Legend has indeed given Mother Damnable a notorious reputation. Her parents, it’s said, were hanged for causing a young girl’s death by witchcraft and her lovers either met gruesome ends or mysteriously vanished. Three were reputedly dispatched by her hand, with the charred body parts of one being discovered in her oven. She’s alleged to have given shelter to the infamous female bandit Moll Cutpurse. In her old age, when rumours of her dabbling in the black arts were at their most intense, Mother Damnable was blamed for any misfortune that befell the inhabitants of Camden Town. (Then little more than a hamlet and collection of alehouses scattered around a crossroads on a northerly route into London.) The villagers would apparently gather outside the witch’s cottage and berate her. Mother Damnable would respond by leaning from her window and flinging foul abuse. Usually, the appearance of her huge, vicious black cat  – widely thought to be a devilish familiar – sent the yokels scurrying.

But was Mother Damnable really a practitioner of black magic? Was she a murderer? Did she exist at all? Was she perhaps a composite of several infamous females? Why was she associated with a pub that remained notorious for centuries after her death? What was Mother Damnable’s connection with the renowned Yorkshire fortune teller Mother Shipton and what did Dracula author Bram Stoker have to say about her? And why might rumours of witchcraft have attached themselves to such a person in the first place? Read on for tales of gallows, hairless cats, bat-embroidered cloaks, spooky crossroads and weird potions.

Mother Damnable’s Notorious Parents and her Four Dead or ‘Disappeared’ Lovers

According to the legends, Mother Damnable’s real name was Jinney – or Jinny or Jenny – Bingham. Though records of her birth have either been lost or never existed, she seems to have been born around 1600. She was the only child of a brickmaker, Jacob Bingham, from Kentish Town, which was the nearest settlement of any size to Camden. Her mother was the daughter of a Scottish peddler, who Jacob met while serving in Scotland in the army. His military service over, Jacob returned to the Camden Town area with his Scots wife and resumed his brickmaking trade. The couple and their young daughter, however, would sometimes travel around the country to peddle Jacob’s wares.

At about 16 years of age, Jinney Bingham became pregnant by her boyfriend, a man known as ‘Gypsy’ George Coulter. Her father built the couple a cottage on a patch of waste land, commonly believed to be the spot now covered by Camden Town Tube Station. (Though some say the cottage stood on the site now occupied by the – perhaps appropriately named – World’s End pub just across the road.) George’s residency in the cottage would prove a short one. Accused of stealing sheep near Holloway, he was tried at the Old Bailey and hanged at Tyburn (A notorious place of execution close to Marble Arch). Jinney next took up with a man named Darby, a heavy drinker. Their relationship soon became full of furious arguments and violent confrontations. After one particularly brutal incident, Jinney is said to have sought her mother’s advice on how to deal with her drunken lover. Darby vanished shortly afterwards. No one knew what had befallen him and no investigation was conducted into his disappearance.

But Jinney was about to lose more people in her life. Her parents were ordered to appear in court, accused of killing a young girl by means of witchcraft. The two were found guilty and hanged. Jinney, perhaps to fill the emotional gap left by their execution, began cohabiting with a man named Pitcher. As with her liaison with Darby, their relationship soon degenerated into a series of arguments and fights. Pitcher, like his predecessor, wouldn’t be part of Jinney’s life for long. Unlike with Darby, however, it soon became clear what had happened to him. Pitcher’s body was discovered – charred and toasted – in Jinney’s oven.

As there was a body, there could be an investigation and Jinney Bingham was put on trial for Pitcher’s murder. Things were looking grim for her until an associate popped up in the witness box. This acquaintance said Pitcher had a habit of hiding in the oven to escape Jinney’s savage tongue. Perhaps, having done this, he’d fallen asleep and his roasting had merely been an accident. The court was convinced and Jinney was acquitted.

An image of ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’, said to be from 1676

Despite her evasion of the noose, the trial ruined Jinney’s – already far from spotless – reputation in her neighbourhood. People avoided her and she became more reclusive. She’d normally wait until nightfall to leave her home, when fewer people were around. Nobody could say for certain how she supported herself, a fact which likely gave rise to more gossip. It was around this time she acquired certain nicknames – Mother Damnable, Mother Redcap and the Shrew of Kentish Town. (In that era, a ‘shrew’ was an ill-tempered, aggressive woman prone to nagging and scolding, as in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.)

In the 1640s, during the English Civil War, the reclusive Jinney Bingham was surprised by an urgent banging on the door of her cottage. She opened it to see a man who begged her for shelter, claiming he was being pursued. Jinney gave him lodgings and the man – who turned out to be wealthy – became her lover. Moll Cutpurse – a notorious thief who wore men’s clothing, smoked a pipe and pimped both male and female prostitutes – sometimes stayed with them during the Civil War and its aftermath. Jinney’s wealthy lover would, however, prove little better at getting on with her than her previous partners. Though their vitriolic relationship dragged on for many years, he eventually died. The villagers suspected Jinney had poisoned him. Their claims were investigated, but the inquest decided there was insufficient evidence to support this allegation. Around this time, rumours grew up that Mother Damnable – as her parents had – was meddling in the black arts. Such gossip would dominate the later years of Jinney Bingham’s life.

Mother Damnable’s Old Age, Reputation for Witchcraft and Devilish Death

As Mother Damnable aged, she became ever more reclusive. Usually, just her large, vicious black cat provided her with company. Villagers did, however, sometimes sneak in to see her thanks to her reputed skills as a teller of fortunes and – according to Samuel Palmer’s local history book St Pancras (1870) – ‘a healer of strange diseases’.  The same residents, however, scapegoated her for anything that went wrong – the death of a cow or child, perhaps, or the failure of a business or crops.

Palmer stated that ‘when any mishap occurred, then the old crone was set upon by the mob and hooted without mercy. The old, ill-favoured creature would at such times lean out of her hatch-door, with a grotesque red cap on her head.’ The cap was said to be worn to hide her baldness. Palmer goes on to describe Mother Damnable as having ‘a large broad nose, heavy shaggy eyebrows, sunken eyes and lank and leathern cheeks; her forehead wrinkled, her eyes wide and her looks sullen and unmoved. On her shoulders was thrown a dark grey striped frieze, with black patches, that looked from a distance like flying bats. Suddenly she would let her huge black cat jump upon the hatch by her side, when the mob instantly retreated from a superstitious dread of the double foe.’

Despite her age and isolation, Mother Damnable never seemed to want for anything. The house, having been built by her father, was hers and she presumably either made sufficient money from fortune-telling and herbalism or had enough left over from her rich boyfriend. She probably died around 1680 and, according to legend, the Devil was seen coming to collect her wicked soul and she was found with a concoction of herbs still bubbling over her fire.

Samuel Palmer quotes from the ‘old pamphlet’ describing the witch’s demise. According to this text, one of those who discovered Mother Damnable thought it would be a good idea to give some of her potion to the cat. The feline’s ‘hair fell off in two hours, and the cat soon died’. Mother Damnable, the pamphlet continues, ‘was stiff when found, and … the undertaker was obliged to break her limbs before he could place them in the coffin and … the justices have put men in possession of the house to examine its contents.’

Palmer concludes by asserting: ‘Such is the history of this strange being, whose name will ever be associated with Camden Town, and whose reminiscence will ever be revived by the old wayside house, which, built on the site of the old beldame’s cottage, wears her head as the sign of the tavern.’

The above account is the story of Mother Damnable as popularly understood in legend. But how true might such a tale be and – if it is more folklore than fact – what could have influenced the evolution of this weird myth? Let’s investigate in the next sections.

Camden Town Tube Station – built over the home of the notorious witch Mother Damnable? (Photo: Sunil060902)

Might Mother Damnable Have Been a Fearsome, Foul-Mouthed, She-Dragon of an … Innkeeper?

In this strange case, it might be wise to see to how much we can tease out the possible narratives of Mother Damnable, Mother Redcap, the Shrew of Kentish Town and Jinney Bingham, see how far they go back and question to what extent these different names might be referring to the same person.

A Mother Redcap is mentioned in a letter said to have been sent from Whitehall by one Henry Foxhall to Charles Firebrace in 1666, but perhaps the most interesting early sources depict a ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’. These sources, consisting of pictures and a satirical rhyme, are dated 1676 and probably came from a broadside. (Broadsides were single sheets of paper hawked in the streets and printed with poems, news or ballads.) The earliest copies of the 1676 sources we have, however, are from 1793. They appear in James Caulfield’s Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of remarkable Persons, from the Reign of Edward III to the Revolution; collected from the most authentic accounts, which seems to have been published in batches between 1790 and 1795.

The pictures show Mother Damnable as a witchy-looking old woman in patched threadbare clothes seated close to a fire, but the accompanying rhyme appears to depict her as a foul-mouthed, combative pub landlady rather than a worker of magic. We learn that Mother Damnable was prone to ‘cursing, fuming, flinging fire in the face of Madam, Lord, Knight, Gent, City Squire’. We also learn that whenever she was ‘ruffled into the least pet, will cellar-dore key into pocket get, then no more ale, And now the fray begins!’ During this ‘fray’, customers are warned to beware of ‘heads, wigs, hoods, scarfs, shoulders, sides and shins’. As the fracas unfolds, the ‘fierce she-dragon’ Mother Damnable ‘sends forth such dismal shrieks and uncouth noise, As fills the town with din, the street with boys.’

The satirical rhyme about ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’. The spilt and broken tankards in the background might also indicate she was the landlady of a rowdy establishment.

So how might this ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’, this terrifying landlady, connect with the witch of Camden Town, Jinney Bingham? Caulfield – who claimed to have acquired the pictures and rhyme from the collection of a ‘J. Bindley Esq’ – states that Mother Damnable’s real name was unknown. But beneath one of the pictures is written: ‘Mother Damnable, the remarkable shrew of Kentish Town, the person who gave rise to the sign of Mother Recap on the Hampstead Road, near London, an dom 1676.’

I suspect this caption was written by Caulfield or some other later writer rather than dating to the late 1600s. The language – though I wouldn’t claim to be an expert – doesn’t sound like 17th-century English and the tense would indicate it was written after Mother Damnable’s death. (The tenses used in the verse, on the other hand, make it sound like Mother Damnable is vigorously alive, as she might well have been in 1676.) What Caulfield, or whoever wrote the caption, is doing, however, is making an explicit connection with a pub that stood for a long time at the crossroads where Jinney Bingham’s cottage is once said to have been located. (Now either the site of Camden Town Tube Station or the World’s End.) This pub – also for a long time – seems to have been called The Mother Red Cap (or Old Mother Red Cap), which – as we’ve seen – was another of Jinney’s nicknames. The satirical rhyme links Mother Damnable to Kentish Town rather than Camden, but as Camden Town was so small in those days it was often lumped in with its more sizeable neighbour. So it’s possible the pub of the notorious alewife of the Mother Damnable rhyme might have been situated at Jinney’s crossroads – and the alewife herself might have been Jinney.

The first known reference to a pub in this location is from 1690. Though we can’t know what the pub was named in such times, the idea seems to have arisen that it was long called the Mother Redcap after a notorious ex-owner. A sketch reputedly from 1746 names the pub the Old Mother Redcap while a cartoon from 1820 includes a painting of the pub with that name (though minus the ‘Old’). In his Book for a Rainy Day or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833 (1905), J.T. Smith wrote that the Mother Red Cap had a terrifying reputation as ‘it has been stated that “Mother Red Cap” was “Mother Damnable” of Kentish Town in early days, and that it was at her house that the notorious “Moll Cut-purse”, the highwaywoman of Oliver Cromwell’s days, dismounted and frequently lodged.’ In Old and New London (1878), Edward Walford reports that ‘the old house was taken down, and another rebuilt on its site, with the former sign, about the year 1850. This again, in its turn, was removed; and a third house, in the modern style, and of still greater pretensions, was built on the same site a quarter of a century afterwards.’

The sign – which always seems to have been rescued from any demolition and displayed outside each version of the Mother Red Cap – according to Walford: ‘Exhibited that venerable lady – whether she was alewife or witch – with a tall, extinguisher-shaped hat, not unlike that ascribed to Mother Shipton.’

A bucolic sketch of the Mother Red Cap, said to be from 1746

So Jinney Bingham – if that was indeed her name – might have been an innkeeper rather than a witch. If Jinney was an innkeeper, one would suspect she’d have presided over a less than respectable hostelry, perhaps some sort of grog shop. (Maybe, due to the tavern’s prominent location, though, the madams, lords and gents of the rhyme occasionally wandered in – to be quickly repulsed by the landlady and clientele.) A character running a rough pub popular with travellers and criminals might well – like the Jinney of legend – have possessed a robust will, volatile temper, razor-edged tongue and propensity to undertake occasional violent acts. The supposed location of Jinney’s cottage – on the corner of a busy crossroads on a route into London – seems to me a more likely site for an alehouse than a ramshackle witch’s dwelling. It’s hard to imagine such a piece of prime real estate being a scrap of waste ground on which a poor workman might erect a humble house for his daughter. Jinney’s giving of lodgings to people – like Moll Cutpurse and the Civil War fugitive – might also suggest innkeeping was her occupation. In addition, ‘Mother Redcap’ was a common nickname bestowed on female innkeepers from the late 1500s onwards. The name is mentioned, for instance, in a 1595 jestbook, a 1597 play and a 1656 ballad. It seems that only in the 1800s did the name Mother Redcap cease to denote an innkeeper and start denoting a witch.

Cartoon of 1820 showing a picture of the Mother Red Cap in Camden Town

But might there not have been some indications of witchiness around this ferocious landlady? It’s been suggested that alewives were perceived by some to have a witchy aura. They owned cats to keep rodents away from the malt, wore tall black hats so they’d stand out in the marketplace, used broom-like braided twigs to remove yeast from fermented beer and displayed magical-looking stars as a sign of their ale’s purity. Furthermore, the 1676 rhyme compares Mother Damnable to other notorious females – Mother Shipton, Mother Louse and ‘Macbeth’s wayward women’. Mother Louse was another infamously ugly and sharp-tongued alewife, but Mother Shipton (of whom we’ll hear more later) and the women mentioned from Macbeth were seen as witches. It’s unlikely, however, that the author of the rhyme was seriously suggesting Mother Damnable was a witch. Though by 1676 the persecution of witches had lost some of its intensity, executions for witchcraft continued into the early 1700s and those suspected of this offence were despised social outcasts. No one would have wanted to drink in a bar run by a witch. What the broadside might have done, however – especially if it had sold well – was put the idea in some minds that there was some link between witches and Mother Damnable and – as we’ll see below – this association may have grown stronger over the centuries.

So How Did Mother Damnable Come to Be Seen as a Witch and What Did Mother Shipton Have to Do with It All?

The 1676 sources depicting ‘Mother Damnable of Kentish Town’ – assuming the materials James Caulfield acquired for his book were genuinely from around that date – would suggest there might have been a formidable landlady with that nickname and that she might have run a pub on Jinney’s crossroads. But, as we’ve seen, these sources describe her as alewife rather than witch. They also make no mention of her slaying her lovers, of her parents being hung for practising the black arts and of the Devil’s remarkable visit to her cottage on the day of her death.

Most of what we know today about the Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable character comes from Samuel Palmer’s 1870 book, the full title of which is the snappy St Pancras, Being Antiquarian, Topographical, and Biographical Memoranda, Relating to the Extensive Metropolitan Parish of St Pancras, Middlesex, with Some Account of the Parish from Its Foundation (St Pancras was the large semi-urban parish that then included Camden Town). Palmer appears to have been the first to link the name Jinney Bingham with the Mother Damnable figure. The only reference to sources he makes, however, is his mention of the ‘old pamphlet’ describing Mother Damnable’s death. I haven’t been able to find any earlier references to this pamphlet. Some of the descriptions Palmer gives – the likening of the patches on the cloak to bats, for instance – smack more of Victorian Gothic Romanticism than how people would have perceived witches in the 1600s. (Palmer – a writer, painter and disciple of William Blake – was an important figure in the English Romantic movement.)

We might suspect, then, that the shrewish and combative aspects of Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable stemmed from the attributes of a real person and only in the Victorian age became mingled with legends of witchcraft. This could have been thanks both to a misunderstanding of the term Mother Redcap, the meaning of which had changed over time, and the Romantic Victorian embellishments of writers like Samuel Palmer. (The letter from Henry Foxhall, though supposedly sent in 1666, actually first appears in a book published in 1843, perhaps suggesting some gothic Victorian enhancements may have taken place with that correspondence.) From Palmer’s descriptions of Mother Damnable, it would seem he was familiar with the pictures published by Caulfield. Could Palmer have observed Mother Damnable kneeling before the fire and allowed his gothic imagination to invent her teapot full of ‘drugs, herbs and liquid’? (Palmer and other later writers perhaps also converted Mother Damnable’s inclination for casual violence into a string of murders.)  

The English Romantic Samuel Palmer (1805-81) in a self-portrait of 1826. Palmer did much to popularise the tale of the Camden Town witch Mother Damnable.

It is possible, however, that Palmer drew at least some of his material from local oral traditions. The turning of Mother Damnable into a witch was probably not a completely Victorian innovation. To understand how this switch of identity may have come about, we’ll need to turn our attention again to Camden Town’s inns. One such tavern had a very similar name to the Mother Red Cap: the Mother Black Cap.

The Mother Black Cap seems to have been established by about 1750. It must have been in existence by 1830 at the latest, as a manuscript from around that date mentions both the Mother Black Cap and Mother Red Cap in a list of Camden Town’s pubs, along with eight other hostelries with names like the Laurel Tree, the Hope and Anchor, and the Elephant and Castle. The Mother Black Cap, according to Walford, stood ‘at the northern or upper end of the High Street’. Mother Blackcap was a common name for Mother Shipton, a semi-legendary witch and fortune teller with astounding prophetic powers said to have lived between 1488 and 1561 and to have been born near Knaresborough, Yorkshire. Walford comments, ‘It is not a little remarkable that two inns bearing the names of these semi-mythical ladies exist within half-a-mile of each other.’

