FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Tales of the Playground Part II

Last week I was reminiscing about the assorted tales I heard during a craze for telling spooky stories at my old village school  As I recorded last week some of these tales were simply compressed, and often gruesomely embellished, versions of classic ghost stories, whereas many others were variations of famous urban legends. However there was a third flavour to these little chillers passed around our playground - what I am going to dub 'the local tale'. 

Now there were two distinct types of local tales. In some stories, it was just an existing tale injected with a bit of local colour; for example, numerous stories were given a nearby location, often along with the kind of fervent assurances that only excitable children can make, that with was indeed a true tale. Needless to say, despite various assertions of veracity such as "This just happened to a couple who lived just down the road from me, swear blind!", there was of course never normally the slightest grain of truth to these claims. And considering the violent and disturbing nature of many of the tales that was a very good thing indeed. My all-time favourite of these "it happened right here" stories was the claim that Dracula had been to our village during his reign of terror! I never believed this spooky "fact" as I was pretty sure Dracula was "just made-up", and in fact when I first heard that the Count had been in Whitby (which is actually not that far away from Aycliffe Village), I was similarly sceptical, thinking this was just another bit of local fakelore

But there was a stronger and purer variety of these local spooky tales - the stories spun about the assorted ghosts that allegedly haunted the village. One I always remember well concerned one of the local pubs, and it stuck in my mind as we had to walk past the allegedly haunted spot on a regular basis. Now Aycliffe Village was home to several pubs, and the one nearest to our school was said to have a haunting. Situated on one of the main roads through the village, the Royal Telegraph is a traditional old English pub that is still open to this very day. This hostelry, with its white walls and black Tudor beams, is a former coaching inn which did a roaring trade back in the heyday of the Great North Road which used to run through the village. 

Now then, like many country pubs, the Royal Telegraph still has an old fashioned sign outside. This is a large painted board bearing the pubs's name, mounted on an iron arm hanging out over the street below. Now the arm that held the board was made of ancient metal, wrought with decorative curlicues and terminates in a great spike. Should it fall, it certainly could do some harm, and of course, according to a tale I heard, this is exactly what happened... 

Apparently back in the olden days, Victorian times to be precise, a lady was out for an evening stroll in the village, wearing, as all good ladies did back then, a huge bonnet decorated with flowers and feathers. According one version, she was a local lady from the village, but in others she was a traveller just passing through while journeying up the Great North Road. Anyhow, while she was walking, a great storm blew in and she hurried to find some shelter from the elements. Seeing she was nearing the Royal Telegraph, she made for the friendly lights of the inn. However the storm grew stronger and stronger, and the Telegraph sign swung wildly back and forward in the great blasts of icy wind and rain. And just as she was reaching the inn, a great gust came, and the great iron arm was blown free from its mounting in the white walls. The sign and spike came hurtling down and dashed out the lady's brains, killing her stone dead on the spot. And it is said on dark and storm nights, when the wind makes that old sign swing wildly back and forth, you can see the figure of the lady standing beneath it, her red eyes glowing in the twilight... 

As you may imagine, knowing this tale made passing the old inn something of thrill on windy days, when the skies were dark and the sign was swinging. I distinctly remember it was said that sometimes all that would be seen were her glowing eyes floating in the shadow of the swinging sign... 

And the old pub still has its hanging sign, but the spikey ancient arm I remember has now been replaced it seems. Now I always assumed that this was an authentic local ghost story, for it has all the hallmarks of a typical folkloric tale,with elements such as being based around a local landmark, and a set of special circumstances when the spectre can be seen. However despite reading many books and articles on ghosts and folklore in the Darlington/County Durham area, I never came across an account of this haunting in print. But then a few years ago, I happened to meet a lovely old lady who still lived in Aycliffe Village, and as it turned out she knew the Royal Telegraph rather well. For her parents had run that very pub for many years, and she herself had grow up there. Naturally I just had to ask about the ghostly lady who appeared on stormy nights beneath the sign... But alas, she'd never ever heard the tale! 

