And now to my last reference : I think I have taxed
your patience long enough. I should have liked to have
said a few words about our Clog Almanacks, but time
forbids. I wish to say a word on the Staffordshire knot.

The badge of the earlier Earls of Staiford was the
White Swan, derived from the Bohuns, and this
continued to be their favourite cognizance.

Edward, Duke of Buckingham, was the patron of
Wynkyn de Worde, and his partner in the printing
and publishing of the romance of Chevalier Assique, or
Knight of the Swan, because Edward was attached to
this cognizance rather than to that of the knot. Indeed,
he went so far as to call himself Bohun, or " poor Edward
Bohun" (Shakspeare).

Among the titles given to the Earls of Stafford in
Doyle's Official Baronage, that of Lord Marcher of
Wales, is given to Hugh, Thomas, William and Edmund,
but not to Humphrey ; also later on to Henry II, as
Humphrey was really Lord of Brecknock and Newport,
which were in the Marches of Wales. This is curious.
But while the Earls who bore the title before him did
not give the knot as their badge, he did so.

Among the armorials of Welsh families once belonging
to a herald painter of Shrewsbury named Bo wen, now in
the Wm. Salt Library, there occurs one attributed to the
famous Edowain of Bradwen, whose descendants were the
Lewises of Abernauthychan, the Lloyds of Peniarth, the
Wynnes of Peniarth, the Lloyds of Mon-y-Mennirch, the
Owens of Caer Beofhan, and the Gryffiths of Garth, etc.

Is it possible that their coat — Three snakes showed ppr.
(or vert), two and one — suggested to Duke Humphrey
the form of the knot ?

It is generally attributed to the common true-love-



NOTi:« ON NORTH RTAFFOlllxSHIUE. 23

knot, and in fact it is always represented as a cord, not
a snake, which there is no ground for supposing it ever
was. It is a cord of twisted gold thread, but it might
have been suggested as to form, as above mentioned, by
the snakes of Edowain of Brad wen. For the short
period when Stafford was distinctly among the Duke's
possessions, the town had his coat-of-arms granted for
the municipality, differenced with the knot upon the
chevron ; and so it is given by Gwillim as the arms of
the town of Stafford ; the bed of black and crimson
velvet, embroidered with white lions and the Stafford-
shire knot, which had belonged to Henry, Earl of
Northampton, was not valued at one shilling as supposed,
but at fifty shillings, and was therefore not specially
undervalued. The knot, when resumed by the
Volunteers, was adopted as a county cognizance, and has
remained so ever since.

In conclusion, in remarking on the archaeology of
Staffordshire, the task is made more easy by the work
of many laborious and gifted antiquaries, to whom the
county owes a debt of gratitude : — Camden and his
translators. Bishop Gibson and Gough, Sampson Erder-
wicke and his editors, Simon Degge and Rev. Harwood ;
Kev. Stebbing Shaw, in his valuable History of Stafford-
shire, unfortunately uncompleted ; Dr. Bob. Plot, in
his History of Staffordshire ; our much-loved Dr.
Garner, the father of Mrs. Lynam ; Be v. Thomas
Loxley, once vicar of Leek ; Elias Ashmole ; Bev.
Simeon Shaw and Mr. Ward ; Sir Walter Chetwynd ;
Mr. John Sleigh ; Mr. William Salt, who left the
valuable Salt Library to the county, amassed with
great judgment and profuse expenditure, and wdiich
is a centre for study and research ; and many others.

I thank you for your patient attention, I trust the
week we are entering upon may be one of enjoyment
and profit for you all, and that you will look back upon
the few days spent in our county as not to be regretted.
I again bid you, in the name of the North Staffordshire
Field Club and Arclueological Society, a hearty welcome
to the moorlands of Staffordshire.



THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE.




