Folk-Lore/Volume 27/Examples of Folk Memory from Staffordshire
EXAMPLES OF FOLK MEMORY FROM STAFFORDSHIRE.
BY SAMBROOKE A. H. BURNE, M.A., BARRISTER-AT-LAW.
(Read at Meeting, 21st June, 1916.)
One supposes that there is by now a fairly general assent among folklorists as regards the existence of a more than ordinary power of memory among certain (using the term relatively) unlettered classes of society. This can be tested over and over again by anyone who is in touch with the farm-labourer class. What is still a matter of controversy may be termed the credibility of the traditional matter which the memory of the folk provides. Is it to be classed as "the drivelling of antiquated crones" (this classification is somewhere about half-a-century old) or as historical material worthy the attention of the serious student?
The following examples collected quite casually in Staffordshire may be considered relevant to what is undoubtedly matter of controversy. I could have added other cases, but they have already appeared in print:
I. The first example comes from Needwood Forest and relates to the curious parochial geography of the old forest area. Prior to the enclosure in 1801 something like twenty townships intercommoned in the forest. As a result of the enclosure this common land was divided among five parishes, not in compact areas but in patchwork fashion, here a piece and there a piece. It well illustrates the anomalous condition of things that the Derbyshire parish of Scropton obtained several small patches of old forest land, lying mainly between Draycott Cliff and Yoxall, both in Staffordshire.
Mr. John Wright, who for ten years prior to 1877, was resident in Scropton village and an overseer of the parish, gave me the reason for this irregularity as he had learnt it from "a very old Scropton farmer, William Shipton, whose family had been freeholders there for generations." Another member of the family lived at Yoxall in Staffs, and actually on one of the above-mentioned patches of land which belonged to Scropton parish.[1]
The tradition ran as follows: When Oliver Cromwell destroyed Tutbury Castle the Scropton people rang their church bells. This so pleased Cromwell that he gave to every freeholder a piece of land in Needwood Forest.
Now, it was certainly not book-learning which prompted Mr. Shipton. Any book to which this Derbyshire yeoman and his circle were at all likely to have had access would have informed him of the Enclosure Act of 1801 and its effect on parochial divisions. Was his story then an ingenious piece of guesswork by way of explanation of these distant and isolated patches? It might be thought so, but it is possible to show that this tradition is deeply rooted in past local history.
In the first place, there is the fact that Tutbury was destroyed by the Parliamentarian army in the Civil War. Scropton Church is distant about a mile and a half, and although there is no proof that the bells were rung in celebration of the Royalist defeat, it is far from unlikely.[2] Further, we have the important historical fact that in 1654 Cromwell issued an ordinance which in effect provided that the forest of Needwood should be sold "for the satisfaction of the soldiery."[3]
This proposal was by no means popular. There were many vested interests to be propitiated. Most formidable, because most democratic, was the opposition of Scropton and the nineteen other townships which enjoyed common of pasture in the forest. Accordingly in 1658 Cromwell amended his scheme by proposing to allocate a definite area of forest land to each township in substitution for its lost grazing rights. In the Salt Library at Stafford is a map which shows the proposed partition. Commissioners went so far as actually to measure up and stake out the allotments. Scropton had 158 acres assigned to it. Two years later came the Restoration, and the forest was saved—for a time. In 1780 another attempt was made, and a Bill for the enclosure was brought forward, which adopted ready made the partition prepared by Cromwell's surveyors. This Bill was, however, rejected. Finally came the Enclosure Act of 1861 by which the Scropton freeholders received the strips of land concerning which the tradition is told. I am unable to prove that the actual allotment corresponded in area and locality with that proposed in 1658, but this is for lack of sufficient research. It is more than likely that it did. Be this as it may, it is hardly stretching language beyond its proper bounds to say that village tradition, unshaken by and apparently oblivious of that monument of Parliamentary draughtsmanship known as 41 Geo. III. c. 66, has substantially preserved the memory of historical events of a far earlier period.
II. The next concrete product of folk memory that I produce is a lullaby or jingle which in 1892 was heard sung to a child at Harriseahead, a remote colliery village in North Staffordshire. The singer was an old woman, and there were several verses, but only one was noted:
"Ding a dong ding.
Ding a dong ding,
I heard a bird sing.
The Parliament soldiers have gone for the King."