On one hand this does rather suggest that possibly this ghostly tale was just the invention of imaginative children rather than a story rooted in local history. However on the other, folklore in its purest form is an oral tradition, and hence an obscure story from a little village may well have been told for generations without it being recorded in print. Alternatively it might have been a tale that was only told by a couple of generations of schoolchildren and has since been forgotten. It probably goes without saying that I would be very interested to hear from anyone else who remembers hearing this particular ghost story. But whatever the truth of the matter may be, at least now the tale of Royal Telegraph's ghostly lady has been set down...

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Tales from the Playground

Aycliffe Village School by Eric Thompson

I can trace my love of folklore back deep into my childhood. A huge inspiration for myself, and I daresay many of us growing up in the '60s, '70s, and '80s were the wonderful retellings of all manner of folk tales and legends from all round the world in the books of Ruth Manning-Sanders. However I also had a more personal connection. I grew up in the little village of Aycliffe in the North-east of England, and at the little village school I attended there was something of a craze for telling spooky stories. Quite how or why this pass-time took off I am not entirely sure, but what I can tell you is that is was very popular, and it seemed to be something more than just some passing fad. There was a great deal of kudos in having a popular tale to tell, with the keepers of the best stories being sought out at play-time or over the lunch-break to spin their out their stories for new audiences.

I heard a great many stories back then that have stuck with me to this day, and often because more than a few them made bed-time a troubling prospect. But over the years I have been able to uncover the origins of a large number of them. When writing of the strange tales children tell each other in A School Story, that great writer of ghost stories MR James remarked -

I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books

Now being a lecturer and a teacher himself, the good doctor was bang on the money here. And what he observed of schoolyard tales back at the start of the 20th century was still very true in my playground some sixty years later. Indeed, a good number of the stories I heard, that were retold with all the appropriate hushed tones and lurid details, were exactly as James described: concise reworkings of tales from books. For example, I particularly remember hearing a version of the WW Jacobs's famous chiller The Monkey's Paw; in fact this was my first encounter with a version of this famous short story. However of course, this playground version had a few details changed - most notably that at the tale's climax, the front door is opened to reveal in gruesome detail the mangled and rotted corpse that has been called up from the grave.

Furthermore, another large proportion of these little stories were what we would now term urban legends. And indeed I heard a great many of the classics during my school's spooky story craze - ones I'm sure most of you will at least know of, if not heard in your own youth - The Hook, The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, the Killer in the Backseat, and of course the great-daddy of the all The Phantom Hitchhiker. Now typically, many of these tales were embellished in various ways depending upon the teller, and it is interesting to note that the first three famous tales I mentioned, plus a good many other little stories of death and murder, I first heard as being incidents in the blood-soaked career of the same killer, a monster known only as Jordan.

"and Jordan was bouncing all the children's bloody cut-off heads on the bed..." 

Now there was no definite description of Jordan; he was always a somewhat shadowy figure. But according to the lore passed around my playground, Jordan was a cannibal and an insane killer, often escaped from a nearby asylum. But there were dark hints that he was something more: I vividly remember a grim-faced little girl in a woolly hat solemnly proclaiming that he was, and I quote, "half man, half ghost". However despite his unclear origins and nature, what all the various stories of his gruesome escapdes agreed upon was Jordan's weapon of choice - he committed his acts of horror with his abnormally long and sharp finger nails. They were as lethal as bayonets and just as strong, capable allegedly of piercing brick and concrete... Well, at least according to leading Jordan authority Little Miss Wooly Hat, and obviously back then, I had no cause to doubt her.

Most infamously for me, in a scene that haunted my nightmares for years, was the Jordan version of the climax of the tale of the Hook. Just like the classic incarnation of the story, at the end the girlfriend disobeys the police and looks round to see what is on the roof of the car. And discovers that, as usual, the tapping noise she has been hearing is the demented killer banging her boyfriend's severed head on the car roof. However in my local version, Jordan actually had the dripping head, and now partially gnawed to boot, impaled on his long talon-like nails!  