15 Y MISS C. S. BURNE.
(Read at the Stoke-on-Trent Congress, 13 Aug. 1895.)

T is DOW nearly fifty years since the late
Mr. W. J. Thorns coined the term
Folklore, to describe those oddities of
superstition and custom which from
time to time have attracted the
attention of the curious. A new
stimulus was thus given to the study
of such traditions, which then for the first time found a
distinctive name. At first studied rather as a curiosity
— an antiquarian fad, of which the outcome was nothing
more important than the elucidation of some obscure
passage of Shakspeare, or the provision of a theme for
the verse-writer or the novelist — these superstitions,
these customs, these legends, were soon found to have a
more serious value, and to be able to tell us what
nothing else can of the thoughts and habits of our
prehistoric forefathers. " With only archaeology to help
us", says Mr. Gomme, " the mud huts and the cave-
dwellings are untenanted ; the flint implements, the
domestic utensils, are ownerless, the graves have no
associations beyond the skeleton remains. . . . But
guided by comparative folklore, we may once more
restore life into this desolate region, because we can
once more get at some of the thoughts and fancies
which accompanied the inhabitants of the primitive
village through the several stages of their daily routine."
For these traditional beliefs, observances, legends, are
" relics of an unrecorded past": a past when the stage of
civilisation attained by our forefathers differed little from
that of the savages of the present day. The old woman
who sticks a bullock's heart full of pins to pierce the



TtlE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSPIIHE. 25

heart of her neighbour, reasons in the same way as the
AustraUan black fellow who puts broken glass into his
enemy's footmarks. The savage " marriage by capture"
is reflected in the tumult of the Border "riding
weddings"; the familiar story of Beauty and the Beast
may be paralleled in almost any collection of savage
fairy-tales.

My task, then, to-night is to show you some few of
such of these " relics of an unrecorded past" as may be
discovered in the county of Stafford at the present day.

First, then, for traces of the savage temper of mind
and the beliefs which it generates. Let me, as a
specimen, give you the ideas of an old agricultural
labourer at High Ofiiey, on the western border of the
county, as expressed by himself, July 1883, from notes
taken at the time. Some neighbours of " Owd
Stock'on's" had been turned out of their house by the
mortgagees.

" Niver see sich a thing i' my life", he said ; " their
things wun all turned out i' the middle o' the road.
Eh 1 I shouldna like to a bin them as did it. I should
be afeard as they'd do suramat at me."

" Why, what could they do ?"

" Why, bewitch 'em, to be sure I Our parson, he dunna
believe in folks bewitchin' annybody. He tould me so
hissel', going thro' Mr. Hyatt's cowpastur'. But there
was Jack Rhodes, the bank-ranger, he went to a witch
in the Potteries about the mooney as he lost. He
said, as soon as ever he saw Jack, ' You've come about
that there mooney — there were so many with you — the
amount was so much — you must not speak to anybody
about it.' But he did, and towd everybody, and he
never got the money back. But one night, when he
was in bed with his fayther, the whole room was full of
little red imps dancing all about. He said arter as the
devil inna black ; but it couldna ha' bin the devil, it
mun 'a bin some of his imps. However can them
witches do such things ?"

" There was a young man (as I knowed) as wanted his
moother to sell him a bit o' waste land, as her cottage
stood on (close to Squire Morris's), and she wouldna' ; so



26 THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE.

he brought one o' these 'ere men from Wolverhampton,
and he gave her a shilling, and arter that, when she was
in bed at a night, somethin' had used to come to her toe
and creep up her till it got to her chest. She lapped
her foot up with all manner o' things, and put something
with pins sticking out of it on her foot, but she never
could get shut on it, and she had it to her dying day.

" Oh" — he concluded, summing up the whole subject
— " when I was in sarvice they'd used to bewitch the
teams, but they darna do that now."

(May I ask the representatives of the local press to be
kind enough not to report this story, nor the following
one, as it would not be quite kind to show up the
ignorance of these poor people in any paper that might
be read by their acquaintances, and cause them to be
laughed at.)

So much for belief in witchcraft. Now for another point
in the savage creed — the tixtni^formation of the spirits
of the dead into a7iimals. Within half a mile of " Owd
Stock'on's" house is a bridge over the canal, which is
always regarded as rather an uncanny place at night.
A labouring man who had to cross this bridge with a
horse and cart, about ten o'clock one evening in January
1879, arrived at home in an extraordinary state of
fright and agitation, and related that just as he passed
the bridge a black thing with white eyes sprang out of the
hedgerow on to his horse. The terrified horse broke
into a gallop ; the man tried to knock off the creature
with his whip, but the whip went through the Thing, and
fell from his hand to the ground. How he got rid of the
intruder or reached home at last, he hardly knew, but
the whip was picked up the next day just where he said
he had dropped it. The story of his strange encounter
quickly spread, and this was the explanation that was
offered by a local wiseacre. " It was the Man-Monkey ,
as always does come again on the Big Bridge, ever since
the man was drowned in the ' Cut'!"

