The Watkins Book of English Folktales Read online

  ‘Shivery, creepy, melancholy, funny, fantastic and very real, the English folktale rises up again from the host of individual voices captured here. Neil Philip’s classic collection offers us an overflowing cauldron of marvellous stories; this is a necessary book.’

  Marina Warner

  ‘Collections of folktales as good as this should be treated in two ways: first, they should be bound in gold and brought out on ceremonial occasions as national treasures; and second, they should be printed in editions of hundreds of thousands, at the public expense, and given away free to every young teacher and every new parent.’

  Philip Pullman

  ‘A book that inspires and informs, and opens hearts and minds to our story heritage.’

  Professor Carolyne Larrington

  ‘Some rare titles have a generational impact, opening up a folkloric landscape many of us have never stopped exploring. This book is one of them. It was a profound influence on me and Hookland.’

  David Southwell

  ‘This is the best collection of English folktales since Katharine Briggs’s assemblage in four volumes, and perhaps the best ever in a single volume; here are tales poignant, strange, wonderful, and ancient, told by people usually shut out from history but here allowed to speak by Philip’s exceptional and attentive scholarship. The general reader and the scholar should be equally glad to see this volume available once again.’

  Professor Diane Purkiss

  ‘Buckle up and prepare for close encounters with ghouls and boggarts, witches and merry-maids, talking cats and roaring bulls. These tales may be quintessentially English, but they are also part of a golden network of folklore that shows how violence can be vanquished, trauma healed, and justice secured. And where else will you find entertainments with as high a coefficient of weirdness as in this collection of tales, wild and whimsical?’

  Professor Maria Tatar

  ‘It has taken more than a century since Joseph Jacobs published his book of English tales for a complete collection of English folktales to be published. Thanks to Neil Philip we now have a superb anthology of more than one hundred extraordinary tales that reveal the exquisite nature of the English storytelling tradition. Philip’s Watkins Book of English Folktales can be enjoyed by young and old. This is a dazzling book.’

  Professor Jack Zipes

  ‘As Job’s children are restored to him, full of life and evergreen, this volume flashes its splendours and returns its golden fruits into our eager hands. Never was a better time for such a knowing, appreciative volume of our shared tales. Welcome to it; draw the benches up; tales older than centuries yet fresh as June fireflies are yours, to read, to share, to remember, to discover.’

  Gregory Maguire

  ‘This is a rare and wonderful treasure of a book: an expertly chosen selection of English folktales, that is highly readable, endlessly entertaining, and intellectually enlivened by the meticulous scholarship of Neil Philip. The Watkins Book of English Folktales offers unrivalled insights into the English imagination as it has taken shape in traditional storytelling over centuries. Here the reader will encounter the characters they might expect to find – Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Little Pigs – along with the more unfamiliar denizens of popular English invention: the small-toothed dog, the one-eyed giant of Dalton Mill, and the terrible Mr Fox. For the cultural historian, there is also the enormous pleasure of Philip’s notes, which identify the story variants, and track the narratives, as much as possible, though the mazy paths of oral and literary dissemination.

  If by some mysterious goblin’s spell I was condemned to give away all the books in my library but one, this is undoubtedly the book I would keep.’

  Professor Andrew Teverson

  This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form in which they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art – when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o’-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find ‘Jack the Giantkiller’, ‘Tom Tit Tot’ and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms’ ‘Little Snow White’ – as well as bedtime frighteners, including ‘Captain Murderer’, as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse.

  Neil Philip has provided a full introduction to the creation, collection and telling of traditional English tales, and source notes illustrate each story’s journey from mouth to page. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.

  Neil Philip was born in York in 1955. He now lives in Oxfordshire, where he divides his time between writing and research and his work as editorial director of a small publishing company. His consuming interest is folk narrative, but he has also written on children’s literature and on English social history. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including The Times, The Times Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement and Folklore, of which he is a former reviews editor. Among his other books are A Fine Anger: A Critical Introduction to the Work of Alan Garner (1981), winner of the ChLA Literary Criticism Book Award; a country anthology, Between Earth and Sky (Penguin 1984); The Tale of Sir Gawain (1987), shortlisted for the Emil/Kurt Maschler Award; and The Cinderella Story (Penguin 1989). He has also edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Folktales. His A New Treasury of Poetry (1990), illustrated by John Lawrence, was hailed by The Times as ‘among the great anthologies for the young’. He is currently editing The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse.

  First published in 1992 as The Penguin Book of English Folktales.

  This edition published in the UK and USA in 2022 by

  Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited

  Unit 11, Shepperton House

  89–93 Shepperton Road

  London

  N1 3DF

  [email protected]

  Design and typography copyright © Watkins Media Limited 2022

  Text copyright © Neil Philip 1992, 2022

  Foreword © Neil Gaiman 2022

  Neil Philip has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Designed and typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd.