Now of course, I'm sure many of you are stroking your chins and formulating all kinds of theories that our local bogey-man Jordan was clearly inspired by kids hearing garbled reports of that 1980s horror superstar Freddy Krueger. But the interesting thing is, I was hearing these tales of this monstrous maniac with finger knives in the early 1970s, a good decade before Wes Craven first brought the infamous dream-killer to the screen. However I suspect I am not alone in getting an extra dose of the chills from the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie, as for pupils of a certain village school circa the mid 1970s, old Fred Krueger appeared to be a figure from our own childhood nightmares come to life...

Another iconic character with knife-like, super-strong talons that could have served as an inspiration is of course that famous X-Man, Wolverine. However delving into comics history, I was hearing the blood-splattered tales of Jordan a good while before Wolverine would become a familiar face for British comic book readers. The famous mutant and his retractable claws had only appeared in late 1974, and it would be another few years before he became one of Marvel's stars. He certainly hadn't made it into the Marvel reprint comics that were appearing in UK newsagents at the time, and if I recall correctly he didn't even appear in the Marvel Superheroes Top Trumps set that came out in 1977 which '70s kids regarded as the ultimate guide to the Marvel heroes and villains.

I also have wondered whether our local monster was perhaps inspired another famous character. In the '70s, the BBC produced a two and a half hour version of Dracula, which starred Louis Jourdan as the Count. And what's more, in this version Bram Stoker's undead villain was seen sporting long and sharp nails. Had some imaginative child seen part of this production and been inspired? Or perhaps a more likely scenario is that some kid saw a trailer for this forth-coming production and seen an image of a sinister man with pointy nails and heard the star's name... However as plausible as that might be for the genesis of my childhood bogeyman, as this production of Dracula screened at Christmas 1977, just before we moved away from the village, unfortunately Louis Jourdan's Count is arriving too late on the scene to inspire all those blood-thirsty tales I heard.

Louis Jourdan as Dracula

It is a fair bet I think that some kid at some point thought it would be cool if all these much passed around tales of murderers and madmen could be the work of one super-maniac. However I would love to know the inspiration for the name, but I suspect I'll never know where the long-taloned cannibal killer really came from. And perhaps that's for the best - monsters are always scarier the less you know about them...

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Brawny Beasts of County Durham Part II

Last week, we uncovered a tangled legend from Bishop Auckland about a brave knight who slew either a dragon or a monstrous wild boar. And this tale of Sir Pollard and the Brawn shared many similarities with the legend of the Sockburn Worm, a story hailing from a few miles south in County Durham. A highly suspect coincidence to be sure. However stranger still, even closer to Bishop Auckland, the virtually neighbouring town of Ferryhill has its own legend of a monster hog.

The tale is found in The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham: Volume 3, Stockton and Darlington Wards by Robert Surtees published in 1823. While detailing the history of the area, and noting the various historical traces and relics left by one Sir Roger de Fery, Surtees' recounts this 13th century knight's great claim to fame - the slaying of the Brawn of Brancepeth. He writes - 

The Boar or Brawn of Brancepath was a formidable animal, which made his lair on Brandon-hill, and walked the forest in ancient undisputed sovereignty from the Wear to the Gaunless. The marshy, and then woody vale, extending from Croxdale to Ferry-wood, was one of the brawn's favourite haunts, affording roots and mast, and the luxurious pleasure of volutation. Near Cleves-cross, Hodge, of Ferry, after carefully marking the boar's track, dug a pitfall, slightly covered with boughs and turf, and then toling on his victim by some bait to the treacherous spot, stood armed with his good sword across the pitfall,— “At once with hope and fear his heart rebounds.” At length the gallant brute came trotting on his onward path, and seeing the passage barred, rushed headlong on the vile pitfall. 