Of local legends I will mention one which shows
traces of a belief in elemental spirits.

Aqualate Mere, a sheet of water on the Shropshire
border of the county, nearly 200 acres in extent, is said



THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE.



27



to be inhabited by a mermaid. On some occasion there
was an idea of draining it, but the mermaid put her liead
out of the water and exclaimed : —

" If this mere you do let dry,
Newport and Meretown I will destr'y" —

and the plan was abandoned.

A similar tradition attached, I believe, to the Black
Mere, near Leek, where the mermaid threatened to
" destroy all Leek and Leek Frith" if her abode were
disturbed.

The Bridestones on Biddulph Moor, which the
Association has visited to-day, is the subject of a
pathetic little story. It is the burial-place, so the folk
say, of the young newly-married bride of a general, who
accompanied her husband to the wars, and was killed
in battle near this spot. At first sight this legend
seems to give little opening for comments, but I should
like to point out how often such prehistoric monuments
are popularly associated with marriage. The stone circle
known as the Hurlers, in Cornwall, is said to be a
wedding party turned to stone : and in the Orkney
Islands a couple who exchanged promises while clasping
hands through the hole in the Woden Stone were held
to be lawfully married, though the tie might be
dissolved by the simple and easy process of attending
service in a Christian church, and leaving the building
by different doors ! I am inclined to suspect that the
Bridestones really acquired its name from some similar
ceremony now long forgotten.

I have this afternoon been told of another ancient
burying-place known as the Bridestones, near Lasting-
ham, in Cleveland, Yorkshire, but my informant knew of
no legend about it.

A large portion of the county was forest-land down to
a more or less recent period, and many traces of this
may be detected in the folklore. Needwood Forest, a
most interesting tract of country, was only disafforested
in the beginning of this century, and the people are even
yet not sufficiently used to enclosures to have learnt to
keep the gates shut. Here we find a variety of



28 THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE.

superstitions connected with trees and plants. For
instance, it is there considered unlucky to bicrn any
green thing. Two hundred years ago this belief took a
more definite shape. In 1636", Charles I, "taking
notice of an opinion entertained in Staffordshire that
the burning of fern doth bring down rain", caused his
chamberlain to write to the sheriff, and desire that it
might be forbidden during the king's journey through
the county. Others specially dread burning elder. " If
you do, you will bring the Old Lad on the top of the
chimney"; and an old man who had burnt some was
always believed to have " seen something" in con-
sequence. All these fancies point to a former belief in
woodland spirits, capable of revenging themselves if
offended.

Then there are curious reminiscences of public forest
rights. Dr. Plot, writing in 1686, mentions a certain
oak-tree, near Tirley Castle, on the Shropshire border,
under whose boughs certain offences against manorial
and ecclesiastical law might be committed without
rendering the offender liable to punishment. And at
the present day there is among the grand old oaks of
Bagot's Park a peculiarly wide-spreading one known as
the Beggar's Oak, beneath whose branches — so the
popular belief has it — any wayfarer has the right to a
night's lodging. This tradition must date from a period
earlier than the enclosure of the park from the forest,
and must point, like the preceding one, to some
prehistoric common right, disregarded at the time of the
enclosure, but still existing in the popular imagination.^

Another instance, the Deerleap. Wrottesley Park,
granted to the Wrottesleys by Edward III in 1347, is
bounded by a belt of uncultivated land, a sort of " green
lane", called the Deerleap,Vi name which is also found (under
a slightly different form) in a pre-Conquest list of
boundaries preserved at Wrottesley. The same name,

1 I can obtain no definite information as to the date of the grant of
Bagot's Park, but tradition says it was given to the Bagots by King
John, who also gave the ancestor of the ancient breed of goats pre-
served there, on the preservation of which the existence of the Bagot
family and their estates is imagined to depend.




THE HOBBY-HORSE AT ABBOTS BROMLEY.




THE HORN -DANCE AT ABBOTS BROMLEY.



THE FOLKLORE OK STAFFORDSHIRE. 29

the Deerleap, is also given to a field adjoining an old
park at Norbury, existing in the fourteenth century, but
now long destroyed. For an explanation of this name
we must go to the neighbouring county of Salop, where
the owners of an old park, existing 1292, but now cut up
into fields, claimed the right of the buck's leap : namely,
the right to cut timber to repair the park fence for the
space of a buck's leap — five yards — on their neighbour's
land outside the park. This right, which I need not say
is unknown to the statute-book, was actually exercised
in 1892.