The genesis of this rhyme can only be the events of the year 1660, when General Monk, having crossed the Tweed at Coldstream, marched to London, transmuted the long discredited "Rump" into a more representative body by recalling some of the old members of Charles I.'s reign, and in the name of this Parliament welcomed Charles II. back to London.
The rhyme seems to breathe not only thankfulness but secrecy, and thus it accurately expresses the political conditions obtaining at the time.
Cromwell's rule was a despotism of the Executive which soon came to be profoundly disliked by all classes of society. Quarter Session records show the extent to which the liberty of the subject was restrained. People were sent to gaol for "driving of horses upon the Lord's Day"; for swearing such mild oaths as "upon my life" and "God is my witness" they were fined six and eightpence. As for liberty of conscience it was a thing undreamed of, and Quakers were no better off than Papists. Colonel Hutchinson's Memoirs contain many glimpses of the discontent smouldering under a despotism worse than that of the Stuarts. Provincial Major-Generals were appointed, who pushed the local J. P. from his position of dignity and "behaved like bashaws" in their enforcement of an exaggerated moral code. They set all the people "muttering." Notice Hutchinson's choice of a word. Of open manifestations of joy at the prospect of the return of the Monarchy we are to understand that there were but few. One reason was that a very strict censorship prevailed to check the circulation of broadsheets, pamphlets, and newspapers. I lay stress upon these circumstances, because they show the historical interest of this jingle. It was only in obscure tracts and chimney-corner and alehouse ditties such as this that the smouldering discontent could find articulate expression. This rhyme is not confined to North Staffordshire. A member of the North Staffordshire Field Club writes that she remembers it being sung to her in her childhood by a nurse, "probably a Cambridgeshire woman, and almost certainly from the Fens."
III. The moorlands of Staffordshire—high, bleak, thinly-populated hillsides—provide two traditional place-names of great interest.
Mr. John Clark, for five years resident at Waterhouses, a village on the turnpike road from Macclesfield to Ashbourne, pointed out to the writer some few months ago a road with what struck him as a peculiar name. It is the length of road running almost due south from the Crown Inn at Waterhouses until it is turned abruptly right and left by the sheer side of the Weaver Hills, This road—it is scarcely more than a lane—is known as "Earlsway." When Mr. Clark first came into the district the pronunciation was "Yarlsway," and on the six-inch O.S. it appears as "Yelsway Lane." The insertion of the consonant Y before vowels and in place of aspirates is a common feature of midland and north country dialects.[4]
The value and interest of this survival seem to be that it can be tested while so many can not. Taking it at its face value, the advocates of the historical faithfulness of folk memory will claim that this place-name will indicate the ownership or the user (at any rate the close personal association) of some historical person with the rank of Earl. Their opponents will, no doubt, urge that the name is a corruption proving nothing at all. In the majority of survivals of this class proof one way or the other is never obtainable. Here, however, a solitary documentary record which I came across entirely by chance decides this issue at least triumphantly in favour of the traditionalists.
It occurs in the Chartulary of Burton Abbey.[5] A deed which may be dated circa 1200 relates to a grant to the Abbey of land situated at Cauldon (p. 52). The boundaries are given, several can be identified, and one of them is "Viam Comitis,"—the Earl's Way. It is evident, therefore, that this place-name had crystallised into permanent use as early as the twelfth century.
Who, then, was the Earl? The earliest mention of Cauldon occurs in the will of Wulfric Spot, the founder of Burton Abbey in A.D. 1004. He is styled "Consul ac Comes Merciorum" in the Burton Chronicle, but, though a very large landowner, it is doubtful whether he ever in strictness held the title of Earldorman of Mercia.[6] If he be excluded there is only one other Earldom which, having regard to the date, can be associated with the "Earlsway," and that is the Palatine Earldom of Chester, created at the Conquest. For two centuries these feudal potentates dominated Cheshire and a large part of Staffordshire and the Midlands. At different dates both Trentham and Dieulacres Abbey (near Leek) were founded by members of this all-powerful house. In Staffordshire they held at one time or another the manors of Alstonefield, Warslow, Chartley, Sandon, Leek, Endon, Rudyard, Rushton, and Alton—all but one in the north of the county. So far as available records go, however, it does not appear that they held Cauldon, which was held by the de Stafford barony in chief from the Crown for many years after the Conquest, and was so held at the presumable date of the grant above mentioned.