Now according to local historians this is the earliest record of the story of the slaying of the beast by Roger/Hodge of Fery. However is it curious that Surtees includes a quote in this recounting of the tale - “At once with hope and fear his heart rebounds” - and quite where this line comes from is unclear. I can find no trace of it anywhere else. Is it a quote from Surtees' source for the tale?

Some digging on my part turned up what appears to be an earlier version, told in verse, although annoyingly lacking Surtee's mystery quote. In another old tome The History of the Urban District of Spennymoor published in 1893, by author James J Dodd relates the Ferryhill legend, often almost quoting some of Surtees' phrasing. However deviating from his predecessor's account, he includes the following verse- 

He feared not ye loute with hys stalfe,
Ne yet for ye knyghte in his mayle;
He cared ne more for ye monke with his boke,
Than ye fiendis in depe Croixdale.
Then out spake Hodge yt wyghte soe bolde,
Yt wous on Fery hye;
And he hathe swome by Seynct Cudberte hys rode,
Yt thys horride brawne shall dye;
And he hathe dygged a depe, depe pit,
And strewed it with braunches so grene

Clearly Dodd's quote is but a fragment, and one that tantalizingly cutting off just where the Surtees line might have appeared. And so far, I have been unable to discover either a complete version or a definite origin for it.  Now I have found this old poem appearing with a date of 1208 attached to it, but its actual provenance has been difficult to ascertain. To further muddy the waters, the Victorians, with their passion for heritage and history, recreated a great many old traditions, and hence there is the possibility that this verse, despite being penned in convincing early English, is actually the product of a later century, a Victorian recreation of an imagined lost ballad perhaps.

However the 1208 date does match the historical record, for indeed there was a knight named Roger de Fery in that time. Local tradition has it that the name of the local area 'Brancepeth' is actually derived from 'brawn's path', as this is where the beast reputedly roamed. However scholars in recent times have cast doubt on this, claiming it more likely comes from 'Brant's path', named after a family that made its home in that locale. But as Surtees remarks "The story has nothing very improbable, and something like real evidence still exists", and goes on detail the legacies of Sir Roger that still exist today. These including his alleged tomb in the parish church of Merrington, a twelfth century grave whose slab bears the carved sign of a crossed sword and a spade. As Mr Dodd remarks - 

Seeing that the sword and the spade were the instruments of his famous victory, it needs a very slight stretch of imagination to identify this stone as the actual tombstone of Hodge of Fery. 

However local lore identifies two other places linked with the legend. As Dodd relates, in 1867 the remains of a large pit were discovered while repairing a stackyard, which was quickly assumed to be the very trap dug by Sir Roger. This may seem like a leap of logic, but some years earlier on the same farm, a large stone was dug up which is purported to be all that remains of a cross erected to mark the spot where Sir Roger slew the beast. The area where it was discovered is now known as Cleves Cross after it, and there is a plaque set into a nearby wall that claims - 

The large stone just above ye part of Cleves Cross marks the site where by tradition the Brawn of BRANCEPETH was killed by ROGER de FERY about the year 1200

The current plaque is a recent facsimile, but the original can still be seen in Ferryhill town hall (which also sports the gorgeous stained glass window seen at the heading of this piece).

While the stone is definitely the remains of a medieval monument, in truth we cannot be sure the cross does actually commemorate the slaying of the beast. Some historians postulate that the cross was more probably a way point or marker for pilgrims to Durham Cathedral, but to be frank that is unsupported supposition too, and  I suspect is more a product of an attempt to rid history of something embarrassing like a monster legend. But is a 13th knight hunting down a ferocious wild hog really that unlikely?