Again, we may trace the for est -influence on aiinual
sports and festivals, in the Horn-dance at Abbots'
Bromley. At the parish wake every year, on the
Monday after the 4th September, six men carrying stags'
horns on their shoulders perform a country dance.
Another dancer, the Hobby- Horse, wears a wooden
horse's head and caparison ; a boy carries a crossbow and
arrow, with which he makes a snapping noise in time to
the music. A woman carrying a curious old wooden
ladle for money, and a clown, make up the party. The
articles used in the dance are kept in the church tower,
in the custody of the vicar of the parish. I have here
some photographs of the performers and of their
" properties", kindly sent me by Mr. Frank Udall and
Mr. Alfred Parker, of Uttoxeter. Dr. Plot, in 1686,
mentions this custom, which seems then to have been in
temporary abeyance, doubtless owing to the civil wars.
The dance, according to his account, took place in the
Christmas holidays, and the stags' horns were painted
with the arms of the principal landowners.^ Some
traces of the paint still remain. "To the Hobby-Horse
Dance", he says, "there also belonged a pot, which was
kept by Turnes, by 4 or 5 of the cheif of the town,
whom they call'd lleeves, who provided cakes and ale to
put in this pot", — after the manner apparently of " sops
in wine". It was then, I suppose, shared as a " loving-
cup" among the spectators. Every well-disposed house-
holder contributed "pence apiece" for himself and his

1 Paget, Bagot, and Wells.



30 THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE.

family ; and with the levy thus made, together with the
contributions of " forraigners that came to see it", was
defrayed, first, the cost of the cakes and the ale, then
the expense of the repairs of the church and the support
of the poor. Tradition says, that when the money
collected was used for these public purposes, the dance
was performed in the churchyard on Sunday after service.
Now, of course, the dancers have the proceeds for them-
selves.

Dr. Plot distinctly says that the horns are " Raindeer"
horns, and this opinion has lately been corroborated by
good authority. If this be correct, there seem no limits
to our conjectures upon the age and origin of the custom :
and at any rate Abbots' Bromley is as likely a place as
any in the county to preserve traditions of immemorial
antiquity. It is situated on the borders of Needwood
Forest, and is one of the estates with which Wulfric
Spot, Ealdorman of Mercia, endowed his foundation of
Burton Abbey in 1002. Before that date it must have
formed part of the possessions of the Ealdormanship, as
its neighbour King's Bromley continued to do down to
the time of Edward the Confessor.^ It has thus had a
continuous existence, with singularly few vicissitudes, of
some nine centuries at least. But without speculating
on the exact age of the custom, the light in which I
would present it to you to-day is, that it is a dramatic
form of the morris-dance, performed in the woodland
characters of stags and huntsmen. Observe that the
deer are evidently the deer of the lords of the manor,
marked with their coats-of-arms, while the dance is the
common act of the villagers as a body. The care of the
property of the dance was entrusted to their official
representatives, ecclesiastical and civil ; the expense of
the common cup was defrayed by common contributions
at a fixed and equal rate ; the money realised was
devoted to a common public object. I believe the

^ Leofric, Earl of Mercia, died here. It appears in Domesday Book
as having belonged to Harold, T. R. E., his sole possession in Stafford-
shire ; doubtless obtained through his marriage with Eadgifu, Ead-
wine's and Morkere's sister. It then passed to the Crown ; hence its
distinctive name of King's Bromley.



THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE. 31

primary intention of the dance to have been the assertion
of some ancient common right or privilege of the village
in regard to the chase. Written records might be lost
or destroyed ; such an " object-lesson" as this was a
constant proclamation of their ancient rights to the
whole village and to the " forraigners". It is just the
same principle as caused little boys to be " dumped",
ducked, and beaten at the parish boundaries in the
annual perambulations, long before and long after parish
maps had come into existence.

