Tag Archives: Suffolk Folk Tales

folk tale

A Medieval Marvel: the Green Children

Leave a comment

‘But the night is Halloween, and the fairy court do ride…’

picture1Tonight is Halloween, and it’s supposed to be the night when the fair folk rise up out of the hollow hills and ride through the lands of the living. If see them dancing and step into the ring to dance alongside them, you could be caught forever… There are many dangers for the unwary mortal stepping into the Otherworld, but less is said about those poor creatures who by chance step out of that world into ours. What if you didn’t want to come to the mortal world? What if it was an accident? Just two children strayed away from their homes, lured into a tunnel by the sound of pretty bells, only to awake in the blazing dawn to a land of strangers, fear and death.

There have been many theories about the Green Children of Woolpit. Many of them have been prosaic, striving to make sense in today’s pragmatic, secular world of something inexplicable. In 1173 there was a battle just outside Bury St Edmunds during the Revolt between Henry II and his sons Henry, Richard and Geoffrey (complicated – don’t go there! Read Sharon Penman’s The Devil’s Brood if you want to find out more). Suffolk was heavily involved in this revolt after the Earl of Leicester landed at Walton Castle and persuaded Hugh Bigod, the Earl of Norfolk, to take up his cause. It causes two stories in Suffolk Folk Tales – A Strange and Terrible Wonder and Maude Carew – and may be the spark for the Green Children.

The 12th century saw a surge of immigration into East Anglia from Flanders across the sea – welcomed in as the Jewish communities were starting the long process of victimisation and eventual banishment in the late 13th century. There was a settlement of Flemish fullers at Fornham St Martin, close to the battle site at Fornham St Genevieve – did the children flee, and get lost? Did they become sick as they wandered, and suffering from dietary deficiencies, was their skin tinged green by chlorosis? Was the Flemish they spoke unrecognisable to the villagers of Woolpit? Was the girl’s talk of St Martin’s Land a reference to their old village? So far, so good. But surely Richard de Calne would have understood Flemish and realised what had happened? This theory assumes an extremely parochial, limited existence for our medieval forebears. I don’t buy that someone living in Bardwell wouldn’t know what was going on in Fornham St Martin. I mean, it’s only about 9 miles away – you could easily walk there and back in a day!

babesinwood00lond_004-21

So where does that leave us? Are they the Babes in the Wood from the Norfolk story? Poisoned by arsenic by their wicked uncle, abandoned in Thetford Forest (scary – got lost there once myself!), they wander into Woolpit. The older, stronger girl survives, but her younger brother is too weakened and dies. Maybe? This tale doesn’t appear until the printing of a broadside in 1595. The most commonly cited wood for the tale is Wayland Wood, just south of Watton, and about 30 miles from Woolpit. Not impossible, but … in the story the children die. The wicked uncle is punished, but there’s no Disney happy ending. They die. Both of them. Alone in the forest.

Putting the green children in context helps. It’s a wonder tale, one of many collated by medieval writers, and particularly in the 12th and 13th centuries. Anything goes! These mirabilia, or marvels, were, perhaps, some of the earliest folklore collecting, predating people like John Aubrey and William Camden by centuries. But their reasons for putting in these tales to their accounts were different. We can’t assume that they were simply included because credulous monks and scholars believed them – though that may have been the case in some instances! There was a conscious searching for the hidden things of the world, that one day might be revealed and understood. The recording of marvels like the Green Children thus becomes a kind of scientific experiment, recorded for posterity when we might understand it better. Or, often, there is a moral lesson within the stories – though it’s hard to pinpoint what that might be in this tale.

17pl7csd3fl76jpg

At this time, this kind of tales was avidly lapped up by the aristocracy. Courtly scholars such as Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury and Gerald of Wales record many mirabilia and fantastica to thrill and chill their courtly audiences. Henry II and Henry the Young King were apparently keen on these stories. The stories included range from international folk tales to locally collected ones. Did our monkish scholars include similar tales to curry royal or aristocratic favour? But these stories give another possibility in our search for the ‘real’ green children – were they aliens? Alexander the Great saw alien spaceships at the Siege of Tyre in 329 BC, they allegedly ‘observed three soaring discs, which were described as “shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims,” … These “shields” were said to have annihilated a stone wall with a lightening-like beam weapon.’[i] In The King’s Mirror, a Norwegian example of these collections of tales from about 1250, an incident is recorded of ships in the sky over County Clare in the 10th century[ii]. In this case, one of the ‘aliens’ comes to earth to fix a problem with his anchor, but, unable to breathe our air, he dies. Gervase of Tilbury also records this tale, but sites it in England, and develops it further with the adventures of a Bristolian in the sky – and that story features in Anthony’s Gloucestershire Folk Tales….

But I don’t think our Green Children were aliens. For me, they seem to have come out of the hollow hills where the fair folk live. Green is a fairy colour, although the ballad Tam Lin mentioned in the first line says that the fairies were ‘grey’ – perhaps referring to the idea that they were spirits of the dead instead of another race… Is Halloween, when the fairy court do ride the first zombie apocalypse? There is another instance, recorded by Gerald of Wales, where the interaction goes the other, more usual way – a boy is approached by two little men saying, “If you will come with us, we will lead you into a country full of delights and sports”[iii] and led into another world with a sunless sky. John Aubrey also records an instance a few centuries later, in which a man accesses the world below through a round barrow; this became the basis for ‘The Fairies of Hackpen Hill’ in my Wiltshire Folk Tales. Its common knowledge that those who go into fairyland come out changed, and that many pine away. Perhaps it’s true of those who come out of the Otherworld, too, like the green boy. The green girl was a different matter, even though her story hints that the Otherworld was possibly more fun than ours as she showed ‘herself to be extremely high-spirited and unrestrained’![iv]