To begin with wild boar were still to be found in England at that time, although by the start of the 13th century their numbers were falling and they were being considered something of a menace. Furthermore as tales of monster slaying go, the tale of the Brawn of Brancepeth is highly plausible; the legend actually lacks all the mythic touches one would expect. It features a real animal, and there are no charms or magic involved. It is in fact a rather straight forward account of hunting a dangerous animal, with none of the usual narrative embroidery of the boar's ferociousness or size, nor some lavish reward for brave Sir Roger to round it out into a traditional story or folk tale.

More importantly, the historical record has some very strong evidence to back up the old tale. The traditions of heraldry in that period allowed a man to place in his arms the likeness of any notable beast he had slew. And hence, as Surtees' records, the seals of the de Fery family in that era do indeed show a boar - with Sir Roger's own showing the full beast, while his daughter Maude's just the head.

Given these seals and the carved device on Sir Roger's tomb, it is therefore very much looks like we have a story here rooted in fact rather than fiction. And as we shall discover next time, slaying wild boars was a not uncommon feat for brave men of that era, however many such stories are not as well supported as Sir Roger's by the historical record... And returning to the Pollard legend we will discover why having a beast slayer in the family was so desirable.

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Brawny Beasts of County Durham Part I

While browsing local legends online, I came across a brief mention of a tale of a limbless worm that reputedly made its lair in a wood outside Bishop Auckland, a little country town literally just down the road from my own. Now the North of England has many legends of great wyrms and dragons, but this one was new to me. And so I did some digging, and in The Works of Sir Walter Scott Volume III (1806) I discovered a fuller account. While discussing the border ballad Kempion, Scott talks at length about the tradition of dragons and wyrms in the North; he recounts the tale of another local dragon, the Sockburn Worm which we have discussed before, and tells of how tradition demands that a new Bishop of Durham is presented with the falchion that slew the beast on his first entrance into the diocese at Croft-on-Tees. But then he goes on to mention a knight slaying a worm at at Bishop Auckland. 

Now what was interesting was that Scott relates that this legend inspired a suspiciously similar ritual involving a falchion and the Bishop of Durham too. I say suspiciously similar for what are the odds of having two dragon-slayers, in the same county, within a few miles of each other, who are both  rewarded with lands and commemorated by presenting exactly the same type of weapon to the local bishop? Surely this was but the same tale but mistakenly attributed to the wrong town and noble family. 

Fortunately for us, Scott quotes his sources, an old tome called Ancient Tenures. It was written by one Thomas Blout in the early 17th century, but was later expanded by other scholars. And hence an edition published in 1815 by by S.Brooke for Butterworth & Son of London has the full title - Fragmenta antiquitatis: or, Ancient tenures of land, and jocular customs of manors (Enlarged and corrected by Josiah Beckwith; with considerable additions from authentic sources, by Hercules Malebysse Beckwith) - and in it we find the following passage - 

Now judging by the dates given in the text, the account of the Pollard's Lands falchion rite dates from long after old Thomas Blout had passed away, and hence is clearly a later addition, most likely a new expansion for this 1815 edition. Now as the scholarship of the 18th and 19th century can be sometime a little muddled with its facts, I tried to find other, and preferably earlier, mentions of the Pollards and a serpent. And in an even older tome I found this reference, which although brief, sheds a very different light on the matter -  

The owners of the land are to doe at every Bishop's first coming to be Bishop here to present him with the Falchion with which the Bore was slayne

from Parliamentary Surveys of the Bishopric of Durham 1649-1650

And so, here was the key to the mystery - there was good reason why I hadn't heard of a dragon tale from Bishop Auckland, for the monster in question was actually a vicious wild boar rather than a serpent! And with that important fact uncovered, it was not difficult to uncover many versions of the tale of the Brawn of Bishop Auckland and its slaying by a knight of the Pollard family.