Tliere ai*e many more points which I should like to
touch upon, but I will only advert to one, and that is the
diversity of custom which prevails in the county.
Morris-dancing, so common in the west of England, I
have so far only met with in Staffordshire at Lichfield ;
though the well-known stained glass window at Betley
Old Hall, described in Donee's Illustrations of Shaks-
peare, shows that it must once have been known farther
north. The Mummers' Play, often confused with the
Morris Dancers, is acted annually at Eccleshall, at
Cheadle, and I think about Rugeley. The fact that the
actors bear a distinctive local name, viz., the Guisers,
evidently from the Norman- French guisards, or masquers,
shows that it has once been a very popular form of
sport among us. Let me say in passing that I think
few people are aware of the exceeding antiquity of the
main incident of the Mumming Play — the death in single
combat of one of the characters, and his resuscitation at
the hands of a wonder-working leech by means of a magic
draught. The names of the principal characters vary
everywhere, and St. George has in most places
appropriated the part of the victorious hero, but there
seems little doubt that in the leading motif of the little
play we have a primitive nature-myth in action ; and if
so it is of the greatest interest to recover as many
versions of the play as possible, and to note the localities
where it is known.

But to return. Li the north of the county we have
the custom of souling, or begging for apples on the eve
of All Souls' Day, 1st November. In the south we have
the same custom practised on St. Clement's Eve,



32 THE FOLKLORE OF STAFFORDSHIRE.

23rd November, and called dementing. In the south,
Mothering or Mid-Lent Sunday is very generally
observed ; in the north, so far, I have not met with it.
Plough Monday is kept by dragging about a plough in
some of the villages on the Trent near Burton, but not
to my knowledge elsewhere. The custom of hiring farm
servants from Christmas to Christmas extends from
Cheshire and North Shropshire across North Staffordshire
to the Derbyshire boundary, where it abruptly^ gives
place to the Derbyshire custom of Martinmas hirings,
which practically means a difference in reckoning the
beginning of the year by the legal quarters or by the
agricultural seasons. Now, when I was collecting the Folk-
lore of Shropshire, I found that the line of demarcation
between these and similar customs there coincided very
nearly with the boundary which students of dialect had
laid down between northern and southern forms^ of
dialect, and also with certain very ancient historical
boundaries. Further investigation is needed to show
whether similar boundaries of custom, and so forth,
exist in Staffordshire, and if so, whether they denote
ethnological differences with us, as they undoubtedly do
in Shropshire.

Three years ago, my friend Miss Keary and myself
formed a project for the collection of the folklore of
Staffordshire. We have accumulated a considerable
amount of interesting material, but unforeseen events
have prevented our making the progress we then hoped
to do. It would be a most satisfactory result of this
evening's proceedings if a new impetus could be given to
the work of collection. The Folk-Lore Society has put
forth a scheme of County Committees for the collection
of local folklore. These are, in fact, very small local
folklore societies affiliated to the London society,
permitted to subscribe to it on the same terms as one
individual, and having sundry advantages in the matter
of publications and books of reference. This scheme is
in practical working order in the county of Leicester ;
but whether or not it be thought wise to adopt the
formal machinery of a committee, there is no doubt that
there is room for more helpers to undertake distinct



THE FOLKLORK OF 8TAFF0RDRHTRE. 33

parts of the work of collection. We should want, not
only more oral information of all kinds, but, for instance,
to have copies made of any items of local folklore already
in print — research made at the William Salt Library
for points in which local folklore is intertwined with
local history — traditional music noted down, photographs
taken of the Whit-Monday Bower at Lichfield, the
Funeral Garlands at Ham, the many holy wells in all
parts of the county, etc. The Dialect of Staffordshire is
now at last receiving its due attention at the hands of
two gentlemen in this district, and the present seems a
fitting time to urge the claims of our local Folklore.




1896



NOTES ON AN ANCIENT CELTIC BELL.




BY RICHARD QUICK, CURATOR OF THE HORNIMAN
MUSEUM, FOREST HILL, S.E.

{Read 4 December 1895.)

HE ancient bell I now have the pleasure of
exhibiting to the Association is unique in
more than one respect. It was found at
an old farmhouse at Bosbury, five miles
from Ledbury, in Herefordshire, in the
year 1888, by Mr. J. Baker. It is from
him that we obtained it. Mr. Baker
tells me that there was a sale of the deceased farmer's
effects, and the bell was turned out of doors with the
lumber. No one had any idea what it was more than
that it was a sort of bell, and the farmer had never
dreamt of its being such a valuable relic. The son of
the previous owner could not give Mr. Baker any
satisfactory history of it ; in fact, he said he did not
know where it came from.

Bosbury is a most ancient parish, and formerly — in the
12th century — was the place of residence of the bishops of