Notes:

[i] Morphy, Rob ‘Anchors Away: Sky Ships and Storm Wizards’, 2011 http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/09/anchors-aweigh-sky-ships-and-storm-wizards/

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konungs_skuggsj%C3%A1

[iii] Cambrensis, Geraldus The Itinerary through Wales and the Description of Wales (JM Dent & Co, London, 1908), pg. 68

[iv] Translation of Ralph of Coggeshall’s story by Dr Monika Simon, 2012

Images:

  1. The Green Children © Kirsty Hartsiotis
  2. Image from http://hypnogoria.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/folklore-on-friday-babes-in-woods.html
  3. Image from http://io9.gizmodo.com/5917914/why-are-there-spaceships-in-medieval-art
Uncategorized

The True History of Friar Bungay

Leave a comment

bacon and bungay

Yes, actually the true story.  Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case, fiction is a lot stranger than the truth.  And yet, by revealing Thomas Bungay for what he was, we can strip away a little bit of the myth that the Middle Ages were completely unlearned, unlettered and superstitious.  In the stories, Friar Bungay is a magician, capable of conjuring up illusions of a damagingly physical nature, working alongside the equally magically-minded Friar Bacon to create a brazen head as part of their plan to protect England by building a wall of brass around the country (an early form of immigration control?) to protect it from its enemies, and fighting the German magician Vandermast.  Bungay’s magical adventures can be found in Suffolk Folk Tales, but like so many legends, his does have a basis in fact.

Blomefield in his History of Norfolk says of Bungay, ‘He was a great mathematician, and so knowing in the hidden secrets of nature and skilled in uncommon experiments, that he performed such wonders by his wit and art, as exceeded the understanding of the vulgar and therefore the doctor was traduced by some as a person dealing in the black art, holding correspondence with demons and in word a conjurer, and that one had to do with the Devil.’[1]  This was written in about 1745, and was the popular idea of both Bungay and Bacon from at least the 16th and 17th centuries when The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay were published.

Thomas Bungay was almost certainly from Bungay – he is sometimes referred to as Thomas de Bungeye, Thomas of Bungay, and he may have become a Franciscan friar in Norwich.  The Franciscan order had arrived in the city in 1226, and was established by the late 13th century on a site that straddled Prince of Wales Road – unsurprisingly close to Greyfriars Road.  Nothing remains of the site now, but it has been extensively excavated. After a few years there, probably as a boy, Bungay went up to Oxford to study at the Franciscan convent, Greyfriars Hall on the Iffley Road.  It wasn’t officially a college, but the Franciscan scholars in the city would have studied there.

It would have been an exciting place to the young Bungay.  His fellow Suffolk scholar, from Stradbroke, Robert Grosseteste, had been one of the first lectors at the hall (we would say lecturer now), teaching, as you might expect, theology.  But that can’t have been all he was teaching.  Grosseteste was a scientist as well as a theologian, writing on light, astronomy, on tides, on the rainbow and on maths in natural science.  He was one of the first scholars in England to start using controlled experiments as a way of demonstrating scientific theories, and although Bungay almost certainly wasn’t there in his day, the scientific tradition continued alongside the theology and philosophy.  We can imagine the scholars making their experiments on the natural world, debating and writing in this heady atmosphere of learning.  I must confess that my idea of what these medieval colleges were like is probably a bit skewed by Susanna Gregory’s Matthew Bartholomew series, set in 14th century Cambridge during and mostly after the Black Death.  I do hope that there was a bit more studying and a little less murder in the real 13th century Oxford!

Bungay may have met his latter-day magician friend Roger Bacon at Oxford, but it is possible they never met at all.  Bacon probably did study with Grosseteste, but he was almost certainly gone from Oxford by the time Bungay arrived, probably around 1250.  By the time Bacon returned to Oxford in around 1278, Bungay had moved on, and was at the Other Place: Cambridge.   It’s possible they met in Paris as Blomefield says in his History of Norfolk that Bungay went from Oxford to Paris after becoming a doctor of divinity and became something of a scholarly celebrity there … if we trust Blomefield, of course. As both men were scholars and natural scientists, it does seem likely that in the small world of Franciscan scholarship in the middle ages, that they did know each other, even if they weren’t at Oxford at the same time.

Bacon is a well-known medieval scholar – though he’s often confused with Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan philosopher, statesman and scientist who also was a pioneer of empirical research in natural science.  Not to mention the 20th century painter of the same name – F Bacon’s all… Our Friar Roger Bacon was an expert on optics, argued for the reform of the Julian calendar (he was proved right, but the Gregorian calendar only came in three centuries later in 1582…), and was allegedly the first person to describe the ingredients and method for creating gunpowder in Europe.  His friend and fellow Franciscan, William Rubruck, had actually been to visit the Mongols at Karakorum and probably obtained some Chinese firecrackers while there.  The picture that starts to build is of the Franciscans in the 13th century having enquiring minds and the freedom to study, travel and experiment.

Bungay didn’t travel that far.  He went on to be a lector himself, at Oxford, and although most of his writing are lost, we know of one paper, De celo et mundo, a commentary on Aristotle’s main astronomical treatise, On the Heavens, which survives in Caius College, Cambridge.  He was also a theologian, of course.  He became the Provincial Master of the Franciscan Order in England, and in the 1280s was sent to Cambridge to be the Franciscan lector there, as part of a scheme by the Cambridge Franciscans to boost their school with able scholars from elsewhere[2].  It is said that he left Cambridge to live in the Franciscan house in Northampton, and was buried there when he died probably in the very late 13th century. It’s possible that he saw the ordination of another famous scholar – one with no whiff of sorcery – ordained at the Church of St Andrew in Northampton in 1291, John Duns Scotus.

