Nottinghamshire Folk Tales

To disciples and followers of Robin Hood everywhere;

and to everyone who loves a good story.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due once again, to Sue who continues to put up with me both sitting at the computer and gallivanting off on singing and storytelling trips. She’s also a fount of ideas and an indispensable critic and proof reader.

To Roy Harris, for the citation, various bits of information, and for being my mentor all those years ago.

To Stephen Best: man of Nottingham, friend, and source of advice and information on this subject.

To Lewis Brockway for the rear cover photo.

To Jenny Ball for the loan of books.

To the staff at both the Nottingham and Derbyshire (Matlock) local studies libraries for help with finding and copying material.

To all the many storytellers and folk musicians I’ve worked with over the years.

To all the many people who’ve sat in my audiences.

To you for buying this book.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Old Mr Snotta built himself a hutta

By the side of the River Trent.

It was a very pleasant spot in the forest deep

And pretty soon he was collecting the rent.

Oh, the castle grew and the factories too

As the people came from miles around

To buy their food and sell their goods

In Mr Snotta’s little town...

This is a dangerous task I attempt! Having already written Derbyshire Folk Tales in this series of county folk tales books for The History Press I am now going to attempt Nottinghamshire Folk Tales. The two cities (and, I suppose, the two counties) are great rivals. The only man who has been able to unite them in the recent past was Brian Clough via his achievements with Nottingham Forest and Derby County football clubs. Now the two cities are literally joined by the Brian Clough Way – the name given to the stretch of the A52 between the two cities. However, in the more distant past there were many other links – even the famous Sheriff of Nottingham was, in fact, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Derby until Elizabethan times (therefore at the time of Robin Hood!) As you read these tales you will find other things the two counties have in common as well.

I’m not from Nottinghamshire. I was born a Man of Kent and I have lived in Derbyshire since 1987 but, back in the 1970s, I lived in Arnold, on the outskirts of Nottingham, for a few very influential years. For the last thirty-plus years I have worked professionally as a folk singer and storyteller, but without those few years spent in Nottingham my life would probably have taken a very different direction and I would not be writing this now, for it was during those years that I first began to take a serious interest in folk songs and folklore. I owe an awful lot to those years in Nottinghamshire.

I had discovered folk music whilst at college having played and sung in rock bands when I was at school, and I’d been toying around on the fringes of folk music – singing songs by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon as well as my own compositions (deeply influenced by the Incredible String Band) for several years by the time we moved to Arnold. In the 1970s, Nottinghamshire was one of the foremost areas in England for folk clubs and bands. (Several of the stories in this book gave rise to the names of clubs or groups—Bendigo’s, Hemlock Stone etc.) We hadn’t been in Nottingham long when I happened to go to a meeting which led to me starting a folk club in Arnold and then, a year or two later when it folded, I joined the committee of the very successful Carlton Folk Club which continued to run into the present century, long after I’d left. Whilst playing as a resident at Carlton I became more and more interested in traditional songs. I learned many and also wrote a few ‘imitation’ folk songs, the most successful of which was probably the Goose Fair Song which was taken up, sung, and even recorded, by several other singers and groups.

Somehow my wife, Sue, and I also managed to get ourselves a series on Radio Nottingham called ‘Sing a Song of Nottingham’. It was a series of five programmes, each with a theme – Sherwood Forest, Coal Mining, People… etc – built around mainly local songs which we performed. I wrote the little song at the top as the theme tune. I suspect the series might have been fairly bad and very naïve, but it sowed a lot of seeds for the kind of work which I’ve done since, including six years running a local radio folk programme after we’d left Nottingham and moved down to Bedfordshire. It was whilst in Bedfordshire that I took the major step of giving up my job as a teacher and going on the road full time as a professional folk musician. A few years later I discovered storytelling and have been doing the two, in tandem, ever since.

