North Yorkshire Folk Tales (12 page)

It was this desire to acquire bright clothes that, far back in the mists of antiquity, must have inspired the first hob to venture on a relationship with humans. No doubt there were hobs working on Greek and Roman farms, hoping perhaps, to gain a tiny chiton or embroidered tunic. As both nations made slaves do all their work it would have been slaves who benefitted most from hob assistance. No doubt it was they who began to make offerings of food to these useful little household gods. The desired clothes, however, were not so quickly forthcoming and so other strategies had to be developed over the centuries.

Humans are pretty stupid, according to hobs, but if you wait long enough they will eventually get the message. Hobs themselves are extremely patient and quite willing to wait hundreds of years for a result. One of them told me that the secret of success is for the hob to wait until there is a particularly sympathetic human, often a child, living on the farm and then to show himself ‘accidentally on purpose’. The person is so shocked at the wretched nakedness of the hob that he or she goes away and makes some clothes for him. When the hob finds them the next night, he pulls them on with a merry whoop and disappears never to be seen (by the donor) again. I pointed out that the kind giver was rather badly repaid for his or her kindness, but I was told, hey, they had got all that work for centuries for the price of an evening bowl of cream, so what was their problem?

Very occasionally, the human gift of clothes will fail to meet hob standards. They are particularly insulted if given tiny copies of peasant smocks made of hemp. That will lose you your hob very quickly. At Sturfitt Hall near Reeth and Close House in Skipton-in-Craven the hobs left in a huff to find less class-ridden employment, crying:

Gin hob mun ha’e nowt but a hardin hamp

(If a hob has no more than a hempen smock)

He’ll come nae more to berry or stamp!

He’ll come no more to mow or thresh

The day of the hob seems, alas, to be almost over. The advent of machinery on farms has rendered most hobs jobless. Has it put an end to their hope of ever getting clothes? Although they have always been country dwellers, it seems possible that they, like foxes, will have no choice but to move into towns. I can foresee the day when some harassed cleaner will arrive early at the office block she (or he) cleans to find the hoovering done, the computer keys dusted, and the sinks and urinals in the lavatories polished. Let us hope that he (or she) will feel grateful enough to leave a suitable present for the unseen helper, for hobs are sensitive to slights of that sort and have been known to punish the ungrateful – as can be seen in the following tale …

Jonathan Gray was a wealthy farmer who lived in Farndale, near Kirby Moorside. His grandfather had had the good fortune to gain the friendship – and free labour – of a hob. This grandfather had been farming for many years before making the hob’s acquaintance and had a particularly fine farm servant called Ralph who could shear or thresh or mow better than anyone else in the area.

One cold winter’s day Ralph was caught in a sudden blizzard and frozen to death as he crossed the moor. Everyone in the dale was very sad and said that the farmer had lost the best thing on his farm.

Not long after Ralph’s funeral, the farmer was awoken in the middle of the night by a thumping noise that seemed to come from the barn. He jumped out of bed wondering what on earth it could be; downstairs he met some of his servants who had also been woken by the noise.

‘What do you think it is? Is it ghosts?’ whispered one of the young farm lads who slept in an attic over the kitchen.

‘Don’t be daft, lad,’ said the farmer, but he was worried. ‘It sounds like someone’s threshing!’ They all listened in terrified silence. Soon the unmistakeable crack of a wooden flail on the stone floor of the barn was clearly recognised by everyone.

‘But who’d thresh at night?’ quavered the farmer’s wife, gripping his arm. ‘Oh my goodness, perhaps it’s our Ralph come back from the dead?’

The farmer saw panic spreading. ‘Nonsense,’ he said firmly, ‘there’s no such thing as ghosts. Get off to bed, everyone, it’ll be one of the hands trying to get into my good books. Get to bed, I say!’

In the morning he and his wife, who would not let him go alone, went down early to the barn. Something had certainly happened to the wheat stored there. The pile of sheaves heaped at one end of the barn had halved, while at the other end there were two new piles, one of shining brown wheat grains and the other, much larger, of all the husks and straw that had been threshed off, waiting to be turned into chaff for animal feed.