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-78678-709-5 (Hardback)

  ISBN: 978-1-78678-725-5 (eBook)

  www.watkinspublishing.com

  For Alan Garner

  O, ’tis a precious apothegmaticall Pedant, who will finde matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first invention of Fy, fa, fum, I smell the bloud of an Englishman.

  Thomas Nashe

  Have with you to Saffron-Walden 1596

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Neil Gaiman

  Introduction to the 2022 Watkins Edition

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  Jack and the Beanstalk

  Jack the Giant Killer

  Clever Jack

  The Little Red Hairy Man

  Jack the Butter-Milk

  Lazy Jack

  The Grey Castle

  Lousy Jack and His Eleven Brothers

  The Magic Knapsack

  The History of the Four Kings

  The Green Lady

  The Old Witch

  The Small-Tooth Dog

  The Glass Mountain

  Three Feathers

  Sorrow and Love

  De Little Fox

  De Little Bull-Calf

  The Frog Lover

  The Frog Sweetheart

  Snow-White

  Tom Tit Tot

  The Gypsy Woman

  Cap o’ Rushes

  The Ass, the Table and the Stick

  The Story of Mr Vinegar

  The Golden Ball

  Mr Miacca

  The Rose-Tree

  The Pear-Drum

  The Flyin’ Childer

  The Story of Mr Fox

  Bobby Rag

  Doctor Forster

  Captain Murderer

  The Wooden Leg

  Wanted, a Husband

  The Hand of Glory

  The Old Man at the White House

  The Golden Arm

  The Story of the Three Little Pigs

  The Old Woman and Her Pig

  Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse

  The Story of Chicken-Licken

  Nursery Tale

  The Tin Can at the Cow’s Tail

  Happy Boz’ll

  Appy and the Conger Eel

  Hawks’s Men at the Battle of Waterloo

  The Austwick Carles

  The Three Big Sillies

  The Miser and His Wife

  Stupid’s Mistaken Cries

  The Doctor’s Pestle

  The Landlord and the Farmer’s Boy

  The Lad who was Never Hungry

  Bad Meat

  The Doctor and the Trapper

  Not So Bad After
All

  The Wrong Train

  The New Church Organ

  Moved by the Spirit

  Abraham’s Bosom

  The Maid who Wanted to Marry

  The Wife’s Request

  The Parsons’ Meeting

  The Penzance Solicitor

  By Line and Rule

  The Hedge Priest

  The Socialist Convert

  The Railway Ticket

  Box About

  His Highness’s Joke

  The Turnip and the Horse

  The Miller with the Golden Thumb

  Four Jests of Sir Nicholas le Strange

  The Bishop and the Doorbell

  The Independent Bishop

  The Miller at the Professor’s Examination

  The Building of the Wrekin

  How Far is it to Shrewsbury?

  Carn Galva, and the Giant of the Carn

  The Giant of Dalton Mill

  Tommy Lindrum

  Jack o’ Kent

  Legends of Sir Francis Drake

  Biard’s Leap

  The Prophecy

  The Spotted Dog

  The Witch Wife

  The Witch Hare

  Watching for the Milk-Stealer

  The Hart Hall Hob

  My Ainsell

  The Fairy Bairn

  The Fairy Changeling

  Skillywidden

  Nursing a Fairy

  The Adventure of Cherry of Zennor

  Fairies Down the Lane

  The Pisky Ring

  The Merry-Maid

  Droll of the Mermaid

  Johnny Reed! Johnny Reed!

  Jahn Tergagle the Steward

  The Roaring Bull of Bagbury

  The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter

  The Curse of the Shoemaker

  The First Smith

  The Haunted Widower

  The Waff

  The Pilot’s Ghost Story

  The Man-Monkey

  Billy B—’s Adventure

  The Ghostly Woolpack

  The Haunted Barn

  The Shepherd and the Crows

  Bodmin Assizes

  The Girl in the Train

  The Ghost at the Dance

  The Tell-Tale Sword

  Mr Akroyd’s Adventure

  In a Haunted House

  The Dauntless Girl

  Dowser and Sam

  The Devil and the Farmer

  The Naturalist and the Devil

  How the Hedgehog Ran the Devil to Death

  Kentsham Bell

  The Master and His Pupil

  Chips

  The Candle

  The Green Mist

  The Pale Rider

  The Wizard of Alderley Edge

  The Dead Moon

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  THE AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER would like to thank the owners of copyright material for their permission to reproduce the following stories:

  J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd for ‘The Grey Castle’ from Dora Yates, A Book of Gypsy Folk-Tales (Phoenix House, 1948). The Estate of T. W. Thompson and the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library, for ‘Lousy Jack and His Eleven Brothers’, ‘The Magic Knapsack’, ‘Sorrow and Love’, ‘The Frog Sweetheart’ and ‘Snow-White’. The Estate of T. W. Thompson and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for ‘Doctor Forster’ and ‘In a Haunted House’. The Estate of T. W. Thompson for ‘Wanted, a Husband’, ‘The Tin Can at the Cow’s Tail’, ‘Appy and the Conger Eel’ and ‘Fairies Down the Lane’ from Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society. The Folklore Society for ‘The Pear-Drum’, ‘The Lad who was Never Hungry’ and ‘The Parsons’ Meeting’ from Folk-lore. Random House Inc. for ‘The Doctor and the Trapper’ and ‘The Railway Ticket’ from William Wood, A Sussex Farmer (Jonathan Cape, 1938), and ‘The First Smith’ from G. E. C. Webb, Gypsies: The Secret People (Herbert Jenkins, 1960). The University of Salzburg for ‘Four Jests of Sir Nicholas le Strange’ from H. P. Lippincott (ed.), ‘Merry Passages and Jeasts’: A Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas le Strange (1603–55) (1974). Beltons for ‘Tommy Lindrum’ from Ethel Rudkin, Lincolnshire Folklore (1936). Routledge for ‘Dowser and Sam’ from W. H. Barrett, Tales of the Fens (ed. Enid Porter, 1963).

  Grateful acknowledgement is also made for permission to quote from the BBC Sound Archives, and from the manuscripts in the archives of the Folklore Society and the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright owners, but this has not always proved possible. The publisher would be interested to hear from any copyright owners not here acknowledged.

  Foreword

  FOLK STORIES AND FAIRY tales came from somewhere else, not England. That was something I’d learned as a schoolboy.

  The tales were still ours, of course: it didn’t matter where they had originated, they were still performed on stage in Panto season by people who sounded like I did, and Cinderella, I knew, must be as English as they come, what with Baron Hardup and Buttons, and for that matter Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp might have been set in ancient Beijing but the Widow Twankey was there to tell us, with a joke about eating fish and chips on the South Parade Pier, that ancient Beijing was incredibly local.

  Still, proper folk stories were collected by the brothers Grimm, or by Charles Perrault. As I grew up, I’d find collections of folktales in books from all over the world – from Sweden to Alaska to the Philippines – and began to feel that I’d missed out by being English.

  I had been raised in a country where stories mattered and had been told, and I knew that too many of those stories were lost, leaving something that was almost a fossil record behind. There were Jack tales, they were English, and I knew about them, and there were local monsters, and places in literature that spoke of the places that tales had been – Shakespeare’s speeches about fairies, whether Puck or Queen Mab, implied a world of stories mostly lost to us; Dickens parodied local stories filled with Goblins, and I wanted to hear the originals.

  I first read this book about thirty years ago. I had recently moved to the US, and missed the England I had left, and I found it in a local bookshop. I loved it, devoured it with delight. It felt alive. Here were stories I had never imagined existing that delighted and astonished me, alongside stories I knew, told in ways I hadn’t encountered them before.

  I read the Snow-White story, with three robbers instead of seven dwarfs, and it changed the inside of my head. G. K. Chesterton wrote, in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, that: ‘If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time’, and now I knew what he meant. I had read and heard and watched the story of Snow White all my life: one of the first books I remember owning had been a beautifully illustrated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And yet the version that Neil Philip gave me here was dissonant enough, real enough, that I looked at the story for the thousandth time, and wrote a version of Snow White called ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ in which the little princess was a vampire, her prince was a necrophile, and her stepmother was, perhaps, the heroine and the victim.

  The retelling of Marie Clothilde Balfour’s ‘The Flyin’ Childer’ was a story I had never run into in any form before. It made a huge impression on me, and a few years later I retold it myself, in Sandman, illustrated by Charles Vess. It felt alive, in ways that I appreciated, a story shape I hadn’t encountered, a story of murder and revenge, of a betrayed woman, of children who flew away. It was a strange, dark story and it delighted me.

  The way that Lucy Clifford’s (written, literary) story, ‘The New Mother’ transmuted into the orally collected story ‘The Pear Drum’ fascinated me, and reminded me that every story starts somewhere, and starts with someone making it up. Here was Dickens’ hilarious take on Bluebeard, ‘Captain Murderer’ alongside the haunting tale of ‘The Story of Mr Fox’ (another story I would one day retell).

  Neil Philip had researched assiduously and spread his net wide to create this collection. He had unearthed tales from all across England, stories that resonated, stories that were more than a fossil record of what was left behind but were a triumphant collection of stories that showed what English stories were – and that was something much more interesting than localized jokes in pantomimes. His commentaries on the stories were enlightening.