Timothy Ferguson's Blog, page 16

“The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain” by John Henry Ingram – Part Two

When I had COVID, my “use it or lose it” style of podcasting plan led to me recording three episodes. I have virtually no idea what’s in them, except that I swept a history of English haunted houses for stories that are Elizabethan and before. Thanks to the Librivox recording teams.

Usually I script in advance, but this time I’ll be transposing in the recordings and adding my comments in bold. I wonder what they will be? Off on an adventure, dear listeners! I’m not going to transcribe all my ramblings.

SAMLESBURY HALL

The famous old Samlesbury Hall stands about half-way between Preston and Blackburn. It is placed in a broad plain, looking southwards towards the woody heights of Hoghton ; eastwards towards the lofty ridges which run through Mellor and Billington to Pendle ; Preston and the broad estuary of the Ribble occupy the western prospect, whilst northwards, Longridge, leading towards the heights of Bowland, fills the scene : enclosing a landscape,” remarks Mr. T. T. Wilkinson, “which for picturesque beauty and historic interest has few equals
in the country.”

Samlesbury is famed in occult lore as the place whence Grace Sowerbutts and other notorious witches came. They were tried for witchcraft early in the seventeenth century, but escaped the fate generally meted out in those days to supposed members of the sisterhood, because, notwithstanding the fact that some of them had confessed their guilt, they were acquitted as impostors. Whilst their neighbours, from Tendle, Demdike, ChafFox, &c, were condemned and hanged as genuine sorcerers, the Samlesbury witches were let off as counterfeits. The eerie reputation acquired by Samlesbury may have partially arisen in consequence of these alleged dealings in the black art by its weird daughters, but that the haunting of the old Hall arose from quite a different cause local tradition guarantees. Harland’s Lancashire Legends traces the history of the famous old building back to the early part of the reign of Henry the Second, when Gospatric de Samlesbury was residing in an ancestral home occupying the site now covered by the present Hall. His dwelling was surrounded by rich pastures and was shut in by the primaeval forests of oak from which the massive timbers were obtained out of which was formed the framework of the structure still standing. This magnificent building was erected during the reign of Edward the Third.

11 The family pedigrees tell us,” says Harland,” that Cicely de Salmesbury married John de Ewyas about the middle of the thirteenth century ; but, dying without male heir, his daughter was united to Sir Gilbert de Southworth, and the property thus acquired remained in the possession of his family for upwards of three hundred and fifty years. It was then sold to the Braddylls, and ultimately passed into the hands of Joseph Harrison, Esq., of Galligreaves, Blackburn; whose eldest son, William Harrison, Esq., now resides at the Hall.” After the disposal of the property by John Southworth, Esq., in 1677, the house was suffered to fall into decay. For many years it was occupied by a number of cottagers ; it was afterwards converted into a farmhouse, and passed through various stages of degradation from neglect. Mr. Harrison, however, determined that
this fine old structure should be no longer thus desecrated.

With a wise and just appreciation he restored both the exterior and the interior of the house in accordance with their original design ; and under his hands the Old Hall at Samlesbury has become one of the most interesting and instructive mansions in the county. ” Sir John Southworth was the most distinguished personage of his race. He was high in military command during the early years of the reign of Elizabeth he mustered three hundred men at Berwick; and served the office of Sheriff of Lancashire in 1562. His possessions included Southworth, Samlesbury, Mellor, besides lands in eighteen other townships ; but he was illiterate, bigoted, and self-willed. His rigid devotion to the faith of his ancestors led him to speak rashly of the changes introduced into the national religion; he also acted unwisely in contravening the laws, for which he was ultimately cast into prison, and otherwise treated with much severity until his death in 1595.

“Tradition states that during his later years one of his daughters had formed an acquaintance with the heir of a neighbouring knightly house. The attachment was mutual, and nothing was wanting to complete their happiness except the consent of the lady’s father. Sir John was thereupon consulted ; but the tale of their devoted attachment only served to increase his rage,
and he dismissed the supplicants with the most bitter denunciations. * No daughter of his should ever be united to the son of a family which had deserted its ancestral faith,’ and he forbade the youth his presence for ever. Difficulty, however, only served to increase the ardour of the devoted lovers ; and after many secret interviews among the wooded slopes of the Kibble, an elopement was agreed upon, in the hope that time would bring her father’s pardon.

The day and place were unfortunately overheard by one of the lady’s brothers, who was hiding in a thicket close by, and he determined to prevent what he considered to be his sister’s disgrace. ” On the evening agreed upon both parties met at the hour appointed ; and as the young knight moved away with his betrothed, her brother rushed from his hiding-place, and slew both him and two friends by whom he was accompanied. The bodies were secretly buried within the precincts of the domestic chapel at the Hall; and Lady Dorothy was sent abroad to a convent where she was kept under strict surveillance. Her mind at last gave way the name of her murdered lover was ever on her lips, and she died a raving maniac. Some years ago three human skeletons were found near the walls of the Hall, and popular opinion
has connected them with the tradition. The legend also states that on certain clear, still evenings, a lady in white can be seen passing along the gallery and the corridors, and then from the Hall into the grounds : that she then meets a handsome knight who receives her on his bended knees, and he then accompanies her along the walks. On arriving at a certain spot, most probably the lover’s grave, both the phantoms stand still, and as they seem to utter soft wailings of despair, they embrace each other, and then their forms rise slowly from the earth and melt away into the clear blue of the surrounding sky.”

Let’s assume the wails of the unquiet dead are dangerous, either physically or psychologically. Let us further posit that the grave is that of the lover. So, under medieval theology the place of the skull is the place of the grave. Were you to move the skull, the knight would go there, and the lady would similarly, follow to the new location. They will rise screaming into the sky from there. So, if you know that a person will be at a certain place on the fated day, you can put the skull there and use it as a land mine in their basement. The next morning, when people are trying to work out why everyone is the building has gone gibberingly mad, you take the skull and put it somewhere similarly useful, and wait a year. At worst someone finds the buried skull, but you have no direct connection to it. Eventually some ghostly knights might turn up and hassle you, but you’re a magician: you can handle them presumably.

SYKES LUMB FARM

“In a secluded dell, on the banks of Mellor Brook’ says Mr. T. T. Wilkinson, “not far from the famous old Hall of Samlesbury, near Blackburn ” (a haunted old Hall whereof an account will be found in these pages), ” stands a lonely farm-house, which was occupied for many generations by a family named Sykes. They gave their name to the homestead, or vice versa, on its being cleared from the forest ; and, from the fact of the pastures lying at a short distance from a broad
and deep portion of the brook, it became generally known by the name of Sykes Lumb Farm.”

This Sykes family, however, as Mr. Wilkinson records, have long since passed to dust, and many generations of strangers have dwelt on their lands, but the doings of one particular member of the race have been handed down, from year to year, by tradition, and still exercise a potent influence upon the minds of the surrounding population. Before referring to the especial tradition for which Sykes Lumb Farm is noted, it may be as well to point out that it possesses an uncanny reputation for a supernatural inhabitant other than the apparition from which its fame is chiefly derived.

In one work by Mr. Wilkinson it is referred to as the residence of a noted boggart, or domestic familiar, in these terms : “When in a good humour, this noted goblin will milk the cows, pull the hay, fodder the cattle, harness the horses, load the carts, and stack the crops. When irritated by the utterance of some unguarded expression or marked disrespect, either from the farmer or his servants, the cream-mugs are then smashed to atoms, no butter can be obtained by churning, the horses and other cattle are turned loose, or driven into the woods, two cows will sometimes be found fastened in the same stall, no hay can be pulled from the mow ; and all the while the wicked imp sits grinning with delight upon one of the cross-beams in the barn. At other times the horses are unable to draw the empty carts across the farm-yard ; if loaded, they are upset, whilst the cattle tremble with fear without any visible cause. IS or do the inmates of the house experience any better or gentler usage. During the night the clothes are said to be violently torn from off the beds of the offending parties, whilst, by invisible hands, they themselves are dragged down the stone stairs by the legs, one step at a time, after a most uncomfortable manner.”

The way in which this boggart is described as haunting Sykes Lumb Farm is in no way out of the
common, especially in Lancashire and the neighbouring counties, but it is of interest in this case, as showing the popular belief that the place is troubled in some way. In what way the house and grounds are really believed to be, or, until recently, to have been, haunted is thus described in Eoby and Wilkinson’s “Lancashire Legends, and William Dobson’s Rambles by the Ribble. In the days when the farm was owned by old Sykes and his wife, careful living and more than ordinary thrift enabled the old couple to gather together a fair amount of wealth, which, added to the continual hoarding of the farmer’s ancestors, caused the pair to be regarded as wonderfully rich, in those days. Whatever the facts as to their wealth may have been, they saw its possession ultimately jeopardized by civil troubles and national famine. It was their chief, if not their only object of affection, as they had neither son nor daughter, nor any other object upon which to expend their love ; therefore, the risk of losing it gave them more than ordinary anxiety.

Old Sykes does not appear to have clung to their darling hoard with half the affection displayed by his worthy consort ; her dread of losing it was intense. Besides, says our chief authority, she had no ” notion of becoming dependent upon the bounty of the Southworths of the Hall, nor did she relish the idea oi soliciting charity at the gates of the lordly Abbot of Whalley. The treasure was therefore carefully secured in earthenware jars, and was then buried deep Beneath the roots of an apple-tree in the orchard. Years passed away, and the troubles of the country did not cease. The Yorkists at length lost the ascendancy, and the reins of government passed into the hands of the Lancastrians ; until at last the northern feud was healed by the mingling of the White Rose with the Red.

Henry VII. sat upon the throne with Elizabeth of York as Queen ; but, ere peace thus blessed the land, old Sykes had paid the debt of nature, and left his widow the sole possessor of their buried wealth. She, too, soon passed away ; and, as the legend asserts, so suddenly that she had no opportunity to disclose the place where she had deposited her treasure. Rumour had not failed to give her the credit of being possessed of considerable wealth ; but, although her relatives made diligent search, they were unsuccessful in discovering the place of the hidden jars.

The farm passed into other hands, and old Sykes’s wife might have been forgotten had not her ghost, unable to find rest, continued occasionally to visit the old farm-house. Many a time, in the dusk of the evening, have the neighbouring peasants met an old wrinkled woman, dressed in ancient garb, passing along the gloomy road which leads across the Lumb, but fear always prevented them from speaking. She never lifted her head, hut helped herself noiselessly along by means of a crooked stick, which bore no resemblance to those then in use. At times she was seen in the old barn, on other occasions in the house, but more frequently in the orchard, standing by an apple-tree which still flourished over the place where the buried treasure was
afterwards said to have been found. Generations passed away, and still her visits continued. One informant minutely described her withered visage, her short quaintly-cut gown, her striped petticoat, and her stick. He was so much alarmed that he ran away from the place, notwithstanding that he had engaged to perform some urgent work. * She was not there/ he gravely said, ‘ when I went to pluck an apple, but no sooner did I raise my hand towards the fruit, than she made her appearance just before me. At last, it is said, an occupier of the farm, when somewhat elated by liquor, ventured to question her as to the reasons of her visits. She returned no answer, but, after moving slowly towards the stump of an old apple-tree, she pointed significantly towards a portion of the orchard which had never been disturbed. On search being made, the treasure was found deep down in the earth, and as the soil was being removed, the venerable-looking shade was seen standing on the edge of the trench. When the
last jar was lifted out, an unearthly smile passed over her withered features ; her bodily form became less and less distinct, until at last it disappeared altogether. ” Since then the old farm-house has ceased to be haunted. Old Sykes’s wife is believed to have found eternal rest; but there are yet many, both old and young, who walk with quickened pace past the Lumb whenever they are belated, fearful lest they should be once more confronted with the dreaded form of its unearthly visitor.”

So wizards with an open mindset could find this ghost. I’m not sure why she’s so scary to the locals. As good Christians they believe in life after death anyway, and if they see her, she occasionally points to a stump with treasure in it. There are far worse hauntings to have.

WADDOW HALL

Mr. William Dobson’s interesting Rambles by the Bibble, furnish one or two accounts of local dwellings labouring under the uncanny odour of being haunted. Mr. Dobson, although evidently no believer in ghosts, and unable to resist the temptation of having a fling at their erratic courses, tells of their doings with a chronicler’s exactitude.

Writing in 1864, our authority says that Waddow Hall, in the township of Waddington, Yorkshire, was then in the occupation of James Garnett, Esquire, Mayor of Clitheroe. The property of the Ramsden family, Waddow Hall is situated in a pleasant park, which, though not of great extent, is of great beauty. The house stands on a knoll, with pleasant woodlands about it. At the foot of a gentle slope flows the Eibble ; the castle and church of Clitheroe are seen to advantage, the smoke only indicating where the town of Clitheroe lies, an intervening hill hiding the town itself
from view. The mansion contains many portraits of its former owners and various members of their family, but the main interest of Waddow appears to arise from its being the scene of an old legend, which the folks of Clitheroe and the neighbouring Yorkshire villages are never weary of repeating, and for the truth of which they are perfectly willing to vouch. Many of the older inhabitants of Clitheroe and Waddington would as soon doubt the Scriptures as they would a single iota of the following tradition.

In the grounds of Waddow and near the banks of the Kibble, there is a spring called Peg o’ Nell’s Well, and good water the spring sendeth forth in plenty. Near the spring is a headless, now almost shapeless figure, said to be a representation of the famous Peg herself. Peg o’ Nell, as I learned, says Mr. Dobson, was a young woman who, in days of yore, was a servant at Waddow Hall. On one occasion she was going to the well for water, the very well that to this day supplies the Hall with water for culinary purposes. She had had a quarrel with the lord or lady of Waddow, who, in a spirit of anger, not common, it is to be hoped, with masters and mistresses, wished that she might fall and break her neck. It was winter, and the ground was coated with ice; her pattens tripped in some way or other, Peggy fell, and the sad malediction was fully realised. To be revenged on her evil wisher, Peggy was wont to revisit her former home in the spirit, and torment her master and mistress by making night hideous.”

Every disagreeable noise that was heard at Waddow was attributed to Peggy; every accident that occurred in the neighbourhood was through Peggy. No chicken was stolen, no cow died, no sheep strayed, no child was ill, no youth ” took bad ways,” but Peg was the evil genius. “When a Waddow farmer had stopped too long at the ‘ Dule ups’ Dun,’ and going home late had slipped off the hipping-stones at Brunerley into the river, or a Clitheroe burgess, when in Borland, had, like ‘Tarn o’ Shanter’ sat too long ‘fast by an ingle bleezing finely/ while ‘ the ale as
growing better/ and had fallen off his horse in going home, and broken a limb, it was not the host’s liquor that was charged with the mishap, but on Peggy’s shoulders that the blame was laid.”

What was worse, in addition to these perpetual annoyances, every seven years Peg required a life ; and the story is that ” Peg’s Night,” as the time of sacrifice at each anniversary was called, was duly observed ; and if no living animal were ready as a septennial offering to her manes, a human being became inexorably the victim. Consequently it grew to be the custom on “Peg’s Night” to drown a bird, or a cat, or a dog in the river, and, a life being thus given, for another seven years Peggy was appeased.

One night, at an inn in the neighbourhood, as the wind blew and the rattling showers rose on the blast, ” and as the swollen Kibble roared over the hipping stones, a young man, not in the soberest mood, had to go from Waddington to Clitheroe. No bridge then spanned the Bibble at Bungerley ; the only means of crossing the river was by the stones, which Henry the Sixth, in his last struggle for liberty, had tripped over towards ‘ Clitherwood.’ He was told he must not venture over the water, it was not safe. He must be at Clitheroe that night, was his response, and go he would.