The first records of Mother Shipton and her prophecies appeared in 1641, 80 years after her reported death. By this stage, accounts of the prophetess would have passed somewhat into the realms of the mythic. Though Mother Shipton was generally seen as a less malevolent character than Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable, the legends of the two enchantresses have certain aspects in common. Mother Shipton was also said to be hideously ugly, she knew the medicinal properties of plants and herbs, and – like Jinney Bingham – she suffered ostracisation because of her ugliness and reputation as a witch. Her husband died young and – as with the Shrew of Kentish Town and her lovers – some suspected Mother Shipton of causing his death. The Devil was also rumoured to be involved in Mother Shipton’s story. Some said Mother Shipton sold him her soul in exchange for her weird powers; others that her mother Agatha had been seduced by the Devil or had summoned him herself, with their union resulting in the birth of the strange child that would grow up to be Mother Shipton. Like Mother Damnable, Mother Shipton foretold the future, though her prophecies tended to be grander than Mother Redcap’s predictions about her neighbours’ affairs. Mother Shipton predicted the first piped water system in York, Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries and Break with Rome, and the spectacular growth of the capital: ‘Shall Highgate Hill stand in the midst of London’. Several accounts have her casually assigning a date for the Apocalypse. Despite her fame as a witch, Mother Shipton, like Mother Damnable, wasn’t put to death. She died peacefully in her bed at an old age.

The famous Yorkshire witch Mother Shipton – a model for Camden Town’s Mother Damnable?

We might wonder why a witch from the north would have a pub named after her in Camden Town. Mother Shipton did have a nationwide fame. D.C. Mackay, in his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1841), wrote, ‘The prophecies of Mother Shipton are still believed in many of the rural districts of England. In cottages and servants’ halls, her reputation is still great; and she rules, the most popular of British prophets, among all the uneducated and half-educated portion of the community.’ Her popularity in the north, however, seems to have been especially strong.

In his 1910 book Famous Imposters, the author of Dracula Bram Stoker devoted a chapter to Mother Damnable’s legend. Stoker felt the Mother Black Cap pub was likely so-named because ‘Camden Town was a suburb through which the northern traffic passed on its way to and from London.’ It was, therefore, ‘wise to use for publicity and entertainment names that were familiar to north country ears. Before the railways were organised the great wheeled and horse traffic between London and the North – especially Yorkshire which was one of the first Counties to take up manufacturing and the wool trade – went through Camden Town. So it was wise forethought to take as an inn sign a Yorkshire name. The name of Mother Shipton had been in men’s mouths and ears for about two-hundred years, and as the times had so changed that the old stigma of witchcraft was not then understood, the association with Knaresborough alone remained.’ As for Mother Damnable’s reputed end, Stoker wryly comments, ‘What a pity it was that no veracious scribe or draughtsman was present in the crowd which had noticed the Devil’s entry into the house. In such a case we might have got a real likeness of His Satanic Majesty – a thing which has long been wanted – and the opportunities of obtaining which are few.’

So, in Camden Town, two public houses were named after notorious women of legend. One – the Mother Black Cap – was named after Mother Shipton, a well-known soothsayer and witch, whereas the other – the Mother Red Cap – may have been christened in honour of Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable, a sharp-tongued shrew with a reputation for violence who, nonetheless, might not have originally had associations with magic. Despite this, there were similarities in the two women’s legends and both pubs’ landlords – according to Stoker, ‘open and avowed trade rivals’ – likely used those legends to promote their competing establishments. Over time, the two ladies with similar names – who also, excepting the colour of their headgear, probably looked similar on their pub signs – may have been confused by the residents of Camden Town and the travellers that stopped there. Bits of Mother Shipton’s myth could therefore have sneaked into the folklore surrounding Mother Redcap. (Perhaps building on the tenuous links already made as long ago as the 1676 broadside.) In this way, witchcraft might have been added to the list of fearsome attributes the sword-tongued shrew possessed. Victorian writers may have then applied a gothic gloss to the legend of Mother Damnable, giving it its current form.

The Black Cap pub in Camden Town, which closed in 2015, was a descendant of the Mother Black Cap. (Photo courtesy of Nylki)

Of course, the Mother Damnable character might over the years have accumulated aspects of several women. A number of scholars – including the folklorists Steve Roud and Jacqueline Simpson and the historian John Callow – do see Mother Damnable as a composite figure of two or more individuals. Mother Louse has already been mentioned and it’s also been suggested that one of the models for Mother Redcap was a follower of the Duke of Marlborough’s army during the Reign of Queen Anne (1702-14). In Holloway, not far from Camden Town, a coin or token is said to have been discovered dated 1667 and crudely stamped with the inscription ‘Mother Read Cap’s in Holloway.’ Another possible prototype for the Mother Redcap myth was an alewife named Eleanor Rumming of Leatherhead, Surrey, who lived in the reign of Henry VIII. The poet John Skelton (c.1463-1529) described Eleanor as being ‘ugly of cheer, her face all bowsy, wondrously wrinkled, her een bleared, and she grey-haired.’ It’s interesting, though, that none of these women seem to have been associated with witchcraft, a fact that would perhaps support the idea that the witchy aspects of Mother Damnable were imported into her myth thanks to Mother Shipton and a confusion – especially after a few ales – of pub signs. But is this necessarily the case or might parts of Mother Damnable’s legend really match up with deep folkloric notions of the magical and attitudes towards witches that were current in the 1600s? Let’s try to find out below.

Crossroads, Black Cats, Scapegoats and the Coming of Capitalism – How Might the Mother Damnable Legend Match up with the Folklore and History of Witchcraft?

Although the Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable legend might have arisen in the Georgian and Victorian epochs from the fusing of various elements – and various semi-historical figures – certain things about her mythos do equate with folkloric notions of witches and the historical knowledge we have of those who tended to be accused of witchcraft.

Mother Damnable owned a black cat and such felines already had their reputation as sinister beings and witches’ familiars in the 1600s. It’s possible, however, that the cat was later added to her myth. It’s also interesting that her cottage was said to have stood at a crossroads. Crossroads, perhaps because they symbolise the intersection of different realities or realms, are in many parts of the world seen as magical sites. In England, they were reputed to be places where magical rituals occurred. They were also sites where suicides were buried and gallows and gibbets set up. This was partly due to the belief that the unquiet ghost of the suicide or executed convict would be confused by the choice of four ways and therefore wouldn’t wander off to haunt nearby settlements. There were indeed once plans to erect a gallows at Mother Damnable’s crossroads. In 1776, The Morning Post stated, ‘Orders have been given from the Secretary of State’s office that the criminals capitally convicted at the Old Bailey shall in the future be executed at the crossroads near the “Mother Red Cap” inn, the half-way house to Hampstead, and that no galleries, scaffolds or other temporary stages be built near the place.’

Ye Olde Mother Red Cap in 1930 opposite Camden Town Tube Station. Some, however, say the station itself was the site of the original tavern.

It seems these gallows were either never erected or never used. This may have been because of the popularity of the site with Londoners. In Old and New London Walford wrote, ‘At the beginning of the present (19th) century the “Mother Red Cap” was a constant resort for many a Londoner who desired to inhale the fresh air and enjoy the quiet of the country, for at that time the old tavern – which, by the way, was also known as the half-way house to Highgate and Hampstead – stood almost in open fields and was approached on different sides by green lanes and hedgerow roads. At that time too, the dairy over the way, at the corner of the Chalk Farm, or Hampstead, or the Kentish Town Roads, was not the fashionable establishment it afterwards became, but partook more the character of “milk fair” … for there were forms for the pedestrians to rest on, and the good folks served out milk fresh from the cow to all who came.’ This bucolic scene perhaps contrasts with some of the crossroads’ more sinister associations and Smith’s depictions of the Mother Red Cap as a terrifying inn.

A postcard showing the Ye Olde Mother Red Cap pub in Camden Town around 1925. The pub is listed under that name in directories from the 1930s and 1940s. In 1985, it was renamed The World’s End.

Returning to Mother Damnable, though, research by historians – such as Keith Thomas in his Religion and the Decline of Magic – indicates that in the Early Modern Period (1500-1700) certain types of people were more likely to be accused of witchcraft. Though individuals of any age, sex or social rank could have the charge of witchcraft levelled against them, older poor women were much more frequently accused. This was largely because the emergence of the capitalist system was leading to a more individualistic and money-orientated outlook on life. The old feudal bonds of community were weakening and people were less inclined to give charity to their poorer neighbours. And the poorest of all tended to be old, often widowed women, who had no one to support them and to whom the economic and social structures of the time gave little opportunity for employment. But the old ways of thinking hadn’t gone entirely so when such people turned up begging at their neighbours’ doors and were sent away, the neighbours were likely to feel guilt. As so often is the case, this guilt expressed itself as anger and blame towards the victims of the social system. When a mishap occurred – an animal dying, a failure of crops – and the householder remembered the old woman he’d turned away (and perhaps turned away with a good few curses and threats coming from the crone) he might assume she’d cast a spell on him.

It’s interesting that the rumours of Mother Damnable practising witchcraft became more intense towards the end of her life. It’s also intriguing that her neighbours were depicted as harassing her when any of them had suffered a misfortune. What doesn’t fit this narrative, however, is that Mother Damnable never seems to have wanted for anything and was never put on trail for witchcraft. This could indicate that – if one of the prototypes of the Mother Damnable figure was some sort of enchantress – she might have been a cunning woman. Cunning men and women were village folk magicians who used a combination of sympathetic magic, Christian prayers, amulets and talismans, and herbal remedies to help neighbours who came to them in trouble. They might, for instance, cure human and animal diseases, help find lost goods or identify thieves. Though being accused of witchcraft was an occupational hazard for a cunning woman or man, it was something that in fact happened infrequently, perhaps indicating the importance communities placed on such people. The Mother Damnable character’s brewing up of potions, her relative prosperity and the fact she wasn’t tried for witchcraft might suggest that one of the models for her was such a person.

Is Camden Town Tube Station still infused with the dark spirit of the witch Mother Damnable? (Photo: Rossographer)

All this is, of course, speculation and the scarcity of sources from the time she was said to have lived makes it difficult to do more than take educated guesses about Jinney Bingham/Mother Damnable’s identity. But an attempt to understand her strange narrative could run something like this. A female innkeeper in the 1600s – infamous for her sharp tongue, aggressive demeanour and violent tendencies – was so notorious that pubs built on the site of her tavern were thereafter named after her. Her legend thus established, it over the years merged with tales of similar redoubtable alewives and – possibly – with memories of old women accused of witchcraft and cunning folk. The setting up of a rival tavern nearby – called the Mother Black Cap, after Mother Shipton – either introduced magical elements into her myth or enhanced any such elements already there. This was largely due to the public confusing Mothers Blackcap and Redcap and merging their legends, legends which may have already boasted striking similarities. When excitable Victorian writers put a fashionably gothic overlay on it all, the terrifying tale of black magic and villainy was complete.

I think Camden Town Tube Station is still a strange spot. The atmosphere’s heavy, as if with centuries of foreboding, and the meeting of four roads throbbing with London traffic does give one a feel of a crackle in the air. On a London Underground network replete with tales of ghosts and hauntings, the origin myth of Camden Town Station stands out as especially eerie. Perhaps, also, the spirit of Mother Damnable lives on in the gothic culture the area’s now famous for, with its market stalls of black drapery and witchy trinkets. The psychogeography of Camden’s pubs also hints at an influence from the tutelary spirit of the once notorious innkeeper. There’s the doomily named World’s End; there was until some years ago a pub bearing the name the Halfway House (called now, I think, the Camden Eye, with a somewhat ominous-looking eye painted on its gable). There was also, until 2015, a pub called the Black Cap – a descendant, I believe, of the original Mother Black Cap. This pub was a haunt of the serial killers Dennis Nilsen and Anthony Hardy and Nilsen picked out some of his victims in there. On a less dark note, a pub called the Mother Black Cap appeared in the cult film Withnail and I (1987), set in Camden Town in 1969. The main characters, drink-soaked and drug-infused out-of-work actors, are threatened with violence in the establishment. Perhaps the spirit of Mother Damnable has truly settled on Camden and – despite ongoing attempts to corporatise, sanitise and gentrify the neighbourhood – isn’t going to leave any time soon.

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But how far back does this peculiar legend go? Is it genuinely ancient or much more recent than we might think? And what folklore – associated both with the area around the Tower of London and with the playful, cunning and intelligent raven – might have woven itself into this strange story?

Let’s first take a look at the legend of the ravens and the Tower of London as it’s commonly understood before exploring what folkloric, mythic and historical resonances might have become caught up in it. We’ll then investigate just how much this wonderfully gothic tale holds up under the light of a more clinical scrutiny.

Prepare yourself for accounts of infuriated royal stargazers, eccentric Welsh bards, severed yet talkative heads, and ravens being given ranks in Britain’s armed forces. You’ll also read about Tower ravens deciding to relocate to pubs, sorcerers sending their souls outside their bodies, decapitated queens, London’s three sacred mounds, Victorian gothic resculptings of England’s bloody history, and how the Tower of London’s precious ravens have been threatened by the Covid-19 lockdown.

The Tower of London and Its Ravens – a History of Legend, or a Legendary History

Many believe that ravens have lived on the site of the Tower of London since at least Roman times, congregating in the Roman fortifications that preceded England’s famous stronghold. In his Biography of London, Peter Ackroyd suggests that semi-domesticated ravens would have been a common sight around the Roman city of Londinium, with the birds helping keep the streets clean by scavenging scraps and bits of offal.

After the Romans left and the medieval epoch began, it appears that Londoners still appreciated ravens – as well as kites – for the same reason. Laws prescribed the death penalty for killing these birds and some ravens were apparently so tame they’d eat bread from children’s hands. One traveller remarked on the city’s ‘quite tame’ kites and it seems that butchers threw out their leftovers for ravens and kites to gobble.

Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror – keen to assert his authority over a potentially rebellious London – built a wooden stockade where the Tower of London now stands. After a fire in 1077, which destroyed much of the wooden city, the Normans began to build the White Tower, a stone fortification that’s still the centrepiece of the Tower of London today. As the years passed, various monarchs added to the stronghold and a moat was dug so the dark waters of the Thames could encircle it. In the Middle Ages, there’s no reason to suspect that London’s ubiquitous ravens wouldn’t have frequented the expanding fortress. Eastcheap Market – famous for its butchers – was nearby so it’s likely some ravens that congregated there made the short hop and wing-flap to the Tower.

The White Tower, the first stone building constructed at the Tower of London and still its centrepiece (Photo: Gareth James)

Legend claims that a particularly gruesome function of the Tower may have attracted them. For centuries, the Tower of London held prisoners – mostly royal or aristocratic – accused of treason. The lives of these inmates sometimes came to an end beneath the executioner’s sword or axe, occasionally on Tower Green – inside the Tower’s Walls – but more commonly on Tower Hill, just outside them. Ravens, due to their scavenging habits, have long been associated with gallows, gibbets and places of execution.

The birds were said to pluck out the eyes of the newly decapitated. They may have also scavenged blood and scraps of flesh. English executioners were not known for their competence. As there weren’t that many royal or noble-born traitors to behead (commoners convicted of treason were hung, drawn and quartered), executioners were usually out of practice. They also seem to have often been drunk.  The messy, drawn-out hacking or slashing, then, might have allowed nimble ravens to swoop in for a snack. A visitor to London records children ‘gathering up the blood which had fallen through the slits in the scaffold’ following a beheading on Tower Hill. If children could do this, then why not the city’s ravens?

The ravens, though, sometimes had a sense of decorum. When Henry VIII executed his second queen Anne Boleyn in 1536, he – perhaps out of some lingering affection for her – had her beheaded on the private Tower Green rather than the public Tower Hill, where convicts knelt before jeering crowds. Henry also brought over a skilled French swordsman – to mercifully allow his ex a swift clean passage from this life. The ravens, sensing the solemnity of the event, apparently ‘sat silent and immovable on the battlements and gazed eerily at the strange scene. A queen about to die!’ The birds weren’t, though, it’s said, so considerate when Lady Jane Grey – a young noblewoman who reigned for a farcical nine days before being deposed in favour of Mary I – was executed in February 1554. Though Jane also had the privilege of being beheaded on Tower Green, the ravens soon flew in to peck her eyes out.

The first reference, however, to the legend that the kingdom will fall if the ravens leave the Tower of London concerns the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Charles’s royal astronomer, John Flamsteed, had an observatory in the White Tower. Flamsteed complained about the Tower’s ravens – of which there were apparently hundreds – flying past his telescopes and obscuring the sky. Some versions of the legend say Charles himself was fed up with the birds’ droppings besmirching his optical instruments.

Charles commanded that the ravens should be destroyed, but one of his courtiers reminded him of the legend that the ravens leaving the Tower would mean the monarchy’s collapse. Perhaps thinking of his father’s fate – who’d lost his kingdom and his head not long ago – Charles ordered that the ravens should be protected forever, with at least six kept at the Tower at all times. As for Flamsteed, he and his observatory were shunted out to Greenwich, where there’s still an observatory to this day.

A different take on the legend says that – after the Great Fire of London in 1666 – citizens started persecuting ravens for scavenging. Flamsteed explained to Charles that the death of the last raven would result in England’s fall, so Charles ordered that six should be kept safely in the Tower of London.

Much folklore is woven around the Tower of London’s ravens. (Photo: Steve Krause)

Thereafter, folklore asserts, all England’s monarchs made sure there were at least six ravens in the fortress. This custom perhaps acquired more urgency when London’s wild raven population began to decline. No longer revered as vital cleaners of the streets, from around the turn of the 19th century ravens were accused of preying on livestock and hunted down. Their numbers plummeted in the capital and the surrounding countryside. The last pair of wild ravens in London were recorded nesting in Hyde Park in 1826. Wild ravens are still extinct in the capital. Gulls, which don’t seem to have appeared in London until around 1890, eventually replaced them as the city’s airborne scavengers.

The Tower ravens, however, found a new purpose as the Tower of London morphed from a place of imprisonment and execution into more of a tourist attraction. The ravens helped create a suitably macabre backdrop to the gothic tales of executions and medieval skullduggery the Victorians delighted in. As Britain moved into the 20th century and Victorian restraint eroded, the tales of beheadings got more gruesome and the ravens found themselves increasingly popular, appearing in a range of artworks and books.

England under Threat – The Tower of London and Its Ravens Struggle with World War II, Escapes, Kidnappings and Covid-19

World War II wasn’t a good time for the Tower of London’s ravens. The Tower closed to the public and the moat – long-drained over health fears – was turned into a vegetable garden to help the war effort. The fortress even resumed its former role as a jail, holding German spies and prisoners of war, with one man being executed there. The ravens, deprived of the food handouts and amusement the tourists brought, were – though – put to use as unofficial spotters of enemy planes and bombs. Those bombs, however, killed several ravens while others fled the Tower or died of shock during air-raids. Legend says Winston Churchill – a Freemason fascinated by the occult – was superstitious enough to boost the ravens’ numbers. When the Tower of London reopened to visitors on New Year’s Day 1946, a full contingent of ravens was waiting to welcome them.