The credibility of this tradition being thus established, has it any historical value? It bears testimony to the almost royal state and authority of the Earls Palatine. "Via regia" is the technical description used in mediaeval documents for what were the equivalent of the turnpikes. But in North Staffordshire during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the King was a name, but the great Earl of Chester a reality. Thus men spoke of the "Earl's" highway not the "King's" highway. That the Earls of Chester were constantly at Leek, five miles west of Cauldon, admits of no doubt. The scarce pamphlet history of Rushton Spencer, published in 1856 by the Rev. T. W. Norwood, mentions that a road between that village and Congleton in Cheshire was known as the "Earlsway," and at Congleton itself the same name occurs in a perambulation of 1593.[7]
These two names clearly mark the route between Beeston Castle in Cheshire and Leek and the moorland manors of the Earl. The road now under notice may be a continuation of that, but it looks much more like a route from north to south. Right down to the close of the Middle Ages, long-distance cross-country travelling was substantially confined to two classes—the peddling merchants and the itinerant landlords eating their way from manor to manor; and as a solution I would suggest that the Earl, when on tour from his northern manors (Alstonefield, Warslow) to Chartley and Sandon further south, regularly made the passage of the river Hamps at this point. Whether or not it is to-day the sole or the most suitable route is hardly a relevant inquiry; we cannot judge of the respective advantages of different routes in the light of modern physical geography and road systems, because river levels have altered and obstacles of forest and swamp no longer cramp the traveller.
IV. Another equally interesting illustration of the permanence of folk memory comes from Waterfall, a true moorland village, lying some 900 feet high on the fringe of the vast expanse of stonewall country which forms the backbone of England. It is a mile north of Waterhouses on the Ashbourne and Macclesfield high road, and lies in the centre of a large loop of the river Hamps. The direct road to Waterhouses runs precipitously down to a ford (now disused) across the river, and is known as Rocester Lane. Needless to say, the natives have no explanation why Rocester is thus advertised to the exclusion of many nearer centres of population. There is no possible relationship between the two places, either administrative or economic; they lie some dozen miles apart, connected by an indirect and indifferent road. The strong probability is that if you asked the way to Rocester of a Waterfall man he would not be able to tell you: certainly he would not direct you down "Rocester Lane," which is practically a cul de sac, ending at the disused ford.
In the survival of this name there is the only link with the pre-Reformation status of Waterfall Church as an appendage of Rocester Abbey. Along this road the parishioners in successive harvest seasons laboriously transported their tithes in kind. Or, the imagination may not unreasonably picture a constant procession of black-cowled priests to and from the Abbey. For the Austin Canons set parochial ministration among their "appropriated" congregations in the forefront of their religious activities. Waterfall has not now, and had not in those days, easy access to the outer world. Leek has now superseded Rocester as the ultimate horizon of travel. With the snapping of monastic ties the artificial geographical relationship of Waterfall and Rocester vanished. It is good, therefore, to note this place-name, for it represents three hundred years of English history; it is a vivid and accurate piece of historical evidence revealing as it does the powerful influence a distant monastic house could exercise on parochial life.
V. My last example is perhaps the most striking of all, but it comes rather at second hand. It is taken from Hinchcliffe's History of Barthomley, a somewhat rare book, written about 1850 by the rector of the parish, which is situated partly in Staffordshire but mainly in Cheshire. The period of the incident in question is of the Civil War. Cheshire was in the main Royalist, but there was very considerable skirmishing up and down the county, of which one Burghall, the Puritan vicar of Acton, who owed his living to the Parliamentary victory, has left a detailed account in diary form. It forms circumstantial reading, though somewhat offensively unctuous in tone. The diary was first published at Chester in 1778 and has since been re-published by the Cheetham Society.
Burghall records under 1643 that "the enemy [i.e. the Royalists] on Saturday came to Barthomley, giving an alarm to the garrison of Crewe Hall: as they marched they set upon the church which had in it about twenty neighbours that had gone in for safety: but the Lord Byrom's troop & Connought, a major to Colonel Sneyd, set upon them and won the church, but the enemy burning the forms, rushes, mats, etc. made such a smoke that being almost stifled they called for quarter which was granted by Connought: but when they had them in their power they stripped them all naked and most cruelly murdered twelve of them contrary to the laws of arms, nature and nations. Counonght cut the throat of Mr. John Fowler, a hopeful young man and a minor."[8]
This reads like an episode of August, 1914, in Belgium, and one feels and hopes with Mr. Hinchcliffe that perhaps Burghall has been carried away by his extreme Puritan bias and is not a credible historian. Tradition here most opportunely throws light upon what really happened. There lived in the parish one Daniel Stringer, who was born in 1743, and was living in 1839, in which year (being then 97 years of age) he informed Mr. Hinchcliffe that his grandfather was one of the few who escaped from the massacre. So his father had told him. He declared that the trouble arose because the son of the rector fired from the steeple upon the troops marching past and killed one. This so irritated the soldiers that they revenged their comrade's death by butchering many within the church. Now mark three points. Daniel Stringer had never heard of Burghall's diary. He did not know the name of the rector. In point of fact the rector of 1643 was Richard Fowler, whose sympathies were well-known to be with the Puritan party. It is pretty evident, therefore, that Mr. Fowler, "the hopeful young man" of the diary who lost his life, and the rector's son of the tradition were one and the same person.
