History and Folklore Podcast

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Discover the folklore behind hawthorn trees in early medieval Europe. 

How are hawthorns connected to the dead?

Why is it dangerous to bring them inside?

Can I say thrimethylamine? (no). 

I had a bit of an issue with the sound at the end of this episode - sorry! I will do my best to get it sorted for the next episode.

Sources used:

Baker, M., Discovering the Folklore of Plants (2019).

Carey, F., The Tree: Meaning and Muth (2012).

Castleman, M., The New healing Herbs (2009).

Eberly, S., A Thorn Among the Lilies: The Hawthorn in Medieval Love Allegory, Folklore (1989)

Roud, S. A Pocket Guide to Superstitions of the British Isles (2005).

Schneidu, L., Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland (2019).

Stocke, L., The Two Mayings in Chaucer's 'The Knight's Tale': Convention and Invention, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1986).Struthers, J. Red Sky at Night: The Book of Lost Countryside Wisdom (2009).

Watts, D.C., Dictionary of Plant Lore (2007).

Transcription:

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We daren’t go a-hunting

For fear of little men;

Wee folk, good folk,

Trooping all together;

Green jacket, red cap,

And white owl’s feather!

By the craggy hillside,

Through the mosses bare,

They have planted thorn trees

For pleasure, here and there.

Is any man so daring

As dig them up in spite,

He shall find their sharpest thorns

In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen,

We daren’t go a-hunting

For fear of little men;

• The Fairies by William Allignhorn. 

Hello, welcome to the History and Folklore podcast, where we look at different folk beliefs through history and how these beliefs have shaped people’s perceptions of nature. Today we’re looking at hawthorn trees and the folklore associated with them.  

Hawthorn has been in the British Isles for over 20,00 years, and is one of only 33 trees that are native to Britain. Probably because of this, it has a central place in British folklore and is seen as a sacred tree to be respected. 

One of the strongest associations that hawthorns have is with spring, particularly May Day. As part of the May festivities, on the night before May 1st young people would go into the woods and return with hawthorn blossoms, stems and branches to turn into garlands and ‘may trees’ - hawthorn branches that would be set up outside the house and decorated with wildflowers. Crosses made of hawthorn would also be hung over home and stable doors to protect the inhabitants and in Suffolk any servant who was able to bring back a branch of hawthorn on May morning was rewarded with a bowl of cream for their efforts. 

Hawthorn was such a sign of the change of seasons that it was actually used as a way measuring of time in some parts of the British Isles. In Scotland, farmers would say that ‘harvest follows thirteen weeks after hawthorn scents the air.’ The use of hawthorn at May Day celebrations became less common after the change from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorain calendar in 1752. This is because May Day was shifted to be about two weeks earlier, making hawthorn blossoms difficult to find. Despite this, the tree still has a strong association with spring and is still called the May Tree in some parts of Britain.

It is probably unsurprising that due to its link with spring and new life, that hawthorn has a number of other positive associations. 

In Europe hawthorn symbolised hope, marriage and fertility. In England, it is often incorporated into the ‘Green Man’ figure and in Ancient Greece brides would carry hawthorn boughs and wear the blossoms in their clothes. In medieval literature hawthorn was used regularly in medieval literature to allude to courtship, fertility and carnal love. 

After the Inclosure Act in England, which saw common land being divided up into smaller private fields, hawthorn was used as a common hedging plant and also became associated with boundaries and protection. Planting hawthorn in your garden was said to keep witches away from your home, or at least severely diminish their power. Including hawthorn in hedging plants was also said to ward away fairies, and any cattle kept in the field would flourish. Similarly, May blossom placed on the cowshed door on May morning would ensure the milk supply for the coming year. In Cambridgeshire, hawthorn was also thought to bring luck to the harvest and a branch would be added to the last hayrick. The protective nature of hawthorn extended to the point where it was said that a sprig of it in a hat would protect the wearer from lightning strike.