“But,’ said the young woman of the inn, by way of climax to the other arguments used to induce him not to go onward, *it ‘s Peg o’ Nell’s night, and she has not had her life.’ He cared not for Peg o’ Nell ; he laughed at her alleged requirement, gave loose to his horse’s rein, and was soon at Bungerley. The following morning horse and rider had alike perished, and, of course, many believed the calamity was through Peg’s malevolence.” Peg, it is averred, is still as insatiable as ever, and many would dread to dare her wrath.

So, a living embodiment of Murphy’s Law, which becomes increasingly powerful until a life is taken seems like a useful contact in your grimoire. A sprit that can sow confusion in your enemeis for the price of a chicken? If you’re one of those carnivorous people you can even eat the chicken afterwards, so there’s little cost in the process. An extremely economical spell.

BURTON AGNES HALL

Amongst the haunted houses of Great Britain those which are the permanent residence of certain skulls are the most curious. Various grand old halls, quaint farm-houses, and ancient dwellings, scattered about the kingdom, are troubled at times by all kinds of supernatural disturbances, in consequence of some long and carefully preserved skull being removed from its resting place, or otherwise interfered with. These pages furnish several singular instances of such legends connected with old ancestral dwellings, but none more mysterious, or devoutly believed in, than that connected with Burton Agnes Hall, the family seat of Sir Henry Somerville Boynton.

Burton Agnes is a picturesque village, between Bridlington and Driffield, in the East Hiding of Yorkshire. It has some pretty cottages, a handsome church, containing several splendid tombs of the Boynton, Griffiths, and Somerville families (one of the last dating back to 1336), and the grand old Hall, the residence of the Boyntons. The village, which is chiefly, if not entirely, owned by the Boyntons, lies on the slope of the Wolds ; a long chain of hills sweep round it from Flamborough Head on the north, whence extensive views over the lowlands of Holderness are obtainable. The Hall, says Mr. F. Ross, from whose interesting article in the Leeds Mercury much of the following information is derived, is a large and picturesque building of red brick, with stone quoins a mixture of the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean styles, with a long broken façade, ornamented with octagonal bays in the wings, and mullioned windows.

In the interior are a grand hall, with a fine carved screen, behind which is the magnificent staircase ; a noble gallery, containing a choice collection of paintings an apartment which has not its equal for many miles. All the chief apartments are profusely ornamented with carved woodwork, over the fire-place of the hall being a curious specimen representing ” The Empire of Death.” Inigo Jones is said to have designed the Hall, and Rubens to have decorated some portions of the interior. Inwardly and outwardly, this English home is as magnificent as it it curious yet comfortable. From the grand entrance gateway, an avenue of yew-trees stretches away to the porch of the Hall, producing a picturesque effect.

Yew trees were associated with death in English folklore. Yew was required to make longbows, but its leaves are poisonous to sheep. The way around this was to grow Yew trees in graveyards, which were fenced to stop sheep defecating on graves. Eventually the association of yew to death developed, and so, it’s not creepy to have a line of yew trees, but it is atmospheric.

Standing, as the edifice does, on an elevation, the panorama seen over the surrounding neighbourhood from its windows is both grand and impressive. Altogether, Burton Agnes Hall might be deemed, in every respect, a desirable dwelling. But there is a skeleton, or, rather, a portion of one, in this splendid mansion. In the course of centuries the estates had passed, by descent, into possession of the De Somervilles, Griffiths, and Boynton families, until they became vested in the persons of three sisters, co-heiresses. A painting at the Hall, represents these three ladies in costumes of the Elizabethan period ; and in one of the upper rooms is the portrait of a lady, apparently one of these three, the bodily representative of the spirit which haunts the ancient mansion, and who is familiarly and irreverently called “Awd Nance,” by the domestics. The skull of this lady is preserved at the Hall, much against the will, it is averred, of the inhabitants thereof, but it is more than mortal dare do to remove it. When this relic of mortality is left quietly upon its resting-place, all goes well ; but whenever any attempt is made to remove it, most diabolical disturbances and unearthly noises are raised in the house, and last until it is restored.

I’m never really clear in these sorts of stories why people feel the need to throw the skull away. Juts leave it alone and everything is fine. What’s the upside of taking it out of its little cupboard? This one used to rest on the dining table, but if you’re rich enough to have a country house, how can you not just eat in another room? In the changeover from Catholicism to Protestantism, sure, maybe, but otherwise…leave it alone.

The story to account for these phenomena, as told by Mr. Ross, is as follows :

” The three ladies, co-heiresses of the estate of Burton Agnes, were in possession of considerable wealth, and had : very exalted ideas of the dignity of the family. For a while they resided in the ancient mansion, which had been the home of several generations of Griffiths and Somervilles ; but it had become dilapidated, and was altogether out of fashion with the existing Elizabethan style of architecture, now merging into the Jacobean, and the three ladies began to think it altogether too mean for the residence of so important a family as theirs. They had many consultations on the subject, and, at length, determined to erect a hall in such a style as should eclipse the splendour of all the mansions in the neighbourhood, even that of the mighty Earls of Northumberland at Leckonfield, a few miles distant.

The most active promoter of the scheme was Anne, the younger sister, who could talk, think, and dream of nothing but the magnificent home to be erected for themselves and their descendants. Money they had in abundance. They called in the best architects of the day to furnish designs ; bricklayers, masons, and carpenters were soon at work building up the mansion, and then, for the decorative portions, the genius of Inigo Jones and the talents of Rubens were employed on whatever portion of the interior that was susceptible of artistic treatment. In process of time it emerged from the hands of artists and workmen, like a
palace erected by the Genii of the Arabian Nights, a palace encrusted throughout on walls, roof, and furniture with the most exquisite carvings and sculptures of the most skilled masters of the age, and radiant with the most glowing tints of the pencil of Peter Paul.

“Of the three sisters, Anne took the most lively interest in the new house. She witnessed the uprising walls, the development of the architectural features of the grand façade, and the outgrowth of the chiselled design of the interior under the cunning handicraft of the carvers and sculptors, with the most rapturous “delight ; and, when it was completed, could never sufficiently admire its symmetrical proportions, noble hall, stately gallery, and manifold artistic enrichments.

” Some little time after its completion and occupation by its lady owners, Anne, the enthusiast, paid an afternoon visit to the St. Quentin’s, at Harpham, about nightfall proposing to return home. She was wholly unattended, excepting by a dog, as the houses were only about a mile apart, singing merrily as she went along. As she approached St. John’s Well, she perceived two ruffianly-looking mendicants stretched on the grass by its side. This was a very numerous and dangerous class, since the dissolution of the monasteries, at whose gates they had been supplied with food, and lived by traversing the country, and going from abbey to priory and priory to abbey, being generally too lazy to apply themselves to work ; and although parochial Poor Laws had been passed in the two or three preceding reigns, it had been left in a great measure to the people to contribute to the poor funds, more by way of a benevolence than as a compulsory rate, so that many parishes shirked the collection altogether, and thus the roads of the country and the streets of the towns swarmed with sturdy beggars, who would take no denial when they were able to demand alms by threats and violence.

The lady approached them with some tremor, but did not feel much fear, as she was still within the precincts of Harpham, and not far from those who would afford her protection. The men rose as she came up to them, and asked alms, and she drew out her purse and gave them a few coins ; but in doing so the glitter of her finger-ring attracted their notice, and, in a threatening tone, they demanded that it should be given up to them. As it was a heirloom that she had inherited from her mother, she valued it above all price, and declared she could not, on any account, give up her mother’s ring. ‘ Mother or no mother,’ replied one of the men in a gruff
tone, we mean to have it, and if you do not bestow it freely, we must take it.’ So saying, he seized her hand and attempted to draw off the ring.

At this manifestation of violence she screamed aloud for help, when the other ruffian, exclaiming, ‘Stop that noise !’ struck her a blow on the head with his stick, and she fell senseless to the earth. Her screams had reached the village, and some rustics came hurrying up, upon which the villains made a hasty retreat, without being able to get the ring from her finger.

She was found, as it was supposed, dead or dying, and was carried carefully to Harpham Hall, where, under the care of Lady St. Quentin and the application of restoratives, she recovered sufficiently to be removed the following day to her home. Although she was restored to sensibility she was suffering acutely from the blow, and was placed in bed in a state of utter prostration ; she remained so for a few days, becoming weaker gradually, until, despite the tender nursing of her sisters, and the best medical advice that York could afford, she fell a victim to the brutal attack of the robbers, and was buried in the church of Burton Agnes.

During these few intervening days she was alternately sensible and delirious ; but in whichever state she was, her thoughts seemed to turn on what had latterly been the passion of her life her affection for her fondly loved home. ‘Sisters,’ said she, ‘never shall I sleep peacefully in my grave in the churchyard unless I, or a part of me at least, remain here in our beautiful home as long as it lasts. Promise me this, dear sisters, that when I am dead my head shall be taken from my body
and preserved within these walls. Here let it for ever remain, and on no account be removed. And understand and make it known to those who in future shall become possessors of the house, that if they disobey this my last injunction, my spirit shall, if so able and so permitted, make such a disturbance within its walls as to render it uninhabitable for others so long as my head is divorced from its home’ Her sisters, to pacify her, promised to obey her instructions, but without any intention of keeping the promise, and the body was laid entire and unmutilated under the pavement of the church.

” About a week after the interment, as the inhabitants of the Hall were preparing one evening to retire to rest, they were alarmed by a sudden and loud crash in one of the up-stairs rooms ; the two sisters and the domestics rushed up together in great consternation, but after much trembling came to the conclusion that some heavy piece of furniture had fallen, and the men-servants, of whom there were two in the house, went up-stairs to ascertain the cause of the noise, but were not able to find anything to account for it. The household became still more alarmed at this report, and for a long time were afraid to go to bed; but hearing nothing further, at length retired, and the night passed away without further disturbance.

Nothing more occurred until the same night in the following week, when the inmates were aroused from sleep in the dead of the night by a loud clapping to, seemingly, of half a dozen of the doors. With fear-stricken countenances and hair standing on end, they struck lights and mustered up sufficient courage to go over the house. They found all the doors closed, but for a while the clapping continued, but always in a different part of the house, remote from where they were. At length the disturbance ceased, and as nothing untoward followed the noise of the preceding A-eek, they again ventured to return to their beds, where they lay sleepless and quaking with fear until daylight. “Another week of quietness passed away, but on the corresponding night they were again disturbed by what appeared to be a crowd of persons hurrying along the galleries and up and down the stairs, which was followed by a sound of groaning as from a dying person. On this occasion they were all too terrified to leave their beds, but lay crouching under the bed-clothes perspiring with fear. The following day the female servants fled from the house, refusing to remain any longer in companionship with the ghost which, they all concluded, was the author of the unearthly noises.

The two ladies took counsel with their neighbour, Mr., afterwards Sir, William St. Quintin and the Vicar of the parish. In the course of conversation it occurred to them that the noises took place on the same night of the week that Anne had died, and the sisters remembered her dying words, and their promise that some part of her body should be preserved in the house ; also her threat that if her wish were not complied with, she would, if she were so permitted, render the house uninhabitable for others, and it appeared evident that she was carrying out her threat.

Honestly, a dry skull in a box seems an easy room-mate to have. I’ve had room mates who have left food in the kitchen so long it fermented, who have left blood all over the place…this just seems easy.

The question then was : What was to be done in order to carry out her wish, and the clergyman suggested that the coffin should be opened to see if that could throw any light on the matter. This was done the following day, when a ghastly spectacle presented itself. The body lay without any marks of corruption or decay, but the head was disengaged from the trunk, and appeared to be rapidly assuming the semblance of a fleshless skull.

This was reported to the ladies, who, although terrified at the idea, agreed to the suggestion of the Vicar that the skull should be brought to the house, which was done, and so long as it was allowed to remain undisturbed on the table where it was placed, the house was not troubled
with visitations of a ghostly nature.

This isn’t the main dining table, it’s a side table. I thought she was eventually put in a little box under the stairs ,but that’s Charlie, who is a different screaming skull. We need to do something with these things for Ars Magi9ca: they seem useful as an alarm or a news distribution system. Skulls screaming from the top of one house to another. A high pitched warbling like dialling into the internet in the 1990s.

Terrified ladies? They know the ghost. They know what she wants, and it’s easy to grant. She’s even making her skull portable by severing it herself via some sort of rapid decay. Honestly she’s being massively accommodating for a wronged spectre and I’m entirely on her side.

“Many attempts have since been made to rid the Hall of the skull, but without success ; as whenever it has been removed the ghostly knockings have been resumed, and no rest or peace enjoyed until it has been restored. On one occasion a maid-servant threw it from the window upon a passing load of manure, but from that moment the horses were not able to move the waggon an inch, and despite the vigorous whipping of the waggoner, all their efforts were in vain, until the servant confessed what she had done, when the skull was brought back into the house, and the horses drew the waggon along without the least difficulty.

Were I a powerful haunting spirit, and were I to ask for as little as to be allowed to stay in my own home, were I to be thrown into a cart of animal manure, I would do rather more than stop the cart from moving. Nance is a model of forbearance.

On another, one of the Boyntons caused it to be buried in the garden, when the most dismal wailings and cries kept the house in a state of disquietude and alarm until it was dug up and restored to its place in the Hall, when they ceased.”

I hope the wailings were “Young man! Get your fecking spade and come dig me up right now, or so, help me, I shall haunt you!” Once again, I’m team Nance all the way on this.

A correspondent of Mr. Ross, to whom, indeed, that gentleman was indebted for some of the particulars already given, furnished him with the following account of his own personal experience of the Burton Agnes hauntings, gained during a night spent at the Hall. He writes :
” Some forty years ago, John Bilton, a cousin of mine, came from London on a visit to the neighbourhood, and having a relative, Matthew Potter, who was a gamekeeper on the estate, and resided in the Hall, he paid him a visit, and was invited to pass the night there. Potter, however, told him that, according to popular report, the house was haunted, and that if he
were afraid of ghosts he had better sleep elsewhere ; but John, who was a dare-devil sort of a fellow, altogether untinctured by superstitious fancies, replied,

‘ Afraid ! not I, indeed ; I care not how many ghosts there may be in the house so long as they do not molest me.’

Potter then told him of the skull and the portrait of ‘ Awd Nance,’ and asked him if he would like to see the latter ; the skull, it would appear, from what followed, was not then in the house. He replied that he should like to see the picture, and they passed into the room where it was hanging, and Potter held up the candle before the portrait, when, in a moment, and without any
apparent cause, the candle became extinguished, and defied all attempts at blowing in again and they were obliged to grope their way to the bed-room in the dark.

They occupied the same bed, and Potter was soon asleep and snoring ; but Bilton, ruminating over the tale of the skull and the curious circumstance of the sudden extinguishment of the light in front of the portrait of the ghost, lay awake. When he had lain musing for half an hour, he heard a shuffling of feet outside the chamber door, which at first he ascribed to the servants going to bed, but as the sounds did not cease, but kept increasing, he nudged his bed-fellow, and said, Matty, what the deuce is all that row about? ‘

“Jinny Yewlats” (owls), replied his companion, in a half-waking tone, and turning over, again began to snore.

The noises became more uproarious, and it seemed as if ten or a dozen persons were scuffling about in the passage just outside, and rushing in and out of the rooms, slamming
the doors with great violence, upon which he gave his friend another vigorous nudge in the ribs, exclaiming, ‘ Wake up, Matty ; don’t you hear that confounded row ? What does it all mean?’

‘ Jinnv Yewlats,’ again muttered his bed-fellow.

‘Jinny Yewlats,’ replied Bilton, ‘Jinnv Yewlats can’t make such an infernal uproar as that.’

