The Watkins Book of English Folktales
‘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
enquiries@watkinspublishing.com
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.