How did Bacon and Bungay become sorcerers in the popular imagination?  Although it seems from the work and travels of Franciscans and other friars and priests that there was a certain amount of freedom of movement and thought, this is simplistic.  The Franciscan Order was busy tearing itself apart over various issues during Bacon and Bungay’s lifetime, and their scientific research often skirted close to the forbidden topic of alchemy – and even if they didn’t practice themselves, we know that Bacon at least wrote about it.  Easy to be tarred with the same brush – from alchemy, which looked, potentially to create gold and prolong life, it was a quick step to the dark arts and magic.  And stories of magic are easier to understand and more fun, more salacious than scientific philosophy. Mathematics and other ‘secret’ languages of science and philosophy (we might describe it as ‘jargon’ today) could easily be considered magic – especially when most people were illiterate.  Bacon may have even been imprisoned for his ‘novel’ ideas … but it looks like Bungay preferred a quieter life.

Next time – a tale of Bungay and Vandermast from the The Famous Historie…

Illustration from the cover of Robert Greene’s play, 1630.

[1] Mann, E Old Bungay (London: Heath Cranton), p. 229.

[2] Swanson, J ‘Thomas Bungay’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com, accessed 23 November 2014

Uncategorized

Black Shuckery … on the One Show

Leave a comment

I know, you wait ages for a Suffolk folk tale on national tv and then two come along at once!  The One Show is apparently having a Suffolk fest at the moment, and this time it is Suffolk’s most famous celebrity beastie who’s in the spotlight: Black Shuck.  A little while ago they found the bones of a giant (devil?) dog buried at Leiston Abbey, and this investigates the dig and their discoveries, as well as relating a little bit of the Shuck legend.  Although: Blythburgh isn’t mentioned by name – why? and Bungay isn’t mentioned at all – no fair!  The article plays at 25.51:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04ls2j2/the-one-show-28102014

Interesting they say it’s a Great Dane.  There was a Great Dane in the village where I grew up, Lower Layham, with whom I think my lifelong unease with dogs (was terror when I was younger) began.  It was huge, and, though I might be wrong, I think this was the dog that scratched (lightly) my face when I was a toddler.  I also met what seemed to ME Black Shuck or his Somersetshire equivalent in Rocks East Woodland, near Bath … also, I later found out, a Great Dane.  It was the size of a PONY and it followed me…

The actual Suffolk folk tale plot thickens as there have been a couple of sightings of Shuck in Leiston, though not at the Abbey, Mike Burgess in his excellent Hidden East Anglia website records James Wentworth Day in the 1950s describes how ‘a slinking, sable shadow slipped among the gravestones like a wraith, leaped the low churchyard wall and slid down the dark lane towards the sand hills like an evil whisper’ that Lady Walsingham and Lady Rendlesham saw when they went looking for the Galley Trot…

storytelling, Uncategorized

Sparrows and the quest for meaning in life

Leave a comment

Sutton Hoo

Irresistibly, I am drawn back to our Wuffings and the beginnings of East Anglian Christianity. It may seem a dry subject to you, but for me it really helps to see how the region developed and took shape over those early years, and, like it or not, Christianity shapes the history of our region, our island, the whole of Europe.  However, we know from many of the tales of mermaids and dragons, of witches and cunning men, of Syleham Lamps and fairy changelings, that the old ways – and human imagination – still kept their hold of the people of East Anglia, right up to today.

So, if you’ve read the previous blogs, A Puff on Wuffings and Woden or Christ? you’ll know that Rædwald made a hesitant half-start when it came to bringing of Christianity to East Anglian shores.  He goes off into eternity honouring an entirely different set of gods, and Mound 1 – if it were to be his – is not the latest non-Christian burial there.  Paganism held sway among some for a time, it seems.  But the march of the White Christ pressed on in East Anglia, and circumstance would see it well entrenched by the time the dreadful Penda years came.  Why such a quick turnaround?  Bede once more has an answer, in the famous sparrow story told while Edwin’s court debates the issue of Christianity vs. their own existing religion up north in Northumbria.

Imagine the warriors of the court sitting on long benches around the central fire with the noble women passing amongst them pouring drinks while the debate rages on the long winter’s night. Outside, the wind howls, and sends the smoke from the fire buffeting through the room.  An old warrior sits back and stares up into the dim, smoky recesses of the rafters.  Can he make out a flitting shape there?  Maybe a bird has strayed in out of the cold.  Whatever he sees, it prompts him to make this famous speech:

Your majesty, when we compare the present life on man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall … The sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing.  Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.[1]

The hope of a life after death for all, not only for those who were already rich and well-kept in this life was naturally desirable. With so much of the world in explicable except by supernatural means, religion and superstition had a power that many of us now cannot understand – at least while this little bubble of comfortable living we have constructed continues.  Edwin’s chief priest, Coifi, sees the writing on the wall, and immediately declares that his religion is worthless, has got him no gains, when others, less devout than he, have gained more, then jumps on a stallion and rides off to destroy the idols in the grove nearby at modern day Goodmanham in the East Riding.

Bede makes it sound very easy – but he is a Christian monk, with a Christian axe to grind. Between the lines of this time you can see that it wasn’t, really.  When Rædwald dies his remaining son, Eorpwald, becomes king.  Edwin of Northumbria then becomes the Bretwalda, and power passes into the north – effectively, Eorpwald owes allegiance to Edwin, as Edwin had done to Eorpwald’s father.  Edwin leans on Eorpwold, and the new king is christened.  Events move fast.  Eorpwald is killed by another member of the royal family, Ricberht, a pagan, and the kingdom reverts to paganism.  Who knows what was happening to the populace, what faith they followed.  In these times, it was all about kings.