Matty, who was now more awakened, listened a moment, and then said, ‘ It’s Awd Nance, but
ah nivver take any notice of her,’ and he rolled over and again began to snore.

Sensible young man.

After this ‘ the fun grew fast and furious,’ a struggling fight seemed to be going on outside, and the clapping of the doors reverberated in the passage like thunder-claps. He expected every moment to see the chamber door fly open, and Awd Nance with a troop of ghosts come rushing in, but no such catastrophe occurred, and after a while the noises ceased, and about daylight he fell asleep.

Note that in period, people do not imagine ghosts walking through doors. They, instead, magically make them burst open.

“The writer adds that his cousin, though a fear-nought and a thorough disbeliever in the supernatural, told him that he never passed so fearful a night before in his life, and would not sleep another night in the place if he were offered the Hall itself for doing so. He further adds
that his cousin was a thoroughly truthful man, who might be implicitly believed, and that he had the narrative from his own lips on the following day.”

“The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain” by John Henry Ingram – Part One

When I had COVID, my “use it or lose it” style of podcasting plan led to me recording three episodes. I have virtually no idea what’s in them, except that I swept a history of English haunted houses for stories that are Elizabethan and before. Thanks to the Librivox recording teams.

Usually I script in advance, but this time I’ll be transposing in the recordings and adding my comments in bold. I wonder what they will be? Off on an adventure, dear listeners!

BISHAM ABBEY

A character about to be discussed is Elizabeth Cook. Her brother-in-law is Lord Burghley, at the centre of the court. She was a famous poetess. Her family thought teaching your girls was a Protestant duty. Her brothers we’ll skip for this but her sister married Sir Nicholas Bacon, so Elizabeth was the aunt of the magician Sir Francis Bacon. Her own husband translated The Book of the Courtier into English and was ambassador to France. Her other sister married a man who was ambassador to Scotland for a while. So she’s very well connected.

Bisham Abbey, in Berkshire, was formerly the family seat of the Hobbys, and about the first half of the sixteenth century was in possession of Sir Thomas Hobby, or Hoby, a man of no slight reputation for learning in those days. He married Elizabeth, the third daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, who shared the general fame of her family for intellectual qualifications. When Sir Thomas went to France as ambassador for Queen Elizabeth his wife accompanied him, and on his death abroad in 1566 Lady Hoby brought his body home and had it interred in a mortuary chapel at Bisham. Subsequently she married John, Lord Russell.

By her first husband the Lady Hoby is said to have had a son who, when quite young, displayed the most intense antipathy to every kind of study ; and such was his repugnance to writing, that in his fits of obstinacy he would wilfully and deliberately blot his writing-books. This conduct enraged his mother, whose whole family were noted for their scholastic attainments, and who, like her three sisters, Lady Burleigh, Lady Bacon, and Lady Killigrew, was not only an excellent, classical scholar, but was also married to a man of literary note, that she chastised the unfortunate lad with all the violence at that period permitted to, and practised by, parents on their children. She beat him, according to the old legend, again and again on the shoulders and head, and at last so severely and unmercifully that he died.

It is commonly reported that, as a punishment for her unnatural cruelty, her spirit is doomed to haunt Bisham Abbey, the house where this cruel act of manslaughter was perpetrated. Several persons have seen the apparition, the likeness of which, both as regards feature and dress, to a pale portrait of her ladyship in antique widow’s weeds still remaining at Bisham, is said to be exact and life-like. She is reported to glide through a certain chamber, in the act of washing bloodstains from her hands, and on some occasions her apparition is said to have been seen in the grounds of the old mansion.

A very remarkable occurrence in connection with this narrative took place some years ago, according to Dr. Lee, author of Glimpses of the Supernatural. ”In taking down an old oak window-shutter of the latter part of the sixteenth century,” he states that ” a packet of antique copy-books of that period were discovered pushed into the wall between the joists of the skirting, and several of these books on which young Hobby’s name was written were covered with blots, thus supporting the ordinary tradition.”

This next one reminds me a faerie story. Not a faerie tale, but one of the folk stories which shows up repeatedly. Terry Pratchett does a version with a happier ending.

LITTLECOT HOUSE

Littlecot House, or Hall as it is sometimes called, the ancient seat of the Darrells, is two miles from Hungerford in Berkshire. It stands in a low and lonely situation, and is thoroughly typical in appearance of a haunted dwelling. On three sides it is surrounded by a park, which spreads over the adjacent hill, and on the fourth by meadows, through which runs the river Kennet. A thick grove of lofty trees stands on one side of the gloomy building, which is of great antiquity, and would appear to have been erected towards the close of the age of feudal warfare, when defence came to be no longer the principal object in a country mansion. The interior of the house, however, presents many objects appropriate to feudal times.

The hall is very spacious, paved by stones, and lighted by large transon windows. The walls are hung with coats-of-mail and helmets, and on every side are quantities of old-fashioned pistols and guns, and other suitable ornaments for an old baronial dwelling. Below the cornice at the end of the hall, hangs a row of leathern jerkins, made in the form of shirts, and supposed to have been worn as armour by the retainers of the Darrell family, to whom the old Hall belonged. An enormous oaken table, reaching nearly from one end of the chamber to the other, might have feasted the entire neighbourhood, and an appendage to one end of it made it answer at other times for the old game of shuffleboard. The rest of the furniture is in a corresponding style, or was a few years ago ; but the most noticeable article is an old chair of cumbrous workmanship, constructed of wood, curiously carved, with a high back and triangular seat ; it is said to have been used by Judge Popham, in the days of Elizabeth.

The entrance into the hall of this ancient mansion is at one end by a low door, communicating with a passage that leads from the outer door in the front of the house to a quadrangle within ; at the other it opens upon a gloomy stair-case, by which you ascend to the first floor, and, passing the doors of some bed-chambers, enter a narrow gallery which extends along the back front of the house from one end to the other of it. This gallery is hung with old family portraits, chiefly in Spanish costumes of the sixteenth century. In one of the bedchambers, which you pass in going towards the gallery, is a bedstead with blue furniture, that time has now made dingy and threadbare ; and in the bottom of one of the bed-curtains you are shown a place where a small piece has been cut out and sewn in again.

To account for this curious circumstance, and for the apparitions which tenant this haunted chamber, the following terrible tale is told : “It was on a dark rainy night in the month of November, that an old midwife sat musing by her cottage fireside, when on a sudden she was startled by a loud knocking at the door. On opening it she found a horseman, who told her that her assistance was required immediately by a person of rank, and that she should be handsomely rewarded, but that there were reasons for keeping the affair a strict secret, and therefore she must submit to be blind-folded, and to be conducted in that condition to the bed-chamber of the lady. With some hesitation the midwife consented; the horseman bound her eyes, and placed her on a pillion behind him.

After proceeding in silence for many miles, through rough and dirty lanes, they stopped and the midwife was led into a house which, from the length of her walkthrough the apartments, as well as the sounds about her, she discovered to be the seat of wealth and power. ” When the bandage was removed from her eyes, she found herself in a bed-chamber, in which were the lady on whose account she had been sent for, and a man of haughty and ferocious aspect. The lady was delivered of a fine boy. Immediately the man commanded the midwife to give him the child, and, catching it from her, he hurried across the room, and threw it on the back of the fire that was blazing in the chimney. The child, however, was strong, and by its struggles rolled itself off upon the hearth, when the ruffian again seized it with fury, and, in spite of the intercession of the midwife, and the more piteous entreaties of the mother, thrust it under the grate, and, raking the live coals upon it, soon put an end to its life. ” The midwife, after spending some time in affording all the relief in her power to the wretched mother, was told that she must be gone. Her former conductor appeared, who again bound her eyes, and conveyed her behind him to her own home; he then paid her handsomely and departed.

The midwife was strongly agitated by the horrors of the preceding night, and she immediately made a deposition of the facts before a magistrate. Two circumstances afforded hopes of detecting the house in which the crime had been committed ; one was, that the midwife, as she sat by the bed-side, had, with a view to discover the place, cut out a piece of the bed-urtain, and sewn it in again ; the other was, that as she had descended the staircase she had counted the steps. Some suspicion fell upon one Darrell, at that time the proprietor of Littlecot House and the domain around it. The house was examined, and identified by the midwife, and Darrell was tried at Salisbury for the murder. By corrupting his judge, he escaped the sentence of the law, but broke his neck by a fall from his horse in hunting, a few months afterwards. The place where this happened is still known by the name of Darrell’s Stile, a spot to be dreaded by the peasant whom the shades of evening have overtaken on his way.”

This is the fearsome legend connected with Littlecot House, the circumstances related are declared to be true, and to have happened in the reign of Elizabeth. With such a tale attached to its guilty wails, no wonder that the apparition of a woman with dishevelled hair, in white garments, and bearing a babe in her arms, haunts that gloomy chamber.

LONDON : THE TOWER

There is no place in the kingdom one would deem more likely to be haunted than that strange conglomeration of rooms, castles, and dungeons, known as the Tower of London. For many centuries it has been the scene of numberless deaths by violence, some by public execution and others by private murder, until it is scarcely metaphorical language to declare that its walls have been built out of human bones and cemented by human blood. That ghosts and spectres have haunted its weird precincts no believer in the supernatural can doubt; and, if we may credit all that has been told of it of late years, its apparitions are not yet quite beings of the past.

Here I’ll break in to remove one story. Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels in 1860, wrote down two stories. One happened to him, and this makes it out of period. Also, it was more a weird illusion than a ghost. His second story, which has better form for roleplaying.

”One of the night-sentries at the Jewel Office,” records our authority, ” was alarmed by a figure like a huge bear issuing from underneath the jewel-room door, ”as ghostly a door as ever was opened to or closed on a doomed man. ” He thrust at it with his bayonet, which stuck in the door, even as my chair dinted the wainscot ; he dropped in a fit, and was carried senseless to the guard-room. ” When on the morrow I saw the unfortunate soldier in the main guard-room,” continues Mr. Swifte, “his fellow-sentinel was also there, and testified to having seen him on his post just before the alarm, awake and alert, and even spoken to him. Moreover, I then heard the poor man tell his own story. … I saw him once again on the following day, but changed beyond my recognition ; in another day or two the brave and steady soldier, who would have mounted a breach or led a forlorn hope with unshaken nerves, died at the presence of a shadow.” Mr. George Offor, referring to this tragedy, speaks of strange noises having also been heard when the figure resembling a bear was seen by the doomed soldier.

When the author talks of the soldier being willing to mount a forlorn hope, that’s a military term. The forlorn hope is the first line of infantry through a breach in a castle wall during a siege. Their chances of survival are not great, so people who participate are considered particularly brave. Some get great rewards for being members: others, for example convicts with capital sentences, are given commutations if they are victorious.

LOWTHER HALL

According to Mr. J. Sullivan, in his Cumberland and Westmoreland, the latter county never produced a more famous spectre, or ” bogie,” to give the local term, than Jemmy Lowther, well known for want of a more appropriate name, as the “bad Lord Lonsdale.

Note the intermixing of faerie and ghostly elements here. In Ars Magica and Magonomia, a bogie, which is the local for boggart, is a sort of faerie. That ism however, clearly not what’s meant here.

Infamous as a man, he was famous as a ghost. This notorious character, who is described as a modern impersonation of the worst and coarsest feudal baron ever imported into England by the Conqueror, became a still greater terror to the neighbourhood after death than he had ever been during his life. So strongly had superstitious dread of the deceased nobleman impregnated the popular mind, that it was asserted as an absolute fact, that his body was buried with difficulty, and that whilst the clergyman was praying over it it very nearly knocked him from his desk.

When placed in his grave, Lord Lonsdale’s power of creating alarm was not interred with his bones. There were continual disturbances in the hall and noises in the stables ; and, according to popular belief, neither men nor animals were suffered to rest. His Lordship’s phantom ”coach and six ” is still remembered and spoken of, and still believed in by some to be heard dashing across the country. Nothing is said of the” bad lord’s” shape or appearance, and it is doubtful whether the spectre has ever appeared to sight, but it has frequently made itself audible.

The hall became almost uninhabitable on account of the dead man’s pranks, and out of doors was, for a long time, almost equally dreaded, as even there there was constant danger of encountering the miscreant ghost. Of late years this eccentric spirit appears to have relinquished its mortal haunts, and by the peasantry is believed to have been laid for ever under a large rock called Wallow Crag.

So, first an apology: that’s not an Elizabethan ghost because it has a carriage and six. It’s Jacobean at earliest. Quick plug for the carriages episode. Note that ghosts in many Elizabethan stories are material, so you can trap them under a big rock.

CLEGG HALL

In Roby and Wilkinson’s suggestive work on Lancashire Legends, to which we are indebted for some of the traditions in this volume, is an account of the Clegg Hall tragedy. The story, as given in the work just referred to, is as follows : ”Clegg Hall, about two miles N.E. from Rochdale stands on the only estate within the parish of Whalley which still continues in the local family name. On this site was the old house built by Bernulf de Clegg and Quenilda his wife, as early as the reign of Stephen. Not a vestige of it remains. The present comparatively modern erection was built by Theophilus Ashton, of Kochdale, a lawyer, and one of the Ashtons of Little Clegg, about the year 1620. After many changes of occupants, it is now in part used as a country ale-house; other portions are inhabited by the labouring classes, who find employment in that populous manufacturing district. It is the property of the Fentons, by purchase from the late John Entwisle, Esq., of Foxholes. ”

To Clegg Hall, or rather what was once the site of that ancient house, tradition points through the dim vista of past ages as the scene of an unnatural and cruel tragedy. It was in the square, low, dark mansion, built in the reign of Stephen, that this crime is said to have been perpetrated, one of those half-timbered houses, called ‘post-and-petrel and having huge main timbers, crooks, etc, the interstices being wattle and filled with a compost of clay and chopped straw. Of this rude and primitive architecture were the houses of the English gentry in former ages. Here, then, was that horrible deed perpetrated which gave rise to the stories yet extant relating to the ‘ Clegg Hall boggarts.

’The prevailing tradition is not exact as to the date of its occurrence ; but it is said that some time about the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a tragedy resembling that of the ‘ Babes in the Wood ‘ was perpetrated here. A wicked uncle destroyed the lawful heirs of Clegg Hall and estates two orphan children that were left to his care by throwing them over a balcony into the moat, in order that he might seize on their inheritance. Ever afterwards so the story goes the house was the reputed haunt of a troubled and angry spirit, until means were taken for its removal, or rather expulsion.

”Of course, this ‘ boggart,’ ” says Mr. Wilkinson,” could not be the manes of the murdered children, or it would have been seen as a plurality of spirits; but was, in all likelihood, the wretched ghost of the ruffianly relative, whose double crime would not let him rest in the peace of the grave. Even after the original house was almost wholly pulled clown, and that of A.D 1620 erected on its site, the ‘ boggart’ still haunted the ancient spot, and its occasional visitations were the source of the great alarm and annoyance to which the inmates were subjected.

From these slight materials, Mr. Roby has woven one of those fictions, full of romantic incident, which have rendered his Traditions of Lancashire so famous. ”It is only just to state,” remarks Mr. Wilkinson, ” that the story of ‘ Clcgg Hall Boggart‘ was communicated to Mr. Roby by Mr William Nuttall, of Rochdale, author of Le Voyageur, and the composer of a ballad on the tradition. In this ballad, entitled ‘ Sir Roland and the Clegg Hall Boggart,’ Mr. Nuttall makes Sir Roland murder the children in bed with a dagger. Remorse eventually drove him mad, and he died raving during a violent storm. The Hall was ever after haunted by the children’s ghosts, and also by demons, till St. Antonea (St Anthony) with a relic from the Virgin’s shrine, exorcised and laid the evil spirits.”