In Serbia, hawthorn was very closely associated with vampires and driving a hawthorn branch into a graveside would prevent the dead from returning as a Vampire. 

However, there was definitely a darker side to hawthorn in folk practice and belief. A popular saying that references the tree states that ‘hawthorn bloom and elder flower fill the house with evil power’ and if hawthorn was brought inside the house then a person inside was likely to die. In certain areas the death would be specified, with children being told that bringing hawthorn into the house would kill their mothers - an early version of ‘don’t step on the cracks or you’ll break your mother’s back’ rhyme that’s sung by schoolchildren in England today. But like all good rules there are exceptions, and in Staffordshire hawthorn could be brought into the house if it was gathered on Holy Thursday and laid in the rafters by someone who was not part of the family who lived there. In that case it would protect the house from lightning strike because apparently ‘under a thorn our saviour was born.’ 

This superstition may have arisen from the fact that, apparently, the blossoms ‘smelt like death’, or more precisely, like the plague. This comparison goes back to before the Great Plague of 1665 and Francis Bacon refers to it in 1627 as an already existing piece of knowledge. The flowers do decay quickly once picked and let off a strong smell. It turns out that the comparison is an accurate one, as trimethylamine (sorry if I haven’t pronounce that properly - I am definitely not a science person - if you know how it should be pronounced please let me know) anyway trimethylamine is one of the first products formed when animal tissues start to decay, is present in hawthorn flowers. So if you want a budget interactive history experience, pick some May blossom and you can transport yourself to a seventeenth century house afflicted by the Great Plague. 

There is a clear difference in historical attitude between hedgerow hawthorns, planted by humans, and lone hawthorn trees, sometimes called ‘sentry’ trees, which were said to either be planted and inhabited by fairies, or to have sprung from the ashes of the dead scattered through the world.

In England these solitary thorns were often used to mark places of administrative meetings or trials. The inclusion of ‘thorn’ in an English place name is assumed to be evidence that such meeting trees once stood there as a place of administration and justice. 

However, in Ireland a ‘sentry thorn’ was a fairy trysting place. It was reported that a woman wearing white could be seen entering and leaving a lone hawthorn tree, and fairies would be seen in their branches. It is thought that this woman could be a fairy queen, or potentially a banshee. Their association with death, and the scattered ashes of the dead is quite interesting in this instance, as there are instances in Icelandic and Scandinavian folklore associating elves with the reincarnated souls of the dead, which makes me wonder if a similar belief used to exist in Ireland and other Celtic nations, or if its just a coincidence. 

Because of their association with fairies, lone hawthorn trees demanded great respect and were especially dangerous on May Day, midsummer or halloween

Big Al at the Winchester says wolves can't look backwards.

Discover other strange medieval folk beliefs and attitudes towards wolves based on folk tales, fables and medieval bestiaries. 

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Transcript:

The Wolf and the Lamb

A wolf saw a lamb straying from the flock. Unusually, he felt somewhat guilty about taking the life of such a helpless creature without some plausible excuse. So he cast about in his mind for some believable grievance.
At last the wolf said to the lamb, ‘I remember you. Last year you grossly insulted me.’
That’s impossible, cried that lamb, I hadn’t even been born then!

Well then, said the wolf, you feed on the grass on my land.

That’s not right, said the lamb, I have never tasted grass.

You drink from my spring then, continued the wolf.

Not me, squeaked the lamb,I have never drunk anything but milk,

Well, anyhow, replied the wolf, I am not going without my dinner. And he sprang upon the lamb and devoured it without more ado.

Hello, welcome to History and Folklore, where we look at different folk beliefs through history and how these beliefs have shaped people’s perceptions of nature through time. Today we’re looking at wolves and because that’s a huge subject in folklore we’re going to focus it down just to early medieval England. I might widen this out to talk about perceptions of wolves in different countries in a future episode, if people are interested. 

