Mythic Cheshire: Frederick Woods 2

Here are a few pieces of useful material from Further Legends and Traditions of Cheshire by Frederick Woods, that suit Ars Magica games.

Birkenhead Hall

The lady of the hall became convinced her husband was having an affair with the maid. After seething for a while, she pushed the maid over the bannisters and fled with all of the portable valuables in the house, to live in a convent in France. The lord returned from some sort of travel and found the corpse of the maid shattered on the floor of the house’s entryway. He had the maid buried in his primary holding in Wales. She has haunted the hall since.

There are options here for retelling the story. If the lady of the hall was wrong, then the ghost wants revenge and can’t really have it, so she haunts. Woods says the lord died old, alone and embittered, but there’s the possibility that he instead continued his relationship with the ghost. This leads to the question of if you can have True Love, which in Ars Magica basically comes from the Divine, at the expense of your marriage, which is also blessed by God. The point I’d make is that in some codes of chivalry, marriage precludes True Love. In Arthurian epitome, Lancelot and Guinevere have True Love.

Capesthorne

This has much the same story of a moving peat island as mentioned in the Christina Hole notes. There’s an added detail that the man became ill and the woman nursed him back to heath during the storm.

Davenham Bridge

Some of the locals haunt a bridge here by dressing as skeletons and dancing with a “coffin” prop that also seems to dance. This is to keep the bridge clear at night to allow smugglers to use it without delay.

Dunham Massey

This manor is haunted by a a mason who was pushed from the roof. A master-mason found his adding an architecturally-unsuitable capstone to a column and, in a fit of anger, killed him. The ghost of the mason wanders the hall, moaning sadly at minor defects in the craftwork.

The Gatley Groaner

There was an enormously annoying man who died, but the joy of his neighbours was tempered when his ghost started wandering the street. He was chanting about how he’d never sold unwatered milk or true weight in flour. They had their parson put together a team for a “praying down”. By tradition this requires seven priests. In this case, all seven held candles. One cuts the ghost off from its grave, then the others hold it in place while another draws a chalk circle about it. They then join hands and pray about it so that it shrinks until the local parson can bind it under a rock near his gate.

Gentleman Higgins of Knutsford

Higgins was a surgeon by day and a highwayman by night. He used to sneak out after his wife fell asleep, using woolen socks to muffle the hoof falls of his horse while near his house. He was eventually caught when he discussed a murder with more familiarity of the scene that was generally known. While in prison he forged an almost-perfect pardon and had it posted to his jailer. Once it was detected he was hung rapidly.

Leasowe

There’s a man who who spends a day speaking to a mermaid on his boat and she gives him a ring to remember her by. He dies of wasting five days later. This is no surprise to anyone, because this is entirely expected in local folklore.

Longdendale

I’ve collected a lot of Longdendale stories and have skipped Sir Ro previously because he’s obviously Ulysses. He goes away on crusade and is captured. He takes years to come home. His neighbor tries to marry his supposed widow. When he returns he is unrecognizable, but he has somehow retained the half of a wedding ring he divided with his wife before leaving. He sends her the piece by servant, she recognizes him, and the neighbour is sent off with a flea in his ear. In the Woods version he returns home by miracle: he falls asleep in his cell and awakens on a hillside he’s familiar with near his home. So, a miracle brings the man home.

Marple

There’s an area of Marple called “No man’s land” where there’s effectively no mundane law. A man stole some linen that was being stretched by the river. The court case was long and held in Chester. At the end, the city did not particularly want to pay the costs of the trial. Why they were asked to is not clear in the story. One of their clerks discovered that this tiny part of the river was actually owned by a little village in Derbyshire. That village was also refuses to pay the costs. In practice this means there’s no one to enforce problems on this land, because there’s no-one to pay wages here, and even if there were, there’s no organisation willing to try cases.

Sir Gaultier of Hughenden

This gentleman and his lady had their own episode.

Sandbach Crosses

These were raised by King Peada to celebrate his betrothal in 615. They are holy and have images of Christ upon them. That Peada’s bride knifed him in the throat doesn’t seem to have affected their Dominion aura.

