Hampshire Folk Tales for Children Page 2

  The dragon started to attack all the farms down the Avon Valley, and there was uproar from the village of Blissford to the village of Winkton. It continued to pick on Lower Bisterne Farm, though, and the people there were at their wits’ end. They started to put out buckets of milk, hoping that this would satisfy the dragon so that he would leave them alone. He knew what they were doing, so sometimes he would drink the milk (which was delicious) and then fly back to Burley Beacon, just to encourage them to put out more milk. But just when they started to think he was going to leave them be, he’d be back again and eat more sheep, or cows, or pigs – and once he ate a goat, which was all right, and a donkey, which was disgusting.

  Well, Lower Bisterne Farm was broken – the livestock was all gone, there weren’t even any cows to give the milk to try to satisfy the dragon, and the people didn’t dare to go out to the fields to work. The dragon was now raiding the other farms, and the people knew that unless they took action, they would all starve.

  So they collected up as much money as they could, and sent word all the way up to Berkeley in Gloucestershire. In Berkeley there dwelt a dragon fighter, a professional, a lone dragon assassin, a slayer of monsters. It was a tough job, and a lonely one, but someone had to do it – and his name was Sir Maurice de Berkeley.

  Sir Maurice and his two great wolfhounds travelled all the way down to Hampshire, and the knight rented himself out a nice little cottage at Moyle’s Court (he’d charge it to expenses). Next he hired a little orphan boy called Perkin Purkis to be his assistant, and Perkin Purkis was glad of the work.

  ‘First thing we have to do, Master Perkin,’ said Sir Maurice, ‘is make a goodly batch of bird lime.’

  Now some people think that ‘bird lime’ means bird poo, but thankfully for Sir Maurice, it doesn’t. It is a bit smelly though, and birds hate it. This is because it is sticky, gooey stuff that people used to spread on the branches of trees in order to catch birds – they would alight on the branch and get stuck. Sir Maurice, however, had no intention of catching birds; he was after something much bigger.

  It takes a while to prepare bird lime. Firstly Perkin and Sir Maurice had to gather lots of holly bark, and there’s plenty of that in the New Forest; then they had to boil it in a big pot for a whole day. It made the cottage stink something chronic, and the landlady thought, ‘Oh Lor, whatever are they doing?’ but everyone wanted to be rid of the dragon, so no one asked any questions. After this the dragon fighter and his assistant stored the pot of stinky stuff in the larder for two weeks, during which time it got stinkier and stinkier. After this they mixed in a lot of pounded-up acorns and conkers, and boiled it all up again. Now it stank so much that the dragon, snoozing up on Burley Beacon, was woken by the smell.

  Then Sir Maurice got a load of bottles of beer from the nearby Ringwood Brewery and drank it all, after which he and Perkin set about smashing all the bottles.

  ‘Oh Lor, oh Lor,’ moaned the landlady, hearing the smashing sound of bottles being hurled around inside her cottage, accompanied by the barking and howling of the dogs.

  ‘Time for me to don my armour, boy,’ roared Sir Maurice, ‘but first, after drinking all that beer I must have a pee.’

  So after Sir Maurice had had a piddle in the middle of the griddle, Perkin helped him on with his armour. Perkin then took a brush and a shovel and covered Sir Maurice from head to foot with bird lime. After this he shovelled up all the broken glass and chucked it all over the noble knight’s armour, where it stuck fast.

  They then tethered a pig to a post, and Sir Maurice strode forth to do battle, his great dogs running ahead of him, whilst little Perkin Purkis watched from behind a hedge.

  Truth be told the dragon was attracted as much by the smell of the bird lime as by the thought of a hog roast, and he came flapping down from Burley Beacon as much out of curiosity as hunger.

  Instantly Sir Maurice’s brave dogs threw themselves at the dragon. They were tough and fast, but the dragon tore them to pieces, and flung them contemptuously to one side – something that made little Perkin cry, because he’d grown to love those dogs.

  Then the dragon roared, blew out a great ball of fire, and leaped on Sir Maurice. The battle lasted all day – every time the dragon coiled around Sir Maurice, the broken glass tore at its scales, and the bird lime pulled and ripped at its skin. Sir Maurice jabbed and sliced with his sword, until the dragon was as filled with holes as a pincushion.

  As the evening drew in the two of them lay exhausted, and as they did so, Sir Maurice’s helmet fell off and rolled down the slope. The dragon lifted its head ready to strike the final blow, whilst also roasting Sir Maurice in his own armour. It was then that little Perkin Purkis ran forward brandishing a tree-felling axe, and chopped off the dragon’s head.

  And that was the end of the dragon. Sadly, Sir Maurice died shortly after. He had suffered greatly in the battle, both from his wounds and from the poisonous effects of dragon blood. He was buried with his dogs, somewhere with the forest behind and the waters of the Hampshire Avon in front. No one felt sadder than little Perkin Purkis, though to him the death of the dogs was the saddest bit.