Now Bishop Auckland was once a place of deep forests and wildwoods, indeed it is said that the town grew from a hunting lodge built there by the Bishops of Durham. With the local woodlands and hills providing excellent sporting opportunities, the little town grew and the Bishops of the county built a great hall there, and later a palatial castle. At some point, alleged in the Middle Ages, a monstrous boar appeared in the woods. Reputedly the size of a cow, this gigantic porker terrorized the area, attacking both man and beast. Naturally this dangerous brawn (as such boars were called) was a great menace to the local folk and was putting a serious dent in the nobility's hunting trips too. Therefore the Bishop of Durham placed a bounty on the beast's head in the hope some brave soul would slay go out and slay it.

A knight named Sir Richard Pollard took up the challenge and tracked the dreaded brawn into the woodland lair, and after a long battle he finally slew the monstrous hog. Sir Richard cut out the boar's tongue and then, being extremely fatigued by the mighty and bloody battle, collapsed into a deep sleep by the still cooling carcass of the brawn. However a cunning fellow happened by the sleeping knight and knowing of the bounty on the brawn, spirited its body away and claimed the reward from the bishop. Naturally Richard was horrified when he awoke, and rode with all haste to the Bishop's palace at Bishop Auckland. The trickery was soon revealed when Sir Richard produced the beast's missing tongue, and in recompense the Bishop offered Sir Richard ownership of all the lands he could ride around before the Bishop had finished his meal. The Bishop however was rather shocked when Sir Richard returned mere minutes later, and the clergyman was even more horrified when he discovered the reasons why. For the wily Sir Richard had rode around Auckland itself, which of course included the Bishop's beloved castle, palace and lands. Of course the Bishop would not honour the agreement but was so impressed by Sir Richard's cunning, he awarded him tracts of the most fertile lands in the county, which of course became Pollard's Lands, and which now survive as Pollard's Dene.

A highly entertaining tale no doubt. But how did a monstrous boar become confused with a great serpent? Well it has been suggested that the confusion arises from an old Germanic word Gewurm which referred to any sort of dangerous wild animal, and has the same origin as the English word 'vermin'. It's a nice theory, however it is one that is rather problematic - firstly there is a clear mismatch of several centuries from when it was possible such Germanic words were still readily peppering the developing English language and the period from which this story purportedly dates, for it is a medieval tale not a Saxon one. Furthermore the Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for 'gewurm' which rather suggests the word was never in common currency in  these isles, and likewise lexicons of Old English  fail to include it too.

A more likely explanation in my view is that thanks to the often broad nature of North Eastern accents, somewhere along the line a visitor from Southern England misheard 'brawn' as 'wyrm'. While accents in County Durham might not always be as thick as Tyneside's Geordie, however the different vowel sounds and speaking cadences in the region could very easily result in a visitor to the area confusing 'wyrm' with 'brawn'. And in the realm of folklore it would not be the first time the confusing of a name lead to the birth of a new legend.

So then, that is one possible explanation for Bishop Auckland having twin legends of knights fighting dragons and boars. However this neat wrap-up of the mystery is somewhat unraveled when you learn that the little town of Ferryhill, which lies less than ten miles away, has a suspiciously similar legend of a brave knight slaying a monstrous boar! Clearly there is some chicanery going on here as we now have three separate but over-lapping legends in the same twenty mile area!

If you will pardon the pun, someone somewhere here is telling porkies! And next time we will discover which naughty knight is telling fibs and discover more about the monster brawns of the North East! 

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY: The Cauld Lad of Hylton

The north east of England is a land steeped in history and features a high concentration of ancient sites and ruins. And naturally where there are crumbling, tumbling stones, the visible remnants of where our ancestors used to live, in the shadows of their histories thrives folklore. For example, if one travels across Wearside, not far from the great city of Sunderland, you will find an impressive Gothic edifice, Hylton Castle. And naturally as you'd expect from any ruined castle worth its salt, it has a famous ghost, the Cauld Lad of Hylton. 

However as is often the case with tales that have been told over many generations, there are several differing accounts of Hylton Castle's supernatural resident. But while many of the differences in the stories are merely changes in the minutia of the tale, some versions cast an interesting light of the evolving nature of local ghost stories and folklore. The usual version of the Cauld Lad's tale goes like this... 