The ravens at the Tower have since been extremely well-treated. They’re housed in a luxurious aviary close to the Bloody Tower and the sole task of one of the Beefeaters, the Ravenmaster, is to look after them. The ravens are well-fed – in addition to treats from visitors, they get through a tonne of meat a year. Sheep’s hearts and biscuits dipped in blood are particularly popular snacks. The Tower ravens – due to their pampered lifestyles – enjoy exceptional longevity. The longest-lived on record made it to 44. When they do expire, the ravens are laid to rest in a special graveyard, in the Tower of London’s South Moat. Recently, seven or eight ravens have been kept at the Tower – the ‘traditional’ six with one or two spares.

At the Tower of London, the sole task of one of the Beefeaters – the Ravenmaster – is to look after the fortress’s ravens. (Photo: Bjorn)

The clan of ravens has, however, sometimes seen its numbers depleted, potentially placing the monarchy and kingdom under threat. The strength of superstition can be seen in the fact any ravens lost are swiftly substituted. Some ravens have been dismissed in disgrace. Since the War, the Tower of London’s ravens have been official members of the British armed forces, even being awarded ranks. This means that – like soldiers, sailors or air force personnel– they can be sacked for misbehaviour. Raven George was retired to Wales after amusing himself by damaging car aerials. A decree was issued, which curtly stated: ‘On Saturday, 13th September 1986, Raven George, enlisted 1975, was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Conduct unsatisfactory, service therefore no longer required.’

Another raven is thought to have been kidnapped shortly after World War II, a mystery that has never been fully explained. In May 2013, a fox sneaked into the Tower and killed two ravens while another bird – Charlie – bit a bomb-sniffing dog and died after the dog grabbed him. The Tower ravens have the feathers on one of their wings clipped, meaning they can fly but not far. This hasn’t prevented some escaping. The – appropriately named – Grog fled the Tower for an East End pub and another bird, Muninn, went missing for three days. She got across the Thames, but was captured in a back garden in Greenwich and brought back to the Tower.

The latest challenge to the Tower and its ravens is the Covid-19 pandemic, a situation that has sparked a number of humorously concerned articles in the British press. After the Tower closed to visitors, the ravens missed both the fun they had with the tourists and the tidbits the tourists feed them (though visitors aren’t officially meant to feed the birds). Ravens – mischievous and intelligent – need constant amusement. Those at the Tower have been known to delight themselves by stealing sandwiches out of people’s hands and tricking them by ‘playing dead’.  One bird – called Edgar Sopper – did this so convincingly that the Ravenmaster really thought he had died. He sorrowfully picked up the ‘corpse’ only to have the raven bite him and flap off ‘croaking huge raven laughs’. With the dearth of visitors due to the coronavirus, the ravens have been given footballs, squeaky toys and teddies to keep them entertained. But the lack of amusement and food – ravens have been knocking on the Beefeaters’ windows begging for scraps – have already led to some escape attempts, with the birds Merlina and Jubilee being the worst offenders.

The Tower of London – this massive fortress covers 12 acres and hosted nearly 2.86 million visitors in 2018. (Photo: Duncan)

But what strands of folklore might be wrapped up in the – apparently powerful and enduring – legend of the Tower of London and its ravens? Let’s examine the archetypes and anxieties that might lurk behind this myth before querying the antiquity of the legend itself.

What Strands of Folklore Might Be Entangled in the Tales of the Tower and Its Ravens?

Bran the Blessed, Bran’s Talkative Severed Head and the ‘Sacred Psychogeography’ of Tower Hill

The Welsh medieval collection of tales The Mabinogion – written in the 12th and 13th centuries but drawing on much older oral traditions – includes a character called Bran the Blessed. Bran – a giant and king of the island of Britain – appears in the story Branwen, daughter of Llyr. In this account, Branwen – Bran’s sister – marries the Irish king, but is treated badly, leading to a battle on Irish soil between the king’s followers and Bran’s.

After the battle, Bran – fatally wounded in the foot – asks his followers to ‘cut off my head and take it to London. Eventually, you must bury it in state on the White Hill of London, turning my head towards France.’

Bran’s head is, therefore, ceremonially lopped off. His followers return with it to Britain and spend many years in strange wanderings, during which the head – still able to speak – proves an entertaining companion. Bran’s entourage finally reach London and the head is interred as Bran has requested, with the understanding that it’s faced towards France to repel invasions from the Continent. Interestingly, the White Hill is thought to be the mound known as Tower Hill today and the Welsh name ‘Bran’ translates into English as ‘crow or raven’.

There are aspects of Bran’s legend that relate to the functions of the Tower of London and the later folklore that would surround it. Bran is a king and the Tower – as well as being a prison – was also long used as a royal palace. When William the Conqueror began to build the Tower, its purpose wasn’t only to overawe the unruly City of London, but to guard the vital thoroughfare of the Thames, up which invaders – such as Vikings – had come. Even as late as World War II, the Tower was garrisoned with soldiers and was one of the fortifications designated to protect London in the event of a German land assault.

Bran’s myth is undoubtedly linked with the Celtic cult of the head. The Celts believed that the head contained the soul as well as the intellect, and the heads of enemies were prized as powerful magical instruments. It’s interesting that Bran’s head was buried in a place where 125 heads are estimated to have rolled over the centuries.

Tower Hill is associated with other ancient kings. King Brutus – the mythical founder of Britain and London – is said to be buried there. Some legends claim King Arthur – somewhat arrogantly – dug up Bran’s head from Tower Hill, stating that he would be the one who’d keep Britain safe from Saxon invasion. Perhaps the eventual loss of England to the Saxons was the result of this rashness.

The site of the scaffold on Tower Hill, outside the Tower of London’s walls. Around 125 heads rolled here while only seven people were beheaded on the more famous Tower Green. (Photo: Bryan MacKinnon)

It’s difficult to know whether the legend of Bran had any influence on the later legend of the Tower of London’s ravens, but it’s intriguing that both myths have links to kingship, ravens and the security of the realm. Tower Hill has also been seen as a significant protrusion by antiquarians and modern psychogeographers. It’s apparently one of ‘London’s three sacred mounds’, the other two being Tothill, near Westminster Abbey, and Penton Hill, near Islington. All three hills boast – or are close to – healing springs and excavations on Tower Hill have also revealed traces of a medieval well and Iron-Age burial. Perhaps Tower Hill has been a strange centre of mythic energy for some time.

The Tower of London, the Ravens and the External Soul

A concept that might shed light on the mystery of the Tower of London and its ravens is the notion of the ‘external soul’.  The idea is that a person can hide their ‘soul’ or ‘life’ in some external object, often an animal or plant. As long as the soul remains concealed and the plant or animal stays well, the person is invulnerable, but if the plant or animal is harmed or destroyed, the person will suffer injury or death. This idea was popularised by James George Frazer in his massive study of folklore, myth and religion The Golden Bough (1890) and – though Frazer is out-of-fashion today – his musings on the external soul might go some way to helping us understand the strange beliefs centred on the Tower’s ravens.

Folktales from many parts of the world feature a wicked character – often a giant, ogre or warlock – who has hidden his soul far away. This evildoer has usually kidnapped a princess and a hero must locate the external soul in order to kill her captor and free her. In a Norse story, a giant has hidden his soul in a well, in a church, on a distant island. In the well is a duck, in the duck is an egg and in the egg is the giant’s soul. The story’s hero manages to find the egg, he squeezes it and the giant bursts.

In some cultures, when a baby is born, their life is said to be bound up with a particular tree. If the tree grows strong and healthy, so will the young person, but if it withers and dies, the person will get sick and die too. Close to Dalhousie Castle, near Edinburgh, there grew an oak said to be intimately connected with the fortunes of the fortress’s owners. If a branch fell off the tree, it was thought a family member would soon die. In some tribal societies, people might believe that the lives of the members of a particular clan or the men or women of the tribe are bound up with those of a certain kind of animal: elephants, perhaps, or tortoises or monkeys. They will, therefore, avoid killing all members of that species as they cannot know which individual elephant or tortoise has their life linked with a certain individual of their clan.

With the ravens of the Tower, it’s slightly different as it’s thought the fate of the whole nation is connected with their welfare rather than just the lives of particular individuals. But might some shadowy notion of the external soul be seen in our somewhat ‘totemic’ attitudes towards the ravens?

Folklore Links the Raven with Death, Executions, Prophecy and Kingship

The common raven is found across Europe, North America, North Africa and northern and central Asia. In many parts of the planet, the raven’s intelligence, playfulness and striking black plumage have seen it gather similar associations in the local folklore. Much of this folklore ascribes characteristics to the raven that are also reflected in the Tower of London legend.

The legend foretells England’s (possible) doom and ravens are seen as sombre birds of prophecy. In Wales, it’s said that a raven cawing from a steeple overlooking a house means one of its occupants will soon die while a Scottish legend states that if a young child drinks from a raven’s skull, they’ll gain the gift of foresight. In Greek myth, ravens are linked to Apollo, the god of prophecy, and are the god’s messengers on earth. A Viking tradition claimed that if a warband’s banner – emblazoned with a raven – fluttered they’d be victorious in battle while if the banner drooped, they’d lose. The raven’s connection with prophecy probably comes from the bird’s unnerving ability to imitate human speech, leading to ravens being seen as ‘oracles’. Many visitors to the Tower of London have been surprised by a croaked ‘hello’ from a raven.

Since the late 1800s, the Tower of London’s ravens have been a tourist attraction. (Photo: Laura LaRose)

Ravens, like the Tower legend, are linked to kingship. A Cornish tradition claims that King Arthur turned into a raven after death and killing a raven was apparently for a long time a taboo act in that county. The legend of the German king Frederick Barbarossa – who shares some characteristics with Arthur – states that the monarch isn’t dead, but rather sleeping surrounded by his knights in a mountain cave. Ravens fly around the mountain and – when they cease to do so – he’ll wake up.

Though they’re not explicitly part of the Tower of London’s raven legend, the Tower has a strong association with executions and death. These themes are also found in the folklore of the raven, probably due to the birds’ deep black plumage, their ‘death-rattle-like’ croak and their habit of scavenging. Ravens are notorious for haunting gallows, scaffolds and gibbets. The executioner’s block is sometimes called a ‘ravenstone’ while in Germany ‘ravenstones’ can refer both to gravestones and ravens’ droppings after they’ve feasted on the corpses of criminals. In Celtic mythology, the warlike goddess Morrigan can take the form of a raven while hovering over scenes of slaughter and some Siberian peoples see ravens as spirits of war and violence. In Serbian legends, ravens often announce the deaths of heroes.

These are just some of the examples of the rich folklore of the raven that can be found across the world. Perhaps some of these associations contributed to the mythology of the ravens in the Tower.

But Wait a Minute – Might the Legend of the Ravens and the Tower of London Just Be a Victorian Invention?

Two ravens perch in front of the White Tower, at the Tower of London. (Photo: Jack’s Adventures in Museum Land)

Until quite recent times, it was accepted that the myth of the ravens at the Tower was of ancient pedigree, so accepted in fact that no one had actually researched how far back it went. But in the last couple of decades, this assumption has been challenged by two scholars: Boria Sax and Geoff Parnell, who’s an official Tower of London historian and member of the Royal Armouries staff. Sax and Parnell have concluded that there are no records of ravens at the Tower before the Victorian age.

This is especially curious as the Tower of London was long associated with all kinds of animals. Among its many functions, the Tower was London’s zoo, housing an impressive array of beasts, most of which had been given to the Royal Family by foreign monarchs. The Tower menagerie lasted from the late 1100s to 1835, when the remaining animals were transferred to the new London Zoo in Regent’s Park. The Tower’s zoo held – at various times – Barbary lions, leopards, wildcats, lynx, jackals, hyenas, brown and grizzly bears, eagles, monkeys, wolves, owls and a tiger. One famous resident was a polar bear, who was taken each day to fish for his lunch in the Thames. An African elephant, captured as a trophy during the Crusades, was given gallons of red wine by his keepers, who thought it would keep out the cold. The elephant didn’t live long. By the 18th century, the Tower zoo had become a popular visitor attraction – admission cost three half-pence though you got in free if you brought along a dog or cat to feed to the animals.

By 1828, the zoo boasted 280 animals from at least 60 species. There is, though, one striking omission from all the records, inventories and reports of the zoo’s creatures. There’s not one mention of ravens. This might be understandable for the centuries during which ravens were widespread in London, but there’s also no mention of the birds being kept at the Tower when London’s wild ravens were dying out.

The earliest reference to ravens in connection with the fortress is in the 1840 novel The Tower of London: A Historical Romance by William Harrison Ainsworth. This melodramatic book – which would do much to establish the image of the Tower in the Victorian mind as a gruesome torture chamber – mentions a flock of ravens and crows wheeling around during the execution of Lady Jane Grey. It seems, however, that Ainsworth just brought in these birds to give his beheading scene a suitably sinister backdrop – there’s no suggestion of such creatures actually living in the Tower.

An illustration in William Harrison Ainsworth’s gothic novel The Tower of London (1840) shows ravens wheeling in the sky, but not actually inside the Tower.

The first two sources to depict ravens within the Tower itself date from 1883. An illustration in the newspaper The Pictorial World includes a raven, though the bird is not of central importance in the picture. The raven is near Tower Green so the bird is probably being used as a gothic prop to emphasise the Green’s association with executions. The other 1883 source – a picture in the children’s book London Town – shows what we might nowadays consider a typical Tower of London scene. There’s a Beefeater and two haughty-looking ravens – a girl and dog are sheltering anxiously from the birds behind the Beefeater’s legs.

A picture from 1895 shows two ravens in the Tower of London, who are – with typical ravenlike mischievousness – tormenting a cat by pulling its tail. The picture appeared in the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) journal The Animal World accompanied by a short article. We learn that one of the ravens is named Jenny. A painting by H.E. Tidmarsh – entitled Place of Execution in Front of St Peter’s Chapel – shows a raven landing ominously near a family of sightseers. This painting was published on a postcard in 1900 and later appeared in Cassell’s Magazine in June 1904. A 1904 picture by S.T. Dadd – called Ravens at the Tower – shows a Beefeater and some tourists with two ravens near the ‘site’ of Tower Green’s scaffold.

One of the two earliest-known depictions of ravens in the Tower of London, from the children’s book London Town (1883).

These sources indicate that in the late 1800s ravens became a feature of the Tower, often being associated with its history of beheadings. Boria Sax suggests that the ravens were – due to their strong cultural links with executions – employed to boost the Tower’s status as a tourist attraction, hence their appearing near Tower Green in visual materials. Public interest in the Tower’s decapitations seems to have been sparked by the fact that – on a visit to the stronghold – Prince Albert had remarked that Queen Victoria would like to see the spot where Anne Boleyn was executed. By 1866, a spot had been identified, a spot soon dramatised by the dubious claim that a permanent scaffold had stood at that location. The spot was surrounded by railings and marked with a plaque, and tourists presumably felt no visit to the Tower was complete without pausing there. Over the years, Sax argues, the ravens were increasingly required to act as gothic ornaments to this site of doom, which encouraged the Tower to maintain a flock.

The supposed site of the scaffold on Tower Green, close to St Peter’s Chapel – notice the raven perch in the background. (Photo: Chris Nyborg)

This would indeed fit with the Victorian view of the Tower – the Victorians were determined to reinvent the fortress as a medieval gothic Disneyland. Children were encouraged to pose with their heads on the executioner’s block. The stronghold’s post-medieval buildings were cleared away and the dilapidated Lanthorn Tower – despite originating in the Middle Ages – was deemed not medieval-looking enough. This problem was remedied by ‘renovations’, including the addition of gargoyles and grotesques. It’s not surprising that the ravens fitted into this world, but we might ask where the Tower’s ravens came from. Wild ravens – that could have been captured and tamed – would have by this time no longer flitted into the fortress.

Parnell suspects ravens may have been introduced to the Tower thanks to the popularity of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven (1845). This poem – featuring a young man grieving for a dead lover who’s surprised at midnight by a raven tapping on his window – started a craze for keeping the birds as pets. The Tower’s Beefeaters and other staff, Parnell argues, might have succumbed to this fashion. Their birds could have then morphed from private pets into an official flock.

An alternative suggestion is that the Tower’s ravens were supplied by the appropriately named Dunraven family. According to The Tower from Within by George Younghusband (1918), the Fourth Earl of Dunraven (1841-1926) provided the birds, perhaps in the hope of demonstrating some sort of spiritual connection between his lineage and the Tower. The Second Earl had been a patron of the eccentric Welsh bard Iolo Morganwg, who seems to have persuaded the family that their castle in Glamorgan had been the seat of King Bran, who wasn’t only a monarch and giant but also a raven god. Morganwg was a colourful individual, who styled himself as a ‘druid scholar’. A stone mason, poet and collector of ancient Welsh literature, Morganwy claimed that an age-old Welsh tradition had survived both the Roman invasion and the conversion to Christianity, but some of his ‘ancient manuscripts’ were discovered after his death to be documents he’d forged. Perhaps, nonetheless, Morganwy’s lingering influence over the Dunravens encouraged them to donate some black-winged birds to the fortress built near the burial place of Bran. (From Younghusband’s book, we also have the first account of ravens being present at the execution of Anne Boleyn.)

Yet another possibility is that the Tower bought the ravens from Philip Castang, an old family firm – operating out of London’s Leadenhall Market – that sourced animals for zoos and private owners. In 1955, the firm’s manager wrote to Country Life magazine claiming he had ‘the order for the first Tower ravens’ framed and hanging on his office wall. Frustratingly, the company has now closed, the manager has died and the order has vanished.

Place of Execution in Front of St Peter’s Chapel, H.E. Tidmarsh (1900), the fourth earliest-known visual depiction of a raven in the Tower of London

Sources from the turn of the 20th century begin to mention the ‘tradition’ that a set number of ravens must be kept in the Tower. The 1898 book Birds of London states ‘for many years past two or three ravens have usually been kept at the Tower of London’ while an essay from 1904 proclaims ‘five pet ravens may be seen in ominous proximity to the Block … The ravens, which haunt the locality with dismal croaks, are a private gift to the Tower, and should one die it is replaced by the donor.’