For three years East Anglia stayed pagan, but then a new king arrived: Sigeberht. This young man had been in exile in France, which was already Christian, and Sigeberht had embraced the new faith wholeheartedly.  There may have been a balance – at first Sigeberht ruled with another king, Ecgric, another Wuffing, who was probably a pagan – as, let’s face it, most people would have been in the Anglo Saxon areas of Britain before 650.  But Sigeberht had a mission, and it didn’t take him long to put it into place.

First, he invited a French monk to join him to convert the masses. This was St Felix, for whom we get Felixstowe (probably).  Felix was made a bishop and set up a cathedral in Suffolk , probably at Dunwich, possibly at Walton near Felixstowe.  Unlike many of these early saints, he wasn’t a man for miracles.  He seems to have got on with the job in hand with minimal fuss, only ensuring that the villages of the Saints (the Elmhams, Ilketshalls etc.) were difficult to access to keep them pure and holy, and then after death playing the usual game of dictating where his body was going to end up – he went to Soham, a church founded by the saint, and then to the inveterate relic-hunters at Ramsey, beating the monks at Ely by casting a convenient darkness that bamboozled the Ely monks and allowed the Ramsey ones to escape with their prize.

No, for miracles we need to look elsewhere – and the next blog will be about East Anglia’s first miracle worker – St Fursey.

Photograph © Kirsty Hartsiotis, 2013

[1] Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Shirley-Price (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 129-30.

storytelling, Uncategorized

A surprising lack of mermaids

Leave a comment

014

The Orwell Mermaid is a proper mermaid story, very similar to Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, but with an even more tragic ending than the Anderson story.  It’s a strange thing, though.  This mermaid story is one of very few in Suffolk.  There’s the Wildman of Orford, of course, but others are few and far between.  There’s a tale that a mermaid tried to gain entry to All Saints church in Sheringham, in Norfolk, but was told to go because she wasn’t a Christian – she nipped in, though, and is immortalised on a bench end.

Then there’s the Kessingland Nessie – or Kessie? – first spotted in 1750, it was seen by H Rider Haggard’s daughter in 1912, further up the coast in Norfolk by the crew of the Kellett in 1923, and again at Kessingland by beach walkers in 1978, but not seen as far as I know since – do you know? Captain Haselfoot of the Kellett writes in the log of the ship this account: ‘The time was about 9am. It was a summer day and the weather was calm and clear. I am not sure whether the sun was actually shining. I then observed rising out of the water about 200 yards from the ship, a long, serpentine neck, projecting from six or seven feet above the water. I observed this neck rising out of the water twice, and it remained up, in each case, for four or five seconds. Viewing with the naked eye only, I could not make out precisely what the head was like.’ It’s hard to doubt the captain – and it was also seen by another officer.  Who knows what lurks beneath?  One feels that Pleasurewood Hills has missed a trick in not having ride dedicated to our local Kessie…

In Suffolk the place to find mermaids, though, is not in la mer, but in freshwater – especially in pools. These mermaids are not the romantic (but still potentially deadly) figures we know from fairy stories, but rather a slightly different kind of monster.  In the northern Midlands and she’s called Jenny Greenteeth, in Yorkshire and Lancashire she’s a grindylow, and Peg Powler on the River Tees.  She’s like the Japanese kappa, and the Slavic vodyanoi or vodnik, the Scottish kelpie and many many more. She’s there as a bogeyman with one role – a role adults have assigned her.  She’s there to frighten children off from playing too near water, and expose themselves to the very real and present danger of drowning.

They are most prevalent in the Ipswich area and around – Yoxford and Rendlesham have sightings, and they’ve also been seen on the River Gipping between Needham Market and Ipswich. No surprise then that our sea mermaid came up the Orwell.  This is from an old man writing into the Ipswich Journal in 1877, ‘When I was quite a child, in 1814, we used to play at Rendlesham where there was a pond at one end with trees round it, the grass in early spring full of flowers … If we went too near our nursemaid would call out to us not to go so near ‘lest the mermaid should come and crome us in.’ A crome is a pond raking tool with sharp tines that curl over a bit like a person’s hand. There are still a few pools out of Rendlesham heading towards Campsea Ash, so beware if you are taking your children there, our mermaids are beautiful with long green hair and will entice your children if they can…

Image © Kirsty Hartsiotis, 2013

storytelling, Uncategorized

In the bleak midwinter – a test of memory at Pin Mill

Leave a comment

DSC00247 - cropTalking with my Mum yesterday about the weather (among other things!) made me think about the long-distance research I had to do for Suffolk Folk Tales. It hammered down with rain on Saturday morning, but was glorious with sunshine in the afternoon … here in Gloucestershire.  Just the opposite in Suffolk.  Weather’s always tricky, and it’s impossible to second guess it, especially four counties away!  And of course, if you work as well as write, you can only go on outings at set times – especially with train prices being what they are.  On the weekend I went over to research the Orwell Mermaid it snowed.  Oh boy, did it snow.  And then the snow bedded down.  But I had things to do, research deadlines to meet.  So off we went – and though I might have plenty to say about 4x4s in general, but stepdad really does need one to access his remote clients, and we wouldn’t have done this trip without it.

Because the story was set on the River Orwell, in that evocative location: Pin Mill. Down one of the steepest slopes in Suffolk!  Down we slithered – there is no way we could have got any further than the car park at the top of the village, I am sure.  Then we teetered down on foot – and straight into the famous Butt and Oyster pub for a warming morning coffee.  Then Mum and I went out to walk into the woods, to get an idea of the landscape around the village, away from what would have been a bustling port and boatyard.