Wolves were once actually pretty common in medieval England, and would have been a familiar sight to many people travelling through the countryside of living in villages or town outskirts. Their prevalence is reflected in the use of wolf hides as tribute among kings and nobility, with King Edwin, in 953 AD, demanding a tribute of three hundred wolf skins per year. Wolf hides have also been discovered at burial sites, suggesting they were associated with power, status and wealth.

Possibly because of their prevalence, wolves were seen as a pest, and a threat to livestock. As early as 300BC Celtic tribes in England bred wolfhounds to hunt wolves. A thousand years later the monk and scholar Bede claimed that the entire month of January was originally known as ‘wolf month’ as it was devoted to the slaughter of wolves. This attitude of seeing wolves as a harmful menace to be exterminated continued into the medieval period, culminating in King Edward I hiring a man called Peter Corbet in 1281 to ‘take and destroy all the wolves he could find.’ Peter Corbett was apparently successful, and along with the destruction of a lot of their natural habitat for agriculture, wolves became increasingly rare. The last mention of them in England was in 1305 when it was recorded that they killed eight cattle in the forest of Lancaster. redo

Authors of encyclopedias in the Medieval era such as Isidore of Seville, in the 7th century, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus, in the 13th century, argued that the Latin word for wolf, lupus, was most likely to have come from the Greek ‘lukos’ as it, apparently, ‘indicates the morals of wolves’, which ‘rapaciously kill whatever they encounter and always desire blood’ and slaughter whatever they found in a ‘frenzy of violence.’ As a result of this Isidore placed wolves within the category of ‘beasts.’ According to him all animals in this group could be identified as they shared  particular characteristics. Most notable of these was that they would attack forcefully with their mouth or claws, but also that they had wildness and freedom, and an ability to ‘wander wherever their spirit leads.’ As with a lot of ideas in Medieval England, these seem to go back to Ancient Greek authors with Pliny referring to wolves as ‘cruel and fierce’ and Aristotle claiming they were ‘wild and untameable.’

The apparent violent and bloodthirsty nature of wolves is one that was obviously feared by the majority of people and was strongly imprinted upon their conscious.The majority of images of wolves from this era depicts them sneaking up to the sheepfolds to destroy livestock. This experience of wolves would have been the one that affected the majority of people in rural England, and wolves would have been seen at best as a nuisance and at worse as direct competition for food, particularly true during times of dearth.

There was also a common fear in medieval society of man-eating wolves, which was expressed through popular folklore. There was a belief that when a wolf was attacked by a group of people, he would remember who threw the first stone and kill that person if he was harmed. 

Strangely, it was believed that if a wolf saw a man before he was spotted, the man would lose his voice, causing him to be unable to cry out for help. If this happened it was said that the solution would be for the man to strip and hit rocks together to prevent the wolf from attacking, which I guess must have made some sort of sense at the time. If a person was in a group and suddenly lost his voice, an onlooker was to say ‘lupus in fabula’,translated as ‘wolf in the story’ in order to restore the person’s voice. If, however, a man saw a wolf first then it was believed that the wolf would lose his fury and would not attack. 

However, there were also some positive attributes associated with the wolf in folklore. For example it was said to be good luck for travellers to approach a wolf, but only if they were approaching from the right, the wolf was barring their way and the wolf was eating large mouthfuls of dirt, which seems so specific as to be nearly useless, as I doubt it would have been a situation that occurred all that often. Pliny is also quoted by medieval writers such as Bartholomaeus, as saying that wolves had a love potion in a tuft in the tip of their tails, which had to be taken while the wolf was alive, and which the wolf would bite off if there was a danger of it being trapped by humans. 

Wolves also seem to be very connected to sheep in the mind of the average medieval person. They were seen as being so detrimental to sheep that the wool of a sheep attacked by a wolf would become lousy and infected, while the sheep gut strings on a harp would become corrupt if a string made of wolf gut was added.