To this meagre if suggestive account of a popular story, may be added, that in a curious manuscript volume, now, or recently, the property of Dr. Charles Clay, of Manchester, Mr. Nuttall notes that ” many ridiculous tales were told of the two boggarts of Clegg Hall, by the country people.” That there were two, all local accounts would seem to testify. ” At one time, proceeds Mr. Nuttall, “ they (the country people) unceasingly importuned a pious monk in the neighbourhood to exorcise or lay the ghosts,’ to which request he consented. Having provided himself with a variety of charms and spells, he boldly entered on his undertaking, and in a few hours brought the ghosts to a parley. They demanded, as a condition of future quiet (the sacrifice of) a body and a soul. The spectators(who could not see the ghosts), on being informed of their desire, were petrified, none being willing to become the victim. The cunning monk told the tremblers:’ Bring me the body of a cock, and the sole of a shoe.’ This being done, the spirits were forbidden to ‘revisit the pale glimpses of the moon till the whole of the sacrifice was consumed. Thus ended the first laying of the Clegg Hall boggarts.”

Once again that sounds a bit faerie. This isn’t bell book and candle or a version of unction.

Unfortunately, the plan of laying the ghosts adopted by the wily priest has not proved; permanently successful ; whether the “sacrifice” has been wholly consumed, or the fact that the spirit of the demand not being truly acceded to is the cause, is, of course, unknown, but, for some reason or other, the two ghosts continue to walk, and the belief in their appearance is as complete and as general as ever.

CUMNOR HALL

This recording is by Alan Mapstone, by the way. Cumnor Hall is important in the Magonomia setting because this is the “JFK magic bullet big conspiracy theory place” where people say Elizabeth put out a hit on Robert Dudley’s wife, or Dudley put out a hit on his own wife, or she was ensorcelled to throw herself down the stairs. The Amy Robsart we are meeting here is Dudley’s wife and she is the impediment to him marrying the Queen. Robsart is her maiden name and she didn’t use it after marriage so I’m not sure why it is being used here.

Cumnor Hall was a large, quadrangular building, ecclesiastical in style, having formerly belonged to the dissolved Monastery of Abingdon, near which Berkshiretown it was situated. It has acquired a romantic interest from the poetic glamour flung over it by Mickle, in his ballad of Cumnor Hall, and by Sir Walter Scott, in his novel of Kenilworth. Both authors allude to it as the scene of Lady Amy Robsart’s murder, and, although the contemporary coroner’s jury pronounced the lady’s death to have been accidental, and modern antiquarians endeavour to exonerate Lord Robert Dudley (afterwards Earl of Leicester) from having bad any hand in his wife’s tragic end, the matter is still enveloped in mystery.

According to the evidence given before the Coroner, Lady Dudley, on Sunday, the 8th of September, 1560, had ordered all her household to go to a fair then being held at Abingdon. Mrs. Odingsell, her companion, hadr emonstrated with her for this order, observing that the day was not a proper one for decent folks to go to a fair; whereupon her Ladyship grew very angry, and said, “All her people should go.”” And they went, leaving only Lady Dudley and two other women in the house. Upon their return the unfortunate lady was found dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, but whether fallen by accident, or through suicide, or flung there by assassins, is, seemingly, an unfathomable mystery.

Sir Walter Scott, taking Mickle’s ballad for his authority, assumed that a foul murder had been committed, and, in his romance of Kenilworth, gives the following dramatic but purely imaginative account of the affair. Lady Dudley, miscalled the Countess of Leicester, is described as imprisoned in an isolated tower, approached only by a narrow drawbridge. Halfway across this drawbridge is a trap-door, so arranged that any person stepping upon it would be precipitated below into a darksome abyss.

Varney, the chief villain of the novel, rides into the courtyard and gives a peculiar kind of whistle, which Amy recognises, and, deeming her husband is coming, rushes out, steps on the trap-door, and falls headlong down. ” Look down into the vault,” says Varney to Foster ; ” what seest thou ? ”

“I see only a heap of white clothes, like a snow-drift,” said Foster. ”Oh, God ! she moves her arm!’

“Hurl something down upon her: thy gold chest, Tony, it is a heavy one.”

The imputation of this terrible crime, derived by Scott from Mickle, was obtained, by the latter, from Ashmole’s Antiqaities of Berkshire, the compiler of which work is said to have found the accusation against Lord Dudley in a book styled Leicester’s Commonwealth, a publication published in 1584, four years before Dudley’s death, and publicly condemned by the Privy Council as an infamous and scandalous libel.

It is interesting to know that Amy Robsart, who is believed to have been born at Stansfield Hall, Norfolk, a house which obtained a fearful notoriety some years ago as the scene of the murder of the Jermyns by Rush, was married publicly at Sheen, in Surrey, on 4th June 1550, instead of clandestinely, as generally stated. King Edward the Sixth, then only eleven years old, kept a little diary (preserved in the British Museum), and, says Canon Jackson, to whom we are indebted for much of the information given here, therein alludes to the marriage in these terms : ” 1550, June 4. Sir Robert Dudeley, third sonne to th’ Erie of Warwick, married S. Jon. Robsartes daughter, after wich mariage, ther were certain gentlemen that did strive who shuld first take away a goose’s head which was hanged alive on two cross posts.”

Although the jury and Lady Dudley’s relatives agreed to accept the poor woman’s death as accidental, the country folk about Cumnor would not forego their idea that foul play had been resorted to. Ever since the fatal event, the villagers have asserted that ” Madam Dudley’s ghost did use to walk in Cumnor Park, and that it walked so obstinately that it took no less than nine parsons from Oxford to lay her. “That they at last laid her in a pond, called ‘Madam Dudley’s Pond’; and, moreover, wonderful to relate, the water in that pond was never known to freeze afterwards.” Notwithstanding the “laying of Madam Dudley, ”however, her apparition still contrives at intervals to reappear, and he is a brave, or a foolhardy man, who dares to visit, at nightfall, the haunts of her past life. Mickle’s ballad is still applicable :

And in that Manor now no more Is cheerful feast and sprightly ball ;
For ever, since that dreary hour, Have spirits haunted Cumnor Hall.
The village maids, with fearful glance, Avoid the ancient moss grown wall;
Nor ever lead the merry dance, Among the groves of Cumnor Hall.
Full many a traveller oft hath sighed, And pensive wept the countess’s fall,
As, wandering onward, they espied The haunted towers of Cumnor Hall.”

DE BURGH CASTLE

I only want a couple of lines from this story to demonstrate a point.

On his arrival at the castle, as he was passing up the stairs, he heard a footstep behind him, and, on turning round, he perceived the same apparition. He hastily entered his room, bolted, locked, and barred the door, but, to his horror and surprise, these offered no impediment to his ghostly visitor, for the door sprang open at his touch, and he entered the room!

And there we are. Like most ghost story readers I was expecting the ghost to just fade through the door and furniture, but no. The ghost is a physical presence in the Elizabethan period and the door unlocks itself. The furniture is magically shoved aside by magic. The spirit doesn’t waft through anything.

HEATH OLD HALL

There are three Halls at Heath, near Wakefield, but the one known as the Old Hall, at present occupied by Edward Green, Esquire, is that which bears the reputation of being haunted. It is a truly magnificent and palatial pile of buildings, and has been well described to us as one of the finest specimens remaining in Yorkshire of the Elizabethan period of architecture. The Hall was built for John Kaye of Dalton. The windows were formerly emblazoned with the arms of many of the chief nobility of England, but these have disappeared, such painted glass as there is there now having been brought over by some nuns, with whom, it is said, was a Princess of Conde, who resided at the Hall during the Revolutionary troubles abroad.

Mr. John Batty, to whom we are indebted for much of the following information, says, the Kayes were succeeded in possession of the Old Hall by William Witham, Esquire. This owner died in 1593, and it is not improbable that some peculiar circumstances which attended his disease and death first obtained for the place its curious reputation. His illness, and its fatal termination, were ascribed to demoniacal agency, and a poor woman of the neighbourhood, named Mary Pannal, who lay under the suspicion of being a witch, was arrested, and executed for the supposed crime at York.

William Witham’s son, Henry, dying without issue, Heath Old Hall became the property of his sister Mary, wife of Thomas Jobson of Cudworth, whose family had grown rich upon the plunder of abbey lands, another very potent reason for an uncanny fame being acquired
by the race. Her first husband dying, Mary took for a second, Thomas Bolles, of Osberton, Nottinghamshire. Mary Bolles, whether for her loyalty or wealth is not stated, was created a baronetess of Scotland, with remainder to her heirs whatever, by James the First, in 1635, if not a solitary, still a very rare instance of such a title having been conferred.

Lady Bolles lived in great state at the Old Hall, and, after much wealth and prosperity, died there in 1662, when eighty-three. Her interment did not take place until six weeks after her
decease, she having assigned 120 pounds, a very much larger sum then than now for keeping open house for all comers during that time. Her will, only signed the day before her death, besides containing a number of charitable bequests, legacies to relatives and friends, and 200 poundsfor the erection of her tomb, further provides for the funeral festivities as follows:

“I give all my fat beeves and fat sheep to be disposed of at the discretion of my executors, whom I charge to perform it nobly, and really to bestow this, my gift in good provision ; two hogsheads of wine or more, as they shall see cause, and that several hogsheads of beer be taken care for (there being no convenience to brew). And, my bedding being plundered from me, I desire that the chambers may be well furnished with beds, borrowed for the time, for the entertaining of such as shall be thought fit lodgers.”

Beeves are cattle – things made of beef.

Besides these arrangements, Lady Bolles left 700 pound to be expended in mourning, and 400 pounds for funeral expenses, and charged her executors most earnestly to see her will exactly performed, adding that if any person interested in it obstructed them in any degree, he or she should forfeit all claim to any benefit from it.

The Old Hall fell to the share of Sir William Dalston, in right of his wife Anne, daughter of Lady Bolles by her second husband, but, after changing hands more than once, passed by purchase to John Smyth, Esquire, of Heath, from whom it descended to Captain Smyth, of the Grenadier Guards, its present possessor. The Hall and its environs, says Mr. John Batty, are beautifully described in “Emilia Monterio,” a ballad by Mr. W. H. Leatham on a young Portuguese lady who lived with the nuns when they inhabited the Hall, some sixty years ago. But the grand feature about this magnificent old Hall is that it is haunted, and by the apparition of Lady Bolles.

Her ladyship is said to walk and disturb the neighbourhood ; but her favourite resort is a fine banqueting-room, with a splendid carved stone chimneypiece, upon which are the Witham arms. Hunter, the Yorkshire antiquarian, deems that the lady’s restlessness in the grave may probably be connected with the romantic circumstances surrounding her father’s death; whilst others think it clue to the non-observance by her executors of certain clauses in her will. According to this latter account, the lady long ” walked in Heath Grove, till at length she was conjured down into a hole of the river, near the Hall, called to this day” Bolles Pit.” ” The spell, however, was not so powerful but that she still rises and makes a fuss now and then.”

A tradition, however, exists in Heath that a room in the edifice which she had had walled up for a certain period, because large sums of money had been gambled away in it, was opened before the stipulated time expired, hence the restlessness of Lady Bolles. At any rate, even now-a-days she is reported to be seen sometimes gliding along the passages of the house
she once inhabited in the flesh, whilst servants in a neighbouring residence have refused to go out after dark, as they have repeatedly seen at dusk a tall woman dressed in antiquated style in the coach-road of Heath Old Hall.

One correspondent, as evidence of the general feeling of the neighbourhood about this time-honoured apparition, informs us that when at Ledsham some time since, he was looking over the tomb in the north chancel, beneath which Lady Bolles lies buried, when two little lads whispered to him, “Don’t go there, maister, there’s t’awd Lad ! (Anglice, the Devil.)”

Let’s pause it there and come back to it next week.

Transcripts for August to October 2022

I’ve prepared and uploaded these early, so that I have the decks clear for the Magonomia Bestiary Kickstarter in late October 2022.

Cellini in Paris

This week we return to the biography of Benvenuto Cellini. At this stage Cellini has made his way to Paris and entered the service of King Francis the First. King Francis gives him use of a castle in Paris but, and this is why I included it, you’ll notice when he says someone already
lives there and he can’t get him out, the King says “Well just go and beat him up.” This is the attitude to violence that you also find in Elizabeth’s England. In Magonomia people don’t expect the law, of itself, to have strength.

After we see Cellini take over his fortress by force we skip forward a few weeks. There’s a bit of a discussion about how Cellini is working one day in his smithy when the King rocks up unannounced to have a look at how he’s doing. I’ve included that because it has a certain feeling of what a Veriditus’s magus workshop might look like in Ars Magica.

After that we skip forward an extra day and i’ve cut some bits out. Cellini is invited to, not dine, but attend the King and the Cardinal of Ferrera while they are dining. During this they ask him to make a salt cellar for the King which matches some candelabras he’s made previously. Cellini agrees to do so. The King asks how much it will cost and Cellini says it will be a thousand ducats. The thousand ducats, in this case, are not a payment. They are being melted down, so the King gives orders to his treasurer to go through and find the best pieces of “old gold”. Now
the reason old gold is important is because the French currency has been repeatedly debased so the older the gold the purer it is. The king doesn’t want his salt cellar made out of brass. Partially this is just a worth thing but also, chemically, it’s quite a good thing. Gold doesn’t affect the flavor of things, like salt, which copper does. Also copper discolours in the presence of salt

Cellini gets the thousand gold pieces, puts them in a little bread basket he’s carrying, and asks the groom of the treasurer to go and tell his young men to come and accompany him home. His young men don’t turn up. The groom offers to carry the money for Cellini. He says “No, no. I’ll carry it myself.” As he’s leaving he sees some servants whispering and fears, rightly, an ambush.

The recordings I’ve been using for these episodes have all come from Librivox. The three sections following are all by Chris Caron. Thanks to Chris and his production team.

***

ON our way to the lodgings of the King we passed before those of the Cardinal of Ferrara. Standing at his door, he called to me and said: “Our most Christian monarch has of his own accord assigned you the same appointments which his Majesty allowed the painter Lionardo da Vinci, that is, a salary of seven hundred crowns; in addition, he will pay you for all the works you do for him; also for your journey hither he gives you five hundred golden crowns, which will be paid you before you quit this place.” At the end of this announcement, I replied that those were offers worthy of the great King he was. The messenger, not knowing anything about me, and hearing what splendid offers had been made me by the King, begged my pardon over and over again…

On the day following I went to thank the King, who ordered me to make the models of twelve silver statues, which were to stand as candelabra round his table. He wanted them to represent six gods and six goddesses, and to have exactly the same height as his Majesty, which was a trifle under four cubits. Having dictated this commission, he turned to his treasurer, and asked whether he had paid me the five hundred crowns. The official said that he had received no orders to that effect. The King took this very ill, for he had requested the Cardinal to speak to him about it. Furthermore, he told me to go to Paris and seek out a place to live in, fitted for the execution of such work; he would see that I obtained it.