DSC00261

The walk was silent except for the crunch of our boots in the crisp frosted snow. We walked past the houseboats along the shoreline, seemingly deserted in this cold weather, and then up the hill – we could barely work out where the path was going in some cases, there was so much snow.  Now, this is where memory starts to let you down.  In my memory, there was a dog, who barked, and I am sure that it was that melded for me the last scene of the story, where the fishermen’s dogs discover the mermaid lying on the frozen earth.  But am I imagining that now?  Whether or not there was a dog, the ethereal snowy landscape set the scene for me, and I knew how that last section had to be – the chill landscape reflecting the bleakness of our heroine’s emotions.  Would I have felt it so strongly if we’d visited in summer, with the birds singing in the trees, and lots of other folk tramping the paths, and coming in and out of the houseboats?  Well, the story only has one possible ending, but I know it would have felt very different, and thus I would have written in differently.

All images copyright Kirsty Hartsiotis, 2012

storytelling, Uncategorized

A Puff on Wuffings

Leave a comment

004

A few months ago it was announced that Rædwald’s home had been found – exactly where it should be, at Rendlesham.   It is always remarkable when archaeology follows ancient sources, especially when those ancient sources postdate the actual events by a good century.  Perhaps the dig at Rendlesham hasn’t revealed a new Mycenae or Troy, but just like the discovery of those once thought to be legendary places, it adds credence to the stories of Rædwald and Edwin.  Of course, we know these people existed as there was no reason for Bede to make people up in his history, just as we have no reason to invent Charles Darwin or Queen Victoria – and Edwin’s palace at Yeavering was found 65 years ago by aerial photography.  But did Rædwald actually have anything to do with the village found at Rendlesham?  Was this where the events recounted in Bede where Edwin takes refuge with the East Anglian king and is oh-so-nearly betrayed?  Is this the place where Rædwald had his shrine to the Christian God and to ‘devils’ – probably Woden, from whom his family, the Wuffingas, claimed descent?

Bede doesn’t say so – what a spoilsport!  Bede talks of Rædwald’s royal vill, but not of Rendlesham.  That comes later, when the mission of Cedd is taking place that results in the conversion of the East Saxon (Essex) king Swidhelm in the mid 7th century, about 40 years after Rædwald died.  But the newly discovered settlement does date back to the early 7th century, when Raedwald was king.  It is also close to St Gregory’s church, long thought to be the site of Rædwald’s famous altars, and to the all important river Deben that would have linked the settlement rapidly with the outside world – and also links the settlement to the burial grounds at Sutton Hoo.  I’m a storyteller – so I would like to believe that this was Rædwald’s home.

It’s probably fair to say that these days Rædwald tends to get more press than most of the early Anglo Saxon kings, even outside of East Anglia.  He is helped by ‘his’ costly burial and also by the high profile visitor attraction that is Sutton Hoo these days.  But in East Anglia in the Wuffings have been well and truly embraced.  From the Eastern Angles production in 1997 to the Wuffings Studio project in Bury, to Wuffings Wood near Flixton to even a twenty20 side the name is used with pride.

Who were the Wuffings?  No – they aren’t people volunteering on organic farms … that’s woofing.  Don’t even think about dogging…  Dr Sam Newton’s site http://www.wuffings.co.uk/ gives full details of the family and reveals the exciting link with the poem Beowulf.  We know a fair bit of what the East Anglians thought about their royal heritage through royal kinglists, that trace the kings back to the first person in the line.  The first East Anglian king was Wehha, followed by the eponymous Wuffa, but before that, back in the old country, we discover a Hrothmund – the same name as the younger of Hrothgar’s sons in Beowulf.  In the poem, the two sons are still boys, even though Hrothgar is an old man.  Could the East Anglian royal family be related to the Danish king?  Was Rædwald a descendent of Hrothgar – and with Rædwald all the East Anglian kings up to Edmund?

After Beowulf had gone home to his own land, the land of the Geats, we learn that there is civil war in Hrothgar’s kingdom between the king and his son-in-law Ingeld.   The old king and his nephew Hrothulf (Rolf!) defeat Ingeld, but shortly after Hrothgar dies.  As Hrothulf is an adult, he takes the throne – but what happens to Hrothgar’s young sons?  Hrethric is killed – but Wealtheow, Hrothgar’s widow, and her younger son escape.  Sam Newton in his book The Origins of Beowulf: And the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia, 2004, explores this potential relationship in great detail, and suggests that not only did the East Anglian kings believe they were descended from this Danish royal line, but also that Beowulf may have been composed in East Anglia.

It’s a glamorous notion – the young exiled prince fleeing with his mother and a group of trusted men and possibly women and children, and maybe crossing the North Sea to the place where everyone was going – Britain.  There may have been a struggle to establish rule, or maybe there was a settlement on the other side of the sea as Hrothmund’s ‘grandson’ Wehha, the ‘father’ of Wuffa, is considered to be first king of East Anglia[1].

Were these real people?  We can never know, but the fact that Hrothulf and co. are mentioned not only in Beowulf but in many Scandinavian sagas suggests that they might well be based on real people.  Going back a bit further in the king list we get to someone who definitely was a real person – but definitely wasn’t related in any way to Rædwald!  The name Caser is used – we know him better as Julius Caesar.  Now, Caesar didn’t have any children with Danish women that we know of, but that wouldn’t be important to the compilers of the kinglists.  Rather, making a link to the Roman Empire implies that the Wuffings have a right to rule, and have imperial ambitions – as shown by Rædwald becoming the Bretwalda, or overlord, of the Anglo Saxons.  It shows too the way that these Christianised Anglo Saxons looked outside their own indigenous culture to the wider world.

But the East Anglian kinglist ends with the usual suspect – Woden, the head god of the Saxon pantheon.  We know him better as the Scandinavian version, Odin, but they are much the same.  Most of the kinglists we have (Essex is the most striking example) end with or include Woden.  Wessex goes further – all the way back to Adam.  Rather needlessly, one suspects, as we are all descended from him in the Christian view of the world, but definitely thorough!

