Folklore of Yorkshire (8 page)

Effigy of Sir William Wyvill in Slingsby Church. (Kai Roberts)

The Nunnington version of the legend is given in more detail and relates that a dragon made its home on a nearby hill until it was opposed by a local knight named Sir Peter Loschy. As with Moore of Moore-Hall, Loschy was forced to rely on his cunning to defeat the beast and so he wore a suit of armour studded with razor blades so that it could not wrap itself around him and squeeze him to death like a boa constrictor. He found, however, that every time he injured the dragon, its wound immediately healed and so the battle dragged on. At length, he managed to sever part of the creature’s body, whereupon his faithful dog took the piece in its jaws and carried it off to the church over a mile away. This process was repeated until the dragon was completely hacked to pieces and drew its last breath.

Although he defeated the dragon, the legend has an unhappy ending. When Sir Peter bent down to congratulate his hound, the animal licked his face and so transferred some of the dragon’s poison, from which both soon expired. A tombstone in All Saints’ Church at Nunnington shows the effigy of a knight resting his feet on a dog and locals have long held that this was Loschy’s resting place. However, there is no record of anybody called Sir Peter Loschy being buried in the church and antiquarians have identified it as the grave of Sir Walter Leye who died in the early fourteenth century. The same story is told about a similar effigy in All Saints’ Church at Slingsby, the only difference being that the identification of the tomb with Sir William Wyvill is correct. In both cases, the so-called hound at the knight’s feet is more likely to be a lion – another common heraldic motif.

Such memorials are clearly a significant aspect of dragon lore in Yorkshire and nearly all examples are connected with some relic. After the milk-drinking serpent of Sexhow was slain by an anonymous knight who rode away without seeking any reward, the villagers skinned the beast and carried its pelt to the church at Stokesley, where it hung for many years. Although no such item can be seen there today, it is thought an artefact supposed to be a dragon’s skin could indeed once been seen in the church. The most likely explanation, however, is that it was actually the hide of a crocodile. As the Jenny Haniver phenomenon attests, such misattributions were not uncommon amongst the uneducated in earlier centuries.

Sometimes the memorials are seen on a much larger scale in the landscape itself. This was especially true of Wharncliffe Crags: Bishop Percy recorded the testimony of a man who around 1720 had been shown the cave in which the dragon had once made its den and the well from which it drank – sites which are still marked on Ordnance Survey maps today. Meanwhile, Loschy Hill near Nunnington and Scaw Wood near Handale were supposedly named to commemorate the eponymous heroes’ victories over dragons in those places. Similarly, legend maintains that a tract of land called Armroyd’s Close near Kellington was given to the titular shepherd and his heirs to reward his triumph.

These are not landscape legends in the same sense as we find associated with giants or the Devil. The stories do not explain how a particular feature of the landscape came to be the way it is with reference to the activity of some supernatural or primordial being. Nor is the landscape personified as the fallen body or mark of such entities. Yet, whilst they might not be landscape legends in the truest sense, such stories nevertheless perform a similar function: connecting people to their environment through narrative. The outcome of this function is that the topographic references are then held up as proof of the legend’s veracity. As Jacqueline Simpson astutely comments, these memorials represent ‘a stimulus for the first invention of the legend, a focal point for its development and a memento which helps to preserve it through following generations.’

There is only one instance in Yorkshire of a landscape feature being perceived as the body of a slain dragon; namely, Filey Brigg. The legend attached to that particular locality is unique in several respects; not least in that whilst it may have originated on the Holderness coast, it was actually collected in Somerset. In narrative terms, it is the only legend in Yorkshire which does not correspond to the lone dragon-slayer model. In this case, the demise of the monster is initially an accident and the job finished off by the community as a whole. It is also more of a droll than a legend. Although it may purport to explain the origin of Filey Brigg, its primarily humorous intent is clear.

The legend tells how a tailor named Billy Biter lived in the vicinity of a dragon-haunted ravine and one misty morning tumbled over the edge into the beast’s lair. Just as the dragon was about to consume this hapless individual, Billy dropped the parkin (a type of treacly gingerbread favoured in Yorkshire) he was carrying and the dragon bit down on this instead. Finding the delicacy much to its liking, the dragon spared his victim and sent him back to his cottage to fetch more. But when the henpecked Billy arrived home and told his wife the story, she refused to believe him and insisted on delivering the parkin herself.

So drunk was Billy’s wife that when she reached the ravine, she too plunged over the precipice and this time, the dragon gobbled her up along with the parkin. As the dragon chewed, a morsel of the sticky cake became lodged in its teeth ‘clinging so loving as an ivy-bine’ and so forced the beast to attempt to wash it off in the sea. Seeing their chance, the cowed townsfolk assembled a mob with ‘sledgehammers and pitchforks and axes’ to prevent it returning to land. At length, a great wave came along and drowned the monster, whose bones formed the rocky reef of Filey Brigg which can be seen stretching out into the North Sea today.

