Peterborough Folklore

The rectory at Barnack had a ghost, and everybody in the house knew his habits. He lived in the big north room. He crossed the floor in loose slippers that flopped as he walked. He turned the pages of books, over and over, looking for a missing deed, because in life...

The devil promised Peterborough Abbey three disasters, and then took his time. In 1041 a Peterborough monk called Aethelric was made bishop of Durham. Pulling down an old church at Chester-le-Street, he came upon a great hoard of treasure, and he sent much of it home...

When somebody drowned in the Nene and the body would not come up, there was a way of finding it, and it was still being used in the 1850s. You took a loaf of bread, and you put quicksilver inside it. Then you set the loaf on the water and let it go. It would drift...

Hereward the Wake, the last Englishman to hold out against the Normans, once had designs on Peterborough. He planned to strip the abbey and burn the town. On the night before he meant to do it, an old man came to him in a dream. The visitor was splendidly dressed,...

Kyneburgha was a daughter of the pagan King Penda, became a Christian, and founded a monastery at Castor around 650, using the ruins of an enormous Roman building whose foundations still lie beside the church. Villagers used to point out a strange feature in the field...

Robert Scarlett was sexton of Peterborough for most of the sixteenth century, and he outlasted nearly everyone. He was born in 1496 and died in 1594, which is remarkable enough, but his fame rests on two funerals. In 1536 he buried Katharine of Aragon. In 1587 he...

Two low stones stand in a field above Milton Ferry Bridge, in what used to be Castor field. For centuries people said that Robin Hood and Little John shot two arrows from Alwalton churchyard, and that these stones mark where the arrows fell. One stone was Robin's, the...

Walk into the Cathedral through the west front and look down at the base of the central column. The stone is dark, and what is carved on it is not comfortable. A man is upside down. Four demons have hold of him, one on each limb, and they are pulling. Between them...

There was an old belief that on St Mark's Eve, the night of 24 April, you could sit up in the churchyard and see who was going to be married and who was going to be buried in the coming year. Watchers went out on purpose to do it. The woman in this story did not. She...

Peakirk takes its name from a woman, which is rare, and she is worth knowing. Pega was the sister of St Guthlac, the hermit of Crowland. She is supposed to have founded a monastery here in the eighth century, and locally she was known simply as St Pee. When Guthlac...

There was a spring in Helpston called East Well, and it was said never to run dry. Its water was reckoned particularly good for sore eyes, and there were old stone troughs at the head of it, cut about with crosses and with people's initials. On Whit Sunday the young...

Behind the stalls in the chancel of Orton Longueville church lies the stone effigy of a medieval knight. His hands are joined in prayer, and around his left wrist there is a curious loop of something. The church thinks it is a piece of cloth. The village had a better...

Behind the high altar of the Cathedral stands a carved block of stone older than almost anything else in the building. It was set up in the ruins of the first monastery after the Danes destroyed it in 869, as a memorial over the monks who were buried there. It also...

This one is recent enough that you can read the witness statements. In the spring of 1926, people began seeing a short figure in a black hood on the lane between Dogsthorpe and Garton End, the road we now call Elmfield Road. Older residents and children stopped going...

Woodcroft is a moated, fortified manor house of the thirteenth century, and its ghost story is built on things that certainly happened. In 1648, during the second round of the Civil War, a Royalist clergyman named Dr Michael Hudson took Woodcroft and held it for the...

Hares used to come in off the fields to graze the good grass of the Minster Close, and Peterborough did not care for it. The rhyme was clear enough: if a hare makes its form in the Minster Close, there will be a fire in the town before the week is out. Some time in...

Before Cromwell's soldiers smashed the medieval glass of the Minster in 1643, one window was famous across the city, and not for the reason you would expect. The Last Supper was shown in two places, once in the cloister and once in the great west window. In one of...

For centuries Peterborough had one lawless day a year, and it fell on Plough Monday, the first Monday after Epiphany. John Clare wrote down what happened. The plough boys met at the blacksmith's shop, but not to put on white shirts and ribbons. They blacked their...

The founding legend of Christian Peterborough begins with a hunt that went wrong. Wulfade, son of King Wulfhere of Mercia, was chasing a hart when the animal fled to the cell of St Chad. Chad hid the creature under branches and leaves, and when the young prince...

Country people around Barnack and Helpston knew to be careful after dark, because of the thing they called the Shag Foal. A woman whose family had lived at Barnack for generations described it in 1902 as a large black animal, shaggy and ill kempt, more like a bear...

Longthorpe Tower holds the finest set of medieval domestic wall paintings in northern Europe, and it is worth remembering that somebody chose to live with them. Beside the visitors' entrance is the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Three kings ride out...

In the Fens there were men who could stop a horse in its tracks, or send it wild, and everybody knew how they had come by the trick. A toadman had a toadbone, and getting one was not a pleasant business. You caught a walking toad and let the ants clean the bones, or...

Peterborough has the oldest written account of the Wild Hunt anywhere in England, and the monks who recorded it were quite sure of what they had heard. In 1127 a Norman abbot named Henry de Angeli arrived to take charge of the abbey. The monks disliked him from the...

John Clare did not believe in ghosts. He tried hard to believe in them, and failed. Will o' the wisps were another matter, and they frightened him all his life. He had reason. One night he and a neighbour went out to look for the ghost of an old woman who had drowned...

Around the year 948, in a village on the edge of what is now Peterborough, a widow and her son were accused of driving iron pins into a man named Aelfsige. The case survives because King Edgar later granted the land at Ailsworth to Aelfsige's son, and the charter...

She was first seen in Woodston in 1908, and people were still arguing about her sixty five years later. The story, as an eyewitness told a local reporter in 1973, was that she had been a poor woman from Belsize Avenue, then the roughest street in Woodston and known to...

There is a village on the Nene that has spent nearly four hundred years living down a joke. The story goes that a man lay down for a nap on a haycock in a meadow by the river. While he slept the water rose and carried the haycock off with him still on top of it. He...