Wolves’ position within popular stories are also generally quite negative. Aesop’s fables, popular during this period, include such tales as the wolf and the lamb, read at the beginning of this episode, in which the wolf tries to use a false excuse to kill the lamb before just eating him anyway and the ‘wolf and the shepherd’, where the wolf gains the trust of a shepherd before attacking his sheep. Both of these reflect the widespread mistrust and fear of wolves as dishonest and violent. 

On the other hand, wolves could also play a humorous role, for example in the stories of ‘Reynard the Fox’ the wolf, Isegrim, was known for being strong, but greedy and stupid. Ultimately Reynard manages to outwit and kill Isegrim in a fight by distracting him by talking just as Isegrim is about to make the winning blow. In these tales wolves were chosen for the moral they could teach the audience. However, it is also possible that their comic portrayal may have been an attempt to diminish fear through humour, or may have dated from a period when wolves were perceived as less of a threat due to their scarcity.

This negative attitude towards wolves also reflected in the religious sphere of medieval life. It was generally believed during this time that animals were granted their characteristics by God as an example of proper conduct for humans to imitate, or to reinforce the teachings of the Bible. In these teachings, used by priests in sermons to convey a moral message to their congregation, wolves were often portrayed as the devil prowling outside the sheep-fold of the faithful. 

Bestiary and encyclopedic literature was particularly good at reinforcing these connections. The Aberdeen bestiary claims that wolves have eyes that shine in the dark because, like the works of the devil, they appear beautiful to foolish people, leading them astray. Bartholomaeus and Isidore stated that another possible origin for ‘lupus’ was from the Greek ‘leo-pos’, meaning ‘lion-footed’ as it was widely believed that the wolf’s strength, like the lion, was in its feet and the front of its body, the head, neck shoulders and chest. This was interpreted as being a reminder from God that the devil was first an angel in heaven and then turned apostate.

The first episode of History and Folklore Podcast looking at how Anglo-Saxons viewed elves and how to heal a disease caused by elf-shot.

Transcript:

For a sudden stitch:
They were loud, yes loud when they rode over the land,

THey were fierce when they rode over the land.
Shield yourself now, that you may escape this evil.
Out, little spear, if herein you be.

Stood under linden, under a light shield,

Where the mighty women readied their power,

And sent their screaming spears.
I will send another back to them,
A flying dart against them in return.
Out little spear, if herein it be.
Six smiths sat, war spears they made.
Out spear, not in spear!
If herein be a bit of iron, hag’s work,

It shall melt.
If you were in the skin shot, or were in the flesh shot,
Or were in the blood shot, or were in bone shot,
Or were in limb shot, may your life be never torn apart.
If it was aesir shor, if it was elf shot,
If it were hag’s shot, now I will help you.
It fled there into the mountains. No rest it had.
Whole be you know. Lord help you.
Now take the knife and dip it into the liquid.

Hello, welcome to History and Folklore, where we look at different folk beliefs through history and how these beliefs have shaped people’s perceptions of nature through time. As this is the first episode I just want to introduce myself, my name’s Holly. I have a degree in history, focussing on social and religious aspects of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England. I focussed on this subject as I was really interested in folk beliefs and stories and what these tell us about how people interacted with and understood the world around them. I also have a Master’s degree in Museum Studies and, for the past ten years have worked in history and museum education.

Today we’re looking at elves in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly looking at charms against elves that turn up in Anglo-Saxon medical texts.

Before we go into too much detail, we need to look at what an elf was to the Anglo-Saxons. The modern idea of elves is usually similar to a Tolkein elf; human-like, graceful, immortal and magical creatures that live in their own society away in the wilds of nature, the forests or mountains. It is fairly well known that Tolkein borrowed a lot of his ideas from Anglo-Saxon and 

Norse mythology, and so his version of elves are quite similar to how an Anglo-Saxon person may have thought about them. 