Five does seem to have been the number settled on around this time. An intriguing account of a visit to the Tower comes from the Japanese writer Natsume Soseki, who toured the fortress on Halloween in 1900. Soseki might best be understood as a Japanese equivalent to someone like James Joyce, with his work blending the fantastical and everyday in a sort of early magical realism. Soseki’s portrayal of his visit has him seeing the ghosts of Walter Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey, Guy Fawkes and the two princes murdered by Richard III, but he also describes the ravens and insists there are five. When he returns to his lodgings, he tells his landlord about his excursion. The landlord responds, ‘There were five ravens there, I suppose … They’re sacred ravens. They’ve been keeping them there since ancient times and, even if they become one short, they immediately make the numbers up again. There are always five ravens there.’

So, from these sources, we can see the idea emerging, around 1900, that a certain number of ravens have long been kept in the Tower and that if one dies or disappears, it must be replaced. But – although we would assume there must be some reason for this ‘timeless custom’ – none of these sources seem to give it. When then, could we say with certainty, does the notion arise that the ravens vanishing will mean the collapse of the Tower, the monarchy and the nation?

The earliest-known mentions of such a legend are from World War II. The story about Charles II ordering that six ravens be kept in the Tower cannot be traced back any earlier than 1944. This didn’t, however, stop this tale finding its way into the Oxford Dictionary of Folklore, published in 2000. The War also appears to have seen the ‘optimal’ number of ravens raised from five to seven. The idea of Churchill stepping in to boost a dwindling population may also be untrue. Legend claims that, by the time the War was nearly over, just one pair of ravens – Grip and Mabel –  had managed to hang on. But it seems that shortly before the Tower’s reopening, the two ravens absconded for a nearby wood. Parnell found a note in the Tower’s records solemnly stating ‘there are none left’. Though the Tower, monarchy and British state all remained intact, some blame the post-War loss of the British Empire on the ravens’ escape.

So, What’s the Conclusion? Is the Tower of London’s Raven Legend a Recent Invention or Ancient Myth?

Although it’s likely that in centuries gone by London’s ubiquitous wild ravens would have frequented the Tower – and may have been drawn to the executions of its inmates – the ‘tradition’ of deliberately keeping ravens in the Tower of London doesn’t seem to have arisen until the later 1800s. Around 1900, the notion grew up that a set number of the birds must be maintained in the stronghold. The idea the ravens’ departure would mean catastrophe for the nation may have also originated around this time, but no sources appear to actually state this until World War II.

It seems, then, that the Tower of London’s raven myth is a recent one, but we might ask why such a strange belief emerged in the Victorian era and the first half of the 20th century. In his book The Invention of Tradition (1994), the historian Eric Hobsbawn argued that modern states often claim that their pageantry, customs and legends are ‘rooted in the remotest antiquity’. Such claims have the effect of making modern nations seem ‘the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so “natural” as to require no definition.’ Such notions become particularly insistent during times of upheaval, stress and change.

In the Victorian age, Britain underwent enormous and rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and technological advancement, as well as a dizzying realignment of the class structure as the upper-middle class surged, the aristocracy weakened, and a growing and disenfranchised working class started to demand their rights. There was also the pressure of maintaining a huge overseas empire and the wars of conquest and brutal suppressions of native peoples that entailed. Faced with such challenges, it must have been tempting to try to claim that Britain and its empire were organised on age-old principals stretching back into misty antiquity and that just under the grimy surface of the Victorian industrial world could be found quaint traditions and a stable hierarchy that had lasted for centuries. There were, for example, assertions that breeds of dogs and other animals were far older than they really were and an often automatic assumption that folkloric dances and ceremonies sprang from an ancient, even pagan past.

There was also a massive vogue in Victorian art, literature and architecture for the medieval and folkloric, an obsession whose influence was felt in the Tower of London. These obsessions were strong enough to survive the death of Victoria herself in 1901 and to continue for some time into the 20th century. The Tower of London and its developing raven myth fitted well into all this. Wrapped up in the imagined continuity of this colony of birds were England’s age-old monarchy and echoes of a feudal era of secure social relations – an era whose black-winged mascots could still be seen hopping about in the present day. In addition to that, the birds added drama to the (recently enhanced) gothic theme park of the Tower with its tales of imprisonment and bloody execution, which all bestowed pleasing frissons of horror on a pleasant Victorian or Edwardian day out.

An ‘executioner’s block’ at the Tower of London – its gruesome history of beheadings has always proved popular with tourists. (Photo: John Morris)

It’s interesting that the Tower of London’s raven legend got a boost in World War II, when the nation was under serious threat. A number of myths seem to have either arisen or been strengthened on our besieged island at this time. As well as the invention, or at least reinforcement, of the legend about the ravens fleeing the Tower, a bizarre belief grew up that the Celtic queen Boudicca – who’d rebelled against Roman rule – was buried under a platform at Kings Cross Station.

But maybe all this is too cynical. I’m of the opinion that – although the Tower’s raven legend developed in fairly recent times in response to social and political stresses – the myth does draw on earlier folklore and deeply held archetypes. The raven’s associations with monarchy, prophecy, execution and death are all apparent in how the bird has been depicted at the Tower and the Tower’s raven legend might well display the human tendency to believe our wellbeing and even survival can be invested in some external object. There’s also the legend of Bran’s head – which at least may have prompted the Dunravens to donate ravens to the Tower – and the strange mythic significance that Tower Hill has accumulated through the centuries.

Perhaps such a strategic spot as Tower Hill, and such a crucial building as the Tower, will always have the tendency to generate myth. Tower Hill lies close to the lowest points at which – for many centuries – the vital thoroughfare of the Thames could be bridged or forded, making it a natural spot from which to control trade or resist invasion. And the Tower itself was for centuries probably the most vital building for upholding the British monarchy and state. It’s served as a royal palace, an armoury, a barracks and – of course – a jail for elite prisoners suspected of plotting to bring the monarch down. The Tower of London was also for many years the Royal Mint – performing the essential function of distributing, and maintaining the quality of, the coinage of the realm. In the fortress’s Byward Tower, a medieval religious mural – promising the fires of hell to thieves and fraudsters – once looked over the room where merchants brought in their gold bullion to sell to the Crown. The Tower also watched over the crucial trading settlement of the City of London, seen by monarchs as both a potential centre of revolt and a cash cow to be milked via taxation. Even today, tensions arise between the government and the City over issues like tax avoidance, banking regulation and money laundering.

It’s no surprise that the Tower and its environs, having been symbolic for years of power structures and important government interests, have had myths woven around them. And when one considers the deep folklore of the sinister and cunning raven, it’s perhaps also no shock that some manifestations of the Tower’s mythology have been embodied in these hopping, croaking and mischievous birds.

(This article’s main image, showing the ravens Jubilee and Muninn at the Tower of London, is courtesy of Colin.)

The post The Tower of London’s Raven Legend – Victorian Myth or Ancient Folklore? appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

Beckoned into a large room and given a seat near the fire, the man warmed his icy hands and his shivering subsided. Apologising that there were no spare rooms, the owners said the beggar could spend the night on the rug, where the embers of the blaze would at least warm him for a time. Profusely thanking the landlord and landlady, the man accepted their offer.

Everyone soon retired to bed, but the maidservant – having remembered one last chore – crept into the kitchen. She walked on tiptoes so as not to disturb the beggar, who she thought would be asleep in the large room, which the kitchen opened onto. But, glancing in there, she saw something that made her gasp – a gasp she only just managed to stifle.

The man had drawn himself up from the rug. Now standing straight, he was clearly neither weak nor old. The man confidently sat down at a table, reached into the pocket of his cloak and drew out a strange object – an object that resembled a withered, disembodied hand. He wedged the hand into a nearby candle holder and daubed some liquid on each finger and the thumb. Stepping over to the fire, the man lit each of these digits, digits that then burned like candles.

Trembling, her heart pounding, knowing the man must have some evil intent, the maid sneaked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to wake the household’s other members. Entering the room of her master and mistress, the maid shook them vigorously, but couldn’t rouse them. She’d never seen anyone sleep so profoundly – it was as if some spell had locked them in the world of dreams. Despairing of waking them, she scurried into the room of their oldest son, but he too was deep in the same enchanted slumber and no amount of shaking, slapping or even pinching could make him stir. It was the same with the other children and with all the servants so – heart bashing, mind whirling – the maid crept back downstairs.

Hiding again in the kitchen, she watched the beggar walk around the large room with an open sack. He picked objects up, examined them leisurely and dropped anything he seemed to think valuable into the bag. The hand stood on the table, its fingers blazing with an eerie light, but the maid noticed the thumb was lacking any flame. The man saw this too and tried to relight it, but the thumb wouldn’t ignite, making the man scowl and swear. (If any person remains awake in a household then one digit of the Hand of Glory – as the thief’s macabre implement was known – will stay unlit.)

Hastening a little now, the man picked up the burning hand and walked towards the door that led to the next room. The girl at least knew he wouldn’t get in there – that door was locked and the key well-hidden. But she was amazed to hear a click and see the man effortlessly push open the door. Placing the Hand of Glory back on the table, the man picked up his sack and entered the room he’d just unlocked, leaving the door ajar behind him.

Now certain the hand was some instrument of devilish magic, the maid sneaked from her hiding place and grasped the candlestick. She tried to blow the fingers out, but couldn’t extinguish them. Hurrying with the Hand of Glory into the kitchen, she poured beer over it, but this just made the fingers burn brighter. She seized a jug of water and tipped it over the talisman, but the flames barely faltered.

The maid was panicking now – the floor was creaking, the metal clinking in the man’s sack as he walked back towards the large room. She grabbed a jug of milk and – as a last resort – drenched the hand with it. With a fizzle, all four fingers went out. Dashing back into the big room, she snatched the key from its hiding place and locked the thief in the room he’d entered.

The hush that lay over the house shattered. The horrors the maid had witnessed broke from her throat in screams; the man was shouting, cursing, barging at the locked door, trying to knock it down. The landlord, his sons and servants came charging in from their bedrooms, the thief was apprehended and it wasn’t long until he was dangling on the gallows.

That’s the story, anyway, that was told to the folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould by a Yorkshire labouring man, probably in the late 1800s. The story seems, at that point, to have been old and widespread. Very similar accounts appear in William Henderson’s Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866) as well as in Disquisitiones Magicae (1593) by Martin Anthony Delrio.

But what exactly was the Hand of Glory? What uncanny powers did folklore ascribe to this grisly object and how might a thief or bandit with a side-interest in the occult go about acquiring or making one? If you suspected someone wanted to use a Hand of Glory against you, how could you defend yourself? As well as hands, could other bewitched body parts be of aid to the enterprising villain and how might the thoroughly weird beliefs around the Hand of Glory have grown up in the first place?

Let’s embark on a strange and gruesome journey past gibbets and gallows, pausing along the way to peruse popular books of magic, to examine the enchanted droppings of ravens, and to watch priests bless severed fingers. And I might just let slip where a person with a macabre curiosity and robust stomach could get a glimpse a genuine Hand of Glory today.

What Was the Hand of Glory?

A Hand of Glory was a severed, preserved hand of an executed criminal. The left hand (the word ‘left’ was once synonymous with ‘sinister’) was generally preferred. If the man, however, had been hung for murder, the hand that ‘had done the deed’ was usually chosen. The Hand of Glory gets a mention in the Petit Albert (Little Albert), an 18th-century French compendium of folk magic, alchemical lore and Kabbalistic enchantments, which was widely translated and distributed across Europe. According to the Little Albert, this is how you can create your very own Hand of Glory:

‘Take the right or left hand of a felon who is hanging from a gibbet beside a highway; wrap it in part of a funeral pall and so wrapped squeeze it well. Then put it in an earthenware vessel with zimat, nitre, salt and long peppers, the whole well powdered. Leave it in this vessel for a fortnight then take it out and expose it to full sunlight during the dog days (the hot, sultry days of July and early August) until it becomes quite dry. If the sun is not strong enough then put it in an oven with fern and vervain.

Next make a candle from the fat of a gibbeted felon, virgin wax, sesame and ponie, and use the Hand of Glory as a candlestick to hold this candle when lighted, and then those in every place into which you go with this baneful instrument shall remain motionless.’

A Hand of Glory in the popular grimoire – or book of magic – known as the Petit Albert (Little Albert)

Notwithstanding the Little Albert’s helpfulness, there was some debate about its instructions. Did ‘ponie’, for instance, refer to horse dung or was it a type of sesame? It’s disputed whether the original French was du siseme et de la Ponie (horseshit) or du siseme de Laponie (sesame of Lapland). Did zimat mean verdigris (a green pigment) or Arabian sulphate of iron? It’s easy to imagine an apprehended thief cursing their decision to substitute sesame seeds for horse manure or bitterly lamenting their choice of green pigment over iron sulphate when preparing their precious Hand of Glory.

Even more confusingly, the Little Albert wasn’t the only authority on how to manufacture this macabre tool and different sources gave differing advice. In Whitby Museum, North Yorkshire, a genuine Hand of Glory is on display. This hand – leathery and long-fingered, its digits leached (or burnt) white – was found hidden in a thatched cottage and is thought to have come from the appropriately named Gibbet Howe, near the Yorkshire village of Castleton. The hand is exhibited with a page from a book published in 1823, which obligingly offers directions on creating a Hand of Glory:

‘It must be cut from the body of a criminal on the gibbet, pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, then laid at a crossroads, then hung on a church door for one night while the maker keeps watch in the porch – and if it be that no fear hath driven you from the porch … then the hand be true won and it be yours.’

A genuine Hand of Glory, in Whitby Museum, Yorkshire. (Photo: badobadop)

But from all the above sources, we get the general idea: a hand must be hacked from an executed convict, somehow preserved and made to produce light, either from its own fingers or by gripping a candle made from an executed felon’s fat. The Hand of Glory’s darkly miraculous powers range from throwing people into unwakeable sleeps to rendering people immobile to unlocking doors, all assets highly useful for those bent on burglary.

But what should you do if you suspect a criminal with a sideline in witchcraft is plotting to use a Hand of Glory? As we’ve seen in the story above, milk seems the only liquid capable of putting the dreadful candles out. If you’d, however, prefer not to get to the desperate stage in which the maid found herself, you can take preventative action. Once again, the Little Albert proves helpful:

‘The Hand of Glory would become ineffective, and thieves would not be able to utilise it, if you were to rub the threshold or other parts of the house by which they may enter with an unguent composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, and the blood of a screech owl; this substance must be compounded during the dog days.’

So now you know. If you have any thieves in your locality with a penchant for the occult then searching out black cats, white hens and screech owls may be more effective than investing in a burglar alarm.

The Strange and Macabre Folklore of the Hand of Glory

The folklore around the Hand of Glory seems to have been fairly similar in a number of parts of Europe. In his A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787), Francis Grose stated that belief in the malevolent powers of the Hand of Glory was widespread across France, Germany and Spain. Grose mentions a foreign judge who told him he’d been present during the torture of criminals who’d admitted using the hand.

The criminals confessed to making the Hand of Glory in a similar way to that prescribed by the Little Albert. They said the hand should be ‘cut from a gibbeted person and wrapped in a piece of shroud or winding sheet’. The hand must be ‘well squeezed to get out any small quantity of blood that may have remained in it, then put in an earthenware vessel with zimat, saltpeter, salt and long pepper.’ The hand should be dried ‘in the noontide sun in the dog days’ and should be used to hold a candle ‘made with the fat of a hanged man, virgin wax and the siseme of Lapland.’ The malefactors also confirmed that an antidote to the ‘dreadful instrument’ could be made from ‘the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen and the blood of a screech owl’.

The cover of the Petit Albert (Little Albert), which promises an insight into the ‘marvellous secrets of natural and Kabbalistic magic’.

The folkloric tales concerning the Hand of Glory have many similarities too. One night in 1797, a hunched and feeble old woman appeared at the Inn of Spital on Stanmore, a high and lonely hostelry run by George Alderson and his wife and son, with the help of their maid Bella. When they heard the crone’s hopeful tapping, the Aldersons had already barred the inn’s sturdy door, and were seated around a crackling fire, discussing a substantial amount of money they’d recently made at a fair at Broughton Hill. Opening the door, they immediately took pity on the woman, especially as a freezing wind was moaning around the inn and whipping stinging rain about.

The woman, dressed in a long cloak and hood, tottered into the warm room as water dripped from her garments, leaving pools on the oaken floor. Though shivering violently, she refused to take off her cloak and have it dried and also declined all offers of food and drink. She said she merely wanted to sleep a little in a chair by the fire and that she’d let herself out and resume her journey as soon as daylight came.

The family went to bed and Bella was left with the old woman. The maid’s attempts at conversation met with little more than single words and grunts, but Bella did notice the woman had an unusually gruff voice. When the woman stretched her feet towards the fire, Bella saw she wore horseman’s gaiters under her long skirt. Deeply suspicious, Bella yawned and stretched, feigning exhaustion. She lay down on the sofa and pretended to fall asleep, but kept her eyes open a crack.

A few minutes into Bella’s mock slumber, the figure in the chair stood up. Frail and stooped no more, the person now seemed to Bella a powerfully built man. Delving into his cloak, the man tugged out what looked like a withered hand. Reaching into his cloak again, the man produced a candle, lit it on the fire and wedged it in the hand’s grip. The stranger stepped towards Bella and leant over her. Though she quickly scrunched her eyes shut, Bella soon had the impression the villain was waving the candle in front of her face. The man chanted an incantation:

‘Let those who rest more deeply sleep,

Let those awake their vigils keep.’

Creaks on the floor indicated the man had turned and stepped away from her so Bella opened her eyes a notch. She watched the man place his Hand of Glory on the table as he murmered the next part of his charm:

‘O Hand of Glory shed thy light;

Direct us to our spoil tonight.’

The man walked to the window, lifted the curtain and peered outside. Apparently satisfied with what he saw he went on:

‘Flash out thy blaze, O skeletal hand,

And guide the feet of our trusty band.’

The flame of the candle shot up and blazed brightly, producing an unworldly light which filled the whole room. The man walked to the door, unbarred it and took a few steps outside. He pulled a whistle from his cloak, which he then blew. Grasping this opportunity, Bella rushed to the door, slammed it shut and slid the bar in place, locking the man out. Running to the bedrooms, she tried to rouse the family, but they all seemed in the deepest slumber and didn’t respond at all no matter how much she shook them and yelled. There now came shouts from outside. Fists were bashing, and shoulders barging, the door; hands were shaking the sash windows. Guided by the glow of the gruesome candle, the rest of the criminal gang must have arrived.

