The Denham Tracts

Preternatural shapeshifters, plague stones and the Grey Man of Bellister! Tonights highlights come from The Denham Tracts, a publication by David Nutt for the Folklore Society in 1895 which brought together a wonderful collection of local pamphlets and tracts published by Michael Aislabie Denham during the middle of the nineteenth century.

'The belief of our credulous ancestry in a female river demon is still implanted in the mind of childhood on the banks of the Tees; and many are the tales still told of her dragging naughty children into its deep waters when playing, despite the orders and threats of their parents.'

Tales From Antiquaria is a podcast dedicated to exploring the legacy of work published regarding folklore and local history during the golden age of antiquarian writing in the nineteenth century.

For show notes and links, visit the episodes page at thelocalmythstorian.com

Episode written, produced and presented by Eli Lewis-Lycett. All source material taken directly from the stated publication. Main theme music by Humanoid Media. Incidental music from Restum-Anoush. 

Find Eli Lewis-Lycett Folklore and History on Facebook and Bluesky

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Pre to natural shapeshifters, play stones, and the gray man of ballister. My name is Eli, and this is Tales from Antiquaria the Denim Tracts. Spoken directly from the pages of the past. A curious collection, this, edited by Dr. James Hardy and published by David Nutt of London for the Folklore Society in 1895. It brings together a wide range of material from pamphlets issued by Michael Aislerby Denham throughout the 1840s and 50s. Born in 1801 in Yorkshire, Denham became a merchant in Hull, which gave him the range to focus on the law and legend of the wider region. These tracts, another name for pamphlets, document Denham's endeavours as he created one of the very first systematically collated oral history collections in England, and in doing so preserved much that may well have been lost with the industrialization of the regions concerned. Initially published in batches of just a few dozen copies each, his contributions to folklore were recognised by the Folklore Society, and in the early 1890s, more than 30 years after his death, the Society undertook the task of compiling and republishing Denham's scattered tracts to make them more accessible to scholars and enthusiasts. There's a wealth of early collections from Denham that we may well revisit him in the future. There's a lovely passage in the intro from the Folklore Society edition by one of the Society's founders, George Lawrence Gomm, that sums up just how important Denham's efforts really were. Collections of folklore which were made before folklore was anything more than a pastime for the curious, or at most an antiquarian pursuit, with no definitive object in view. I confess my sympathy goes out to these old antiquaries, who were content year after year to record small things for the sake of recording. The world is too much in a hurry now to produce any more of this class of antiquary. The dividing line between the collector and the student who seeks to use collections for scientific purposes is not always preserved, and in consequence works are produced which cannot always be commended. The functions of these two classes of folklorists are quite distinct and should be kept distinct. A plain, unadulterated collection of material, the result of personal testimony and research, is a thing to pray for. One other aspect of the Denham Tracts is that within the publication were listed a huge inventory of names and terms that were associated with types of spirits found across the north of England. The spectres, shally coats, imps, nymphs, lubricins, literally dozens of different names. But it's here we find mention of one particular type of sprite that may well have been the point of inspiration for one of our most esteemed fantasy writers, Tolkien himself. For there, next to hobgoblins are found hobbits. I couldn't possibly cover this title without making mention of it. In tonight's episode, I think we've got one of the most genuinely scary kind of ghost stories that we've come across as well. The Grey Man of Ballister. The tale presents quite an unnerving spectacle. And I wouldn't normally draw people's attention to it because this podcast is what it is. But I am aware that some of these tales tonight are pretty gritty. Or maybe I'm overreacting, I don't know. But anyway, I've made you aware. So let's get started Midsummer Cushions. This was a custom used some seventy years ago at many places in the north of England, but it, like almost every other of the innocent and pleasing customs and amusements of our foreelders, is now vanishing fast away. Young lads and lasses of the town or village, having procured a cushion, or in accordance with local phrasology, a Loshan, would then cover it with calico or silk of showy and attractive colour, and then proceeded to bedeck it with every variety of flower which they could procure out of their parents and more wealthy neighbours' gardens, displaying them in such a manner as to give it the most beautiful appearance. All this done they would place themselves with their cushion in the most public place they conveniently could, soliciting every passerby a trifling present of pence, which in numerous cases was liberally and cheerfully bestowed. This cushion prevailed from