They were generally seen as human-like creatures, who were usually invisible to humans, or at least hard to see, and they lived in their own communities separate from humans. They also seem very tied to nature, with various references to different types of elves including water, mountain, wood, down, sea and field elves. From this it can be assumed that elves were associated with wild places, separate from human civilisation. What I find particularly interesting then, is how Anglo-Saxons perceived elves and what this says about how they perceived the natural world around them. If you are walking through a forest that you believe is inhabited by invisible beings, how you feel about those beings will very much affect how you feel about the forest.  

It is apparent from a lot of existing texts that elves were seen as unpredictable and generally hostile towards humans. In the epic tale of Beowulf elves are listed as being part of the group of monsters who sided with Cain after he murdered his own brother. As punishment for this, they were driven away from mankind, denied the promise of heaven and were probably quite bitter towards humans because of this. However there are hints that elves were not seen as entirely evil. For example, the Old English ‘aelf’ is often used as a prefix to old English names to represent beauty, light or wisdom. Names like Aelfred or Aelfwynn mean elf councilled and elf joy respectively, which shows a rather more positive perception of elves. Although on a side note, if you have read any of Terry Pratchett’s books, in Lords and Ladies he does point out that the fictional elves of the Discworld are glamorous because they project glamour, they are enchanting because they weave enchantment and they are terrific because they beget terror. Although those descriptions are seen as positive none of them are synonyms for nice, and it might be a good idea to keep this idea in mind. 

One issue that we do have in learning about Ango-Saxon elves is the arrival of Christianity. Christian missionaries in England were not interested in completely destroying the beliefs and culture of the Anglo-Saxons, but wanted to take elements of the culture and give it a more ‘Christian’ slant. Churches, for example, would be built on holy sites as people were already accustomed to going there to worship. Festivals would be celebrated at the same time of year, and in the same way, but the meaning for the celebration would be shifted to focus on Christianity. 

Karen Jolly, who has written a brilliant book about elf cures, has pointed out that Anglo-Saxon folklore and Christian religion became so entwined that it is almost impossible to tell the extent to which Christianity shaped Anglo-Saxon culture and and to which Anglo-Saxon culture shaped Christianity. Elves are a particularly good example of this. In many sources where elves are mentioned they are often represented as the equivalent to Christian demons, which is understandable as most sources were written by Christian monks. However, during conversion the Anglo-Saxon people would have had a better understanding of elves than demons, so it is likely that demons would have been explained by comparing them to elves, causing demons in modern Christianity to have partially been shaped by the idea of elves 1,500 years ago. For this reason, elves and demons, formal religion and magic existed very comfortably side by side in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon person.

Some of the most interesting sources where this is shown are the ‘elf charms’ that are found in medical texts such as Bald’s Leechbook and the Lacnunga, both written after the conversion to Christianity. It was believed that some illnesses were caused by ‘elf-shot’, an attack by a hostile elf on a human or animal, and this is an idea which lives on in modern language when we describe a stabbing or shooting pain and elf charms told the reader how to cure these diseases. 

Unfortunately, most of these charms do not give any real information about the symptoms caused by elf shot, as it was assumed the reader of the charm would know how to identify the illness. However, one of the elf charms that I particularly like is the cure for ‘water elf disease’, which some historians have argued is actually chicken pox. This charm does list some symptoms, which apparently include livid fingernails, tearful eyes and, strangely, ‘looking down.’ Although no markings are listed in the symptoms, the cure involves making a poultice of herbs and placing this on the wound caused by the arrows.

A lot of charms against elf shot call for creating a potion or poultice of herbs to purge the evil of the elf shot out of the body. The most common herbs used in these charms were lupin, bishopwort, fennel, cropleek, garlic, hassock, pennyroyal, rue and wormwood. These were all herbs that were used in treating symptoms associated with psychological and mental afflictions such as demonic possession, nightmares, fever and hallucinations which gives an idea of the type of symptoms tha