Bella raced back into the main room. Seeing the Hand of Glory burning, she realised the weird implement was the cause of the family’s abnormal sleep. The bandits outside were screaming threats; the stout bar on the door was bending, splintering, as the men repeatedly threw themselves against it. Glancing around in panic, Bella spotted a jug of milk and poured it over the hand. The flames hissed out; seconds later George Alderson and his son hurtled into the room in their nightclothes, clutching firearms. Flinging open a window, the son fired into the darkness.

‘Give up the Hand of Glory and we will not harm you!’ a voice called out.

In answer, young Alderson fired again. There was a groan and the thieves fled. The next morning, the family noticed a trail of blood that ran for quite a distance. The Hand of Glory stayed in the Aldersons’ possession for the next 16 years.

This story appears in About Yorkshire (1883) by Thomas and Catherine Macquoid. The authors claimed that one of their informants, a Mr Atkinson, was told the tale by Bella herself when she was an old lady.

A Hand of Glory in the 1565 artwork ‘The Elder St Jacob Visiting the Magician Hermogenes’ by Pieter van der Heyden

Another story has two magicians cadging a night’s lodgings in a pub. Distrustful of the strangers, the maid spies on them through a keyhole and sees them producing a Hand of Glory from a sack. The magicians anoint the fingers with a mysterious potion and light them like candles. Only the thumb won’t burn because the maid is still awake. While the thieves are trying to break into her master’s strongbox, the girl grabs the hand and blows the candles out. The family – who’ve been trapped in a magical sleep – swiftly wake up.

In a story from Huy in the Netherlands, two miscreants beg a bed for the night before sparking up a Hand of Glory. The maid, however, stays awake, a fact indicated by a tell-tale finger that won’t light. She soon seizes the morbid candelabra and blows out its flames. Her master and the manservants come bounding from their beds and drive the villains off.

These accounts all have a similar pattern – thieves, sometimes in disguise, request a night’s shelter before trying to rob the family using the baleful hand. They’re foiled by the maid, who manages not to fall asleep and – often with the milk jug’s help – extinguishes the instrument of enchantment. The thieves are captured or chased away and never succeed in their attempts at burglary.

Though similar tales about the Hand of Glory were widespread across Europe, we might ask if it was only dead men’s hands that criminals used as supernatural aids. Other magical body parts were indeed sometimes employed by those seeking to rob, cheat and steal as the next section will show.

Ravenstones, Felons’ Feet and Fingers of Sin – Gruesome Alternatives to the Hand of Glory

Tales from Continental Europe suggest that other dubiously acquired body parts were seen as having similar properties to the Hand of Glory.

An account from the Netherlands has a thief being arrested near Bailleul. When searched, the thief was found to have been carrying the foot of a hanged man, which – like the Hand of Glory – had the power to put people to sleep.

Sometimes just a finger seems to have been enough. Also in the Netherlands, in a village called Alveringen, there once lived a sorceress who owned a thief’s finger. The sorceress had got the village priest to empower this dastardly digit by reading a total of nine masses over it. She’d wrapped the finger in cloth and persuaded the sacristan it was a holy relic, which the priest was then happy to bless. Though just a single finger, the dismal talisman seems to have had all the powers of a full Hand of Glory as the sorceress would use it to send people to sleep before pilfering their possessions. But, like all those who use such morbid relics, she was eventually found out and the stolen items were recovered from her home.

Another tale concerning a finger comes from Poland. In Pomerania, a tavern owner possessed a finger of sin – a preserved finger from an executed felon. The wily publican kept this finger in his casks of drink and – because of the detached digit’s baleful powers – his establishment was always thronged and he grew wealthy. One day his servant, when cleaning out a cask, was shocked to discover the bleached wrinkled relic. The servant reported his master to the authorities and the publican was given a long prison sentence. After getting out of jail, the man tried to re-establish his tavern, but – due to his reputation for dabbling in the occult – customers avoided his bar. The man went bankrupt and became a beggar.

In Germany, thieves made use of objects called ravenstones. Ravens were infamous for feasting on the corpses of gibbeted convicts. Ravenstones were the undigested remains of criminal’s eyes picked out of ravens’ droppings. Supposedly, ravenstones gave off a light only their owners could see.

Thieves’ Lights – An Even More Repulsive Practice

An especially horrifying variation on such customs was found in Germany – the practice of making so-called thieves’ lights. Thieves’ lights were candles formed from the body parts of unborn, unbaptised babies. The lights were especially effective if the mother had been an executed felon. The poet and historian Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860) wrote in his Der Rabenstein:

‘It is gruesome to relate how thieves’ lights are obtained. They are the fingers of unborn, innocent little children. For these purposes, the fingers of already born and baptised children cannot be used …

When a female thief or murderer hangs or drowns herself, or is hanged or beheaded, and she is carrying a child inside her body, then you must go forth at midnight on the Devil’s roads, not on God’s roads, with incantations and magic, not with blessings and prayers, and you must take an axe or knife that has been used by an executioner, and with it you must open the poor sinner’s belly, take out the child, cut off its fingers and take them with you.

But this absolutely must all be done at midnight in the most perfect solitude and silence. Not even the softest sound, no “oh” and no sigh can escape the lips of the seeker.’

These gruesome lanterns would supposedly ignite whenever and wherever their owner wished, would burn for him and no one else, make him invisible and enable him to see even in the thickest darkness. The owner could also put them out with just one thought. No matter how many times it was used, the finger wouldn’t burn down but would stay the same length. Like the Hand of Glory, thieves’ lights put people into a deep sleep. According to Arndt, a bewitched individual wouldn’t wake even if you ‘set off ten thunderbolts over his head’.

Fingers weren’t the only parts of unborn children that could be used in this way. The German folklorist Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) wrote that a talisman known as a thief’s thumb – the thumb of an unbaptised child – was reputed to have similar effects to the Hand of Glory.

The toes of such infants could also be utilised for wicked purposes. A story from Germany has an old vagrant begging a night’s lodging from a widow. But, unlike in the stories above, this beggar proves to be a hero rather than a criminal. Hearing a noise, the beggar wakes to see three men – their faces painted black – moving through the house clutching strange candles. The beggar murmurs a spell, the men’s candles are extinguished and they find they can’t move. Their face-paint scrubbed off, the villains turn out to be in-laws of the widow. Their mysterious lanterns had been made from the toes of unborn children.

In Swiss folklore, the whole hand of an unbaptised child could be employed for villainy. Like with the Hand of Glory, one finger wouldn’t burn if anyone in the house was awake. Apparently, in Switzerland it was the practice to bury unbaptised babies at night in unmarked graves so no one would be tempted to put their remains to such unholy uses.

Indeed, some tales suggest criminals would go to incredible lengths to acquire these nefarious trophies. In Germany, it was alleged bandits would buy pregnant women for high prices so their babies’ fingers could be made into thieves’ lights. In one story, the serving girl of a miller is with child. Her fiancé, coming to visit one night, sees a covered cart outside the house and hears a groan from inside the wagon. The fiancé peers through the miller’s window and sees him counting a pile a coins in front of a group of suspicious-looking men. Climbing into the back of the wagon, the fiancé finds his intended gagged and bound. He carries her off and – from a hiding place – they watch the jubilant bandits drive away, convinced they’ll be enriched by their malignant talismans.

What Could Explain the Strange Customs and Beliefs around the Hand of Glory?

We might ask why criminals – and much of the general populace – believed the Hand of Glory could imprison people in sleep and make locks spring open. The strange notions around the hand – and similar gruesome artefacts – seem to have arisen from a weird mix of entrenched folklore, gallows superstitions and misunderstandings of ancient books. Keep reading for tales of gibbets, sun-bleached bones said to cure arthritis, midwives acting as undertakers, and dead convicts’ hands healing beautiful women.

Many Believed Relics from Executions Were Imbued with a Potent Magic

In many parts of the world and across different periods of history, there’s been a sense that objects linked to executions have magical or healing powers. Accounts of public executions in London speak of the crowd scrambling to hack pieces from the hangman’s rope or tear scraps from the dead felon’s clothing. Those fighting over these morbid souvenirs presumably either wanted them for their own superstitious purposes or were keen to sell them for a substantial sum.

Murderers were often gibbetted, meaning their rotting bodies were suspended – sometimes for years – in a cage or chains from a gallows-like structure as a warning to others. Gibbets could be a target for those seeking items of folk magic or medicine. The bones of one John Breads, whose body was hung up on Gibbets Marsh near Rye, Sussex, were stolen by old women who believed they could help their rheumatism. Wooden splinters from Winter’s Gibbet in Northumberland were famous for curing toothache.

The popular imagination seems to have, especially, imbued the hands of the executed with strong powers of enchantment or healing. An account by a Frenchman of a London execution tells of a sickly ‘young woman, with an appearance of beauty, all pale and trembling, in the arms of the executioner, who submitted to have her bosom uncovered in the presence of thousands of spectators and have the dead man’s hand placed upon it.’ In the mid-1600s, the severed hand of an executed criminal could fetch the price of ten guineas as ‘the possession of the hand was thought to be of still greater efficacy in the cure of diseases and the prevention of misfortune.’

It’s not surprising, then, that the Hand of Glory – cut from an executed, often gibbetted, criminal – was seen as a magical instrument. But what might explain the specific powers ascribed to the hand – its abilities to shed an eerie light, pick locks, make people immobile and cast them into the deepest sleep?

The Hand of Glory’s Weird Powers – Sympathetic Magic and the Ominous Mandrake Plant

There was probably some sympathetic magic going on with the notions around the Hand of Glory. The dead man’s hand made people temporarily ‘dead’ – by throwing them into a ‘deathlike’ sleep and rendering them as immobile as a corpse. There was also the fact that the hand had belonged to a criminal. Magically empowered by the execution its owner had gone through, the criminal’s hand – villains may have reasoned – would have been adept at criminal acts like picking locks. But the hand’s alleged ability to glow with a weird light is harder to explain.

The idea the Hand of Glory could shed light might have arisen from nothing more than a misunderstanding of an ancient book. A great deal of superstition surrounded the mandrake plant – whose roots resemble a human body – and mandrakes found growing under gallows were particularly prized. ‘Hand of Glory’ is probably a translation of the French Main de Glorie, which is believed to be a corruption of mandragore, meaning mandrake. According to the 4th-century author of an influential book of herbal medicine, Pseudo-Apuleius, the mandrake – among its other startling attributes – can ‘shineth by night altogether like a lamp’.

Pseudo-Apuleius’s Herbal was, until the 12th century, Europe’s most popular book on healing plants and copies of it were found across the continent well into modern times. The capacity for illumination the Herbal credits the mandrake with and its confusion with the term Main de Glorie could – at least in part – account for the legends of the Hand of Glory’s light-giving prowess.

The mandrake in Pseudo-Apuleius’s ‘Herbal’ – dogs were often used to uproot this magical plant.

The Lack of the Church’s Blessing and the Misuse of Holy ‘Magic’

Executed convicts were often denied a Christian burial and the lack of this sacrament may have given the Hand of Glory a devilish potency in the minds of the superstitious. Such notions can also be seen with the gruesome custom of making thieves’ lights from the bodies of unbaptised children.

These dismal objects were often imbued with the magic conferred by an execution – it was considered best if the infant’s toes or fingers came from the womb of an executed felon. But folklore also ascribed a strange power to the fact the children hadn’t undergone baptism. It may have been believed that – as the purifying holy water hadn’t been sprinkled upon them – the babies’ relics were empowered with a demonic force.

The idea unbaptised children were ‘unhallowed’ was once widespread, with the baptism ritual not only marking the baby’s entrance into the Church but also into the local Christian community. Stillborn or unbaptised children couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. Instead, it was the duty of midwives to respectfully – but without ceremony – bury the bodies in some field or wood.

Medieval and early modern documents, however, feature complaints about midwives being less than conscientious about this responsibility. They sometimes carelessly left the tiny corpses where pigs or wild animals might find them or even abandoned them on dunghills. All this underlines how necessary people felt baptism was for a person to be considered fully human. The fact thieves’ lights came from bodies that had received neither baptism nor Christian burial likely boosted the faith of the credulous in their potency.

But, while the absence of the Church’s blessing seems to have aided the effectiveness of the Hand of Glory and thieves’ lights, the Church’s otherworldly powers – even if harnessed dishonestly – could, paradoxically, make such items more formidable. The Whitby Hand of Glory had to hang for a night in a church porch while the sorceress in the Netherlands made sure six masses were said over her gruesome finger.

Common Elements from Folk Magic and Folktales

In addition to the potent mixture of all the above, the traditions around the Hand of Glory seem to have combined the sort of practices – doing things at midnight, journeying to crossroads, utilising black cats – that are common in folk magic across the world.

As for the reputed adventures involving the Hand of Glory, these stories contain elements frequently found in folktales. It’s interesting that it’s usually a person of humble status who foils the thieves. Normally, it’s the maid, but in the German story above it’s a beggar and, in one account from England, a cook disables the Hand of Glory with a conveniently placed milk jug. In folktales, those of modest rank – children, servants, peasants, vagrants, even animals – can demonstrate a resourcefulness and cunning that eludes the better-educated, powerful and wealthy. The heroes and heroines of folktales are also – like the maids – often young.

The accounts of the Hand of Glory contain an element of rough justice, another common facet of folk stories. Those using ghastly body parts for criminal purposes are thwarted, arrested, wounded, impoverished, imprisoned or hung. Though Hands of Glory really existed, the narratives of encounters with them do appear to have borrowed from the usual range of folk archetypes and motifs.

But does the Hand of Glory belong in a more credulous, folkloric past or does the malignant light of its flaming fingers still cast its shadow over literary culture and the modern epoch? Let’s find out in the next section.

The Flickering Hand of Glory Casts Its Shadow over Literature, Culture and the Modern Age

The Hand of Glory inflamed the gothic creativity of some members of the Romantic movement. Robert Southey has the hand crop up in his Thalaba the Destroyer (1801):

‘A murderer on the stake had died;

I drove the vulture from his limbs, and lopt

The hand that did the murder, and drew up

The tendon strings to close its grasp;

And in the sun and wind,

Parch’d it, nine weeks exposed …

Look! It burns clear, but with the air around,

Its dead ingredients mingle deathliness.’

Writing under his pseudonym of Thomas Ingoldsby, Richard Barham included a Hand of Glory in The Ingoldsby Legends (1837):

‘Open, lock,

To the Dead Man’s knock!

Fly bolt, and bar, and band!

Nor move, nor swerve,

Joint, muscle or nerve

At the spell of the Dead Man’s hand!

Sleep all who sleep! – Wake all who wake!

But be as the dead for the Dead Man’s sake!’

Though few – as far as I know – would nowadays use the Hand of Glory as an aid to theft, its doleful light still, in a strange way, illumines modern culture. The Hand of Glory has made quite a few appearances in books, films, TV programmes and video games.

The Hand of Glory features in the novels Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (in which Draco Malfoy stumbles across a hand in a ‘dark arts shop’) and Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. The hand also made it into the film version of Chamber of Secrets. All this has no doubt brought the Hand of Glory – through J.K. Rowling’s outpourings – to millions of page-flickers and cinemagoers.

A Hand of Glory appears in the dark Hollywood film Angel Heart (1987) as well as in the Amicus horror production – starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee – The Skull (1965). The hand has turned up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, where a Hand of Glory is discovered in a floating market. Perhaps most famously, a Hand of Glory features in the classic 1973 folk-horror film The Wicker Man. Here a pagan landlord uses the hand to lull the Christian policeman Sergeant Howie to sleep, despite the landlord’s daughter fearing the hand’s potency could mean ‘he might sleep for days.’

The Hand of Glory makes an appearance in the 1973 folk-horror classic ‘The Wicker Man’.

Maybe we’ll never quite escape the grisly, bizarrely compelling legend of the Hand of Glory. The hand may well be shedding its sinister light upon us for some time to come.

(This article’s main image is an illustration from the Little Albert, showing the two variations of the Hand of Glory.)

The post The Hand of Glory – a Macabre & Magical Criminal Implement appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

The day seems to darken. You wonder if – instead of stepping on springy turf – you’ve stepped through some portal out of the 21st century and back into a more gruesome epoch. Because there – on a hillock next to a quiet B-road – you can make out a gibbet.

There’s that gallows shape – that grim, almost archetypal structure – like a signpost pointing the way out of this existence and into the afterlife. A shape long feared by our forefathers and foremothers, a bleak reminder of the powers of the Establishment and State, a power that even intruded into the remotest regions.

Hanging from that gibbet is some kind of rope, chain or bar and attached to that is the unmistakable outline of a human head. As you come closer, you hear a groaning, a creaking, as that head sways in the wind – a sound that’s somehow burned onto the ancestral memory, a noise evoking images of the bodies of malefactors suspended in cages or chains.

Though such a sight is unusual, it’s not the only one. Scattered around England are reminders of our nation’s grisly past: the gibbets, the gallows, the memorials that mark the places where – across the centuries – the State delivered the ultimate penalty to its more wayward subjects.

A gibbet can simply mean the apparatus of execution – a term that includes gallows (where people were killed by hanging), guillotines, the executioner’s block or even the scaffold upon which such implements stood. To gibbet means to extend the punishment beyond death – to wrap the corpse of the wrongdoer in chains or put it in a cage and then display the body publicly by suspending it from a tall gallows-like structure (also known as a gibbet).

The rotting corpse would dangle – sometimes for years – as a warning to any tempted to stray down the same path. There it would hang, a banquet for maggots and crows, wafting its stomach-turning scent as the chain creaked in the breeze and the cage knocked against the gibbet’s wood. Gibbeting was seen as a horrendous extra punishment in an era when ideas were widespread about the destiny of the soul being intertwined with the body’s fate.

Below I’ve listed ten places in England where you can still see some indications of these brutal histories – perhaps a replica gallows or gibbet, a noose, the rusting remnants of a cage, or an eerily decaying post. Read on to learn about cursed chairs, skulls in town hall attics, murderers’ ghosts, the grim punishments that awaited pirates and mutineers, England’s only guillotine, and the strangest ever cures for toothache and rheumatism.

Number 1: Steng Cross Gibbet, Northumberland

Steng Cross Gibbet, Northumberland, England (Photo: Phil Thirkell)

The description above is of Steng Cross Gibbet – also known as Winter’s Gibbet – in Northumberland. Northumberland – being close to Scotland and a hangout of cattle rustlers and cross-border raiders – was a popular place for gibbets, but this particular relic has nothing to do with Scottish interlopers or livestock thieves.