This then is Rædwald’s background – descended from kings, emperors (well, almost) and gods, he is declared as fit to rule by his ancestry, and his continued veneration of Woden in his temple is a form of ancestor worship that would be difficult to give up in a still pagan society that recognises his kingship through his descent from the god.   If St Gregory’s is indeed the site the of Rædwald’s temple, then it makes a lot of sense to place it there both from the usual Christian point of view of supplanting the heathen idol with the ‘true’ god but also from the point of view of authority and lineage – by worshiping Christ in the same place that the ancestor Woden was venerated the East Anglian kings might be saying that there is a link between Christ and Woden, and thus a link between them and Christ, reinforcing their authority to rule.  One hopes that there are more discoveries to made so that slowly we can join up our own fantasies about the kingship of Rædwald’s time with the reality of what lies beneath the ground at our feet.

Image © Kirsty Hartsiotis, 2013

[1] I’m using the inverted commas as we don’t truly know what relationship these men were to each other – early medieval kingship isn’t nearly as easy to follow as the later rule of primogeniture, and may rest rather on suitability – such as being an adult! – and suitability than on direct descent from the previous king.

storytelling, Uncategorized

A Mess of Saints – the battle to be England’s patron saint.

Leave a comment

So who should be patron saint of England? St George? St George is fine. And very popular: many countries around the world have adopted him as their patron saint, just as England did. But I wanted to use St George’s Day as the springboard to bring back England’s neglected first patron saint: Edmund. Edmund was made patron saint of a newly united England, and remained so, alongside the later Edward the Confessor, until Edward III officially made St George our saint in the mid 14th century. For over ten years there has been a drive to reinstate St Edmund, and it’s a fun idea. It’s all too easy, though, to see the drive to reinstate the (possibly) local English-born Edmund over the Palestinian/Turkish/Greek George as an exercise in jingoism – out with the foreigner, bring back the native born son! So we need to tread carefully. St George has wide appeal and everyone knows about the dragon killing and the princess rescuing (though that’s a bit non-PC in my book!) though fewer I suspect know about the story of his martyrdom at the unwilling hands of Diocletian, who knew him, respected him and had been a friend of his father.

Of course, George does have a claim to Englishness. There are those who say that he was born in Coventry – and died there too – but this derives the legend of the seven champions, recorded in England as The Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom by Richard Johnson in 1596. This wacky series of tales about some of the most popular saints in Britain at the time (including all our patron saints: Patrick, Andrew, David and George, as well as those of Spain, France and Portugal, James, Denis and Anthony of Padua) are romances in which the hero-saints win fair maidens, fight enchantments and the enemies of Christendom. They were very popular and bear very little reference at all to the lives of the saints themselves: St Andrew, for example, delivered six women who had lived for seven years as swans and all of the saints were put into an enchanted sleep in the Black Castle. These tales inhabit the worlds created by Sir Thomas Malory and the other, earlier Romance writers – it’s easy to see why they were so popular. Be warmed, though! They are super racist and sexist… A product of their time.

What about Edward the Confessor? His reign was free from war, so he was called the ‘Peacemaker’. He was canonised in 1161, and was regarded as a patron saint to England until, again, St George was brought to the fore. Whether Edward was truly worthy of his title is a matter for debate, especially as after he died in 1066 a furious battle for England began between the claimants to the throne resulting in the Norman Conquest, the results of which, I might argue we still feel today… His canonisation may owe more to the ambitions of the clergy of Westminster Abbey than to any actual holiness! However, a legend says that when he was in the last year of his life he gave a ring to a beggar who had pleaded to him in the name of St John the Evangelist, and subsequently St John assisted two English knights lost in the Holy Land because of what Edward had done and instructed them to go back and tell Edward that in six months he would be waiting to escort Edward through the pearly gates. He was also supposed to heal the sick within his own lifetime, starting the tradition in England of kings having the healing touch. For information, his saint’s day is 13 October – easy to remember, as it’s the day before the Battle of Hastings…

Unbeknownst to me, apparently we had a third patron saint as well: St Gregory the Great. Gregory is honoured because he sent the first mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons: he’s the one who made the witty comment about some Anglo-Saxon slaves he saw in a market in Rome. Finding their appearance unusual: ‘fair complexions, fine-cut features, and beautiful hair,’ he enquired after them. It was explained that they were pagans from the island of Britain. Gregory was disappointed that ‘such bright-faced folk are still in the grasp of the author of darkness’ and asked the name of their race. The slaver replied: ‘They are called Angles.’ Gregory came back with the retort ‘Non Angli sed angeli,’ – not Angles but angels. He then continued punning on discovering that they were from the province of Diera (which then stretched from the Humber to the Tees), saying that ‘they shall indeed be rescued de ira (from wrath) and called to mercy of Christ.’ On hearing that their king was Aelle, he then punned on that, saying that it was right that their land echoed with the word to praise God, Alleluia…(1) What a wit! He acted immediately to beg the then pope to send a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons, but only achieved this when he himself became pope. He has the saint’s day 3 September.

And then St Edmund the Martyr, our East Anglian saint. During his lifetime – or just after – there is one mention of him by name from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as it describes ‘a great heathen force’ arriving in 866 when Edmund is referred to as making a peace with them in East Anglia, though not by name, through to 870: ‘The force went over Mercia to East Anglia, and took winter quarters at Thetford. In that year, St Edmund the king fought against them and the Danes took the victory, killed the king, and overcame all the land.’(2) From this the familiar legend grew of the death of Ragnar, the revenge of Ivar, Edmund’s devoted Christianity, the wolf’s head and so forth. You can find the whole tale, taken from many sources around Suffolk, in my Suffolk Folk Tales. Within 20 years of Edmund’s death a memorial coinage was being issued, already marking him as a saint, and in Asser’s Life of King Alfred, written in 893, more biographical detail is given of his coronation and death. He is said to have been an inspiration to Alfred as he too fought against the Danes a few years later in the late 870s. His saint’s day is 20 November.