Midsummer Day to Magdalene Day, which latter has been long corrupted to Maudlin Day. Animal sacrifice at Christian burials. In the month of August 1849, in excavating earth within Staindrop Collegate Church, the skeleton of a human body was exhumed, which was generally supposed to be one of the lordly navels of Raby Castle, at whose feet were found the bones of a dog of the greyhound breed. It would be worth the trouble of inquiry could we ascertain the fact whether this primitive custom of slaying and interring a favourite animal with the body of its owner was occasionally retained in the Christian church down to the period of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. We read of one of the noble Nevils whose war horse, armed in battle array, preceded the body of its master at his interment in Durham Priory Church. The horse, however, in this case was not slain, but given to the said church as a portion of its owner's mortuary payment. Puddening Infants The ancient offering of an egg, a handful of salt, and a bunch of matches to a young child on its first visit to the house of a neighbour is still very prevalent in many parts of the north of England. In the neighborhood of Leeds, the ceremony is called pudding, and the child is said to be pudded. There is no doubt that these type of offerings are typical of the resurrection of the dead. North Side of Churches. Stillborn and unbaptized children, persons executed in accordance with the law, and in fact all persons who laid violent hands on their own persons and brought themselves to an unnatural death, persons excommunicated either by eclastical or civil law and a variety of other offences, deprived those so transgressing of the benefit of Christian interment, that is, when there was neither a service nor the toiling of a bow. They were buried within the night on the back side of the church. This antipathy to interment on the north side also to a minor degree extended itself to the west end of the church. Witness the west end of the cemetery at High Conscliffe near Darlington, where till almost within the period of living memory no interments had taken place, the south and east portions alone being used. Such also, strange to say, was the case in the crowded graveyard attached to all saints in Newcastle. These circumstances I gathered from a mass of curious and valuable notes on a speech from John Fenwick, Esquire of Newcastle. RIVERGODS The belief of our ancestors in a female river demon is still implanted in the mind of childhood on the banks of the Tees, and many are the tales still told at Piersbridge of a dragging naughty children into its deep waters when playing, and the writer still perfectly recollects being dreadfully alarmed in the days of his childhood, when he chanced to be alone on the margin of those waters, should she issue from the stream and snatch him into her watery chambers. Thunderstone. The quartz pebble, which is so common in the beds of rivers, is popularly known by the name of Thunder, or rather thunderstone, and is believed to have fallen from the clouds during a thunderstorm. Crossing the witches out. This useful and necessary ceremony is performed by all good housekeepers. At the moment they lay the batch of dough down upon the hearthstone to rise previous to baking. The process is simple, and it's performed by making the sign of the cross thereon with the forefinger of the right hand. This act not only prevents the dough from sticking to the pasteboard, but also from falling as it is termed both before and after putting into the oven. It also prevents witches exercising any of their devilish arts. My housekeeper performs this duty as regularly as the baking day comes. The father of the writer, who died in 1843 in his 79th year, had a perfect remembrance of a great number of persons belonging to the upper and middle classes of his native parish of Bowes, and he recalled them assembling upon the banks of the river Greta to work for Needfire. A disease amongst cattle, called the moraine, then prevailed to a very great extent throughout the district of Yorkshire. The cattle were made to pass through the smoke raised by this miraculous fire, and their cure was looked upon as certain. This fire was produced by the violent and continued friction of two dry pieces of wood until such a time it was thereby obtained. To work as though one was working for need fire is a common proverb in the north of England. On hedgehogs. Another relic of the old world times in the bishopric of Durham is that hedgehogs or urchins, as we call them, have still imputed to them the offence of suckling the milk of cows as they sleep. I have endeavoured to dislodge the fable from the minds of several of the unlearned, but my endeavour to do so only tended to increase their belief. Excessive grief for the dead. An old woman still living in 1854 in Piersbridge, who mourned with unorderate grief for a length of time the loss of her favourite daughter, asserts that she was visited by the spirit of a departed child, and earnestly exhorted not to disturb her peaceful repose by unnecessary lamentations and repinings at the will of God. And from that time forth she never grieved no more. Events of this kind were curiously common around a century ago. Fairy treasures at Bamborough. There's a part of the rock on which Bamborough Castle stands, only revealed to the lucky where money is found, having been placed there by the fairies. Those who