I got the five hundred crowns of gold, and took up my quarters at Paris in a house of the Cardinal of Ferrera. There I began, in God’s name, to work, and fashioned four little waxen models, about two-thirds of a cubit each in height. They were Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Vulcan. In this while the King returned to Paris; whereupon I went to him at once, taking my models with me, and my two prentices, Ascanio and Pagolo. On perceiving that the King was pleased with my work, and being commissioned to execute the Jupiter in silver of the height above described, I introduced the two young men, and said that I had brought them with me out of Italy to serve his Majesty; for inasmuch as they had been brought up by me, I could at the beginning get more help from them than from the Paris workmen. To this the King replied that I might name a salary which I thought sufficient for their maintenance. I said that a hundred crowns of gold apiece would be quite proper, and that I would make them earn their wages well. This agreement was concluded. Then I said that I had found a place which seemed to me exactly suited to my industry; it was his Majesty’s own property, and called the Little Nello. The Provost of Paris was then in possession of it from his Majesty; but since the Provost made no use of the castle, his Majesty perhaps might grant it me to employ in his service. [1] He replied upon the instant: “That place is my own house, and I know well that the man I gave it to does not inhabit or use it. So you shall have it for the work you have to do.” He then told his lieutenant to install me in the Nello. This officer made some resistance, pleading that he could not carry out the order. The King answered in anger that he meant to bestow his property on whom he pleased, and on a man who would serve him, seeing that he got nothing from the other; therefore he would hear no more about it. The lieutenant then submitted that some small force would have to be employed in order to effect an entrance. To which the King answered: “Go, then, and if a small force is not enough, use a great one.”

The officer took me immediately to the castle, and there put me in possession, not, however, without violence; after that he warned me to take very good care that I was not murdered. I installed myself, enrolled serving-men, and bought a quantity of pikes and partisans; but I remained for several days exposed to grievous annoyances, for the Provost was a great nobleman of Paris, and all the other gentlefolk took part against me; they attacked me with such insults that I could hardly hold my own against them. I must not omit to mention that I entered the service of his Majesty in the year 1540, which was exactly the year in which I reached the age of forty.

Note 1. This was the castle of Le Petit Nesle, on the site of which now stands the Palace of the Institute. The Provost of Paris was then Jean d’Estouteville, lord of Villebon.

XIII
THE AFFRONTS and insults I received made me have recourse to the King, begging his Majesty to establish me in some other place. He answered: “Who are you, and what is your name?” I remained in great confusion, and could not comprehend what he meant. Holding my tongue thus, the King repeated the same words a second time angrily. Then I said my name was Benvenuto. “If, then, you are the Benvenuto of whom I have heard,” replied the King, “act according to your wont, for you have my full leave to do so.” I told his Majesty that all I wanted was to keep his favour; for the rest, I knew of nothing that could harm me. He gave a little laugh, and said: “Go your ways, then; you shall never want my favour.” Upon this he told his first secretary, Monsignor di Villerois, to see me provided and accommodated with all I needed. 1

This Villerois was an intimate friend of the Provost, to whom the castle had been given. It was built in a triangle, right up against the city walls, and was of some antiquity, but had no garrison. The building was of considerable size. Monsignor di Villerois counselled me to look about for something else, and by all means to leave this place alone, seeing that its owner was a man of vast power, who would most assuredly have me killed. I answered that I had come from Italy to France only in order to serve that illustrious King; and as for dying, I knew for certain that die I must; a little earlier or a little later was a matter of supreme indifference to me.

Now Villerois was a man of the highest talent, exceptionally distinguished in all points, and possessed of vast wealth. There was nothing he would not gladly have done to harm me, but he made no open demonstration of his mind. He was grave, and of a noble presence, and spoke slowly, at his ease. To another gentleman, Monsignor di Marmagna, the treasurer of Languedoc, he left the duty of molesting me. The first thing which this man did was to look out the best apartments in the castle, and to have them fitted up for himself. I told him that the King had given me the place to serve him in, and that I did not choose it should be occupied by any but myself and my attendants. The fellow, who was haughty, bold, and spirited, replied that he meant to do just what he liked; that I should run my head against a wall if I presumed to oppose him, and that Villerois had given him authority to do what he was doing. I told him that, by the King’s authority given to me, neither he nor Villerois could do it. When I said that he gave vent to offensive language in French, whereat I retorted in my own tongue that he lied. Stung with rage, he clapped his hand upon a little dagger which he had; then I set my hand also to a large dirk which I always wore for my defence, and cried out: “If you dare to draw, I’ll kill you on the spot.” He had two servants to back him, and I had my two lads. For a moment or two Marmagna stood in doubt, not knowing exactly what to do, but rather inclined to mischief, and muttering: “I will never put up with such insults.” Seeing then that the affair was taking a bad turn, I took a sudden resolution, and cried to Pagolo and Ascanio: “When you see me draw my dirk, throw yourselves upon those serving-men, and kill them if you can; I mean to kill this fellow at the first stroke, and then we will decamp together, with God’s grace.” Marmagna, when he understood my purpose, was glad enough to get alive out of the castle.

All these things, toning them down a trifle, I wrote to the Cardinal of Ferrara, who related them at once to the King. The King, deeply irritated, committed me to the care of another officer of his bodyguard who was named Monsignor lo Iscontro d’Orbech. By him I was accommodated with all that I required in the most gracious way imaginable.

XIV
AFTER fitting up my own lodgings in the castle and the workshop with all conveniences for carrying on my business, and putting my household upon a most respectable footing, I began at once to construct three models exactly of the size which the silver statues were to be. These were Jupiter, Vulcan and Mars. I moulded them in clay, and set them well up on irons; then I went to the King, who disbursed three hundred pounds weight of silver, if I remember rightly, for the commencement of the undertaking. While I was getting these things ready, we brought the little vase and oval basin to completion, which had been several months in hand. Then I had them richly gilt, and they showed like the finest piece of plate which had been seen in France.

Afterwards I took them to the Cardinal, who thanked me greatly; and, without requesting my attendance, carried and presented them to the King. He was delighted with the gift, and praised me as no artist was ever praised before. In return, he bestowed upon the Cardinal an abbey worth seven thousand crowns a year, and expressed his intention of rewarding me too. The Cardinal, however, prevented him, telling his Majesty that he was going ahead too fast, since I had as yet produced nothing for him. The King, who was exceedingly generous, replied: “For that very reason will I put heart and hope into him.” The Cardinal, ashamed at his own meanness, said: “Sire, I beg you to leave that to me; I will allow him a pension of at least three hundred crowns when have taken possession of the abbey.” He never gave me anything; and it would be tedious to relate all the knavish tricks of this prelate. I prefer to dwell on matters of greater moment.

XV
WHEN I returned to Paris, the great favour shown me by the King made me a mark for all men’s admiration. I received the silver and began my statue of Jupiter. Many journeymen were now in my employ; and the work went onward briskly day and night; so that, by the time I had finished the clay models of Jupiter, Vulcan, and Mars, and had begun to get the silver statue forward, my workshop made already a grand show.

The King now came to Paris, and I went to pay him my respects. No sooner had his Majesty set eyes upon me than he called me cheerfully, and asked if I had something fine to exhibit at my lodging, for he would come to inspect it. I related all I had been doing; upon which he was seized with a strong desire to come. Accordingly, after this dinner, he set off with Madame de Tampes, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and some other of his greatest nobles, among whom were the King of Navarre, his cousin, and the Queen, his sister; the Dauphin and Dauphinéss also attended him; so that upon that day the very flower of the French court came to visit me. [1] I had been some time at home, and was hard at work. When the King arrived at the door of the castle, and heard our hammers going, he bade his company keep silence. Everybody in my house was busily employed, so that the unexpected entrance of his Majesty took me by surprise. The first thing he saw on coming into the great hall was myself with a huge plate of silver in my hand, which I was beating for the body of my Jupiter; one of my men was finishing the head, another the legs; and it is easy to imagine what a din we made between us. It happened that a little French lad was working at my side, who had just been guilty of some trifling blunder. I gave the lad a kick, and, as my good luck would have it, caught him with my foot exactly in the fork between his legs, and sent him spinning several yards, so that he came stumbling up against the King precisely at the moment when his Majesty arrived. The King was vastly amused, but I felt covered with confusion. He began to ask me what I was engaged upon, and told me to go on working; then he said that he would much rather have me not employ my strength on manual labour, but take as many men as I wanted, and make them do the rough work; he should like me to keep myself in health, in order that he might enjoy my services through many years to come. I replied to his Majesty that the moment I left off working I should fall ill; also that my art itself would suffer, and not attain the mark I aimed at for his Majesty. Thinking that I spoke thus only to brag, and not because it was the truth, he made the Cardinal of Lorraine repeat what he had said; but I explained my reasons so fully and clearly, that the Cardinal perceived my drift; he then advised the King to let me labour as much or little as I liked.

Note 1. These personages were Madame d’Etampes, the King’s mistress; John of Lorraine, son of Duke Renée II., who was made Cardinal in 1518; Henri d’Albret II. and Marguerite de Valois, his wife; the Duaphin, afterwards Henri II., and his wife, the celebrated Caterina de’ Medici, daughter of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino.

XVI
BEING very well satisfied with what he had seen, the King returned to his palace, after bestowing on me too many marks of favour to be here recorded. On the following day he sent for me at his dinner-hour. The Cardinal of Ferrara was there at meat with him. When I arrived, the King had reached his second course; he began at once to speak to me, saying, with a pleasant cheer, that having now so fine a basin and jug of my workmanship, he wanted an equally handsome salt-cellar to match them; and begged me to make a design, and to lose no time about it. I replied: “Your Majesty shall see a model of the sort even sooner than you have commanded; for while I was making the basin, I thought there ought to be a saltcellar to match it; therefore I have already designed one, and if it is your pleasure, I will at once exhibit my conception.” The King turned with a lively movement of surprise and pleasure to the lords in his company—they were the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the Cardinal of Ferrara—exclaiming as he did so: “Upon my word, this is a man to be loved and cherished by every one who knows him.” Then he told me that he would very gladly see my model.

I set off, and returned in a few minutes; for I had only to cross the river, that is, the Seine. I carried with me the wax model which I had made in Rome at the Cardinal of Ferrara’s request. When I appeared again before the King and uncovered my piece, he cried out in astonishment: “This is a hundred times more divine a thing that I had ever dreamed of. What a miracle of a man! He ought never to stop working.” Then he turned to me with a beaming countenance, and told me that he greatly liked the piece, and wished me to execute it in gold. The Cardinal of Ferrara looked me in the face, and let me understand that he recognised the model as the same which I had made for him in Rome. I replied that I had already told him I should carry it out for one who was worthy of it. The Cardinal, remembering my words, and nettled by the revenge he thought that I was taking on him, remarked to the King: “Sire, this is an enormous undertaking; I am only afraid that we shall never see it finished. These able artists who have great conceptions in their brain are ready enough to put the same in execution without duly considering when they are to be accomplished. I therefore, if I gave commission for things of such magnitude, should like to know when I was likely to get them.” The King replied that if a man was so scrupulous about the termination of a work, he would never begin anything at all; these words he uttered with a certain look, which implied that such enterprises were not for folk of little spirit. I then began to say my say: “Princes who put heart and courage in their servants, as your Majesty does by deed and word, render undertakings of the greatest magnitude quite easy. Now that God has sent me so magnificent a patron, I hope to perform for him a multitude of great and splendid master-pieces.” “I believe it, “ said the King, and rose from table. Then he called me into his chamber, and asked me how much gold was wanted for the salt-cellar. “A thousand crowns,” I answered. He called his treasurer at once, who was the Viscount of Orbec, and ordered him that very day to disburse to me a thousand crowns of good weight and old gold.

When I left his Majesty, I went for the two notaries who had helped me in procuring silver for the Jupiter and many other things. Crossing the Seine, I then took a small hand-basket, which one of my cousins, a nun, had given me on my journey through Florence. It made for my good fortune that I took this basket and not a bag. So then, thinking I could do the business by daylight, for it was still early, and not caring to interrupt my workmen, and being indisposed to take a servant with me, I set off alone. When I reached the house of the treasurer, I found that he had the money laid out before him, and was selecting the best pieces as the King had ordered. It seemed to me, however, that that thief of a treasurer was doing all he could to postpone the payment of the money; nor were the pieces counted out until three hours after nightfall.

I meanwhile was not wanting in despatch, for I sent word to several of my journeymen that they should come and attend me, since the matter was one of serious importance. When I found that they did not arrive, I asked the messenger if he had done my errand. The rascal of a groom whom I had sent replied that he had done so, but that they had answered that they could not come; he, however, would gladly carry the money for me. I answered that I meant to carry the money myself. But this time the contract was drawn up and signed. On the money being counted, I put it all into my little basket, and then thrust my arm through the two handles. Since I did this with some difficulty, the gold was well shut in, and I carried it more conveniently than if the vehicle had been a bag. I was well armed with shirt and sleeves of mail, and having my sword and dagger at my side, made off along the street as quick as my two legs would carry me.

ON our way to the lodgings of the King we passed before those of the Cardinal of Ferrara. Standing at his door, he called to me and said: “Our most Christian monarch has of his own accord assigned you the same appointments which his Majesty allowed the painter Lionardo da Vinci, that is, a salary of seven hundred crowns; in addition, he will pay you for all the works you do for him; also for your journey hither he gives you five hundred golden crowns, which will be paid you before you quit this place.” At the end of this announcement, I replied that those were offers worthy of the great King he was. The messenger, not knowing anything about me, and hearing what splendid offers had been made me by the King, begged my pardon over and over again. Pagolo and Ascanio exclaimed: “It is God who has helped us to get back into so honoured a go-cart!”

On the day following I went to thank the King, who ordered me to make the models of twelve silver statues, which were to stand as candelabra round his table. He wanted them to represent six gods and six goddesses, and to have exactly the same height as his Majesty, which was a trifle under four cubits. Having dictated this commission, he turned to his treasurer, and asked whether he had paid me the five hundred crowns. The official said that he had received no orders to that effect. The King took this very ill, for he had requested the Cardinal to speak to him about it. Furthermore, he told me to go to Paris and seek out a place to live in, fitted for the execution of such work; he would see that I obtained it.

I got the five hundred crowns of gold, and took up my quarters at Paris in a house of the Cardinal of Ferrera. There I began, in God’s name, to work, and fashioned four little waxen models, about two-thirds of a cubit each in height. They were Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Vulcan. In this while the King returned to Paris; whereupon I went to him at once, taking my models with me, and my two prentices, Ascanio and Pagolo. On perceiving that the King was pleased with my work, and being commissioned to execute the Jupiter in silver of the height above described, I introduced the two young men, and said that I had brought them with me out of Italy to serve his Majesty; for inasmuch as they had been brought up by me, I could at the beginning get more help from them than from the Paris workmen. To this the King replied that I might name a salary which I thought sufficient for their maintenance. I said that a hundred crowns of gold apiece would be quite proper, and that I would make them earn their wages well. This agreement was concluded. Then I said that I had found a place which seemed to me exactly suited to my industry; it was his Majesty’s own property, and called the Little Nello. The Provost of Paris was then in possession of it from his Majesty; but since the Provost made no use of the castle, his Majesty perhaps might grant it me to employ in his service. [1] He replied upon the instant: “That place is my own house, and I know well that the man I gave it to does not inhabit or use it. So you shall have it for the work you have to do.” He then told his lieutenant to install me in the Nello. This officer made some resistance, pleading that he could not carry out the order. The King answered in anger that he meant to bestow his property on whom he pleased, and on a man who would serve him, seeing that he got nothing from the other; therefore he would hear no more about it. The lieutenant then submitted that some small force would have to be employed in order to effect an entrance. To which the King answered: “Go, then, and if a small force is not enough, use a great one.”

The officer took me immediately to the castle, and there put me in possession, not, however, without violence; after that he warned me to take very good care that I was not murdered. I installed myself, enrolled serving-men, and bought a quantity of pikes and partisans; but I remained for several days exposed to grievous annoyances, for the Provost was a great nobleman of Paris, and all the other gentlefolk took part against me; they attacked me with such insults that I could hardly hold my own against them. I must not omit to mention that I entered the service of his Majesty in the year 1540, which was exactly the year in which I reached the age of forty.