I’ll be blogging more on St Edmund, and the Vikings in his story: Ragnar Hairy Breeches and Ivar the Boneless, as well as the various revenges of the saint on various unholy royals and council planners (and his nicer catalogue of saving children!) but today I wanted to put to you: who should be England’s saint? Well, why should we have to choose? Why not have the lot? Many countries have multiple saints – according to Wikipedia, France has seven, Germany has nine, and India and Japan have four and two respectively! So – shall we go back to having lots? Four saints? And maybe – can we have four bank holidays too?

References:

1. Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Penguin Books, London, 1990), pp. 103-4
2. Savage, Anne (trans.) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (CLB Publishing Ltd., Godalming, 1995), p. 92

 

 

Uncategorized

Vikings and holy wells – an exercise in how difficult it is to find the ‘truth’

Leave a comment

027

It was a freezing cold day when we rocked up at Holywells Park in Ipswich to try to find the ‘hermit’s mossy cell’ as described by Elizabeth Cobbold in her poem ‘Holy Wells’ that inspired my Legend of the Holy Wells. Snow lay everywhere around, and children were racing while chilly parents followed them. It wasn’t easy to see what we were looking at, but it certainly showed what a vibrant place the former grounds of Elizabeth’s house has become.

DSC00298 (800x600) DSC00288 (800x600)

Why is it called Holywells? Well, shh, let me tell you a secret … it was called Hollow Wells (1) before , and our romantic 19th century citizens changed Hollow to Holy – maybe Elizabeth herself coining the term. The place does have a religious history, however, as it was owned by the Bishops of Norwich. There may possibly have been a residence for the bishops, and potentially a small chapel – but the idea of a Bishop’s Palace may well also have been concocted by Elizabeth! She seems to have been a woman after my own heart – keen to enchant, or re-enchant the landscape around her.

Is there any possibility that Elizabeth’s story has a grounding in history? The importance of the water on the site doesn’t seem to have been celebrated until the Cobbold’s came along to use it in their beer making in the 17th century. But there have certainly long been rumours of something holy happening at Holywells. Was it a guardian of the wells? A guardianship handed down from father to son over the generations? Had there, in fact, been a guardian there since the Iron Age and the time of the druids? A friend of Boudicca, maybe? We’ll never know – unless archaeology does turn something up in the future.

But, what about those Vikings? They were there, right? Oh yes. On the 5 May in 1010 there was a battle at Nacton, and indeed there is a snippet of folklore about the area. The Seven Hills mounds at Nacton – there are actually eight, and there were thirteen or fourteen once – by the A1156 are supposed to be the graves of the Saxons who fought under Ulfcytel Snillinge, or the Bold, Ealdorman of East Anglia, and who were killed by the invading Vikings under Thorkell the Tall (2).

In the saga of St Olaf, the Heimkringla, East Anglia is Ulfketel’s Land. He seems to have ruled from 1002 until his death in 1016. He may have been married to a daughter of King Ethelred. The Saxon forces in the battle at Nacton did not cover themselves with glory however. Thorketel Mare’s Head ran away, taking his force with him, and only the men of Cambridgeshire held firm. The Vikings then sack Ipswich, and raid the region.

But there are Vikings on both sides. This is a war for the rule of the country, not random raids to take plunder. Ulfketel and Thorketel are Scandinavian sounding names, and fighting on Ethelred’s side was also St Olaf, Olaf Haraldsson, the king who brought Christianity to Norway. And it’s complicated. The ‘enemy’ is Sweyn Forkbeard, and one of the reasons he felt able to invade was that his sister Gunhilde was said to have been killed as part of the St Brice’s Day Massacre on 13 November 1002, when Ethelred ordered all Danes (Vikings!) in England killed as he was afraid they might come after his throne – he was afraid that the Danes were ‘sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat’. Of course, his plan backfired and led to his overthrow, not once, but twice – badly counselled indeed! And an early indicator of the effects of an intolerant political agenda towards migrants. The Danes in Oxford, for example, sought refuge in a church, and were burnt out and killed. Who is the bad guy here? Can we tell? Can we judge – I doubt they could judge at the time, and I doubt we can judge now even with hindsight.

The battles continued. The same year at Rymer in Suffolk (seven miles south of Thetford, near RAF Honington and indeed another Seven Hills with mounds…) there was another battle in which St Olaf fought alongside Ulfketel:

To Ulfkel’s land came Olaf bold,
A seventh sword-thing he would hold.
The race of Ella filled the plain —
Few of them slept at home again!
Hringmara heath
Was a bed of death:
Harfager’s heir
Dealt slaughter there.

From Hringmara field
The chime of war,
Sword striking shield,
Rings from afar.
The living fly;
The dead piled high
The moor enrich;
Red runs the ditch.(3)

Ethelred won this one, and Ulfketel attempted to make a truce with Sweyn, but he broke it and tried to sack Thetford. This jockeying went on until St Edmund (allegedly) killed Sweyn in 1014, revenging himself on the Danes who had taken his life, and perhaps incensed that Sweyn had chosen the same day to get crowned as himself – Christmas day. But that’s another story for another blog. His son Cnut took the throne in 1016, after the battle that killed Ulfketel. It is said that he was killed by his nemesis at Nacton, the Jomsviking Thorkell.