  I don’t know where the grave is, but I know that at Bisterne Manor House there is a stone carving of a dragon between fiery beacons, and a coat of arms with a dragon crest: the Berkeley Arms. Looking out over the entrance to the house there are two great stone dogs, surely statues of Sir Maurice’s hounds. There is also a patch of ground in Dragon Field, Lower Bisterne Farm, where the grass will never grow. This is, of course, because it has been poisoned by dragon blood.

  3

  THE

  WHERWELL

  COCKATRICE

  Wherwell is a peaceful village, spread along the banks of the River Test. To sit there and listen to the bubbling of the river and the bells of Wherwell Priory ringing across the water meadows would give anyone a feeling of peace and tranquillity.

  You wouldn’t feel very tranquil, though, if the Wherwell cockatrice was around. The cockatrice was a monster, and it ate people. If you were to meet it, it would be quite happy to eat you. All up.

  It was a sort of dragon – a chicken dragon – because it had the body of a dragon and the head of a chicken, well, not a little fluffy chick, but a cockerel. It was a very strange beast, but this is Hampshire.

  The story starts with a hen, and she was so proud of herself after laying her first egg. She clucked and chuckled and paraded around the farmyard, as if to say ‘Look at me – look at me’ to the other hens, who turned their beaks up into the air, to show that they’d seen it all before.

  It was whilst she was parading around that a toad came creeping towards the hen’s egg. Toads don’t keep their eggs, they lay them in long strings by the riverbank and leave them, but this toad wanted an egg. To her, a hen’s egg was a giant egg, and she wanted a giant egg. So she pushed the egg out of the chicken pen, rolled it across the farmyard, down some steps, and into a cellar underneath Wherwell Priory. The toad then squatted over the egg – and the egg incubated, warmly and damply. When the egg tore open (it was too damp to crack) out came a cockatrice. When a hen’s egg is incubated by a toad, the result is always a cockatrice. At least, that’s what the stories say!

  Underneath the priory, the cockatrice grew and grew, and the nuns at their devotions little knew that there was a monster growing beneath them.

  The mother toad brought the cockatrice lovely tasty snacks: woodlice, slugs, worms, spiders, snails and centipedes. The cockatrice continued to grow until it was bigger than the toad, and then it ate her too, which really wasn’t very nice. It then crawled out of the cellar, up the steps, and out into the sunshine. Ouch – it hated the sunshine – it stung.

  So the cockatrice, now as big as a dog, found a nice hollow place by the river. It stopped crawling and started to run – though it never went far from its hollow – which it dug deeper and deeper – and which filled with water, but the cockatrice liked that.

  It ate ducks and swa
ns, and grew quite good at flicking fish out of the river. When it had grown to the size of a horse, it chased a nun across a field and ate her too.

  That was too much – the Prioress of the Priory and the Bishop of Winchester, who was very important, strode across to the cockatrice, and commanded it to stop.

  It ate them.

  Well, eating people was bad enough – but eating the cattle, sheep, goats and pigs on the farms was worse, because that was people’s livelihoods. It was as bad as the Burley Dragon – poor Hampshire, to be beset by such beasts.

  So the people called on their local lord, the noble Sir Eginard the Unwieldy of Nether Wallop.

  ‘Come thou forth, Sir Eginard,’ cried the people. ‘You’re happy to take our tithes and taxes, now you’ve got to give us a bit of protection.’

  So, Sir Eginard donned his armour, saddled up his noble steed, and rode to the field, next to the River Test in Wherwell, wherein dwelt the cockatrice.

  He reined in his horse at the opposite side of the field from the river, and bellowed, ‘Cockatrice, show thyself!’ The cockatrice lifted its head and glared at Sir Eginard.

  ‘Prepare to meet thy doom!’ shouted Sir Eginard, levelling his lance.

  ‘Cockadoodleburp,’ said the cockatrice.

  ‘Hast thou nothing better to say to a knight, he who hast come to rid the earth of thy pestilential presence?’ roared Sir Eginard.

  The cockatrice lifted its bottom out of the hole, screwed up its eyes, and let out a long, smelly, wet one.

  ‘Have at thee, foul fowl from hell!’ shouted the outraged Sir Eginard, and galloped straight at the cockatrice.

  The cockatrice turned round, opened its beak, and ate Sir Eginard up – armour, horse and all.

  ‘Doodle-doo,’ it squawked, and spat the armour out. It then ran along the riverbank and ate two sheep in order to take the taste away.

  Well, the people were at their wits’ end. They sent messages out far and wide – there was a reward for slaying the cockatrice. Sir Egbound the Uncomfortable came all the way from Egdon Heath in Dorset, and got eaten; Sir Egregious the Untruthful came down from London, and got eaten; and Sir Egnog the Unsteady came riding in from Old Basing, and got eaten. After that the knights stopped coming; they left Wherwell to the cockatrice.