Note 1. This was the castle of Le Petit Nesle, on the site of which now stands the Palace of the Institute. The Provost of Paris was then Jean d’Estouteville, lord of Villebon.

XIII

THE AFFRONTS and insults I received made me have recourse to the King, begging his Majesty to establish me in some other place. He answered: “Who are you, and what is your name?” I remained in great confusion, and could not comprehend what he meant. Holding my tongue thus, the King repeated the same words a second time angrily. Then I said my name was Benvenuto. “If, then, you are the Benvenuto of whom I have heard,” replied the King, “act according to your wont, for you have my full leave to do so.” I told his Majesty that all I wanted was to keep his favour; for the rest, I knew of nothing that could harm me. He gave a little laugh, and said: “Go your ways, then; you shall never want my favour.” Upon this he told his first secretary, Monsignor di Villerois, to see me provided and accommodated with all I needed. 1

This Villerois was an intimate friend of the Provost, to whom the castle had been given. It was built in a triangle, right up against the city walls, and was of some antiquity, but had no garrison. The building was of considerable size. Monsignor di Villerois counselled me to look about for something else, and by all means to leave this place alone, seeing that its owner was a man of vast power, who would most assuredly have me killed. I answered that I had come from Italy to France only in order to serve that illustrious King; and as for dying, I knew for certain that die I must; a little earlier or a little later was a matter of supreme indifference to me.

Now Villerois was a man of the highest talent, exceptionally distinguished in all points, and possessed of vast wealth. There was nothing he would not gladly have done to harm me, but he made no open demonstration of his mind. He was grave, and of a noble presence, and spoke slowly, at his ease. To another gentleman, Monsignor di Marmagna, the treasurer of Languedoc, he left the duty of molesting me. [2] The first thing which this man did was to look out the best apartments in the castle, and to have them fitted up for himself. I told him that the King had given me the place to serve him in, and that I did not choose it should be occupied by any but myself and my attendants. The fellow, who was haughty, bold, and spirited, replied that he meant to do just what he liked; that I should run my head against a wall if I presumed to oppose him, and that Villerois had given him authority to do what he was doing. I told him that, by the King’s authority given to me, neither he nor Villerois could do it. When I said that he gave vent to offensive language in French, whereat I retorted in my own tongue that he lied. Stung with rage, he clapped his hand upon a little dagger which he had; then I set my hand also to a large dirk which I always wore for my defence, and cried out: “If you dare to draw, I’ll kill you on the spot.” He had two servants to back him, and I had my two lads. For a moment or two Marmagna stood in doubt, not knowing exactly what to do, but rather inclined to mischief, and muttering: “I will never put up with such insults.” Seeing then that the affair was taking a bad turn, I took a sudden resolution, and cried to Pagolo and Ascanio: “When you see me draw my dirk, throw yourselves upon those serving-men, and kill them if you can; I mean to kill this fellow at the first stroke, and then we will decamp together, with God’s grace.” Marmagna, when he understood my purpose, was glad enough to get alive out of the castle.

All these things, toning them down a trifle, I wrote to the Cardinal of Ferrara, who related them at once to the King. The King, deeply irritated, committed me to the care of another officer of his bodyguard who was named Monsignor lo Iscontro d’Orbech. [3] By him I was accommodated with all that I required in the most gracious way imaginable.

Note 1. M. Nicholas de Neufville, lord of Villeroy.

Note 2. François l’Allemand, Seigneur de Marmagne.

Note 3. Le Vicomte d’Orbec. It seems that by ‘Iscontro’ Cellini meant
Viscount.

XIV

AFTER fitting up my own lodgings in the castle and the workshop with all conveniences for carrying on my business, and putting my household upon a most respectable footing, I began at once to construct three models exactly of the size which the silver statues were to be. These were Jupiter, Vulcan and Mars. I moulded them in clay, and set them well up on irons; then I went to the King, who disbursed three hundred pounds weight of silver, if I remember rightly, for the commencement of the undertaking. While I was getting these things ready, we brought the little vase and oval basin to completion, which had been several months in hand. Then I had them richly gilt, and they showed like the finest piece of plate which had been seen in France.

Afterwards I took them to the Cardinal, who thanked me greatly; and, without requesting my attendance, carried and presented them to the King. He was delighted with the gift, and praised me as no artist was ever praised before. In return, he bestowed upon the Cardinal an abbey worth seven thousand crowns a year, and expressed his intention of rewarding me too. The Cardinal, however, prevented him, telling his Majesty that he was going ahead too fast, since I had as yet produced nothing for him. The King, who was exceedingly generous, replied: “For that very reason will I put heart and hope into him.” The Cardinal, ashamed at his own meanness, said: “Sire, I beg you to leave that to me; I will allow him a pension of at least three hundred crowns when have taken possession of the abbey.” He never gave me anything; and it would be tedious to relate all the knavish tricks of this prelate. I prefer to dwell on matters of greater moment.

XV

WHEN I returned to Paris, the great favour shown me by the King made me a mark for all men’s admiration. I received the silver and began my statue of Jupiter. Many journeymen were now in my employ; and the work went onward briskly day and night; so that, by the time I had finished the clay models of Jupiter, Vulcan, and Mars, and had begun to get the silver statue forward, my workshop made already a grand show.

The King now came to Paris, and I went to pay him my respects. No sooner had his Majesty set eyes upon me than he called me cheerfully, and asked if I had something fine to exhibit at my lodging, for he would come to inspect it. I related all I had been doing; upon which he was seized with a strong desire to come. Accordingly, after this dinner, he set off with Madame de Tampes, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and some other of his greatest nobles, among whom were the King of Navarre, his cousin, and the Queen, his sister; the Dauphin and Dauphinéss also attended him; so that upon that day the very flower of the French court came to visit me. [1] I had been some time at home, and was hard at work. When the King arrived at the door of the castle, and heard our hammers going, he bade his company keep silence. Everybody in my house was busily employed, so that the unexpected entrance of his Majesty took me by surprise. The first thing he saw on coming into the great hall was myself with a huge plate of silver in my hand, which I was beating for the body of my Jupiter; one of my men was finishing the head, another the legs; and it is easy to imagine what a din we made between us. It happened that a little French lad was working at my side, who had just been guilty of some trifling blunder. I gave the lad a kick, and, as my good luck would have it, caught him with my foot exactly in the fork between his legs, and sent him spinning several yards, so that he came stumbling up against the King precisely at the moment when his Majesty arrived. The King was vastly amused, but I felt covered with confusion. He began to ask me what I was engaged upon, and told me to go on working; then he said that he would much rather have me not employ my strength on manual labour, but take as many men as I wanted, and make them do the rough work; he should like me to keep myself in health, in order that he might enjoy my services through many years to come. I replied to his Majesty that the moment I left off working I should fall ill; also that my art itself would suffer, and not attain the mark I aimed at for his Majesty. Thinking that I spoke thus only to brag, and not because it was the truth, he made the Cardinal of Lorraine repeat what he had said; but I explained my reasons so fully and clearly, that the Cardinal perceived my drift; he then advised the King to let me labour as much or little as I liked.

Note 1. These personages were Madame d’Etampes, the King’s mistress; John of Lorraine, son of Duke Renée II., who was made Cardinal in 1518; Henri d’Albret II. and Marguerite de Valois, his wife; the Duaphin, afterwards Henri II., and his wife, the celebrated Caterina de’ Medici, daughter of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino.

XVI

BEING very well satisfied with what he had seen, the King returned to his palace, after bestowing on me too many marks of favour to be here recorded. On the following day he sent for me at his dinner-hour. The Cardinal of Ferrara was there at meat with him. When I arrived, the King had reached his second course; he began at once to speak to me, saying, with a pleasant cheer, that having now so fine a basin and jug of my workmanship, he wanted an equally handsome salt-cellar to match them; and begged me to make a design, and to lose no time about it. I replied: “Your Majesty shall see a model of the sort even sooner than you have commanded; for while I was making the basin, I thought there ought to be a saltcellar to match it; therefore I have already designed one, and if it is your pleasure, I will at once exhibit my conception.” The King turned with a lively movement of surprise and pleasure to the lords in his company—they were the King of Navarre, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and the Cardinal of Ferrara—exclaiming as he did so: “Upon my word, this is a man to be loved and cherished by every one who knows him.” Then he told me that he would very gladly see my model.

I set off, and returned in a few minutes; for I had only to cross the river, that is, the Seine. I carried with me the wax model which I had made in Rome at the Cardinal of Ferrara’s request. When I appeared again before the King and uncovered my piece, he cried out in astonishment: “This is a hundred times more divine a thing that I had ever dreamed of. What a miracle of a man! He ought never to stop working.” Then he turned to me with a beaming countenance, and told me that he greatly liked the piece, and wished me to execute it in gold. The Cardinal of Ferrara looked me in the face, and let me understand that he recognised the model as the same which I had made for him in Rome. I replied that I had already told him I should carry it out for one who was worthy of it. The Cardinal, remembering my words, and nettled by the revenge he thought that I was taking on him, remarked to the King: “Sire, this is an enormous undertaking; I am only afraid that we shall never see it finished. These able artists who have great conceptions in their brain are ready enough to put the same in execution without duly considering when they are to be accomplished. I therefore, if I gave commission for things of such magnitude, should like to know when I was likely to get them.” The King replied that if a man was so scrupulous about the termination of a work, he would never begin anything at all; these words he uttered with a certain look, which implied that such enterprises were not for folk of little spirit. I then began to say my say: “Princes who put heart and courage in their servants, as your Majesty does by deed and word, render undertakings of the greatest magnitude quite easy. Now that God has sent me so magnificent a patron, I hope to perform for him a multitude of great and splendid master-pieces.” “I believe it, “ said the King, and rose from table. Then he called me into his chamber, and asked me how much gold was wanted for the salt-cellar. “A thousand crowns,” I answered. He called his treasurer at once, who was the Viscount of Orbec, and ordered him that very day to disburse to me a thousand crowns of good weight and old gold.

When I left his Majesty, I went for the two notaries who had helped me in procuring silver for the Jupiter and many other things. Crossing the Seine, I then took a small hand-basket, which one of my cousins, a nun, had given me on my journey through Florence. It made for my good fortune that I took this basket and not a bag. So then, thinking I could do the business by daylight, for it was still early, and not caring to interrupt my workmen, and being indisposed to take a servant with me, I set off alone. When I reached the house of the treasurer, I found that he had the money laid out before him, and was selecting the best pieces as the King had ordered. It seemed to me, however, that that thief of a treasurer was doing all he could to postpone the payment of the money; nor were the pieces counted out until three hours after nightfall.

I meanwhile was not wanting in despatch, for I sent word to several of my journeymen that they should come and attend me, since the matter was one of serious importance. When I found that they did not arrive, I asked the messenger if he had done my errand. The rascal of a groom whom I had sent replied that he had done so, but that they had answered that they could not come; he, however, would gladly carry the money for me. I answered that I meant to carry the money myself. But this time the contract was drawn up and signed. On the money being counted, I put it all into my little basket, and then thrust my arm through the two handles. Since I did this with some difficulty, the gold was well shut in, and I carried it more conveniently than if the vehicle had been a bag. I was well armed with shirt and sleeves of mail, and having my sword and dagger at my side, made off along the street as quick as my two legs would carry me.

XVII

JUST as I left the house, I observed some servants whispering among themselves, who also went off at a round pace in another direction from the one I took. Walking with all haste, I passed the bridge of the Exchange, [1] and went up along a wall beside the river which led to my lodging in the castle. I had just come to the Augustines—now this was a very perilous passage, and though it was only five hundred paces distant from my dwelling, yet the lodging in the castle being quite as far removed inside, no one could have heard my voice if I had shouted—when I saw four men with four swords in their hands advancing to attack me. [2] My resolution was taken in an instant. I covered the basket with my cape, drew my sword, and seeing that they were pushing hotly forward, cried aloud: “With soldiers there is only the cape and sword to gain; and these, before I give them up, I hope you’ll get not much to your advantage.” Then crossing my sword boldly with them, I more than once spread out my arms, in order that, if the ruffians were put on by the servants who had seen me take my money, they might be led to judge I was not carrying it. The encounter was soon over; for they retired step by step, saying among themselves in their own language: “This is a brave Italian, and certainly not the man we are after; or if he be the man, he cannot be carrying anything.” I spoke Italian, and kept harrying them with thrust and slash so hotly that I narrowly missed killing one or the other. My skill in using the sword made them think I was a soldier rather than a fellow of some other calling. They drew together and began to fall back, muttering all the while beneath their breath in their own tongue. I meanwhile continued always calling out, but not too loudly, that those who wanted my cape and blade would have to get them with some trouble. Then I quickened pace, while they still followed slowly at my heels; this augmented my fear, for I thought I might be falling into an ambuscade, which would have cut me off in front as well as rear. Accordingly, when I was at the distance of a hundred paces from my home, I ran with all my might, and shouted at the top of my voice: “To arms, to arms! out with you, out with you! I am being murdered.” In a moment four of my young men came running, with four pikes in their hands. They wanted to pursue the ruffians, who could still be seen; but I stopped them, calling back so as to let the villains hear: “Those cowards yonder, four against one man alone, had not pluck enough to capture a thousand golden crowns in metal, which have almost broken this arm of mine. Let us haste inside and put the money away; then I will take my big two-handed sword, and go with you whithersoever you like.” We went inside to secure the gold; and my lads, while expressing deep concern for the peril I had run, gently chided me, and said: “You risk yourself too much alone; the time will come when you will make us all bemoan your loss.” A thousand words and exclamations were exchanged between us; my adversaries took to flight; and we all sat down and supped together with mirth and gladness, laughing over those great blows which fortune strikes, for good as well as evil, and which, what time they do not hit the mark, are just the same as though they had not happened. [3] It is very true that one says to oneself: “You will have had a lesson for next time.” But that is not the case; for fortune always comes upon us in new ways, quite unforeseen by our imagination.

The Ghost Ship by Richard Middleton

This the last episode in our Hallowe’en Week, which is in September because late in October the podcast will switch to supporting the Kickstarter for the Magonomia bestiary. The Magonomia bonus episodes will go live: two a week for five weeks which is the 30 day period that the Kickstarter is active.

I’m sharing the most popular short story by Richard Middleton, an English poet and short story writer. He suffered depression and eventually killed himself with chloroform. His way of fighting the darkness was to write little humorous stories, of which this is one. This could be played almost with a straight bat for Magonomia and there are certain covenants in Ars
Magica where, similarly these events could be entirely straightforward. There’s also a vis source in the last line.

Thank you to the Librivox production team, particularly to Emma Charlotte who is
the reader on this one.

***

Fairfield is a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between London and the sea. Strangers who find it by accident now and then, call it a pretty, old-fashioned place; we who live in it and call it home don’t find anything very pretty about it, but we should be sorry to live anywhere else. Our minds have taken the shape of the inn and the church and the green, I suppose. At all events we never feel comfortable out of Fairfield.

Of course the Cockneys, with their vasty houses and noise-ridden streets, can call us rustics if they choose, but for all that Fairfield is a better place to live in than London. Doctor says that when he goes to London his mind is bruised with the weight of the houses, and he was a Cockney born. He had to live there himself when he was a little chap, but he knows better now. You gentlemen may laugh—perhaps some of you come from London way—but it seems to me that a witness like that is worth a gallon of arguments.

