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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