Steng Cross Gibbet – located on bleak moorland next to the B6342 about eight miles (12.87 kilometres) east of Otterburn – is an 18-foot (5.48-metre) replica of the gibbet that once suspended the corpse of William Winter.

Winter – a wanderer and highwayman – had crept up to an isolated cottage near Whiskershield Common one rainswept blustery night in 1791. Urged on by two sisters – Jane and Eleanor Clark – Winter knocked on the door and begged the cottage’s sole occupant, an elderly woman, for shelter. The lady beckoned him in and Winter repaid her kindness by beating and kicking her, slitting her throat and escaping with her possessions loaded on a donkey.

Winter and his two accomplices felt that – in such a lonely spot – it would take a while for the victim to be discovered, giving them plenty of time to get away. But the gang were seen by a shepherd boy, who recognised a knife Winter was using to peel an apple as belonging to the old woman. The boy also took note of the patterns on the soles of Winter’s boots, enabling the authorities to track the robbers via his footprints in the mud.

The three were arrested, tried in Newcastle and condemned to death by hanging. The judge ordered that Winter’s body should be suspended in chains. (The bodies of the sisters were given up for dissection – gibbeting was a punishment almost exclusively reserved for men.)

The site chosen for Winter’s Gibbet was significant. Due to the stench and risk of contamination, it was preferable to locate gibbets away from populated areas, but – to have a deterrent effect – they needed to be where people would see them.

Roadsides were often, therefore, used, as it was hoped the gibbets would have an invigorating influence on the morals of those passing by. Winter’s Gibbet is located on the highest point of an important road along which Scottish drovers herded their cattle to English markets. This point was once marked by a stone Saxon cross – the base of which only now remains – hence the name Steng Cross Gibbet.

The head suspended from Winter’s Gibbet, Northumberland, England (Photo: Phil Thirkell)

Winter’s body hung on the gibbet until it rotted away. After that, his bones were scattered, though his skull was sent to a Mr Darnell in Newcastle. Winter’s ghost is rumoured to haunt the surrounding moorlands. His phantom is fond of causing sudden thick fogs and of appearing at a nearby cattle grid.

An interesting superstition is linked to Winter’s Gibbet. It’s said you can cure toothache by cutting a splinter off and rubbing it on the offending tooth or gum. Objects associated with executions were long believed to have magical or healing properties. Pieces of a hanged man’s clothing or skin were prized as talismans. Burglars believed the preserved hand of an executed felon – known as a Hand of Glory – could trap their victims in a profound sleep. The fact the current Winter’s Gibbet is just a replica doesn’t seem to have weakened its reputation for curing dental distress.

The head suspended from Steng Cross Gibbet is a concrete one. Once there was a whole concrete body, but as people kept using it for shooting practice or stealing it to play pranks, the body was removed, with only the head remaining.

Number 2: The Busby Stoop Inn, North Yorkshire

A noose hangs from a mock gallows outside the Busby Stoop Inn, Yorkshire, England (Photo: David Rogers)

If you were driving towards Sand Hutton Crossroads, near Thirsk, North Yorkshire, you might be surprised to see a noose dangling from a gallows beside a white building.

That building is the Busby Stoop Inn and the noose and gallows recall a sinister legend connected with the pub.

The landlord, Thomas Busby, was a notorious drunkard and criminal. One day in 1702, he quarrelled with his father-in-law. Some say it was because the older man was trying to rescue his daughter from Busby, others that the argument concerned a coin counterfeiting gang they were involved with. Anyway, Busby lost his temper and bludgeoned his father-in-law to death.

Busby was sentenced to be hung on the other side of the crossroads from his inn, after which his body was gibbetted and left for years to sway and creak in the wind on the same spot. Before his execution, however, Busby was permitted to have one last drink in his pub. He sat in his favourite chair and – when he got up to face the rope – he is said to have cursed the seat, warning that anyone who sat in it would meet a premature and violent death.

Over the years, a number of people have been unwise enough to sit in Busby’s chair, and all have – apparently – succumbed to his curse. A young labourer – tricked by his colleagues into sitting on the seat – the same day fell through the roof of the house he was working on and split open his skull. Some Canadian airmen, stationed near the Busby Stoop Inn during the Second World War, dared each other to sit on the chair. Shortly afterwards, their plane crashed, killing everyone on board.

One of the pub’s landlords, disturbed by such stories, hid the chair in the cellar. But one day a man delivering beer spotted the seat and decided to take a rest. A few hours later, his lorry crashed, killing him. The chair is now kept in a museum in the nearby town of Thirsk, hung high on a wall so no one is tempted to test whether the curse is true. There’s some dispute about this chair, however, with some claiming its style – with machine-turned spindles – would date it to after Busby’s lifetime.

Though the chair now resides in a museum, it until recently featured on the pub’s sign (Photo: Maigheach-gheal)

Thomas Busby’s ghost has long been said to haunt the inn as well as the site where he was hung and gibbeted. Crossroads were a popular location for gibbets and gallows. As they were often busy junctions, it was hoped the sight of the gibbeted corpse would be a powerful moral reminder to travellers going by. Crossroads could also be places of burial: the remains of criminals might be interred beneath the gallows they’d been hung from while suicides – a stake driven through their hearts – were sometimes buried at such junctions. Many believed this meant the vengeful or disturbed ghosts of these tragic individuals – confused by the choice of four ways – wouldn’t wander off to haunt nearby settlements.

The pub later renamed itself the Busby Stoop Inn, stoop meaning gallows in the local dialect. Perhaps this – in addition to the mock scaffold and noose outside – was an attempt to cash in on Busby’s legend. Busby’s chair also featured on the pub sign – until recently, that is.

The Busby Stoop Inn is an inn no longer. It’s been converted into an Indian restaurant called Jaipur Spice. There’s no evidence, however, that this change of function has caused Thomas Busby’s ghost to disappear. Perhaps he’s developed a taste for biryani and balti.

Number 3: Execution Dock, Wapping, East London

A gallows near the site of Execution Dock, Wapping, London, England (Photo: Marathon)

When the tide is low, descend the Pelican Stairs by The Prospect of Whitby pub, making sure you don’t slip on the mud or moss coating the steps. If you then pick your way along the Thames foreshore and lift your eyes from examining the pottery shards, the old clay pipes, the urban debris strewn over the river’s exposed bed, you’ll see a gibbet rising from the sand, with a noose dangling from a surprisingly short rope.

You’re near the site of Execution Dock, Wapping, where for over four centuries pirates, mutineers and smugglers were hanged. Those executed here had been sentenced by the Admiralty courts, whose jurisdiction covered all crimes committed at sea.

The gallows at Execution Dock were just below the low tide mark of the river – the gibbet, therefore, fell within the Admiralty’s domains. Crimes for which sailors were hung included murder on the high seas, acts of mutiny that led to death, and other offences, such as sodomy. The Admiralty sought to bring all those found guilty back to London, to end their earthly span at Execution Dock.

The convicts were normally kept in Marshalsea Prison, on the south bank of the Thames, though some were held at Newgate, where the Old Bailey now stands. Prisoners destined for Execution Dock found themselves taking part in quite a spectacle. They were placed on a cart and transported in a parade that went across London Bridge and past the Tower of London. The procession was led by the High Court Marshall on horseback, who brandished a silver oar representing the power of the Admiralty.

A chaplain travelled in the cart with the condemned, urging them to make one last confession. Perhaps more curiously, the procession stopped at an inn – The Turk’s Head – where the prisoner was allowed one final quart of ale. Enthusiastic crowds lined the parade route and river banks and people even chartered boats to get a good view of the hanging.

Pirates faced an especially brutal ordeal. They were hanged with a shortened rope, resulting in a slower death through suffocation as the rope wasn’t long enough to break their necks. This process was called ‘the Marshall’s Dance’ because the prisoners’ limbs twitched as they died through slow asphyxiation. When they finally expired, the pirates weren’t cut down but left hanging until at least three tides had washed over their heads.

The bodies of the most notorious pirates were tarred and gibbeted. They were hung in chains, usually either at Cuckold’s Point – on the Rotherhithe Peninsula – or Blackwall Point, near where The O2 Arena now stands. Here the decaying corpses would serve as a grim warning to sailors coming up the river. The infamous pirate Captain Kidd – whose legend inspired Treasure Island and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug – died at Execution Dock in 1701. His remains were gibbeted over the Thames at Tilbury Point for three years. The last hangings at Execution Dock occurred in December 1830.

Though the noose flaps mournfully from its replica gibbet between The Prospect of Whitby and the Thames, there’s debate about the exact location of Execution Dock. Some say its site is indicated by a large letter E painted on a warehouse at Swan Wharf; others maintain the spot lies beneath Wapping Overground Station. Three pubs are also in the running for this gruesome accolade, with The Prospect of Whitby, the Town of Ramsgate and the Captain Kidd all claiming to stand on – or very close to – the old Execution Dock.

Another place pirates were hanged was Jacob’s Island, a notorious South London slum situated where the River Neckinger met the Thames. The Neckinger – which now flows underground – apparently got its name from the term ‘Devil’s Neckcloth’, meaning the hangman’s noose. The site of the – long demolished – Jacob’s Island slum is now occupied by the Shad Thames and St Saviour’s Dock areas of Bermondsey.

Number 4: The Halifax Gibbet, West Yorkshire – An Early Guillotine

The Halifax Gibbet, Yorkshire, England (Photo: Ivan Hall)

In Halifax, Yorkshire, stands a device that looks like it should belong in the aftermath of the French Revolution. First set up in the 1500s – though no one knows exactly when – the Halifax Gibbet was an early guillotine. Such a contraption seems to have been unique in England, where decapitation was usually administered by more straightforward tools like axes and swords.

Halifax was once part of the Forest of Hardwick. Here an ancient custom allowed the local lord to execute anyone accused of stealing goods worth 13½ pence or more, without needing to go through the inconvenience of holding a trial. This custom may have been a relic of the Anglo-Saxon infangthief tradition, which allowed lords to enforce summary justice on thieves caught within the boundaries of their estates.

Not that such things were uncommon in medieval England. In the reign of Edward I (1272-1307), 94 private gallows and gibbets were in operation in Yorkshire, including one owned by the Bishop of York. What was unusual about Halifax was that this custom lingered on into the 17th century, by which time public opinion had decided that the summary beheading of petty thieves was a little over the top.

By the time the guillotine was set up, the decision to execute was made by a jury rather than a feudal lord, but there was still no need for a judge, defence counsel or the taking of oaths. Interestingly, this law only applied in the Forest of Hardwick and the Halifax Gibbet stood about 500 yards (450 metres) from its boundaries. Two men are known to have dodged the blade by sprinting off and getting beyond the forest’s frontiers. Records show that at least 52 men and women were beheaded by the guillotine before its use was outlawed – despite much local opposition – in 1650.

A sketch of the Halifax Gibbet in operation

The decapitation of petty thieves may have continued for so long in Halifax because it was a centre of the production of a type of cloth called kersey. As part of the manufacturing process, the cloth had to be hung outdoors to dry, making it an easy target for the light-fingered.

The Halifax Gibbet was dismantled after it had performed its final executions, but its stone platform was rediscovered in 1840. A full-sized (but non-working!) replica was set up on this base in 1974. The replica includes a blade made from a casting of the original. The original blade can be seen in the Bankfield Museum in Boothtown on Halifax’s outskirts. A plaque close to the replica lists the names of the 52 people known to have been executed by the guillotine.

Number 5: The Caxton Gibbet, Cambridgeshire

The Caxton Gibbet, Cambridgeshire (Photo: Andrew Dunn)

The Caxton Gibbet stands on the important ancient thoroughfare known as Ermine Street (now the A1198), which links London and Huntingdon, close to where it crosses the road (now the A428) connecting Cambridge and St Neots.

The Caxton Gibbet is unusual as local folklore associates it with a particularly gruesome method of execution – the placing of convicts in a gibbet cage while still alive. The prisoner would then die from thirst, exposure, starvation or a mixture of all three.

Local tales speak of a murderer who killed a man named Partridge. Upon being convicted, the criminal was suspended alive in a gibbet cage. A baker who tried to relieve his sufferings by offering him a piece of bread was sentenced to the same punishment.

There are, however, no court or burial records of such ordeals being inflicted at Caxton and live gibbeting seems to have been uncommon in England.

Tales of convicts being gibbeted at Caxton can be traced back to the 1670s and court records show the gibbet was still in use in 1745.

The Cambridgeshire antiquarian William Cole (1714-82) wrote, ‘About 1753 or 1754, the son of Mrs Gatward, being convicted of robbing the Mail, was hanged in chains on the Great Road. I saw him hanging in a scarlet coat. After he had hung two or four months, it is supposed that the screw was filed that supported him and he fell in the first high wind after.’

The Caxton Gibbet seems to have disappeared in the first decades of the 19th century. A replica was set up, probably in the early 1900s. As with the mock gallows at Busby Stoop, it may have been erected to drum up business for a nearby pub, also called the Caxton Gibbet.

Number 6: The Cage of John Breads’ Gibbet, Rye, East Sussex

Gibbet cage in Rye Castle Museum, similar to the one which displayed the body of John Breads (Photo: DeFacto)

John Breads – an innkeeper and butcher from Rye – was in 1737 fined by the mayor James Lamb for cheating his customers with non-standard weights. Breads thereafter nursed a hatred of Lamb and – six years later – saw an opportunity to pay him back.

On 17th March 1743, James Lamb’s son John hosted a dinner party on a ship in Rye Harbour. John had invited his father to attend and Breads – having heard about the dinner – hid in a churchyard hoping to surprise James Lamb on his way home. Later that night, seeing a figure pass among the graves, Breads leapt out from behind a tombstone and thrust a knife into the person’s back. But the victim was not James Lamb. Lamb was ill and the man Breads stabbed was Lamb’s brother-in-law Allen Grebel, who’d gone to the dinner in his place.

In the gloom of the churchyard, Breads didn’t notice his error. He excitedly dropped his knife and ran away shouting, ‘Butchers should kill lambs!’ Grebel died of his wounds later that evening.

Breads was imprisoned in Rye Castle and – when he came to trial – he found his intended victim James Lamb was the presiding magistrate. Breads told him, ‘I did not mean to kill Mr Grebel. It was you I meant it for and I would murder you now if I could!’

On 8th June, John Breads was hanged outside the Strand Gate, Rye. His body was then placed in a cage on – the aptly named – Gibbet Marsh, where it was left to dangle for 50 years. The cage and Breads’ skull are now kept in the attic of Rye Town Hall. It’s said his other bones were stolen by old women and used as cures for rheumatism.

A mock cage with a mock skeleton can be seen in Rye Castle Museum, in the very cell where Breads was held. Like Thomas Busby, John Breads was permitted to enjoy a last pint in his pub – The Flushing Inn – before he faced the rope.

Though many of those gibbeted were hung with chains wrapped around their bodies, others – like Breads – were suspended in specially designed cages. For these, the blacksmith would often measure the convict, in the way a tailor might measure a man for a suit.

Number 7: Combe Gibbet, Berkshire

Combe Gibbet on Gallows Down, Berkshire, England (Photo: Andrew Foster)

This gibbet stands high on Gallows Down, near the village of Combe, Berkshire. It’s on the Test Way – an important long-distance footpath – and prominently sited on top of a long barrow.

Combe Gibbet was erected in 1676 to display the bodies of George Broomham and Dorothy Newman and was only ever used for them. The two were having an affair and they murdered Broomham’s wife Martha and son Robert when they stumbled upon the lovers on the downs.

Despite its sinister past, the gibbet now seems a centre of fun activities. It’s a tourist attraction and often surrounded by hang gliders and paragliders. The gibbet is the start of a scenic off-road run – the Combe Gibbet Race – which takes place every year.

Though the current gibbet is a replica – the original was dismantled years ago – a condition in the lease of a nearby farm states the gibbet must be properly maintained. Perhaps there’s a suspicion that someday this grim apparatus may once again come in handy.

Number 8: Brigg Gibbet, Lincolnshire

Brigg Gibbet, which stands on the A18 three miles east of Brigg, Lincolnshire, is unusual in that no wrongdoers were ever suspended from it. It was erected in the early 17th century as a warning, following a fight between two feuding local families, in which members of both clans died. King James I warned the families – the Rosses of Melton Ross and the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby – that any more killings would be treated as murder. The king had the gibbet set up to underline his point.

Number 9: The Bilstone Gibbet, Leicestershire

The remnants of the Bilstone Gibbet, Leicestershire, England (Photo: Ian Rob)

This gibbet post stands outside the hamlet of Bilstone, Leicestershire. The Bilstone Gibbet was erected to suspend the body of John Massey, a hard-drinking – and notoriously short-tempered – farmhand. John was famous locally as a wrestler and known as Topsy Turvey because of his trick of lifting opponents above his head before throwing them.

In 1801, after returning to Bilstone from a drinking session in the Curzon Arms, Twycross, Massey got into a violent row with his new second wife. After assaulting her, he picked her up and flung her into a mill stream. Though she didn’t drown, she died a few weeks later from her injuries. Massey also hurled her 10-year-old daughter – who’d tried to intervene – into the mill race. The daughter clambered out – shaken but unharmed – with the help of the mill keeper and would later give decisive evidence against Massey in court.

Following his trial, John Massey was hung, after which his body was suspended in chains from the Bilstone Gibbet for 18 years. By the time he was taken down, only a partial skeleton was left.

Unlike many of the gibbets in this article, this gibbet post – though eroded and worm-eaten – isn’t a replica but a remnant of the original object. Ancient iron bolts can still be seen in its wood.

Those who have lingered near the gibbet in the late evening have reported an unsettling sensation. Teenagers used to dare each other to walk up close to the gibbet at night, especially on Halloween.

Number 10: The Millom Gibbet, Cumbria

Near the town of Millom, Cumbria, a memorial stands next to a socket in the ground that once secured a gibbet post. As in the Forest of Hardwick, the local lords – the Huddleston family – had the right to execute suspects without all the troublesome hassle of court cases. The socket is all that remains of the gibbet that dispatched them.

The Decline of Gibbeting and Public Gallows

Though favoured by the courts as a theatrical method of deterrent, gibbeting was always a controversial practice. There were frequent complaints about the sight and smell of the decaying corpse and attempts were sometimes made to remove and bury bodies. One reason gibbet posts were so high was to make this difficult and some gibbets had nails sticking out of the wood to discourage any tempted to climb them to cut down the corpse.