Dull? Well, you might find it dull, but I assure you that I’ve listened to all the London yarns you have spun tonight, and they’re absolutely nothing to the things that happen at Fairfield. It’s because of our way of thinking and minding our own business. If one of your Londoners were set down on the green of a Saturday night when the ghosts of the lads who died in the war keep tryst with the lasses who lie in the church-yard, he couldn’t help being curious and interfering, and then the ghosts would go somewhere where it was quieter. But we just let them come and go and don’t make any fuss, and in consequence Fairfield is the ghostiest place in all England. Why, I’ve seen a headless man sitting on the edge of the well in broad daylight, and the children playing about his feet as if he were their father. Take my word for it, spirits know when they are well off as much as human beings.

Still, I must admit that the thing I’m going to tell you about was queer even for our part of the world, where three packs of ghost-hounds hunt regularly during the season, and blacksmith’s great-grandfather is busy all night shoeing the dead gentlemen’s horses. Now that’s a thing that wouldn’t happen in London, because of their interfering ways, but blacksmith he lies up aloft and sleeps as quiet as a lamb. Once when he had a bad head he shouted down to them not to make so much noise, and in the morning he found an old guinea left on the anvil as an apology. He wears it on his watch-chain now. But I must get on with my story; if I start telling you about the queer happenings at Fairfield I’ll never stop.

It all came of the great storm in the spring of ’97, the year that we had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it very well, because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow’s garden as clean as a boy’s kite. When I looked over the hedge, widow—Tom Lamport’s widow that was—was prodding for her nasturtiums with a daisy-grubber. After I had watched her for a little I went down to the “Fox and Grapes” to tell landlord what she had said to me. Landlord he laughed, being a married man and at ease with the sex. “Come to that,” he said, “the tempest has blowed something into my field. A kind of a ship I think it would be.”

I was surprised at that until he explained that it was only a ghost-ship and would do no hurt to the turnips. We argued that it had been blown up from the sea at Portsmouth, and then we talked of something else. There were two slates down at the parsonage and a big tree in Lumley’s meadow. It was a rare storm.

I reckon the wind had blown our ghosts all over England. They were coming back for days afterwards with foundered horses and as footsore as possible, and they were so glad to get back to Fairfield that some of them walked up the street crying like little children. Squire said that his great-grandfather’s great-grandfather hadn’t looked so dead-beat since the battle of Naseby, and he’s an educated man.

What with one thing and another, I should think it was a week before we got straight again, and then one afternoon I met the landlord on the green and he had a worried face. “I wish you’d come and have a look at that ship in my field,” he said to me; “it seems to me it’s leaning real hard on the turnips. I can’t bear thinking what the missus will say when she sees it.”

I walked down the lane with him, and sure enough there was a ship in the middle of his field, but such a ship as no man had seen on the water for three hundred years, let alone in the middle of a turnip-field. It was all painted black and covered with carvings, and there was a great bay window in the stern for all the world like the Squire’s drawing-room. There was a crowd of little black cannon on deck and looking out of her port-holes, and she was anchored at each end to the hard ground. I have seen the wonders of the world on picture-postcards, but I have never seen anything to equal that.

“She seems very solid for a ghost-ship,” I said, seeing the landlord was bothered.

“I should say it’s a betwixt and between,” he answered, puzzling it over, “but it’s going to spoil a matter of fifty turnips, and missus she’ll want it moved.” We went up to her and touched the side, and it was as hard as a real ship. “Now there’s folks in England would call that very curious,” he said.

Now I don’t know much about ships, but I should think that that ghost-ship weighed a solid two hundred tons, and it seemed to me that she had come to stay, so that I felt sorry for landlord, who was a married man. “All the horses in Fairfield won’t move her out of my turnips,” he said, frowning at her.

Just then we heard a noise on her deck, and we looked up and saw that a man had come out of her front cabin and was looking down at us very peaceably. He was dressed in a black uniform set out with rusty gold lace, and he had a great cutlass by his side in a brass sheath. “I’m Captain Bartholomew Roberts,” he said, in a gentleman’s voice, “put in for recruits. I seem to have brought her rather far up the harbour.”

“Harbour!” cried landlord; “why, you’re fifty miles from the sea.”

Captain Roberts didn’t turn a hair. “So much as that, is it?” he said coolly. “Well, it’s of no consequence.”

Landlord was a bit upset at this. “I don’t want to be unneighbourly,” he said, “but I wish you hadn’t brought your ship into my field. You see, my wife sets great store on these turnips.”

The captain took a pinch of snuff out of a fine gold box that he pulled out of his pocket, and dusted his fingers with a silk handkerchief in a very genteel fashion. “I’m only here for a few months,” he said; “but if a testimony of my esteem would pacify your good lady I should be content,” and with the words he loosed a great gold brooch from the neck of his coat and tossed it down to landlord.

Landlord blushed as red as a strawberry. “I’m not denying she’s fond of jewellery,” he said, “but it’s too much for half a sackful of turnips.” And indeed it was a handsome brooch.

The captain laughed. “Tut, man,” he said, “it’s a forced sale, and you deserve a good price. Say no more about it;” and nodding good-day to us, he turned on his heel and went into the cabin. Landlord walked back up the lane like a man with a weight off his mind. “That tempest has blowed me a bit of luck,” he said; “the missus will be much pleased with that brooch. It’s better than blacksmith’s guinea, any day.”

Ninety-seven was Jubilee year, the year of the second Jubilee, you remember, and we had great doings at Fairfield, so that we hadn’t much time to bother about the ghost-ship though anyhow it isn’t our way to meddle in things that don’t concern us. Landlord, he saw his tenant once or twice when he was hoeing his turnips and passed the time of day, and landlord’s wife wore her new brooch to church every Sunday. But we didn’t mix much with the ghosts at any time, all except an idiot lad there was in the village, and he didn’t know the difference between a man and a ghost, poor innocent! On Jubilee Day, however, somebody told Captain Roberts why the church bells were ringing, and he hoisted a flag and fired off his guns like a loyal Englishman. ‘Tis true the guns were shotted, and one of the round shot knocked a hole in Farmer Johnstone’s barn, but nobody thought much of that in such a season of rejoicing.

It wasn’t till our celebrations were over that we noticed that anything was wrong in Fairfield. ‘Twas shoemaker who told me first about it one morning at the “Fox and Grapes.” “You know my great great-uncle?” he said to me.

“You mean Joshua, the quiet lad,” I answered, knowing him well.

“Quiet!” said shoemaker indignantly. “Quiet you call him, coming home at three o’clock every morning as drunk as a magistrate and waking up the whole house with his noise.”

“Why, it can’t be Joshua!” I said, for I knew him for one of the most respectable young ghosts in the village.

“Joshua it is,” said shoemaker; “and one of these nights he’ll find himself out in the street if he isn’t careful.”

This kind of talk shocked me, I can tell you, for I don’t like to hear a man abusing his own family, and I could hardly believe that a steady youngster like Joshua had taken to drink. But just then in came butcher Aylwin in such a temper that he could hardly drink his beer. “The young puppy! the young puppy!” he kept on saying; and it was some time before shoemaker and I found out that he was talking about his ancestor that fell at Senlac.

“Drink?” said shoemaker hopefully, for we all like company in our misfortunes, and butcher nodded grimly.

“The young noodle,” he said, emptying his tankard.

Well, after that I kept my ears open, and it was the same story all over the village. There was hardly a young man among all the ghosts of Fairfield who didn’t roll home in the small hours of the morning the worse for liquor. I used to wake up in the night and hear them stumble past my house, singing outrageous songs. The worst of it was that we couldn’t keep the scandal to ourselves and the folk at Greenhill began to talk of “sodden Fairfield” and taught their children to sing a song about us:

 “Sodden Fairfield, sodden Fairfield, has no use for bread-and-butter,
 Rum for breakfast, rum for dinner, rum for tea, and rum for supper!”

We are easy-going in our village, but we didn’t like that.

Of course we soon found out where the young fellows went to get the drink, and landlord was terribly cut up that his tenant should have turned out so badly, but his wife wouldn’t hear of parting with the brooch, so that he couldn’t give the Captain notice to quit. But as time went on, things grew from bad to worse, and at all hours of the day you would see those young reprobates sleeping it off on the village green. Nearly every afternoon a ghost-wagon used to jolt down to the ship with a lading of rum, and though the older ghosts seemed inclined to give the Captain’s hospitality the go-by, the youngsters were neither to hold nor to bind.

So one afternoon when I was taking my nap I heard a knock at the door, and there was parson looking very serious, like a man with a job before him that he didn’t altogether relish. “I’m going down to talk to the Captain about all this drunkenness in the village, and I want you to come with me,” he said straight out.

I can’t say that I fancied the visit much, myself, and I tried to hint to parson that as, after all, they were only a lot of ghosts it didn’t very much matter.

“Dead or alive, I’m responsible for the good conduct,” he said, “and
I’m going to do my duty and put a stop to this continued disorder.
And you are coming with me John Simmons.” So I went, parson being a
persuasive kind of man.

We went down to the ship, and as we approached her I could see the Captain tasting the air on deck. When he saw parson he took off his hat very politely and I can tell you that I was relieved to find that he had a proper respect for the cloth. Parson acknowledged his salute and spoke out stoutly enough. “Sir, I should be glad to have a word with you.”

“Come on board, sir; come on board,” said the Captain, and I could tell by his voice that he knew why we were there. Parson and I climbed up an uneasy kind of ladder, and the Captain took us into the great cabin at the back of the ship, where the bay-window was. It was the most wonderful place you ever saw in your life, all full of gold and silver plate, swords with jewelled scabbards, carved oak chairs, and great chests that look as though they were bursting with guineas. Even parson was surprised, and he did not shake his head very hard when the Captain took down some silver cups and poured us out a drink of rum. I tasted mine, and I don’t mind saying that it changed my view of things entirely. There was nothing betwixt and between about that rum, and I felt that it was ridiculous to blame the lads for drinking too much of stuff like that. It seemed to fill my veins with honey and fire.

Parson put the case squarely to the Captain, but I didn’t listen much to what he said; I was busy sipping my drink and looking through the window at the fishes swimming to and fro over landlord’s turnips. Just then it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they should be there, though afterwards, of course, I could see that that proved it was a ghost-ship.

But even then I thought it was queer when I saw a drowned sailor
float by in the thin air with his hair and beard all full of bubbles.
It was the first time I had seen anything quite like that at
Fairfield.

All the time I was regarding the wonders of the deep parson was telling Captain Roberts how there was no peace or rest in the village owing to the curse of drunkenness, and what a bad example the youngsters were setting to the older ghosts. The Captain listened very attentively, and only put in a word now and then about boys being boys and young men sowing their wild oats. But when parson had finished his speech he filled up our silver cups and said to parson, with a flourish, “I should be sorry to cause trouble anywhere where I have been made welcome, and you will be glad to hear that I put to sea tomorrow night. And now you must drink me a prosperous voyage.” So we all stood up and drank the toast with honour, and that noble rum was like hot oil in my veins.

After that Captain showed us some of the curiosities he had brought back from foreign parts, and we were greatly amazed, though afterwards I couldn’t clearly remember what they were. And then I found myself walking across the turnips with parson, and I was telling him of the glories of the deep that I had seen through the window of the ship. He turned on me severely. “If I were you, John Simmons,” he said, “I should go straight home to bed.” He has a way of putting things that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary man, has parson, and I did as he told me.

Well, next day it came on to blow, and it blew harder and harder, till about eight o’clock at night I heard a noise and looked out into the garden. I dare say you won’t believe me, it seems a bit tall even to me, but the wind had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow’s garden a second time. I thought I wouldn’t wait to hear what widow had to say about it, so I went across the green to the “Fox and Grapes”, and the wind was so strong that I danced along on tiptoe like a girl at the fair. When I got to the inn landlord had to help me shut the door; it seemed as though a dozen goats were pushing against it to come in out of the storm.

“It’s a powerful tempest,” he said, drawing the beer. “I hear there’s a chimney down at Dickory End.”

“It’s a funny thing how these sailors know about the weather,” I answered. “When Captain said he was going tonight, I was thinking it would take a capful of wind to carry the ship back to sea, but now here’s more than a capful.”

“Ah, yes,” said landlord, “it’s tonight he goes true enough, and, mind you, though he treated me handsome over the rent, I’m not sure it’s a loss to the village. I don’t hold with gentrice who fetch their drink from London instead of helping local traders to get their living.”

“But you haven’t got any rum like his,” I said, to draw him out.

His neck grew red above his collar, and I was afraid I’d gone too far; but after a while he got his breath with a grunt.

“John Simmons,” he said, “if you’ve come down here this windy night to talk a lot of fool’s talk, you’ve wasted a journey.”

Well, of course, then I had to smooth him down with praising his rum, and Heaven forgive me for swearing it was better than Captain’s. For the like of that rum no living lips have tasted save mine and parson’s. But somehow or other I brought landlord round, and presently we must have a glass of his best to prove its quality.

“Beat that if you can!” he cried, and we both raised our glasses to our mouths, only to stop half-way and look at each other in amaze. For the wind that had been howling outside like an outrageous dog had all of a sudden turned as melodious as the carol-boys of a Christmas Eve.

“Surely that’s not my Martha,” whispered landlord; Martha being his great-aunt that lived in the loft overhead.

We went to the door, and the wind burst it open so that the handle was driven clean into the plaster of the wall. But we didn’t think about that at the time; for over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord’s field. Her portholes and her bay-window were blazing with lights, and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks. “He’s gone,” shouted landlord above the storm, “and he’s taken half the village with him!” I could only nod in answer, not having lungs like bellows of leather.

In the morning we were able to measure the strength of the storm, and over and above my pigsty there was damage enough wrought in the village to keep us busy. True it is that the children had to break down no branches for the firing that autumn, since the wind had strewn the woods with more than they could carry away. Many of our ghosts were scattered abroad, but this time very few came back, all the young men having sailed with Captain; and not only ghosts, for a poor half-witted lad was missing, and we reckoned that he had stowed himself away or perhaps shipped as cabin-boy, not knowing any better.

What with the lamentations of the ghost-girls and the grumbling of families who had lost an ancestor, the village was upset for a while, and the funny thing was that it was the folk who had complained most of the carryings-on of the youngsters, who made most noise now that they were gone. I hadn’t any sympathy with shoemaker or butcher, who ran about saying how much they missed their lads, but it made me grieve to hear the poor bereaved girls calling their lovers by name on the village green at nightfall. It didn’t seem fair to me that they should have lost their men a second time, after giving up life in order to join them, as like as not. Still, not even a spirit can be sorry for ever, and after a few months we made up our mind that the folk who had sailed in the ship were never coming back, and we didn’t talk about it any more.

And then one day, I dare say it would be a couple of years after, when the whole business was quite forgotten, who should come trapesing along the road from Portsmouth but the daft lad who had gone away with the ship, without waiting till he was dead to become a ghost. You never saw such a boy as that in all your life. He had a great rusty cutlass hanging to a string at his waist, and he was tattooed all over in fine colours, so that even his face looked like a girl’s sampler. He had a handkerchief in his hand full of foreign shells and old-fashioned pieces of small money, very curious, and he walked up to the well outside his mother’s house and drew himself a drink as if he had been nowhere in particular.

The worst of it was that he had come back as soft-headed as he went, and try as we might we couldn’t get anything reasonable out of him. He talked a lot of gibberish about keel-hauling and walking the plank and crimson murders—things which a decent sailor should know nothing about, so that it seemed to me that for all his manners Captain had been more of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking cherries off a crab-tree. One silly tale he had that he kept on drifting back to, and to hear him you would have thought that it was the only thing that happened to him in his life. “We was at anchor,” he would say, “off an island called the Basket of Flowers, and the sailors had caught a lot of parrots and we were teaching them to swear. Up and down the decks, up and down the decks, and the language they used was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the masts of the Spanish ship outside the harbour. Outside the harbour they were, so we threw the parrots into the sea and sailed out to fight. And all the parrots were drownded in the sea and the language they used was dreadful.” That’s the sort of boy he was, nothing but silly talk of parrots when we asked him about the fighting. And we never had a chance of teaching him better, for two days after he ran away again, and hasn’t been seen since.