participate in their bounty may have it every time they visit the spot, but unless a silver coin is placed among it to secure it, would slip away as if it had never been. The Hazelrig Dunksy. In crossing Balford Moor, by the upper road leading to Wooler, there are several projecting rocky eminences of sandstone overlooking the valley. These heights were frequented by a mischievous being, or rather spirit, called the Hazelrig Dunny, or Dunksie. It is reputed to have been the spirit of a petty robber of olden times who hoarded his gear in the crags, which contained several cavernous receptacles adapted for concealment. On one occasion, however, he was surprised by the people of Hazelrig whilst in the granary robbing corn and was sacrificed to their vengeance. He was loath to die, for it took all the folks of Hazelrig to kill him. His ghost, however, has haunted the place ever since. His pranks seem to lie chiefly in frightening the children and rustics of the village, and to be somewhat aching to those of the headly cow. Often in the morning when the ploughman has caught his horse in the field and brought him home and yoked him with his fitting care, he will be horror stricken to see the harness come slapped to the ground just as he has finished. While his tractable brute, never guilty of such pranks, is already howled far off, kicking up his heels and scouring across the country like the wind. According to other accounts, Dunny, as his name imports, was a brownie, and created uproar and mournings by an upturn of furniture. He also was a general exchanger of babies between the fairies and thoughtless good wives, and was particularly on alert when the midwife came, sometimes substituting himself for the horse that brought her and landing both her and her conductor in a morass, taking precious care that she should not be in the mire. At other times his dim form a scene about the Crags apparently bewailing the loss of his buried treasure. The death of Jean Gordon. The Gypsies, or Fay, from its proximity to their headquarters at Yaltam, greatly frequented Wooler, especially at the two fairs, which offered excellent opportunities for the disposal of their wares. On one of these statute anniversaries, one of the gypsies stole a pair of shoes from a store. The townspeople, although some ascribed the ill deed to the country folks, broke out and carried the culprit to the mill dam, which branching off from Wooler Water, flows along the bottom of the high bank on which the town is situated, and the locals ducked her there till she was next to dead among their hands. One of them had gone so far as to set his foot down on her to keep her down. When the excitement subsided down, she was drawn out, all bedraggled with slime, and laid on a high stone on the wood bank. But she was far too gone for recovery, and gave only a gasp or two and died. Old William Bollum, who was once a schoolmaster in the place and who died at the workhouse several years since, recollected seeing her in that deplorable condition. The gypsies never forgot this barbarous outrage, and hence a constant watch had to be kept on their movements for many years to prevent their taking similar wild justice for this wicked maltreatment of one of their clan. Within memory, the townspeople used to live in dread of them. The woman's name was Jean Gordon. She was a relative of the famous other Jean Gordon, who was equally cruelly drowned by a mob at Carlisle. To this day, whenever a continence of bad weather is experienced in the town, old superstitious people say that's a cloud for the death of Jean Gordon, or a race of bad weather will always hang over Wooler for the death of Jean Gordon, drowned in the milldam. Silky, a Northumbrian tradition. Eighty or ninety years ago the inhabitants of the quiet village of Black Headon, near Stanfordham, and of the country round about, were greatly annoyed by the pranks of a preternatural being called Silky. This name it had obtained for a predilection to make itself visible in the semblance of a female dressed in silk. Many a time when any of the more timorous of the community had a night journey to perform, they have unawares and invisibly been dogged by their spectral tormentor, who, at the dreariest part of the road, the most suitable for thrilling surprises, will suddenly break forth in dazzling splendour. If the person happened to be on horseback, she would unexpectedly seat herself behind the rider, rattling in her silks. At Balsi, some two or three miles from Blackheadon, she had a favourite resort. This was a romantic crag finely studied with trees under the gloomy umbrage of which, like one forlorn, she loved to wonder all the night long. Here often has a belated peasant beheld her dimly through the somber twilight, and while he thus stood and gazed and listened to immentations impossible to be misapprehended, enthralled by the dread reality of that mysterious being, and all at once excited by that wondrous agency. He would have heard the howling of a restless tempest rushing through the woodland, the branches creaking in violent concussion, whilst to the eye not a leaf was seen to quiver, nor a spray to bend. All was a delusion and naught was truth. The bottom of this crag is washed by a picturesque lake or fish pond, at whose outlet is a waterfall over which a venerable tree, sweeping its unobregius arms, adds impressiveness to the scene. Amid the complicated limbs of this tree, Silky possessed