The London diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) expressed disgust at gibbeting and such sentiments seem to have grown as time went on. Though the Murder Act of 1751 stipulated that ‘in no case whatsoever shall the body of a murderer be suffered to be buried’ but should instead be dissected or hung in chains, this may well have been intended to reverse a decline in gibbeting.

The practice, however, became less common and objections to it more outspoken. Doubts were also rising about the moral instruction the sight of a gibbeting could impart. In one notorious case, a 16-year-old girl invited a friend to a picnic beneath a gibbet and fed her a poisoned cake, in revenge for her friend taking a job she’d coveted.

The last gibbetings in England were those of William Jobbing, a Jarrow miner, and James Cook, a Leicester bookbinder, both in 1832. Jobbing was soon cut down by his fellow miners and buried decently. Cook’s body was taken down by the authorities after a few days, following horrified complaints from nearby residents. Gibbeting was abolished in 1834.

Public hangings went on. Though such executions were often large-scale events, drawing thousands of onlookers, disquiet about them was also increasing.

Charles Dickens, after witnessing a public hanging, wrote a letter to The Times complaining of the ‘wickedness and levity of the immense crowd … The horrors of the gibbet and of the crimes which brought the wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language of the assembled spectators.’

Dickens described many of these spectators as ‘thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind’ who indulged in ‘every variety of offensive and foul behaviour … fightings, faintings, whistlings … brutal jokes’ and ‘tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight.’

As had been the case with gibbeting, uncertainties were growing about the virtuous effects of public executions on the masses. From 1868, hangings were carried out behind prison walls. The UK’s last ever hangings took place in 1964.

The landscape, however, remembers our brutality. We can see it in our place names – Gallowgate, Gibbet Marsh, Gibbet Lane, Gallows Down. Our cruelties are recalled by those replica gibbets, those flapping nooses, rain-filled sockets and worm-eaten posts that lurk eerily at England’s crossroads and waysides, reminding us of attitudes that have faded and will hopefully never re-emerge.

(The featured image, showing Winter’s Gibbet, is courtesy of johndal)

The post England’s Top 10 Gibbets, Gallows & Places of Execution appeared first on David Castleton Blog - The Serpent's Pen.

‘For God’s sake, bring me a light!’ the man shouted. ‘For we have caught Spring-heeled Jack here in the lane!’

Jane hurried into the house and rushed back bearing a candle. As soon as she handed the candle to the policeman, however, he flung off his cloak to reveal ‘a most hideous and frightful appearance.’

His eyes glowed like ‘red balls of fire’, and – as she trembled with terror and shock – Jane saw that he wore a large helmet and tight-fitting clothes that resembled white oilskin. The man opened his mouth and vomited a stream of blue-and-white flames in the direction of Jane’s face.

The man sprang forward, grabbed Jane and – placing her head under his arm – tore at her gown with claws that were ‘of some metallic substance’. Miss Alsop screamed, managed to slip away and ran back towards the house. The man bounded after her, caught her on the steps, mauled her arms and neck with his metal talons and wrenched out some of her hair. But Jane’s shrieks had alerted one of her sisters, who came running to help. After a short but intense struggle, the man fled.

This incident was widely reported in the newspapers, even making it into The Times. Far from being seen as an isolated attack, for those living in and around London, the Alsop case fitted into a pattern of bizarre assaults perpetrated by a man – or phantom or demon – known as Spring-heeled Jack.

Some described Spring-heeled Jack as a ghost, some as a bear, an armoured man, a devil; others suspected he might be a dissolute aristocrat. As well as his flaming breath and burning red eyes, many claimed he had the astounding ability to spring or leap great distances, bounding over walls and hedges and even onto house roofs.

But who was this strange entity who terrorised the London area – and other parts of the country – throughout the Victorian age and beyond? Was Spring-heeled Jack just one person or several, could there have been any supernatural element involved, and how does Jack fit into an urban folklore rich with ghosts, devils and sadists – beings that many genuinely believed haunted the dark and narrow streets of 19^th century Britain?

Let’s see what we can discover about the peculiar phenomenon of Spring-heeled Jack.

Spring-heeled Jack Terrorises London and Its Suburbs

The first sightings of Spring-heeled Jack occurred in 1837. In October that year, Mary Stevens, a servant girl, had been walking along the edge of Clapham Common. A tall figure jumped at Mary from a dark alley. He grabbed hold of her, tore at her clothes with claws and forced kisses on her face. His hands felt ‘cold and clammy as those of a corpse.’ Mary screamed and the attacker fled. Her cries alerted several locals, who searched for her assailant, but could find no one.

The next day, a similar figure sprang in front of a carriage. The carriage crashed and the coachman was badly injured. According to witnesses, the figure then escaped by leaping over a nine-foot (2.7-metre) wall while emitting a stream of high-pitched laughter.

News of this strange attacker soon spread through London and the surrounding settlements, and it wasn’t long before this sinister being was christened ‘Spring-heeled Jack’. The idea arose that his leaping abilities might be due to springs hidden in the heels of his boots, with newspapers like The Morning Chronicle crediting him with ‘spring shoes’.

Jack, however, didn’t always stick with his tall, jumping, metal-clawed persona. In early September 1837, a ‘ghost, imp or devil’ in form of ‘a large white bull’ was rumoured to have attacked a number of people, especially women. Over the next two months, Jack was said to have appeared in the guises of a ‘ghost, bear or devil’ in over twenty villages around London. In – the suitably named – Cut-throat Lane, Isleworth, a carpenter called Jones was attacked by Spring-heeled Jack clad in armour. Jones resisted and a fight began, but two more ‘ghosts’ joined the fracas on Jack’s side and carpenter was severely beaten.

Rumours of Spring-heeled Jack were soon terrifying London

Jack is said to have haunted St John’s Wood in late December 1837 and early January 1838 dressed in armour and in the guise of a bear. On the western edge of London, he put in an appearance as a devil armed with iron claws, with which he attacked a blacksmith and several women. There were rumours Jack had been seen climbing over the walls of Holland Park and Kensington Palace at midnight to dance ‘fantastic measures on the wooded lawns.’ A woman in Dulwich had been ‘nearly deprived of her senses’ by the sight of a ghost ‘enveloped in a white sheet and blue fire’ and a nine-year-old boy from Hammersmith had been ‘terribly frightened’ by a glimpse of Spring-heeled Jack in the shape of a bear.

Stories of Jack’s assaults kept circulating. According to one account, a servant girl, Polly Adams, was attacked on Shooter’s Hill by a man who vomited fire in her face and attempted to rip her clothes off. She suspected the man was a gentleman who’d tried to seduce her earlier the same day. London’s outskirts swarmed with rumours of a man who’d hide in unlit lanes before springing out at travellers. After accosting them, he’d escape with the most incredible leaps, sometimes clearing hedges and gates with just one bound.

With the metropolis humming with tales of this strange predator and the populace’s fear and agitation intensifying, the authorities felt they had to be seen to take action.

 Spring-heeled Jack’s Outrages Prompt London’s Lord Mayor to Act

On 9^th January 1838, the Lord Mayor of London announced – during a public session at the Mansion House – that he’d received a letter from ‘a resident of Peckham’. A part of the letter read:

‘It appears that some individuals (of, as the writer believes, the highest ranks of life) have laid a wager with a mysterious and foolhardy companion, that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three different disguises – a ghost, a bear and a devil … The wager, however, has been accepted and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover …

At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned and has never from that moment been in her senses.’

Spring-heeled Jack in his guise as a devil

Though the Lord Mayor was sceptical of such reports, members of his audience told him that ‘servant girls around Kensington, Hammersmith and Ealing tell dreadful stories of this ghost or devil.’ The revelations from the Lord Mayor’s meeting were reported in The Times on the same day and in a number of other papers on January 10^th. On the 11^th, the mayor showed another meeting – packed with anxious citizens – a heap of letters detailing similar ‘wicked pranks’ committed in and around London.

One correspondent claimed Jack had frightened several women into ‘dangerous fits’ in the Hammersmith area and another asserted that in Brixton, Stockwell and Vauxhall people had even died of fright upon encountering the monster. One writer claimed Spring-heeled Jack had been spotted several times in Lewisham and Blackheath. Another complainant stated that a servant girl in Forest Hill had been sent into fits by a figure in a bear’s skin.

There were especially strong rumours about a gang of aristocratic ‘rascals connected to high families.’ Letters alleged ‘that bets to the amount of £5,000 are at stake upon the success or failure of the abominable proceedings’ and that the ‘object of the villains is to destroy the lives of not less than 30 human beings! Viz eight old bachelors, 10 old maids and six ladies’ maids, and as many servant girls as they can, by depriving them of their reason, and otherwise accelerating their deaths.’

The mayor still thought the hysteria around Spring-heeled Jack had inspired the ‘greatest exaggerations’ and said he doubted that ‘the ghost performs the feats of a devil upon earth’. But he promised that the man responsible for these ‘pantomime displays’ would be apprehended and punished. The mayor instructed the police to search for the culprit and offered rewards for information leading to his capture.

Spring-heeled Jack Gains More Infamy and Commits Fresh Crimes

In spite of the mayor’s determination to catch Spring-heeled Jack, reports of fresh outrages kept coming in. On 20^th February 1838, the attack on Jane Alsop occurred and on 28^th February another young woman, Lucy Scales, was the victim of a similar assault. Lucy and her sister were walking through Limehouse, passing along Green Dragon Alley, when they saw a person in a large cloak standing in that narrow thoroughfare.

As Lucy passed the person, he vomited ‘a quantity of blue flame into her face’, temporarily blinding her. Lucy fell to the ground and began having violent fits, which would go on for several hours. Lucy’s assailant, who hadn’t attempted to touch her, then strode away. He was described as being tall, thin and of gentlemanly appearance, to have been carrying a lamp similar to those used by the police and to have been wearing some sort of headgear.

A few days later, in East London’s Turner Street, off Commercial Road, a servant boy responded to a vigorous knocking on his master’s door. He opened it to see a man wrapped in a cloak. The man threw his cloak back to reveal a bizarre costume and hideous features similar to those that had confronted Jane Alsop. The boy screamed so loudly it caused the man to flee. As the man turned to run, the boy is said to have noticed the letter ‘W’ embroidered on his cloak as part of an ornate, aristocratic-looking crest.

After the attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, a number of suspects were arrested and questioned, but all were let go. The man most strongly suspected of being Spring-heeled Jack was one Thomas Millbank, a carpenter who lived near the Alsops. Millbank – who had apparently made drunken boasts of carrying out the Alsop assault and had been wearing white overalls and a greatcoat on the day it occurred – escaped being charged because the police were convinced he had no ability to breathe fire. Millbank had also been drunk on the night of the attack and Jane and her sister insisted their assailant was sober.

Spring-heeled Jack, as depicted in a penny dreadful of 1904

The assaults by Spring-heeled Jack – or, due to his growing fame, those imitating him – went on. On 28^th February 1838, a well-dressed man informed the landlady of the White Lion pub in Vere Street that he was Spring-heeled Jack. The man then produced a club and swung it at a group of women. A man dressed in a cloak seized hold of a lady in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and slapped her face, and in Islington a blacksmith called James Priest was arrested after attacking a number of females. Priest was given three months’ hard labour. In March, two tall men in dark cloaks – their faces painted with ochre – frightened a boy in Westmoreland Mews. In Kentish Town, a youth was cautioned after being caught with a mask with blue glazed paper arranged around its mouth – paper meant to mimic Jack’s flaming breath. A Kilburn man was fined four pounds after pulling off several pranks wearing a bearded mask and sheet.

Spring-heeled Jack was also becoming more active outside the capital. In April, a woman was attacked on the cliff tops at Southend by a ‘gentleman’ who ripped her clothes and shoved grass into her mouth, prompting the local paper to run the headline ‘Spring-heeled Jack at Southend’. On 14^th April 1838, an article in the Brighton Gazette claimed that a gardener in Rose Hill, Sussex, had been terrified by a being ‘in the shape of a bear or some other four-footed animal.’ After startling the gardener with a growl, the ‘bear’ had scaled a wall and trotted along it on all fours before leaping down and chasing the gardener. The ‘animal’ then clambered over the wall and made its escape. This incident was picked up by The Times, with the newspaper commenting, ‘Spring-heeled Jack has, it seems, found his way down to the Sussex coast.’

Spring-heeled Jack, meanwhile, was turning into a figure of urban legend. As well as his frequent appearances in the newspapers, sensationalist pamphlets about his exploits were published and plays about him performed at cheap theatres. Three pamphlets were rushed out – claiming to be based on fact, but probably also including some fictional embellishments – in January and February 1838. A play of 1840 – Spring-heeled Jack, The Terror of London – depicted Jack as an outlaw driven to attack women because of a betrayal by his own sweetheart. In some Punch and Judy shows, the devil character was rechristened Spring-heeled Jack.

The Years Pass, But Spring-heeled Jack Keeps Appearing

Despite his rising fame, reports of encounters with Spring-heeled Jack began to dwindle. In 1843, however, there was a fresh surge of sightings across the country. Jack was spotted in Northamptonshire, where he was described as ‘the very image of the Devil himself, with horns and eyes of flame.’ In East Anglia, Spring-heeled Jack was held responsible for a series of assaults on the drivers of mail coaches.

In 1845, Jack apparently bounded up to a prostitute – Maria Davis – on Jacob’s Island, a notorious South London slum located where the River Neckinger met the Thames. Jack is said to have grasped Maria in his claw-tipped hands and belched his trademark blue flames into her face. He then lifted her above his head before flinging her into one of the open sewers – called Folly Ditch – that ran through the neighbourhood. Maria struggled vainly before she sank beneath the foul waters.

In July 1847, Spring-heeled Jack was alleged to have committed a number of outrages in Teignmouth, Devon, ‘disguised in a skin coat, which had the appearance of a bullock’s hide, skullcap, horns and mask’. The ensuing investigation resulted in one Captain Finch being convicted on two counts of assaulting women. Some also blamed Spring-heeled Jack for the strange phenomenon of the ‘Devil’s Footprints’ – a 40-mile-long line of mysterious cloven hoof marks, mostly in single file, that appeared in the snow in Devon overnight in 1855. Whoever made the hoofprints seems to have been able to jump over rivers, haystacks and houses with ease.

Sightings of Spring-heeled Jack once more decreased until there was another panic in the 1870s. In 1872, the News of the World reported that Peckham was ‘in a state of commotion owing to what is known as the Peckham Ghost, a mysterious figure, quite alarming in appearance.’ This spectre, the paper claimed, was actually ‘Spring-heeled Jack, who terrified a past generation.’ The ghost was said to be tall and dressed in white. There were references to the phantom having a flaming face, the ability to leap fences and a fondness for wearing spring-heeled boots. In Sheffield, local residents began glimpsing a ‘Park Ghost’, who would also come to be identified with Spring-heeled Jack.

In one of his most infamous escapades, Jack was accused of harassing soldiers at the large military base in Aldershot, Surrey. At Aldershot’s North Camp one evening in March 1877, a sentry saw a strange figure emerge out of the darkness. The sentry shouted a challenge, but the figure strode straight up to him and slapped him several times across the face, with an icy corpse-like hand. Other soldiers fired at the intruder, but their bullets had no effect. The figure then vanished into the darkness ‘with astonishing bounds.’ More incidents occurred in April and the soldiers grew so unsettled that sentries were given live ammunition and told to shoot the ‘night terror’ on sight. But Jack would return to torment more sentries at the end of the summer. At Aldershot, Spring-heeled Jack is even said to have leapt the Basingstoke Canal – a channel 15 paces across.

In the autumn of 1877, Spring-heeled Jack appeared in Lincoln, wearing the skin of a sheep. A mob chased him, but with his usual bounds and jumps, Jack escaped. Jack apparently leapt distances of 20 feet or more as he sprang across rooftops and he even bounded right over a Roman monument called Newport Arch. A few citizens shot at him, but Jack seemed impervious to their bullets.

A somewhat sensationalist illustration of Spring-heeled Jack – in the guise of a bear – in Lincoln

In 1888, in the Everton district of Liverpool, Spring-heeled Jack was spotted on the roof of a church and – in 1904 – there were reports of him in the same city, in nearby William Henry Street. Here he is said to have taunted residents by bounding 25 feet up onto house roofs then jumping down into the street again. Locals described him as sporting a mask, long boots and a black cloak.

After the incident in William Henry Street, Jack seems to have faded into history and folklore, but I’ve found one reference to a hunt for Spring-heeled Jack in Glasgow as late as the 1930s. It’s not known if Jack was accused of committing any crimes against Glaswegians, but – interestingly – Glasgow seems to have been a frequent venue for ‘monster hunts’ in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The city saw searches for hobgoblins, banshees, maniacs and even a being known as the Gorbals Vampire, who was said to haunt Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis.

So Who, or What, Might Spring-heeled Jack Have Been?

A number of explanations have been put forward to account for the strange phenomenon of Spring-heeled Jack. Read on for ideas about mad marquesses, phantom attackers, mass hysteria, ghosts, devils and notions about how Jack might have sprung, evaded bullets and breathed fire.

Could Spring-heeled Jack Have Been the Consequence of an Aristocratic Bet?

The Marquess of Waterford in 1840. Could he have been Spring-heeled Jack?

Even at the time of his first assaults, most people didn’t consider Spring-heeled Jack to be a supernatural being, but rather an individual – or individuals – in disguise who had a macabre sense of humour. Many – like the writer of the letter to the Lord Mayor – suspected Jack’s outrages were perpetrated by a group of noblemen as part of a wager. Popular rumour pointed to the young Irish aristocrat the Marquess of Waterford as the main culprit.

The Marquess was frequently in the news for his drunken brawling, violent practical jokes and participation in outlandish bets. The term ‘paint the town red’ comes from an episode involving the Marquess and his friends. After finding some red paint lying around in Melton Mowbray, they went on a drunken rampage, daubing houses and pubs while beating and painting red any police officers who tried to stop them. 

There’s evidence the Marquess of Waterford might have been Spring-heeled Jack. The Marquess was famous for his disdain towards women. He already had a reputation for amusing himself by ‘springing on travellers unaware, to frighten them’ and he is known to have been in London around the time of the first Spring-heeled Jack assaults. The Marquess was noted as a sportsman, boxer and equestrian so – though no human could have performed Jack’s more outlandish feats – an athletic man like the Marquess may have been able to leap surprising distances and bound over gates. The boy in Turner Street, apparently, noticed a ‘W’ on Jack’s cloak as he fled.

