Repentant soul or walking corpse? Debatable apparitions in Medieval England [1]

Folklore, Dec, 2003 by Jacqueline Simpson

Shape-Shifting Spirits in Later Folklore

The nature of ghostly apparitions continued to be debated by learned writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in Britain and on the Continent; some, including Augustin Calmet (1746), accepted the possibility of reanimated corpses. It is harder to find traces of popular beliefs during these centuries, but when English folklore began to be systematically recorded in the nineteenth century an intriguing picture emerges. This folklore includes a good many local legends about exorcism, but in Protestant, not Catholic, terms; the aim of the procedure is not to speed the ghosts on their way to Heaven by absolutions and requiems, but to bully them into submission by psalms, and then banish them into deep water or some distant and desolate spot for as long as possible. In several tales, the revenants appear in animal form, either of their own volition or at the orders of the exorcist. One cluster of such stories occurs in the counties bordering on Wales. At Kington in Herefordshire the ghost of Black Vaughan would appear sometimes as a fly and more often as a bull, until twelve parsons "read him down" into a silver snuff-box which they laid in a pool for a thousand years (Leather 1912, 29-30); at Bagbury in Shropshire the ghost of a wicked squire "came again" as a roaring bull with flaming eyes and horns, sometimes said to be skinless, and was eventually laid in a snuff-box in the Red Sea (or in a boot under the door-stone of Hyssington church) (Burne 1883, 107-11 and 642). The famous Cornish ghost of Tregeagle at one point spontaneously appears as a black bull, but more commonly in Devon and Cornwall it is the exorcist who forcibly turns the revenant into an animal, which is then driven into deep water (Brown 1979, 28-31).

There are even closer parallels to the fantastic features of the Byland Abbey stories in a different type of folk tradition, well documented in Victorian collections. This concerns grotesque spectres in the form of animals or objects, which were not viewed as ghosts of dead humans, but as supernatural beings in their own right, lurking in lanes to scare night travellers. Dogs, horses, and calves were common, and often had fiery eyes. In Cheshire, there was a pig with its back studded with lighted candles (Haworth and Comber 1952, 83), and also a headless duck (Haworth and Comber 1961, 87); a road in Crowborough (Sussex) was haunted by a bag of soot, which chased a boastful blacksmith down the road (Firmin 1890, 141-2).

Most significant in relation to the Byland tales are apparitions which did not limit themselves to one shape, but took on a variety of curious forms. Collectors classified them as "sprites" or "hobgoblins," and linked them to the more alarming types of mischievous fairy; Katharine Briggs agreed, and dubbed them all "bogey-beasts." Around Leeds, there was one creature called Padfoot which could look like a white dog, or like a bale of wool rolling along the road, or be invisible; and another called the Barguest which generally appeared as a shaggy black dog with fiery eyes (Henderson 1879, 273-5). Then there was the Yorkshire Gytrash, with a remarkable repertoire of shapes at its command. Charlotte Bronte mentions it in Jane Eyre (1847, chap. 12) as "a spirit ... which, in the form of horse, mule or large dog, haunted solitary ways"; Branwell Bronte in an unpublished fragment entitled Percy (1837, Bronte Parsonage Museum), says it is "a spectre not at all similar to the ghosts of those who were once alive, nor to fairies, nor to demons," appearing mostly as "a black dog dragging a chain, a dusky calf, nay, even a rolling stone," and as "an old, hideous, and dwarfish man, as often without a head as with one, moving at dark along the naked fields." For good measure, the Gytrash could also appear as a large cow; to see it was an omen of death (Wright 1913, 194). Equally protean was a creature at the village of Hedley in Northumberland. It could look like a bundle of straw, a horse, a cow, or a human (Henderson 1879, 270-1); in one humorous story it changes from one form to another: an iron pot full of gold coins, a lump of silver, a lump of iron, a stone, and finally its own natural shape, that of a frisky horse (Jacobs 1894, 50-3).