At the beginning of the 17th century, in the employ of the then Baron of the estate, Sir Robert Hylton, was a stableboy called Roger Skelton. According to many tellings of the tale, Roger often complained of being 'cauld' (that 'cold' to you folks unfamiliar with the Mackem dialect), and took to sleeping in the hay in his master's stables, which were warmer and cosier than the servants' quarters. However one day, young Roger overslept and didn't get his master's horse ready on time. The Baron flew into a terrible rage - some accounts claimed he struck the boy with a riding crop causing a head injury that would result in his death a few days later, but others say he hurled a pitchfork at the lad, slaying him on the spot. And more violently still, in some quarters it is alleged that the Baron's wrath was so great, he lopped Roger's head clean off his shoulders. 

Some versions claim that Roger's crime was dallying with the Baron's daughter, but whatever the circumstances of his death, the baron sought to hide his deed by concealing the body in a well or pond. But all the tales agree that the Baron would not go unpunished. Now it's said a few months later the body was discovered and that Sir Robert was put on trial for the slaying of the stable lad. However a servant testified that young Roger had died in an accident and so the Baron but walked away from court a free man.

But there are other Powers besides the law of man, and soon Hylton Castle was a troubled place. Pots were smashed, pans were thrown, the kitchen often trashed. Strange noises were heard, cries and wailing, and most sinister of all, a shape of a body, made from ashes from the fire would be found on the floor. Roger, the cauld lad, had returned to haunt the castle it seemed.  

A cook held a vigil one night to see who was causing the trouble and saw the spectre of a shivering, naked boy, wailing "I'm cauld! I'm cauld!". And so, this enterprising fellow and his wife procured a warm cloak and left it out the troubled spirit. The next night they held vigil again and saw the spectre happily take up the clothes proclaiming:  "Here’s a cloak and here’s a hood, the Cauld Lad of Hylton will do no more good".  And with that the ghostly lad vanished, never to be seen again...

...Or so that version of the story goes. A shorter version of the tale states that the Baron never should trial but suffered nightly hauntings until young Roger's corpse was discovered and given a proper burial in holy ground. But others claimed the Cauld Lad was never laid to rest; M.A. Richardson writing in 1843 reports that the Cauld Lad was still being seen, and furthermore was seen singing the following song which implies the spirit would never find rest -  

Wae’s me, wae’s me,*
The acorn’s not yet fallen from the tree,
That’s to grow the wood,
That’s to make the cradle,
That’s to rock the bairn
That’s to grow to the man
That’s to lay me!

* - "Woe is me, woe is me" in Mackem!

And indeed reports of ghostly wailing continued into the 20th century.

So then is there any truth to this tale? And what are we to make of the Cauld Lad's cryptic final remarks? Well, according to an 1857 tome The History of Durham Volume II there indeed was both a Roger Skelton and a Sir Robert. Indeed it is recorded that on 3rd July 1609, a servant boy Roger Skelton was found dead in the castle, with murder suspected and a inquest was held. The investigating authorities ascertained that the lad had been struck by a scythe wielded by Sir Robert Hylton, the 13th Baron of Hylton,  who was charged with manslaughter. However the trial found that the boy's death had been an "accident of misfortune" - apparent the Baron had been mowing the grass in the castle grounds and accidentally struck the boy who was stood behind him, in the leg, causing a "mortal wound one inch long and two inches broad".  Presumably the blade had  hit an artery for they were unable to stop the bleeding and poor Roger bled to death within an hour. And hence Sir Roger was granted a free pardon by order of Bishop James on the 6th September 1609. 