As well as having the sadistic character and physical capabilities to undertake at least some of Spring-Heeled Jack’s crimes, the Marquess had the money and resources. In the days before mass public transport, few commoners would have had the cash or time to criss-cross London and its suburbs in the way Jack did, but this would have been less of a challenge for a nobleman in a coach. Wealth would also have been needed to procure items like suits of armour and bearskins. Many – including the authorities – felt a whole group of noblemen might be involved and there’s some evidence Jack didn’t act alone. Three men beat Jones the carpenter and Jane Alsop’s father suspected his daughter’s assailant may have had a helper.

The lull in Jack’s activities after 1839 could have resulted from the bet being fulfilled or those posing as Spring-heeled Jack becoming alarmed by the attention the press and police were focusing on the case. Imitators or spreading mass hysteria could then explain the later incidents.

The Marquess of Waterford may have carried out the earlier assaults – like those on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales – but he couldn’t have been the perpetrator of Spring-heeled Jack’s later outrages. Around 1842, the Marquess seems to have reformed. He married and settled down in County Waterford, where he apparently led an exemplary life before dying in a riding accident in 1859.

Was Jack’s Legend the Product of Press Sensationalism and Mass Hysteria?

Even at the time of the early Spring-heeled Jack incidents, there was a certain amount of scepticism from the authorities and press. While many accepted that Jack’s escapades may have resulted from a sinister wager, some sightings of ‘Jack’ and some of the powers ascribed to him were suspected of being the product of an over-excited popular imagination.

Investigations by journalists showed that the glimpses of Jack in the form of ‘a large white bull’ were caused by nothing more uncanny than a white-faced heifer. Some of the accounts of ‘ghosts’ were shown to stem from the sight of a police officer in a white uniform on a horse. The reports of Jack scaling the walls of Kensington Palace to dance on its lawns were found to be inspired by an unrelated episode from 1822. As Jack’s fame expanded, it seems that a number of sexual assaults, crimes and acts of hooliganism – which, while distressing for their victims, weren’t exceptional in themselves – were added in the popular mind to Jack’s reign of terror. In addition, pranksters, criminals and sexual predators appear to have mimicked aspects of Jack’s legend to disorientate and terrify their victims.

Though some pressmen may have been sceptical about Jack, others were less so. The more outlandish accounts of Jack’s escapades in Lincoln, for example, come from The Illustrated Police News, a publication that reported crimes in a sensationalist and sometimes exaggerated manner.

There was also the influence of the numerous plays and penny dreadfuls churned out about Jack. These may have reminded people about Jack’s legend at times when it was fading from the collective memory. The play Spring-heel’d Jack or the Felon’s Wrongs was staged in 1863 while 1867 saw the release of the penny dreadful Spring-heel’d Jack, the Terror of London, A Romance of the Nineteenth Century. Another 40-part penny dreadful was published in 1863 and reprinted in 1867. Could these plays and publications have resurrected Jack in the popular mind and helped inspire the outbreak of sightings in the 1870s? More plays and pamphlets appeared between the mid-1880s and early 1900s. Could these have contributed to the reports of Jack’s final outrages around the turn of the century?

Spring-heeled Jack in the 1867 penny dreadful series ‘Spring-heeled Jack: The Terror of London’

Certain incidents weren’t even seen as the work of Spring-heeled Jack until declared so by the press. The case of the ‘Peckham Ghost’ of 1872 was extensively covered by two local papers, but they simply described this entity as a ‘ghost’ and made no mention of Spring-heeled Jack. The Peckham incidents were only linked to Jack – no doubt helping to reawaken memories of him – by the national papers The News of the World and The Illustrated Police News.

Later writers may also be guilty of exaggerating Jack’s legend. Mike Dash – in his excellent long essay Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost – suspects Peter Haining, the author of the 1977 book The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring-heeled Jack, of embellishing or even making up a number of incidents. Dash has found absolutely no contemporary reports of the attack on Polly Adams on Blackheath and suspects Haining’s account of it may be an attempt to push his theory that the Marquess of Waterford was Spring-heeled Jack. Dash even suspects that the aristocratic ‘W’ seen on Jack’s cloak in Turner Street might be an invention of Haining’s.

Dash has also been unable to find any contemporary references to the murder of the prostitute Maria Davis, an incident that features prominently in Haining’s book. Dash suspects the Maria Davis story may have come from a woodcut showing two men in a boat apparently recovering a prostitute’s body from Folly Ditch. A closer examination rather suggests they are collecting drinking water.

Are these men pulling a body from Folly Ditch or just collecting water?

 Alarming – though not particularly uncanny episodes – have sometimes been incorporated into the Spring-heeled Jack myth. The stories of Jack’s activities in Liverpool in 1904 seem to have their source in the behaviour of a mentally ill man. 60 years after the events, a Mrs Pierpont, who had lived in the neighbourhood all her life, said ‘Jack’ was a local man who ‘was slightly off-balance mentally …. He had a form of religious mania and he would climb on to the rooftops of houses crying out: “My wife is the Devil!”’

‘They usually fetched police or a fire-engine ladder to get him down. As the police closed in on him, he would leap from one house roof to the next. That’s what gave rise to the Spring-heeled Jack rumours.’

It does seem, however, that some of the Spring-heeled Jack incidents really did occur and really were something out-of-the-ordinary, especially the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales. But even here, there seem to be some discrepancies about what Jack actually did. Jane and her sisters, for instance, insisted that Jack had breathed fire while two eye-witnesses – men called Richardson and Smith – maintained that Jack didn’t belch any flames.

Smith said, ‘I saw no light but that of a candle’ and Richardson reportedly stated that the assault on Jane didn’t ‘impress him with the idea that it had been so furious as he subsequently saw it described in the newspapers.’    

What Could Explain Jack’s Leaps, Fiery Breath and Other Startling Characteristics?

Some of Jack’s outlandish attributes – his ability to make massive leaps, his fire-breathing, his metal claws, his apparent imperviousness to bullets – seem so impressive that people have wondered whether he was in some way supernatural or not of this world. Later writers have speculated that Spring-heeled Jack might have been an alien – perhaps from a planet with stronger gravity than our own – or that he could have been a demon summoned, deliberately or accidently, by occultists.

During the Victorian era, Jack was mostly seen as human though the frequent references to him as a ‘ghost’ or ‘devil’ do suggest some suspected his powers might have uncanny origins. But could there be any rational explanations for the astounding abilities Jack was credited with?

Spring-heeled Jack’s Fiery Breath

One of Spring-heeled Jack’s most alarming features was his fire-breathing. Only four incidents, however, are said to have involved Jack belching flames – the Polly Adams and Maria Davis attacks (which might not have occurred) and the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales. As we’ve seen, there’s some debate about whether the Alsop assault involved fire, but – assuming Jack did breathe fire during the attacks on Jane and Lucy – how could he have managed it?

It’s likely Jack used a fire-breathing trick of the kind performed in circuses and at carnivals, by filling his mouth with a flammable fluid and spurting it onto a flame. This could explain the blue-and-white colour of Jack’s fire. In the attacks on Jane and Lucy, Jack needed a flame to pull off his trick – he asked Jane for a candle and he was holding a lamp when he assaulted Lucy. In both attacks, he is said to have held the light at the level of his chest, which is what fire-breathers do. The police at the time suspected Jack was using some sort of carnival technique and they talked to circus fire-breathers to try to work out how he could have done it.

This sort of stunt would be very dangerous. Because the slightest breeze can result in the flame igniting the liquid while still in the fire-breather’s mouth, the trick is usually only performed indoors. The evenings when Jack attacked Jane and Lucy seem to have been calm, but perhaps the hazards of such a prank meant Jack wasn’t keen to undertake it more than twice. After the attacks on Lucy and Jane, he may have decided to lay aside the flame-spurting part of his repertoire or given up his attacks altogether, to be replaced by lesser imitators incapable of fire-breathing. Jack’s costume of a helmet and white oil-skin may have been designed to lessen his risk of injury if an accident did occur.

It’s unlikely that Jack breathed fire straight into his victims’ faces. This would have resulted in horrendous injuries, but there’s no record of Jane or Lucy receiving burns and Lucy is said to have only been blinded temporarily. If Jack did breathe fire, the reports of him vomiting flames directly into faces are probably exaggerations. 

Spring-heeled Jack’s Leaping Abilities

What could explain Spring-heeled Jack’s incredible leaps?

If attempted by humans, Jack’s most spectacular leaps – jumping over high walls and down from roofs – would have led to smashed ankle bones.

In the earlier accounts of Spring-heeled Jack, his leaps – while impressive – are often less incredible than those of his later career. Sometimes, he didn’t leap at all. Following the attack on Lucy, Jack just strode off; after the assault on Jane, he merely ‘scampered away across the fields.’ But Jack’s leaping abilities were soon emphasised. This could have been the result of exaggerations among the public – as in the 1904 Liverpool case – or in the press, as in the Illustrated Police News account of Jack in Lincoln. Some of his most spectacular jumping feats don’t appear until they’re featured in accounts written years after the incidents they proport to describe. There are no contemporary records of Jack leaping the Basingstoke Canal – such a claim doesn’t appear until 1907, three decades after the events at Aldershot.

An interesting account of Spring-heeled Jack was given by a lady who claimed to have seen him fleeing across Tooting Bec Common. The lady observed Jack ‘jumping over good-sized furze bushes and clumps of grass with no apparent effort, though she came to the conclusion that any greater leap would have been impossible. He was doing far more than any ordinary man could have accomplished without mechanical aid, but nothing resembling the exploits with which he had been credited by rumour. Had a good horse been near, he could have been overtaken, but as it was, he escaped, the mist and gathering night helping him.’

Might Jack have been a vigorous and athletic young man, whose leaping feats, though astonishing, didn’t become superhuman until they were exaggerated?

It’s also unlikely that Jack wore spring-heeled boots. Such boots would only be of use on firm, fairly even ground and many of Jack’s exploits took place on the rougher terrain of parkland, heaths, fields, county lanes and badly paved city alleys. In addition, springs wouldn’t have been powerful enough propel Jack over high walls and houses.

Jack’s Talons and Imperviousness to Bullets

Spring-heeled Jack’s metal talons are easy to explain – they could have been fitted to specially designed gloves. What’s more puzzling is Jack’s apparent ability to deflect bullets.

In Lincoln, (assuming Jack was fired at and such accounts aren’t exaggerations) the locals’ pot shots may have missed or been deflected by Jack’s sheepskin. But in the Aldershot case, it seems stranger that Jack could have dodged the bullets of trained soldiers.

When Jack first appeared at the base, the shots fired at him were blanks. Jack was fired on with real bullets when he turned up again in April 1877, but escaped harm thanks to poor shooting on the part of startled sentries.

The Times reported, ‘A soldier, in his excitement, loaded his rifle, fired but missed his aim. From here, the ghost went towards the military cemetery and in a similar manner attempted to frighten a private … and was fired at again, but without being hit.’

By the time Jack returned at the end of summer, the guards were no longer using live ammunition. According to the Illustrated Police News, sentries had ‘been ordered to fire on the ghost, and were loaded with ball, but this precaution being lately given up, Jack pursued his old tactics on Friday last …’

This suggests Jack was aware of the order to use live rounds and also knew when that order was rescinded. This leads one to suspect Jack had inside knowledge of the workings of the camp and was probably a soldier stationed at Aldershot.

It’s likely the Aldershot Jack was a young, athletic army officer fond of playing pranks on his fellow soldiers. Some serving at Aldershot had their suspicions about Jack’s identity.

A retired colonel, looking back 30 years later, said, ‘The pranks were popularly attributed to a lively young officer of the Rifles … a very big, powerful man, extraordinarily active … he certainly was not convicted of them and I do not know that he ever acknowledged himself to be Spring-heeled Jack.’  

Spring-heeled Jack’s Legend Could Be Built on Strong Urban Traditions of Ghosts, Devils and Phantom Attackers

The tales of Spring-heeled Jack could have been influenced by earlier urban legends of ghosts, devils and bogeys. Jack’s outrages likely reawakened such terrors in the collective mind. These terrors then became linked to Jack’s myth, strengthening it further.

London has a long folklore of ghosts haunting its streets – pale, human-like entities that assault lone travellers. In 1803-4 and again in 1824, a being known as the Hammersmith Ghost was said to rove the city’s western fringes. This spectre – suspected to be the spirit of a local suicide – was accused of attacking pedestrians. The ghost had similarities to Spring-heeled Jack. He was described as being very tall and dressed in white clothes, over which he wore a long dark coat with shiny buttons. Other descriptions have the ghost sporting a cow-skin, horns and large glass eyes. Like Jack, the Hammersmith Ghost was good at outrunning and evading pursuers and several of his victims were said to have died of shock. Another famous urban spectre was the Southampton Ghost. This phantom was said to be 10 feet (3 metres) tall and – like Spring-heeled Jack – fond of jumping over houses. Jack’s ‘ghostly’ aspects can also be seen in the fact he never seemed to age. He was just as athletic and vigorous in the 1870s as when he first emerged in 1837.

Spring-heeled Jack in the guise of a ghost

Another ‘ghostly’ or ‘devilish’ aspect of Jack was his ability to manifest in different forms. In addition to his spring-heeled persona, he could appear as a white-sheeted ghost, a bull, a bear, a devil or ‘an unearthly warrior clad in armour of polished brass’. Sometimes Jack even mixed his personas – for example, appearing as an armoured man draped in a bearskin and sporting horns.

This drew on an old tradition that evil spirits often disguised their identities, including by masquerading as animals. So it would have seemed less puzzling to the Victorians than to us that Jack could assume different forms while remaining the same entity. Jack’s flaming breath and occasional cloven hooves also drew on traditional representations of devils and demons. The animal hides Jack sometimes sported reflect ancient associations between animal skins and fertility, especially the skins of bulls. Such associations emphasised Jack’s sexually predatory characteristics. Jack’s sexually aggressive imitator Captain Finch wore a bull’s hide.

Spring-heeled Jack’s devil-like aspect is depicted by the sensationalist ‘Illustrated Police News’.

Spring-heeled Jack also fits into the tradition of ‘phantom attackers’: criminals that – though human – are so sadistic and strange they have an aura of the uncanny or demonic. One of Jack’s predecessors was the London Monster, a man reported to have stabbed over 50 women between 1788 and 1790. Some accounts of the Monster claimed he had knives attached to his knees, others that he hid blades in bunches of flowers, which he then encouraged women to smell.  

Another assault by a ‘phantom attacker’ is said to have occurred in 1826. A young man walking down Commercial Road at midnight was attacked by a cloaked and masked individual with cloven hooves for feet. The attacker grasped the man and squeezed him against his body, which seemed to be on fire. During his desperate struggles, the badly burned victim pulled the mask away to find his assailant was his younger brother.

Many of Jack’s characteristics seem to stem from universally held architypes of springing, devil-like, sometimes fire-breathing characters who leap out of the darkness to attack or terrify their victims. Accounts of Spring-heeled-Jack-like creatures can be found in various parts of the world. In 1926, a ‘ghost’ plagued Bradford’s Grafton Street. The ghost – described as tall, athletic, ‘glowing’ and ‘on springs’ – escaped his pursuers by bounding over rooftops.

In 1951, a tall, thin, cloaked spectre haunted a housing project in Baltimore. This highly athletic entity was fond of leaping onto rooftops and scaling high walls. A being known as the ‘Black Flash’ or ‘Phantom’ menaced Provincetown, Cape Cod, from 1938 to 1944. Black Flash was said to jump incredible distances and spit blue flames. He had eyes like balls of fire and some suspected he wore springs on his feet.

During the Second World War, a ‘Spring Man’ was rumoured to roam the blacked-out streets of Prague, leaping at passers-by from alleyways. In the 1950s, white-clad, hopping, mannequin-like creatures caused a panic in East Germany. In 2001, mass hysteria was sparked by a ‘Monkey Man’, who apparently attacked people in Delhi at night. Victims described the Monkey Man as having glowing red eyes and metal claws. He was said to wear a helmet and tight-fitting clothes and to be capable of leaping four storeys.

So What’s the Conclusion? What Could Account for the Strange Phenomenon of Spring-heeled Jack?

I suspect there was a ‘real’ Spring-heeled Jack – active around 1837 and 1838 – and that this Jack was definitely human. The original Jack was probably responsible for the assaults on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales and for some of the other outrages that occurred around that time. It’s likely Jack and his cronies were young rich men – possibly engaged in a bizarre wager – and that Jack was exceptionally athletic. Jack may have also been capable of fire-breathing tricks.

The sheer strangeness of Jack’s assaults caused an upsurge of mass hysteria, rumours, exaggerations and press sensationalism. Pranksters aped some of Jack’s actions while crimes carried out by ordinary criminals and sex offenders were blamed on Spring-heeled Jack, further fuelling his notoriety. Penny dreadfuls and lurid plays amplified Jack’s fame as did embellishments by authors writing years after the events.

Jack’s antics dredged up archetypes of devils, ghosts and sadists from the collective memory, adding even more sinister colour to his legend. At times of panic, trauma or uncertainty, such archetypes can indeed coalesce around certain folkloric figures, figures that soon take on aspects of the myth-drenched past. Examples of such beings that have – like Jack – incongruously appeared in relatively modern epochs include the Highgate Vampire, the Manchester Mummy and the Cardiff Giant.

But perhaps Spring-heeled Jack – as an updated ‘devil’ or ‘phantom’ – was also a personification of the injustices and cruelties of the Victorian era, representing the tendencies of the rich and powerful to prey on lower social classes and men to prey on women. In addition, Jack – with his iron claws, metal springs and chemical breath – could be seen as a spectre of the emerging machine age, personifying the dangers of urban life in a rapidly industrialising country.

Though Jack’s fame has faded somewhat, he has featured over the years in comics, novels, TV programmes, video games and films. In parts of Britain, he has lingered on as a bogeyman figure, threatening to spring in through the windows of children who refuse to go to bed. One Exeter man recalled:

‘My maternal grandmother, who died at an advanced age, was accustomed to tell me, when I was a little lad, uncanny stories about Spring-heeled Jack, who, she asserted, was the Marquess of Waterford. The monster was credited with hiding at night in dark and lonely places and, when some chance pedestrian came along (by preference a solitary female), Spring-heeled Jack would suddenly leap out at one bound, and pin his unlucky victim to the ground.’

(This article’s main image is from the 1904 penny dreadful Spring-heeled Jack)

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