A complex tale indeed, and who’s to say that two wounded Vikings didn’t make their way to Ipswich and that one found his long lost Saxon father and stayed as a hermit guarding the holy well…

There is a certain irony to all this, though. Because there is a Viking age holy well in Ipswich. A boundary charter of 970 records a haligwille near the Stoke area on the other side of the Orwell, probably where Fir Tree Farm was, and where the Chantry Estate now is. The well was already well enough established to be used as boundary marker:

The aforesaid land is bounded this way and that by these limits : ‘These are the boundaries (landgemaera) of the 10 hides at Stoke. The first of these is a hythe and along the midstream at Ashman’s yre and so forth into the middle of the stream it comes to brunna and so forth to Theofford and from there to Haligwille to Healdenesho and so to Pottaford to Hagenefordabrycge from Hagenefordabricgeto Horsewade to [into] a merscmylne from merscmylne to the bridge In the year of the Lord’s incarnation the nine hundred and seventieth was this charter written.’(4)

It may have been in use for a long time before, as it is close to the place where a cache of Iron-age gold torcs was found in 1968 – a ritual offering? The mystery deepens…

Notes:
1. http://www.gatehouse-gazetteer.info/English%20sites/4278.html
2. Actually Bronze Age bowl barrows…
3. http://omacl.org/Heimskringla/ The text of this edition is based on that published as “Heimskringla: A History of the Norse Kings” (Norroena Society, London, 1907, and edited, proofed, and prepared by Douglas B. Killings, April 1996
4. Fairclough, John ‘The Bounds of Stoke and the Hamlets of Ipswich’ in Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology & History Volume XL, part 3 (2003), pp. 262-277

Uncategorized

Vikings in Suffolk – part 1: who do they think they are?

Leave a comment

DSC05201

I know, it’s been ages since my last post – a legacy of mad hecticness in my other life as a museum curator that has lasted from June last year until now! But, celebrating the 1st anniversary of the publication of the book (well, nearly), off we go again! And back, eventually, to Hadleigh, from where the first photo comes, and where I went to school as a child, living as I did a few miles away in Lower Layham.

I visited the new Vikings exhibition at the British Museum this week, and although the exhibition itself wasn’t all that exciting, it did set me thinking about how we think about Anglo Saxons and Vikings. A slightly depressing 20 years ago this autumn I started an MA in Medieval Studies: the Early Medieval World 400-1100 at York, so you can see that I am a bit keen on this period, and have been for a very long time… Feeling old! But it was a treat to go back to those roots when looking at the Viking material in the exhibition, so I’ll be posting a few blogs about this topic over the next week or so.

There are two stories in Suffolk Folk Tales that directly involve Vikings: King Edmund and The Legend of the Holy Well. In both stories I hope I have painted an ambiguous picture of the Northmen. Certainly characters like Ivar the Boneless and his brothers Hubba and Halfdan are vicious and bent on revenge, but they have come to avenge the great wrong they believe Edmund has done to their father Ragnar Lothbrok. But in fact, in the story, Edmund welcomed and befriended the lost Viking, and their shared culture allows Ragnar to slip into life at Edmund’s East Anglian court with ease. In the Holy Well story things are more complex. The early 19th century poem on which this story is based is itself based on a real battle at Nacton, near Ipswich, in the year 1010 between Ulfketel the Earl of East Anglia, and Thorkill the Tall, a Swedish Jomsviking. This was at the time at Sweyn Forkbeard was making a play for the English throne – on which more in the next blog! – but the names of the protagonists give it away. Thorkill was from Scandinavia, but Ulfketel is a Scandinavian name. Was he a Viking too? And, by the 11th century, after a century of intermarrying among the nobility – and likely below as well! – could you tell who was who, even if you wanted to?

Viking settlement in East Anglia begins after Edmund’s death in 869, in theory. But in fact it was another Englishman – the West Saxon King Alfred – who starts it in earnest. After subjugating Northumbria (867), East Anglia (869) and Mercia (877-9) Wessex was the next prize on the Great Heathen Army’s list, but, so the story goes, Alfred the Great rose up and defeated the Dane, Guthram at the Battle of Edington in 878 and Guthram, defeated, became a Christian. Triumph to the Saxons! And if you’d like to read that story, then check out my other Folk Tales collection, Wiltshire Folk Tales. Triumph to the English? Well, yes and no, as my (Scottish) Grandad would say.

What happened to Guthram after that? It’s a Suffolk story, after all. Guthram, by becoming a Christian with the nice new English name Athelstan, was now Alfred’s ally. They divided up their joint spoils between them, Guthram taking East Anglia, Essex and Eastern Mercia. Guthram seems to have taken his oaths seriously (this time!) and lived and ruled in the region, dying in 890 and being buried in what was presumably a royal vill, Hadleigh. Interesting aside – the Hadleigh Historical Society say in their timeline that Guthram killed Edmund. If true, it would an ironic full circle, given how much Alfred admired Edmund…

In the Vikings exhibition there is one really shocking thing (well, apart from some of the way the exhibition is designed, but that’s another story!). By the longship there is an assemblage of skeletons, heads separated from bodies, clearly hacked about – one hand has been cut through as the man was resisting even as his head was cut off. Here we are in a Viking exhibition. Clearly this is an atrocity by Vikings against the innocent English, isn’t it? Well, no. This was war. These men’s DNA has been traced back to Scandinavia. They are Vikings. Raiders? Warriors attacking from the Danelaw during wars between Alfred’s son Edmund the Elder and the Vikings over Mercian land? We can’t know. But it illustrates that there wasn’t a hair between the English and the Vikings – both were warrior cultures, keen to defend their own self-interest.

I’ll be blogging next time about the remarkable woman who wrote the poem that inspired the Legend of the Holy Well, and also Ulfketel and Thorkill, and about Sweyn Forkbeard and Edmund’s revenge, hopefully providing a small window into a time that must have been unsettling and difficult for the ordinary folk who lived in East Anglia – whether English or Viking.

Images: © Kirsty Hartsiotis

1. St Edmund’s head held by the wolf – a bench-end in St Mary’s

2. St Mary’s Church, Hadleigh: Guthram was buried in an earlier church probably on this site

DSC05211