet,' they concluded.

Whether there is any truth to this I do not know, but certainly the exercise involved in the task of catching those tricksy falling leaves certainly will help in warding off the coughs and colds of winter! 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - All Hail the Conkerer!

Summer is fading away, the leaves are beginning to change colour, and the kids have been packed off back to school. Yes, September is here once again and autumn is beginning. Now here in England before Halloween, Bonfire Night and Christmas, the first of all the old rites and rituals of the last quarter actually begins in this month. Or at least they do for those afore-mentioned schoolkids, whose enforced return to the classroom is sweetened by an annual seasonal playground tournament - the game of conkers! 

For those of you unfamiliar with this peculiar practice, this is a centuries old game played with the nuts of the horse chestnut tree. The nuts - the titular conkers - are large, smooth and round, growing in spiked green cases, and around September time they are beginning to drop off the trees. Although thanks to the popularity of conkers with schoolkids, they are often "helped" down, and therefore should you be visiting the British Isles in early autumn and see a ring of children hurling sticks up into the branches of a tree, be assured that this is not some folk survival of an ancient rite to drive evil spirits from the boughs, but a method of harvesting conkers quickly! 

The collected shiny horse chestnuts are then taken home, and in most cases these days, a parent must be pestered to get out the electric drill and holes are bored through the centre of the nut, from top to bottom. A string or old shoe lace is then threaded through the hole, creating the conker proper - a nut that came be swung in deadly combat! Now despite the British youth's reputation for hooliganism, conkers are NOT an anti-personnel weapon, neither of the melee or missile variety, and conkers are only deployed against their own brethren. 

The game is played as follows - one player holds his conker hanging from its thread, and the other attacks it by swinging his conker at the dangling one. Then the roles are reversed, and the match continues until one conker smashes the other. And that is it - brilliant in its simplicity and violence, with the added twist that it may be the attacking conker that shatters. However this is a tournament based sport, for surviving conkers gain a score. A freshly made untried conker is a noner - having won no matches, where as a fresh victor is a oner! And a survivor of two matches a two-er and so forth! Of course there are regional variants to the rules and jargon - in Scotland, conkers are ranked as bully-one, bully-two, while in some areas the winning conker absorbs the score of its vanished foe - hence a newly strung oner that batters a three-er into fragments, would become a fiver - one for itself, one for the and match and then adding the three points from its vanquished foe. However whichever variation on the scoring system is used, possessing a battle-hardened  veteran conker such as a ten-er or even a twenty-er, has long been a ticket to playground fame and legend.

Due to the naturally superstitious nature of children, and the peculiar oral culture that is the lore of the schoolyard, there are ancient beliefs clustered about conkers. For example, in some areas, particular horse chestnut trees are said to give the best conkers, and coincidentally often ones in places that take some pluck to visit, such as those standing in graveyards or on private lands. Moreover there is a whole slew of beliefs about how to create the strongest conker. While such folk methods are considered cheating in official conker tournaments - and yes, there are such things,  the World Conker Championships for example has been held annually since 1965 - this hasn't stopped generations of schoolkids subjecting their conkers to bizarre hardening rituals. 

The simplest but the most annoying - for it requires planning an A LOT of patience and therefore is deemed heretical to most kids - involves keeping the conkers in a warm, dry place for a whole year. Yes, I know, a whole ruddy year! Needless to say this method is not very popular. Firstly because it's a very long time to wait, and secondly mothers tend to frown on discovering that the airing cupboard is now home to an autumnal arsenal. Boo! However for the impatient child - and let's be honest, that's all of the them - other more exciting methods are available, such as boiling the conkers in vinegar, baking them in the oven, or coating them in nail varnish. While the efficacy of any of these methods is very much open to question, there is however one really sure result - an irate parent whose kitchen now stinks of vinegar, burnt chestnut and spilled nail varnish.   

And thus it has been for generations! The game of conkers remains popular to this very day, although in recent years a new myth has sprung up around it. Usually just when kids are starting to collect conkers, some newspaper or other will resurrect a story that schools are banning conkers, thanks to that modern folk devil, the dreaded Health & Safety regulations. Now this bit of flim-flam is seemingly now annually reported, however it is a modern piece of folklore, that originates from a bit of fun in one particular school as related here intended to highlight safety issues for children. However it persists every year, despite the UK Health & Safety Executive having a special page debunking the myth.

Actually horse chestnuts are a relative recent addition to the European and American landscapes. With conkers being large and heavy, they weren't naturally distributed by birds and animals in the same way that most of our tree populations were. The tree was actually imported to Northern Europe and the US in the 17th century and only became a widespread part of the British landscape in the 19th. The first game of conkers recorded apparently occurred in 1848 on the Isle of Wight, although there is an earlier mention of a similar game played with hazelnuts in Robert Southley's memoirs in 1821. And game historians believe that such similar games had been played with other nuts and shells for centuries. 

However despite the horse chestnut tree's relative recent arrival in our lands, it has accumulated a certain degree of folklore, aside from the game of conkers. The Encyclopedia of Superstitions, Folklore and Occult Sciences Vol. 2 (1903) by Cora Linn Daniels records that it is considered lucky to carry horse chestnuts in your pockets, noting that "the Walloons carry three horse-chestnuts in the pocket, as a relief from giddiness!" - although quite why the folks of Belgium needed a cure for giddiness it sadly does not explain. However this superstition seems to have grown and spread, for it is claimed all across Britain and America that carrying three horse chestnuts in your pocket is beneficial. 

In many areas it is claimed that carrying three shiny conkers in your pocket will ensure you will always have money. While in other places, particularly in the US, it is claimed that carrying conkers - or buck-eyes as they are called over the pond - ensure virility in a man. In addition, buck-eyes are often found in hoodoo recipes, and again often in powders to promote *ahem* a gentlemen's strength. It is thought that this belief may have arisen from the supposed resemblance of the nuts in their spiky cases to the relevant pair of parts on the male anatomy. On a related but more polite note concerning the conkers in their spiked cases, in England it was claimed that the longer spines in the conker, the longer and harder the winter to come. Again this may be a belief derived from their shape, with the green conker spikes resembling icicles. 

However the most common folk belief about conkers, and one that persists to this very day, is that placing conkers around your house will repel spiders. And bizarre as it sounds, this method of keeping spiders at bay is said to effective by many arachnophobes. Now from a folkloric point of view, you would expect it was conkers in the spiky cases that were said to do this trick - for again the spiky shells roughly resemble the creepy-crawlies they are repelling, and hence worked perhaps through sympathetic magic or possibly just by acting an insect scarecrows! However surprisingly the lore states it is the conkers themselves, and what's more, they must be replaced every year to remain effective. 

Now as those who employ this method of spider control, assert that this is the case, it would rather  suggest that the conkers themselves give off some kind of chemical or scent that naturally repels spiders. However despite many tests, so far scientists have failed to discover any such compounds or substances in the humble conker. But apparently another natural property of the conker is an utter disregard of science, for it is still widely reported that conkers will keep spiders away, and many folks do swear by them. So possibly there is still some magic in the old horse chestnut tree after all...