ABOUT NOTTINGHAMSHIRE FOLK TALES

When I wrote Derbyshire Folk Tales I had no trouble in finding stories from every part of the county, in fact Derby itself received but scant attention. I have found Nottinghamshire to be very different. Most of the stories look to Nottingham. Even if they are set elsewhere in the county, the participants are often going to or coming from the city. There are comparatively few stories which are rooted entirely in any of the other towns and villages. This is probably because until recently there were few other big settlements in the county. Newark and Southwell spring to mind but apart from those, there were only small market towns and hamlets scattered through the forest and, of course, the large estates of the nobility – the Dukeries. There are many stories about the gentry and nobility.

With its forests, its grand houses and its wide open spaces, Nottinghamshire, if it were on the Continent, would be an ideal setting for terrifying tales of wolves and vampires, evil Counts and little girls lost in the depths of the dark wood but, no, this is quiet, calm, middle England, where you are never far from the Great North Road and can soon escape to civilisation, so there are very few dark tales of that sort – although I have found some to include here.

In the eighteenth/nineteenth century, industry came to the county in the form of mining and factories. Tiny hamlets became pit villages which rose, and fell again when the pits closed in the 1980s, if not before. Nottingham became a manufacturing town but retained its literary and intellectual elite. I am well aware, and even feel slightly guilty, about the fact that I have not explored the folk tales of the mines and factories. I know there are a lot of customs and superstitions connected with both and I think there must be stories too, but it is a whole different world which I would have to explore and I haven’t had the time – perhaps that’s another book? Meanwhile, those traditions survive in songs and in the novels of writers as diverse as D.H. Lawrence and Alan Sillitoe.

There are a lot of what could be called ‘true stories’ in this collection – stories about people who have actually existed. How much of their stories actually happened though, is a different matter – they are collected from bits of gossip, tall tales, and legends. Whether Robin Hood fits into this category is open to discussion and is a matter of personal belief.

ABOUT STORIES AND STORYTELLING

This is not a book of stories I’ve created, and it is not a history book. Most of the stories in this book are traditional, and even where I have mentioned a source – a publisher or a book – that is usually the man who collected or published the story, not the man (or woman) who ‘made it up’, for they are folk tales and they are, by definition, anonymous. This book is a miscellany, a hotchpotch, a cornucopia of different sorts of stories from different sources. They come from all periods of history and all classes of people. You will find fairy tales, legends, tall tales, bits of gossip, jokes, and retellings of historical events. You won’t find real, accurate history. Where the events actually happened, or where the characters actually lived, it is the story which has been told, not the facts.

Folk tales inhabit a world of contradictions: on the one hand, they take an event and blow it up out of all proportion, then pass it on in a form in which it could not possibly have happened, and once the story has taken root it proves almost impossible for a historian to say, ‘No, it couldn’t have happened like that’. People’s reaction is to say that it did in the story so it must have! A quote I am fond of using to sum this up is, ‘When the legend becomes fact print the legend’ (words spoken by the journalist at the end of John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence). But that determination to remain unchanged also means that folk tales sometimes preserve, over thousands of years, information that has long been forgotten by scholars. Studying folk tales can almost be like archaeology; sometimes you can excavate a small gem of truth from a lot of rubble.

Most of these tales have existed in an oral form at one time or another. They were probably passed on by word of mouth for many years, perhaps, even, for many generations before they were written down. That is the case with all kinds of folklore – it moves from the mouth to the page and then back to the mouth, and each form influences the other.

I am a story teller. I was telling stories for decades before I was asked to write any down. Writing is a different art form to telling – you cannot successfully transcribe a story as it is told. Telling a story in a live situation involves using gesture and tone of voice, something which does not come across when it is written. Also, a live telling is told in a particular environment which can colour the telling; one of the reasons it is really enjoyable to tell a story in the place where it is supposed to have happened.

I started off trying to group the stories here like I did in the Derbyshire book, but they didn’t fit into sections like that so I thought I wouldn’t group them at all, I’d just let them run on from one to another – a ‘chain’ of stories, like I might do when telling them live. In a live telling you add introductions, say why you like the story and what it means to you – in other words, add