‘That’s never a right man’s work,’ gasped the farmer’s wife. ‘It’d tek ten men to do that much in a night. Even our Ralph couldn’t have done it!’ The farmer ran his fingers through the wheat and rubbed a few grains between his palms.

‘Wheat seems right enough, though.’

‘Do you think it’s Ralph’s ghost?’

‘Nay lass, Ralph’s in Heaven like the Good Book says – dinna you mind the parson? This is summat else. I reckon we’ve got us a hob!’

And so it proved. The hob continued to work. Come hay-time he mowed half a field a night and carted it home too; at shearing he sheared as many sheep in one night as three farmhands could do in two days. At harvest he reaped and loaded a whole wagon by himself. The other farm labourers might have complained at losing paid work, but as the farmer could now afford to rent more land to expand the farm, they were all still employed. The whole place flourished.

The farmer was a wise man and knew better than to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

‘The labourer is worthy of his hire!’ he said to his wife, so every evening she put out a big jug of cream for the hob, and every morning she found it empty (and washed and neatly turned upside-down on the draining board).

Well, years went by and the hob went on working. The farm remained prosperous, the garden flourished and the workers always seemed lucky and cheerful. When the old man died, he passed the farm on to his son who continued to value the hob and never forgot his jug of cream. When the time came, he, in his turn, passed the farm on to his son Jonathan and his wife Margery. In his will, he reminded them never to forget to whom they owed the farm’s prosperity.

Unfortunately, after a few years Margery fell ill and died when the children were still quite small. As was the custom in those days, Jonathan soon married again in order to provide his children with someone to look after them. The new wife seemed a pleasant enough woman, never unkind to the children, but she had come from a hill farm where strict economy was essential for survival. She was used to keeping a tight hand on the purse strings. When Jonathan told her about the hob’s cream she could hardly believe her ears. A whole jug of cream that might have been made into butter, wasted! She did not want to offend her new husband so she grudgingly put out the cream every night, but it pained her careful mind sorely.

One evening it was too much for her. At the market that day she had seen how expensive butter had become and that she could have made a handsome profit if only she had had more of it to sell. That night she put out a jug of whey (the thin watery stuff left over from butter making, normally given to the pigs).

The very next day all luck left the place; the tireless hob stopped working. There was no more help with the shearing or mowing or threshing. Worse still, lots of things that had gone well before began to go badly. The hob who had worked so hard for the farm’s prosperity now began to work for its destruction. The butter would not come, no matter how long the dairymaids churned; the wife’s nicely fattened hens were carried off by a fox; the mould on the cheese was a thick blue fur so that no one would buy it; the ale brewed and the bread baked were all spoiled by some strange unpleasant yeast.

Now you might think that if the farmer’s wife had started to put out the cream again the hob might have come around. But not she! On the contrary, she was so angry and upset at what was happening that she swore by the Bible that the hob would never have another mouthful of cream from her.

‘He’s nobbut an evil boggart!’ she declared to her alarmed husband. ‘Don’t you try to change my mind. I’ve sworn on the Bible!’

No one likes being called a boggart.

‘I’ll boggart them!’ thought the hob and he began to act like one.

Soon the house was almost unbearable to live in. No one could sleep for the banging of kettles, the clashing of pewter plates, the crashing of pottery and the clanging of fire irons. The house echoed every night with groans, howls, rude noises, thumps, rattles. People were tripped up; beds were lifted and then dropped with a bone-shaking crash; candles were blown out; people were pinched black and blue. It was not long before no farmhand would stay anywhere near the farmhouse.

Jonathan and his wife endured this for a few months, but the farm was going to pieces; they were both at the end of their tether. Nearly all the money made by Jonathan’s father and grandfather had gone. They were forced to give up the tenancy their family had held for so many generations and take another on a much smaller farm.

‘It will be harder work for us, but at least we’ll be free of that hob!’ said Jonathan.