a rude chair where she was wont in her moody moments to sit, wind-rocked, enjoying the rustling of the storm in the dark woods. It is due to the present proprietor, Sir Charles Bart of Balsey Castle, to state that the tree is so consecrated in the sympathies and the terrors of the vicinity it has been carefully preserved. Though now no longer tenanted by its aerial visitant, it yet spreads majestically its time hallow canopy over the spot, awakening in the lore-versed rustic when the winter's wind raves gusty and sonorous through its leafless boughs. The sole harrowing recollection are the exploits of this ancient Fey, the Selking. The grey man of Ballister. It was at the grey of evening twilight, about half a century ago, that a stripling held his way towards the castle of Ballister, with a view of entering into service there. Having crossed the Tyne at Hort Whistle, he found the darkness increasing fast, and although the distance he had to travel was not great, in those days bad companions were more common than welcome on the unfrequented roads after nightfall. Leaving the ferry, he passed a thicket of willow bushes, and then his route lay along a broken road, which he had been directed to follow as being that which would conduct him to the castle. He had not proceeded far when he described a traveller at some distance in advance, a circumstance rather singular, as he had carried a few minutes at the ferry, yet no one had come over for some time previous. The youth, a stranger in the place, was looking forward with solitude towards the new scene of his labours, but was soon overcome by a mysterious feeling, to which this idea gave rise in the prospect of relief from his own anxious thoughts that were clinging to him on his journey. He therefore quickened his pace, and when sufficiently near shouted to the unknown individual up ahead to stop. But the stranger paid no regard. He neither stopped nor looked behind, for he passed forward with superhuman rapidity, gliding rather than walking over the surface. An unpleasant sensation of fear crept over the youth, which was not a little increased by a closer inspection so far as a dubious light enabled of the object of his misgivings. He shouted again at the unknown individual to stop. But the stranger paid no regard, he neither stopped nor looked behind, but the traveller could now see the figure before him. His head was uncovered, and his long hair hung behind white as the frosts of winter. He was wrapped in a long grey cloak reaching to his heels, and he appeared to carry a small bundle under his arm. So occupied had the youth been in the struggle that he did not at first perceive that he had now reached the broken gateway of the old castle of Ballister. At the instant when its dark mass became evident through the gloom, the mysterious figure unexpectedly stood still, and turning abruptly around upon the youth, revealed the awful nature of the fellowship which he, in the simplicity of his heart, was so eager to obtain. Death had set his pallid seal on that grisly countenance, and a bloody gash that ran across it heightened the expression of ghastliness imprinted there. The thick beard was dripping with blood, and the forepart of the garments was dyed with the stream. The being fixed its large, lustrous eyes upon the youth, and pointing with a menacing scowl towards the dilapidated ruins of the castle, melted silently away. It was a scene of deepest horror. For some time the youth stood spowbound on the spot, gazing into the vacant air that gave back no image, but extended itself in limitless expansion into a vast, all absorbing gulf that seemed to invite him forward in pursuit of the dread. Rallying a scattered fortitude, his first idea was that of self preservation. His new home was nigh, and tither scarcely conscious of the action, he betook himself. The old mistress was the only one of the family within, and to her he revealed the horrifying apparition he had witnessed. The old lady was much concerned. The existence of a spirit near the place she was fully aware, she had heard of it from others wiser and older than herself, members of a generation of which there were now few survivors. And there were several instances in which it had made itself visible to persons whom she knew well. Such a thing never occurred, she said, without some accompanying calamity. And when, on the present occasion, there was manifested tokens of a vindictive disposition on the spirit's part, the danger was near and alarming. It came to pass as the old lady feared and predicted. That very evening the unfortunate lad was seized with a severe illness, and before the next morning was too a corpse a real mix. In this collection between some incredible lore around the the house goblins like the silky, the absolutely terrifying spectacle of the grey man of Ballister and some really quite gnarly stuff too. Talk of suicide and Jean Gordon being laid out on the riverbank after she'd been dunked and murdered. But that's our folklore. Some of it is wondrous and drives the imagination, and some of it is genuinely disturbing. That's a sense of real tales being recorded from times long past that were famous within the communities that told those stories. Hope you've enjoyed this tonight. We'll be back soon with the next episode. So until then, take care, and may you God go with ya. You can find out more about the show and about my other projects at the localmythstorian.com.