The devil of Croyden Hill: kinship, fiction, fact, tradition

Folklore, April, 2005 by John B. Smith

Whatever the origin of (C1), it is matched in one way or another by three further West Country stories. Our first, (C2), bears the title "The Prank that Backfired" and runs as follows:

   When I was a child in the early years of the [twentieth] century, my
   father often told the tale about the lad who lived at Maiden Newton
   [eight miles NW of Dorchester in Dorset[, and who was always
   boasting how he was afraid of nothing. One night when he was walking
   home in the dark alone, the other village lads planned to play a
   joke and catch him out. One of them dressed in a white sheet, lay in
   wait, and popped up behind a hedge making a screeching noise. The
   lad, who really wasn't afraid of anything, beat him over the head
   with the hames from the horse harness he was carrying, and killed
   him. My father would use this as a cautionary tale to warn me, and
   the other children, not to play foolish pranks (Somerset Federation
   1992, 71).

One thing stressed by the narrator of (C2) is that the main character is "afraid of nothing." Here we are reminded of AT 326 "The Youth who Wanted to Learn what Fear Is," in some versions of which the hero kills a person who, disguised as a ghost, has lain in wait with the object of frightening him (Aarne and Thompson 1973, 114-15). [5] There can be little doubt, however, that the main debt of (C2) is to (C1). In each of these the hero is plotted against by village lads; in each, one of these appears to him as a ghost in order to try and scare him; in each he kills his tormentor with an agricultural implement (coulter, haines) he happens to be carrying. If anything makes C2 stand out from C1, it is that the former has been shaped into a cautionary tale.

Now consider the following text, (D), recorded as recently as 1986, at East Harptree in the northern Mendips:

   That was an old man used to live on his own, he used to make spars
   and baskets, and used to get drunk every night up at The Waldegrave
   Arms at East Harptree. And he passed this big school where they used
   to train young parsons. Taylor's school, at Summerleaze, it's
   called. And she was the cook up there, you see, my aunt, my father's
   sister, and 'course, this old Mr Taylor, the head man, he was very,
   very polite, quite a gentleman, big beard down to here. And this old
   man used to come down every night after 10 o'clock, cussing and
   shouting to hisself and the language he used was summat awful, you
   see.

   And he [Mr Taylor] said to my aunt, one night, he wished she'd go
   out and try to frighten him. And she said, how could she frighten
   him? He said, "Put a white table cloth over your head and make out
   you're a ghost," you see, "and see if that will frighten him."

   Course she went out, you see, with this [table cloth] when he came
   down towards her, and he stopped and he said, "And, and who bist
   thee?" And she said, "I'm the Devil," and he hit her across the head
   with his walking stick, and she had to have stitches put in: he
   nearly killed her. [6]