Although this story was originally recorded as ‘Billy Biter and the Parkin’, Billy is only an inadvertent hero and a circumstantial protagonist. He may have been freed from a greedy dragon and a dipsomaniacal wife in the same day, but both his own role and the dragon-slaying are incidental to the narrative, which seems to be as much about the perils of shrewishness and the propensity of parkin to stick in one’s teeth. It seems that the story was never intended to be taken seriously in the form in which it was recorded (except perhaps by children) and the existence of an alternative origin story for Filey Brigg concerning the Devil tends to support this supposition.

Nonetheless, it is an artful narrative which subverts the expectations of an audience perhaps overly familiar with tales of chivalric dragon-slayers. Billy Biter falls into the class of commoner protagonists in these legends, along with Armroyd of Kellington and Scaw of Handale, who may have gained land as a consequence of their victories, but started out as ordinary individuals. It is a notable contrast to Sir Peter Loschy, Moore of Moore Hall, Sir William Wyvill and the anonymous knight who vanquished the dragon at Sexhow. Possibly this divergent tradition arose later as a deliberate reaction to tales of the dragon-slaying gentry, offering audiences the message that they too could accomplish heroic deeds and free themselves from adversity, with the right amount of fortitude or just plain luck.

However, both these strands may ultimately have performed a similar function. As Jacqueline Simpson concludes in her study of British dragon legends:

They foster the community’s awareness of and pride in its own identity, its conviction that it is in some respect unusual, or even unique. That the lord of the manor should be descended from a dragon-slayer, that a dragon should once have roamed these very fields, or, best of all, that an ordinary lad from this very village should have outwitted and killed such a monster – these are claims to fame which any neighbouring community would be bound to envy.

Many naturalistic theories have been mooted to explain dragon legends over the years, in particular that they are allegories for some historical occurrence, such as the defeat of paganism by Christianity, conflict between the Saxons and Vikings or a simple land dispute. Yet the Victorian notion that folklore necessarily encodes and preserves the memory of ancient events and beliefs has long been doubted. Simpson’s emphasis on the power they had to bind a community – both to its immediate topographic environment and to its social institutions – seems a far less fanciful account of their evolution.

Complete with their medieval tombstones and heraldic associations, Yorkshire dragons probably emerged from the conditions of the late Middle Ages, when new communities and social institutions were being forged and stabilised. Like so many motifs in English folklore, the dragon represented an outside threat to the stability of those communities and institutions, a destructive force beyond their control which must be overcome through virtues such as selflessness and courage if the community wished to survive. The threat of the hostile ‘other’ is still exploited today for such purposes, and whilst these outsiders may be portrayed more subtly than a dragon, they are often every bit as imaginary.

I
n English legend, there are typically two categories of giant: the landscape-shaping oaf and the murderous ogre. Neither type is particularly intelligent; whether they are engaged in terrorising local villages or some colossal construction, their schemes are often characterised by clumsiness and stupidity. As a result, it can seem that by the time they were first recorded, such legends were not taken very seriously. Perhaps they were told as drolls for the benefit of credulous travellers or bedtime stories with which to subdue unruly children. However, these roles are often the final function of narratives that once had a more serious purpose, and beneath the whimsical veneer, they often have much to tell us about the way past generations perceived the world in which they lived.

To deal first with the landscape-shaping variety of giant, it is no surprise to find that Yorkshire is fertile territory for these legends, especially in the north and west ridings. Distinctive landscape features invariably accrue an enduring glut of folklore and the uplands of the Pennines or North York Moors bristle with such vistas. Characteristically, these tales purport to account for the origin of certain topographic prominences and it may well be that these narratives were the sincere product of the pre-modern mind’s tendency to anthropomorphise its environment. Long before even the most basic principles of geology had taken hold in the popular psyche, the grit stone crags and ancient megaliths which strew the Yorkshire countryside must have seemed the work of some titanic race that stalked the land in days gone by.

Quite how long these legends may have survived before the advent of modernity is uncertain. Giants appear in the creation mythologies of a great number of pre-modern cultures – including those of early settlers of the British Isles such as the Celts, the Saxons and the Norse – and they still inspired belief by the late Middle Ages. Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed that giants were the original occupants of Britain in his influential twelfth-century tome,
The History of the Kings of Britain
, as did Raphael Holinshead in his
Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland
, written as late as 1587. When even educated men expressed such ideas, it is scarcely surprising that giants persisted so stubbornly in the minds of the general populace and the annals of local legend.

Perhaps more than any other traditional folk narrative, giant lore expresses what Anthony Roberts, a previous writer on these myths, calls ‘the topography of legend’: giants not only dwelled in these locations, they
formed
them. As such, we may also consider that even as this belief ebbed away and the legends were no longer accepted literally, the storytelling tradition ensured that tales of landscape-shaping giants continued to relate man to his immediate environment. The local farmer might not have genuinely believed that a giant once fashioned the hillside on which he grazed his flocks, but the stories he had heard growing up still invested that landscape with colour and significance. He may equally have felt pride that such a narrative was attached to
his
neighbourhood, with the giant becoming a sort of local mascot. It is a function that endures in tourist-lore today.