Spurstow Hall

There’s a house here, or perhaps an inn, where rich pedlars, or relations of the owner, do not leave alive. Eventually the servants inform on the owners and the dead are found buried under the pantry, each given a small barrel of brandy and left to starve to death.

A young man off to meet his girlfriend overheard a group of men plotting to attack a farmer’s house and rape his daughter. These were the sons of a local lord so he couldn’t go to the authorities, but he warned the farmer. In a perfect example of why there’s a crime called “housebreaking” the men quietly dug a hole in the side of the house, and then one checked the coast was clear by shoving his head through. The farmer bought his axe down on the man’s neck at this point, and refused to give his head back to his brothers. The body was taken in secret to a churchyard, but wherever a corpse is carried becomes a public right of way, and a headless ghost walks its length.

Toft: Ghost Trees?

There’s a group of chestnut trees here where a woman asked to be buried. She also requested a bag of nuts be buried with her. Woods does not say what type, but let’s go with chestnuts for thematic continuity. This was so she’d have snacks while waiting for Judgement. Her ghost has dropped one of these nuts and it was the ancestor of a patch of local trees. These seem like a Mentem vis source.

The Tushingham Ghost Duck
Woods notes his extraordinary skill at finding ghost ducks. This was a pet duck that annoyed the patrons of an inn, so the innkeeper killed, but did not eat it. She instead buried it beneath a staircase. The ghost of the duck would trip, chase and bite people, so as is traditional in Cheshire the local pastor called together a crack team of twelve priests and they prayed down the duck. This is the ghost that was shrunk so small it could go into a bottle.

Folklore notes

The surname “Pelling” is a sign of faerie blood. A long time ago a Welsh farmer saw some faeries dancing and captured one, taking her as his wife. She would never give her name, but using the same stealth he used to watch her people dance, he snuck close and heard the faerie woman mourning the loss of their sister, Penelope. Once the man told his wife h knew her name she placed a new prohibition on him, that she would be forced to leave if he ever struck her with iron. They lived together many years and had children, but one day a horse was playing up and he tried to slap it with its bridle. He missed and hit his wife with the bit, so she vanished. The Pellings are all descended from Penelope.

If a woman is married in her shift, her new husband does not take on her debts. She changes in the vestry, generally.

A baby needs to be carried upstairs before birth, so it will rise in life. To allow this, lying in rooms are always on the ground floor. If there’s no suitable staircase, a person may step up onto a chair to complete the ritual. Failure to do this may cause Flaws based on ill-luck.

At funerals it is customary for all present to touch the hand of the corpse. It is unlucky not to. This may be an echo of the belief that if the murderer touches the corpse of a victim, it will begin to bleed.

Woods mentions two festivals of interest. Blazing the wheat involves running around the field with flaming branches to scare off evil spirits. He places it on “Old Christmas Night” which is January the 6th. This name for the Feast of the Epiphany doesn’t make sense in 1220, because the synchronization of calendars under Gregory XIII, which shifts the year sufficient days for there to be an “old Christmas Day” in January, is still 263 years in the future. England didn’t harmonize until 1752, which causes the drift of eleven days.

There’s a tradition in Maying where young folk go around the village and put up greenery that jokingly refers to the character of the person who owns the door. So, a young man expected to marry in the next year would get a branch of broom, for example, or a woman who was fair get a branch of pear. He lists several other examples, but if you weren’t in on the cant, you’d never really work out what a particular tree meant.

Students demand a holiday on Oak Apple Day, which is the 29th of May, with a traditional song.

The heraldic symbol of the Breteon family is a bear muzzle. A knight of the family was disturbed at dinner by a servant and, in a fit of anger, chased him through the house, finally killing him with his sword. When he turned himself in to the king he was tasked with finding a way to muzzle a bear in three days, or being fed to one. He succeeded in muzzling one of the bears in the tower, and kept the device as his (ahem) device.

The Davenport family has a felon’s head in a noose as their device. This may be because they were the king’s foresters for Macclesfield and had the right to pass death sentences. The other versions of the story are that an ancestor either killed one of the king’s messengers or was cowardly in battle, and they were given the device as a punishment.

A used parson’s wig is a charm against witches. That’s a minor magic item. I wonder if it works while it is still sitting atop the parson? A sort of hidden weapon in the fight against evil?