And so the affair does not appear quite so wanton and cold-blooded an atrocity as the Puritan historian would wish his public to understand.
Fortunately for the reputation of Lord Byrom's troop what one may term official history is here supplemented and corrected from traditional sources. This is an admirable instance of the strong sidelight which survivals of this nature may throw upon past events. But it would be futile to argue that all traditions can be so satisfactorily worked out as this.
Three of these examples, it will be observed, date from the period of the Civil Wars, some two centuries and a half ago. Two of them, at any rate, were consciously related as historical incidents. The two remaining examples derive from a much older period. Such place-names as Earlsway and Rocester Lane embody no conscious tradition. They have no meaning for the folk who use them, and to whose tenacious memories we owe our knowledge of them. Superficially, all the material brought to your notice this evening is commonplace. Many a highly-coloured picturesque tradition can be traced to an imaginative guide-book. But there is no ground for suspecting any of these five traditions to have been inspired or due to motive. The evidence of bygone social conditions which they afford is all the more weighty because it is unconscious; and this leads me, though it is a little beside my main point, to draw attention to a popular belief which is by no means peculiar to Staffordshire. In October, 1910, a witness at an inquest at Stone, in that county, said, "I was under the impression the body was not to be touched till the police came." The Coroner was much surprised (not being a folklorist), and rightly commented upon the absurdity of the idea. But is it so absurd? It is admittedly an inaccurate and highly inconvenient notion, but I cannot help feeling that its source lies far back in mediaeval criminal procedure. If so, there is here provided an excellent example of the stubbornness of traditional knowledge. Under the criminal law as it stood in the first three centuries after the Norman Conquest there was in the case of any unexplained death a certain presumption of guilt upon the first finder of the dead body, who was compelled to attend at the inquest. The following extracts from the Staffordshire Assize Roll of Henry III. will illustrate the procedure: "Thomas the miller, of Burton, and Richard his son, were drowned while conveying turf in a boat on the water of the Trent. Henry son of Ralph was the first finder. Nobody is suspected." Or this: "Nicholas, son of William de Oaken, through madness fell on the wheel of a mill so that he died. Henry the miller is the first finder and is not suspected. Henry did not appear, therefore his sureties are fined half a mark."
So then it was manifestly a prudent thing to let someone else be the first finder of a dead body. Now, a man who pulls a dead body out of the river stamps himself at once as the first finder: at any rate he runs great risk of being found in the act. The prudent man of the Middle Ages left someone else to do this, for fear lest he should be put to the inconvenience of clearing himself from a crime he had not committed. His descendant to-day, impelled, as I believe, by an inherited memory of mediaeval coroner's law, leaves the police to be the first to touch a dead body.
- ↑ It is interesting to notice that the Muster Roll of 1539 for Yoxall bears the name of "Hew Shypton, able man with byll."
- ↑ Churchwardens' accounts may be available to elucidate this point.
- ↑ The evidence for this is a contemporary petition quoted in Shaw's Staffordshire, 1798—a rare history, which is in few but collectors' libraries.
- ↑ Thus Yarnfield in 1266 was written Ernefeld and in 1379 Ernefen. Cf. Falstaff in Henry IV., Part I. (Act i. Sc. 2), "Hear ye, Yedward, if I tarry at home and go not, I'll hang you for going."
- ↑ The original is at Beaudesert. I have used the only transcription, that published by the Salt Archaeological Society in Staffs Collections, v. pt. I.
- ↑ His name is probably preserved at Spot, Spotgate, and Spotacre, near Stone.
- ↑ Head's Hist. of Congleton, 123.
- ↑ My italics.