The family packed up, with many tears from the children, very unhappy about leaving their home. The old carthorse was put between the shafts of their last remaining cart, which was piled high with all the furniture that remained after the family had paid off its immediate creditors.

They still owed the landlord part of the year’s rent, but there was no way they could pay it so they left the farm late one night, doing a ‘moonlight flit’ to avoid being seen by the landlord’s bailiff.

Jonathan looked back at the place where his family had been so happy.

‘Enjoy yourself!’ he shouted to the hob. ‘Make someone else’s life a misery, why don’t you!’ Then he turned away and shook the reins.

At the bend in the road, they met one of Jonathan’s neighbours who had been out late with his dog, shooting rabbits.

‘Hey Jonathan!’ he said. ‘What are you all doing at this time of night?’

Before Jonathan could reply, from the top of the furniture piled on the back of the cart, came a strange gravelly voice:

‘We’re flittin’!’ it said, gleefully.

One day, when I was about twelve, one of my pencils began to walk across the floor. I did not believe it at first. I got out of bed and went over to it. It was definitely my pencil – I could even see the toothmarks on it where I had chewed the end, ‘Wow!’ I thought, ‘So magic really does exist!’

I bent down to get a better look; a little frightened but wondering what it would do next. Then, as though someone had flicked a switch the vision of the pencil disappeared and was replaced with that of a large, crawling hawkmoth caterpillar (I had been raising them). It was not just a matter of my imagining the pencil: my eyes had actually seen it. Brains interpret the information the eyes send them as best they can, according to what the owner knows about and what is expected.

In the twilight, when shadows deceive our eyes, or in the dark when all our ancient senses are particularly alert, we may literally see strange things. If we expect to see fairies, then fairies we will see; if extraterrestrials or demons or angels or just moving leaves, then we will see them instead; it all depends on a confusing visual situation and the expectations of the viewer.

Belief in fairies was waning by the time the genial vicars, who collected so many folk stories, walked the hills of Yorkshire. To admit to such a belief had become a badge of foolishness. That does not mean that it had not been widespread not so long before, or that it had actually died out. Fairies are jealous things and speaking of them has always been considered bad luck, especially where roads are dark and lonely; life was uncertain enough without fairy enmity. The tales of fairies we have are only the tales that ordinary people were prepared to tell someone ‘educated’ – there must have been many more!

‘Thoo’s niver going by Elbolton Hill? Well, watch out for fairies!’ Frank’s friend gave him a parting slap on the back and waved a cheery goodbye.

‘I’s not afeart. Never worry about me!’ Frank headed off into the spring night. It was ideal for walking; the moon shone as brightly as day; the scents of hawthorn and elder rose strongly in the still cool air. It was pure pleasure to be out in it.

As he walked, Frank hummed ‘Barbry Allen’, a tune popular in his village, but finding it too slow and sad to walk to, he switched and sang ‘The Bold Dragoon’ and was soon stepping out in fine style, no longer humming but singing with gusto. He loved singing and thought himself rather talented.

The dragoon with his broaden sword

He made their bones to rattle …

Before him the distinctive shape of Elbolton Hill rose up strange in the moonlight. Frank felt a little flutter of fear mixed with excitement. He remembered as a lad going down into Navvy Noodle Hole on the side of the hill, a place where everyone knew the fairies lived. He had done it as a dare and nearly been frightened out of his wits, but the fairies had not been in that day, and he climbed back out of the hole with nothing worse than a few grazes and a bumped head.

Some of his friends kept treasured elf bolts they had picked up near the hill, little leaf-shaped pieces of worked flint like arrowheads that fairies shot at cattle or people who annoyed them. If they hit you, you got sick; everyone knew that.

Frank’s granny had told him a lot about fairies, and despite all the dangers, he wanted to see them very much. He did not think that they were as evil as they were painted; after all, they liked music, dancing and merriment, so they were not so very different to him.

As he reached the footpath along the side of Elbolton Hill he stopped singing and walked along as quietly as possible. Who knew? Tonight might be the night he got his wish.