That’s my story, and I assure you that things like that are happening at Fairfield all the time. The ship has never come back, but somehow as people grow older they seem to think that one of these windy nights she’ll come sailing in over the hedges with all the lost ghosts on board. Well, when she comes, she’ll be welcome. There’s one ghost-lass that has never grown tired of waiting for her lad to return. Every night you’ll see her out on the green, straining her poor eyes with looking for the mast-lights among the stars. A faithful lass you’d call her, and I’m thinking you’d be right.

Landlord’s field wasn’t a penny the worse for the visit, but they do say that since then the turnips that have been grown in it have tasted of rum.

Gloramone by Madison J. Cawein

A little poem to continue Hallowe’en Week, from Madison Cawein. This recording was released in the public domain through Librivox.

The moonbeams on the hollies glow

Pale where she left me; and the snow

Lies bleak in moonshine on the graves,

Ribbed with each gust that shakes and waves

Ancestral cedars by her tomb….

She lay so beautiful in death,

My Gloramone,—whose loveliness

Death had not dimmed with all its doom,—

That, urged by my divine distress,

I sought her sepulchre: the gloom,

The iciness that takes the breath,

The sense of fear, were not too strong

To keep me from beholding long.

I stole into its sorrow; burst,

With what I know was hand accursed,

Its seal, the gated silence of

Her old armorial tomb: but love

Had sighed sweet romance to my heart;

And here, I thought, another part

[15]

Our souls would play. I did not start

When indistinctness of pale lips

Breathed on my hair; faint finger-tips

Fluttered their starlight on my brow;

When on my eyes, I knew not whence,

Vague kisses fell: then, like a vow,

Within my heart, an aching sense

Of vampire winning. And I heard

Her name slow-syllabled—a word

Of haunting harmony—and then

Low-whispered, “Thou! at last, ’tis thou!”

And sighs of shadowy lips again.

How madly strange that this should be!

For, had she loved me here on Earth,

It had not then been marvelous

That she should now remember me,

Returning love for love, though worth

Less, yes, far less to both of us.

And so I wondered, listening there:

How was it that her soul was brought

So near to mine now, whom in life

She hated so? And everywhere

About my life I thought and thought

And found no reason why her love

Should now be mine. We were at strife

Forever here; her hatred drove

[16]

Me to despair: I cast my glove

Into the frowning face of fate,

And lost her. Yea, it was her hate

That made her Appolonio’s wife.

Her hate! her lovely hate!—for of

Her naught I found unlovely;—and

I felt she did not understand

My passion, and ’twere well to wait.

And now I felt her presence near,

I, full of life; yet knew no fear

There in the sombre silence, mark.

And it was dark, yes, deadly dark:

But when I slowly drew away

The pall, death modeled with her face,—

From her fair form it fell and lay

Rich in the dust,—the shrouded place

Was glittering daggered by the spark

Of one wild ruby at her throat,

Red-arrowed as a star with throbs

Of pulsing flame. And note on note

The night seemed filled with tenuous sobs

Of fire that flickered from that stone,

That, lustrous, lay against her throat,

Large as her eyes, and shadowy.

And standing by the dead alone

I marveled not that this should be.

[17]

The essence of an hundred stars,

Of fretful crimson, through and through

Its bezels beat, when, bending down

My hot lips pressed her mouth. And scars,

Aurora-scarlet, veiny blue,

Flame-hearted, blurred the midnight; and

The vault rang; and I felt a hand

Like fire in mine. And, lo, a frown

Broke up her face as gently as

The surface of a fountain’s glass

A zephyr moves, that jolts the grass

Spilling its rain-drops. When this passed,

Through song-soft slumber, binding fast,

Slow smiles dreamed outward beautiful;

And with each smile I heard the dull

Deep music of her heart, and saw,

As by some necromantic law,

Faint tremblings of a lubric light

Flush her white temples and her throat:

And each long pulse was as a note,

That, gathering, like a strong surprise

With all of happiness, made sweet

With dim carnation in wild wise

The arch of her pale lips, and beat

Like moonlight from her head to feet.

I bent and kissed her once again:

And with that kiss it seemed that pain,

[18]

Which long had ached beneath her smile

And eyelids, vanished. In a while

I saw she breathed. Then, wondrous white,

Fair as she was before she died,

She rose upon the bier; a sight

To marvel at, whose truth belied

All fiction. Yet I saw her eyes

Grow wide unto my kiss,—like skies

Of starless dawn.—And all the fire

Of that dark ruby at her throat

Around her presence seemed to float,

A mist of rose, wherein like light

She moved, or music exquisite.

What followed then I scarcely know:

All I remember is, I caught

Her hand; and from the tomb I brought

Her beautiful: and o’er the snow,

Where moonbeams on the hollies glow,

I led her. But her feet no print

Left of their nakedness, no dint,

No faintest trace in frost. I thought,

“The moonlight fills them with its glow,

So soft they fall; or ’tis the snow

Covers them o’er!—the tomb was black,

And—this strong light blinds!”—Turning back

[19]

My eyes met hers; and as I turned,

Flashing centupled facets, burned

That ruby at her throat; and I

Studied its beauty for a while:

How came it there, and when, and why?

Who set it at her throat? Again,

Was it a ruby?—Pondering,

I stood and gazed. A far, strange smile

Filled all her face, and as with pain

I seemed to hear her speak, or sing,

These words, that meant not anything,

Yet more than any words may mean:

“Thy blood it is,” she said; then sighed:

“See where thy heart’s blood beateth! here

Thy heart’s blood, that my lips did drain

In life; I live by still, unseen,

Long as thy passion shall remain.—

Canst thou behold and have no fear?—

Yea, if I am not dead, ’tis thou!—

Look how thy heart’s blood flashes now!—

Blood of my life and soul, beat on!

Beat on! and fill my veins with dawn;

And heat the heart of me, his bride!”

And then she leaned against me, eyed

Like some white serpent, strangely still,

That binds one with its glittering stare,

[20]

That at wild stars hath gazed until

Its eyes have learned their golden glare.

And then I took her by the wrists

And drew her to me. Faintly felt

The shadow of her hair, whose mists

Were twilight-deep and dimly smelt

Of shroud and sepulchre. And she

Smiled on me with such sorcery

As well might win a soul from God

To Hell and torments. And I trod

On white enchantments and was long

A song and harp-string to a song,

Love’s battle in my blood. And there,

Kissing her mouth, all unaware

The ruby loosened at her throat,

And, ere I wist, hung o’er my hand,

And on the brink I seemed to stand

Of something that cried out, “Admire

The beauty of this gem of fire,

Its witchcraft and its workmanship.”

Then from her throat it seemed to slip,

And, in the hollow of my hand,

A rosy spasm, a bubble-boat

Of living flame, it seemed to float;

A fretful fire; a heart, fierce fanned

Of red convulsions. Like a brand,

[21]

A blaze, it touched me; seemed to run

Like fever through my pulses, swift,

Of torrid poison. One by one,

Now burning ice, now freezing sun,

I felt my veins swell. Then I felt

My palm brim up and overflow

With blood that, beads of oozing glow,

Dripped, drop by drop, upon the snow,

Like holly-berries on the snow.

Then something darkly seemed to melt

Within me, and I heard a sigh

So like a moan, ’twas as if years

Of anguish bore it; and the sky

Swam near me as when seen through tears—

And she was gone…. In ghostly gloom

Of dark, scarred pines a crumbling tomb

Loomed like a mist. Carved in its stone,

Above the grated portal deep,

Glimmered this legend:—

“Let her sleep,

Crowned with dim death, our lovely one,

Known here on Earth as Gloramone.

Our hearts bow down by her and weep,

And one sits weeping all alone.”

The Dance of Death by Baudelaire

A further seasonal poem, read into the public domain by mathemagic through Librivox.

Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves,
Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves
With all the careless and high-stepping grace,
And the extravagant courtesan’s thin face.

Was slimmer waist e’er in a ball-room wooed?
Her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod
With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod.

The swarms that hum about her collar-bones
As the lascivious streams caress the stones,
Conceal from every scornful jest that flies,
Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes

Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays
Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways,
Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebræ.
O charm of nothing decked in folly! they

Who laugh and name you a Caricature,
They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure,
The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone,
That is most dear to me, tall skeleton!

Come you to trouble with your potent sneer
The feast of Life! or are you driven here,
To Pleasure’s Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir
[Pg 138]And goad your moving corpse on with a spur?

Or do you hope, when sing the violins,
And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins,
To drive some mocking nightmare far apart,
And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart?

Fathomless well of fault and foolishness!
Eternal alembic of antique distress!
Still o’er the curved, white trellis of your sides
The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides.

And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find,
Among us here, no lover to your mind;
Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave?
The charms of horror please none but the brave.

Your eyes’ black gulf, where awful broodings stir,
Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller
Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath,
The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.

For he who has not folded in his arms
A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
Reeks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.

O irresistible, with fleshless face,
Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
“Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons!

Withered Antinoüs, dandies with plump faces,
Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces,
Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath,
[Pg 139]Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death.

From Seine’s cold quays to Ganges’ burning stream,
The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream;
They do not see, within the opened sky,
The Angel’s sinister trumpet raised on high.

In every clime and under every sun,
Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run;
And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye;
And mingles with your madness, irony!”

Jedburgh Castle and the Red Death

This was produced for a Hallowe’en Week post-a-day, but when that crossed over with the Magonomia Bestiary Kickstarter, I moved it to September. In the episode I mention “older episodes” based on a book called “Haunted Homes”. Those haven’t been released yet: they are pencilled in for September 22, September 29, and October 13. I recorded them while out of my gourd on COVID and painkillers, so I really do not know what they contain. I recall vaguely spending a lot of time barracking for the screaming skull in one of the stories and that’s it.

John Henry Ingram, who wrote the following piece, was one of Poe’s early biographers. He’s the first who didn’t want to destroy Poe’s reputation. He claims that the following story is the source of the Masque of the Red Death. I can’t verify that, and it is out of scope for Magonomia because it is set in Scotland, but I want to share it because it can be transplanted easily to other sites, in either Magonomia or Ars Magica.

The reader is Lorraine Carey: thanks to her and her Librivox production team. I’ll be popping in with brief explanations as we go, and I’ll shade them in bold.

***

Even the ruins of this ancient border-fortress have disappeared, and its site is, or was recently, occupied by a large prison. But time was in Scottish history that Jedburgh boasted of an important and even magnificent castle, that was the favourite residence of royalty. William the Lion and Alexander the Second often graced it with their regal presence, but it was left to Alexander the Third to still further enhance its glory and carry its splendour to its highest pitch.

Alexander the Third, for clarity, reigned from 1249 to 1286, so well within the Ars Magica period.

The childless monarch, having determined upon marrying again, ordered the wedding festival to be kept at Jed-burgh, and there, in October 1285, he was united in marriage to Jolande, or, as some style her, Joleta, daughter of the Count of Dreux.

Notwithstanding the high character borne by King Alexander, and the universal festivity and jollification, melancholy forebodings were not wanting on the occasion of this wedding. The hilarity, indeed, of the royal host and his guests was destroyed, or at all events overshadowed, by a circumstance by many deemed supernatural, and of which no explanation has ever yet been afforded. The occurrence appears to have given Edgar Poe a hint which he expanded into the tale, if such it may be termed, of The Masque of the Red Death.

You’ll note the author drops the “Allan” there. Edgar Poe was his birth name, and he gained Allan as a middle name at his christening when he was informally adopted by a couple called the Allans. The modern habit of always writing his middle name had not yet congealed when Ingram was writing.

Whilst the wedding revelry was at its height, a figure was suddenly observed by the startled guests, gliding through their midst. In the poet’s imaginative words, the figure is described as “tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat.

“Who dares ?” he makes the royal host demand, “insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him, that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements!” At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of the group of pale courtiers in the direction of the intruder but, from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumption of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there was found none who put forth hand to seize him, so that while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centre of the room to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first.”

Ultimately, the revellers take courage, and, “seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless,” they “gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form !” Less terrifying, yet not the less suggestive, are the lines of Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, when recounting the ill-omened tale :

“In the mid revels, the first ominous night
Of their espousals, when the room shone bright
With lighted tapers—the king and the queen leading
The curious measures, lords and ladies treading
The self-same strains—the king looks back by chance,
And spies a strange intruder fill the dance;
Namely, a mere anatomy, quite bare,
His naked limbs both without flesh and hair,
(As we decipher Death,) who stalks about
Keeping true measure till the dance be out.”

Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels

Nothing further is known of this spectral appearance, which had glided so suddenly into the midst of the startled revellers, and had as suddenly and as mysteriously vanished. But everyone felt that it was the portent of some great approaching calamity. Thomas the Rhymer, the famous seer and prophet, informed the Earl of March, in the presence of several persons, that the 16th of March should be “the stormiest day that ever was witnessed in Scotland.”

Thomas the Rhymer was a bard taken to Faerie, who had escaped. He left behind a series of writings which were the Nostradamus of his day. His story is where people get the weird idea that Faerieland pays a rent to Hell, I believe.

The day came clear and mild, and the scoffers laughed the prophecy to scorn, when suddenly came the news that the King was dead. “That is the storm which I meant,” said Thomas,” and there was never tempest which will bring more ill luck to Scotland.” The seer was right.

Alexander the Third, riding in the dusk, between Burntisland and Kinghorn, was thrown from his horse over a precipice, and killed, in his forty-fifth year, a few months after his marriage. When the sad news spread, causing distraction among the people, and civil war between the claimants to the vacant throne, many thought of the dire omen which had appeared at the King’s wedding, and deemed that it had been sent to be token his speedy and premature death.

The Dark Pool by Francis Hard

A little Halloween poem, read by Dale Grothmann.

It lies beneath a sunless sky,
Deep in the entrails of a bog;
Gnarled willows hide it, lifting high
Their tortured arms; and never frog,
Nor newt, nor toad, nor dragonfly
Dare come within its deadly fog.
For evil spirits there are bound
Within its slime: an impious rune
They chant, nor is there other sound
But wicked whispers, out of tune.
As un-dead things that there lie drowned
Obscenely mutter to the moon.
The nightshade petals in its dank
And fetid vapors darkly bloom;
Black orchids on its silent bank
Insinuate a sick perfume;
And from its depths ooze up the rank
And gassy stenches of the tomb.
For potencies of witchcraft fell
Are buried in its slimy bed,
And deathly blasphemies that well
And bubble up with grisly dread.
From things that in its waters dwell—
From things that died, but are not dead.

Fata Morgana by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

I have tried several times to use this poem for Ars Magica or Magonomia, and I have failed each time. I’m sending it out into the universe so that it returns as something new and strange. Thanks to the Librivox production team. You’ll get a short episode every day this week to celebrate the festive season. Well in my family it’s a festive season…

[Added later – I wrote this before moving the Hallowe’en Week out of the way of the Bestiary Kickstarter.]

***

O sweet illusions of Song,
  That tempt me everywhere,
In the lonely fields, and the throng
  Of the crowded thoroughfare! 

I approach, and ye vanish away,
  I grasp you, and ye are gone;
But ever by night an day,
  The melody soundeth on. 

As the weary traveller sees
  In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees,
  That a pleasant shadow cast; 

Fair towns with turrets high,
  And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh,
  Like mists together rolled,– 

So I wander and wander along,
  And forever before me gleams
The shining city of song,
  In the beautiful land of dreams. 

But when I would enter the gate
  Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait
  For the vision to reappear.