So then, considering the historical record it would seem at first that the tale of the Cauld Lad originates in a local scandal. Much like the truth behind the Babes in the Wood we investigated just before Christmas in this series, it would appear that a ghostly legend sprang up around a suspect death implicating a local authority figure. Indeed it is interesting to note that several versions of the tale have a faithfully old servant testifying to an accident being the cause of the boy's death, allowing the murderous master to walk free. And local historians have questioned the version of events given in court - why exactly would a wealthy nobleman be doing his own mowing being a key question. Certainly it does seem a trifle suspect! Hence the tales of ghostly troubles that appeared, reflect that the local populace had similar questions and did not perhaps have much faith the court's findings. Therefore local folklore was bringing the Baron a form of justice that the courts did not, and ensured his perceived crimes were not forgotten. 

However as regular readers of these articles will know, nothing is ever quite as it seems in the world of folklore. Our first clue is in the mysterious rhyme the Lad leaves us with: why does a troublesome spook, who appears to be behaving very much like a classic poltergeist, claim to be ceasing to do good? Well, a further clue lies in the method of his laying to rest which suggests the Cauld Lad may well date back further than the death of Roger Skelton. For traditionally a gift of clothes was away to rid a house of a very different species of supernatural resident... Yes, that's right rather than a folk rite for ridding one's home of a ghost, the giving of garments was a way to free a dwelling from a household faery. 

Looking at various tellings of the tale, some do mention that the Cauld Lad could be helpful as well as troublesome, such as doing household chores, and servants would leave out bread or cream to gain his good offices. Now such caprice is integral to faery behaviour and appeasement in this way an age-old way of placating the fair folk, and in this regard the Cauld Lad appears to be behaving like a traditional brownie or house elf. Indeed the tale of the haunting of Hylton Castle appears in many collections of faery lore, most notably being retold in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs in 1890 where he is identified as a brownie, defined by Jacobs thus - "a Brownie is a funny little thing, half man, half goblin, with pointed ears and hairy hide".

The Cauld Lad as depicted by John D. Batton in English Fairy Tales (1890)

Doing some further digging into old tomes, the earliest tales of the Cauld Lad appear in The Histories and Antiquities of the County Palatinate of Durham by Robert Surtees, in Volume III published in 1820. According to Surtees  - 

Every castle, tower, or manor-house, has its visionary inhabitants. “The cauld lad of Hilton” belongs to a very common and numerous class, the Brownie , or domestic spirit; and seems to have possessed no very distinctive attributes. He was seldom seen, but was heart nightly by the servants who slept in the great hall. If the kitchen had been left in perfect order, they heard him amusing himself by breaking plates and dishes, hurling the pewter in all directions, and throwing every thing into confusion. If, on the contrary, the apartment had been left in disarray (a practice which the servants found it most prudent to adopt), the indefatigable goblin arranged every thing with the greatest precision. 

Our respected North Eastern antiquarian goes on to note that some "with an admixture of English superstition" have identified the Cauld Lad as the spectre of Roger Skelton and notes the historical court case detailed above as the likely origins of the ghostly variant. 

What is interesting here is that in this earliest surviving recorded account, is that Surtees first and foremost identifies the Cauld Lad story as an example of faery lore, and then adds the ghost version as supplementary account. Hence here in 1820, we have we have two separate folkloric traditions side by side. However as the nineteenth century progress the second version supercedes the first, for example with Richardson presenting the legend as a tale of  a restless spirit. And notably the Caul Lad being more presented as a spectre is occurring roughly in parallel with the rise in popularity of ghost stories in literature at the same time. However the elements of his original faery nature still remain in many versions of the tale as we have seen above.   

As always in the field of folklore, given the increasing sparseness of written sources the further back you travel in time, it is difficult to be definitive, but  it would seem that the Cauld Lad legend has its roots in older faery lore. Whether the Cauld Lad's tale changed later as ghost stories become a popular literary genre or whether his story is the result of older local legends of brownies and house-elves fusing with a tale of a murdered lad's spirit returning it is impossible to say. However certainly the mix of faery and ghostly lore we find in his story does reflect the evolving nature of folklore, and how over the centuries different mythological beings capture the popular imagination.