  But then, a travelling tinker man brought the news to a faraway village in Sussex, called Dragons Green. In Sussex they have dragons that they call ‘knuckers’ – dragons that live in deep, deep ponds called Knucker Holes – and a young man from Dragons Green, called Egbyrt Green, was making a bit of a living from fighting them (that is, on top of his regular job as a baker). He had never had dealings with a cockatrice though, so he told the people of Dragons Green that they’d have to bake their own bread for a few months, gathered up his dragon-fighting equipment, wrapped it all in a spotty hankie, tied the hankie to a stick, slung the stick over his shoulder, and set off for Hampshire.

  ‘I’ve come to slay thy cockatrice,’ he announced to the people of Wherwell, as he entered the White Lion Inn.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ asked the suspicious locals.

  Egbyrt puffed out his chest. ‘I’m from Sussex,’ he announced proudly.

  ‘Bloody foreigner,’ said a grumpy-looking man, leaning on the bar, ‘the like of thee’ll never kill our cockatrice. It ate Sir Eginard himself, and ’tis twice as big as them silly little knuckers down in Sussex, you.’ (Hampshire people always used to put the word ‘you’ at the end of a sentence. They don’t now; I don’t know why they stopped – probably through watching too much telly.)

  Egbyrt Green started to get the impression that the people of Wherwell were almost proud of their cockatrice, even though it was eating them out of hearth and home.

  ‘Well, I shall slay your cockatrice,’ he said, ‘because I’ve got brains as well as brawn,’ and the assembled Hampshire people weren’t bright enough to work out that he’d insulted them. A well-known poem used to be:

  I’m Hampshire, born and bred,

  Strong in the arm, and thick in the head.

  Well, Egbyrt Green had a few pints of Wherwell cider, and then he went down to the cockatrice’s field. He undid the spotty hankie, and took out a big, round mirror. He polished it with his hankie, attached a chain to it, and then lowered it down the hole in which dwelt the cockatrice. The smooth face of the mirror slid against the cockatrice’s face, then bumped its back. Its eyes opened. ‘What’s this? What’s this?’

  Using his other arm, Egbyrt lowered a lantern on a chain. In the light of the lantern the cockatrice caught sight of its own reflection.

  ‘Another cockatrice,’ it thought. ‘I’m the only cockatrice in Wherwell – who is this upstart?’

  And then it set about the mirror. All day it fought its own reflection – well, truth be told, it was a Hampshire cockatrice and not any brighter than the people, so it fought itself all day and all night before it was completely exhausted, at which point Egbyrt climbed into the hole, and, with a Sussex woodsman’s axe, chopped off the cockatrice’s head.

  And do you know what? I feel sorry for the cockatrice. I know it went around eating people and stuff, but we eat chickens, and we should really be able to think about these things a bit more than a cockatrice can.

  Anyway, Egbyrt claimed the reward. The reward turned out to be four acres of land in nearby Harewood Forest – and land is worth more than mere money any day. To this day the land is known as Green’s Acres.

  Egbyrt Green went back to Dragons Green, sold his bakery to a man called Jim Pulk, and went back to Hampshire to work his land. His ancestors lived there for centuries, but then the house prices got very expensive, so the Wherwell Greens sold their houses and moved into the nearby town of Andover. I believe that the Green family live there still.

  As for the cockatrice, it was stuffed and its body put on display in the White Lion. It got a bit smelly, and the feathers all fell out, so in the end they had to burn it on a bonfire. They did make a cockatrice weathervane, though, and it was put on to the church tower. It scared people, so it got taken down, and now it’s in Andover Museum. If you don’t believe me, go and have a look.

  4

  BEVOIS

  OF

  SOUTHAMPTON

  This story starts in Scotland, in a gloomy castle, on a gloomy headland, overlooking the dark North Sea. This was the gloomy place where a gloomy girl called Murdina grew up. I’m not surprised she was gloomy, because being brought up to be a lady in those days really wasn’t much fun. You had to spend all your time doing embroidery, being respectful to oafish knights, and talking about silly things – you were never allowed to talk about anything serious. Murdina could do all that – she played the game because to have rebelled would have just made life worse – but secretly she dreamed about love, sunshine, blue seas, happy music and sizzling sausages. She had heard that in other countries sausages could sizzle and pop in a pan, rather than float, semi-submerged, in a slowly bubbling, greasy, fatty, glutinous gunge.

  So, when Sir Murdure, from far away Almayne, came to visit – with his fancy clothes, confident manner, and gleaming, shiny teeth – she thought he was wonderful. He seemed to be a symbol of all the things she had been dreaming about. She was a teenager now, and he was in his twenties; to her he seemed so mature and masterful.

  Her father, however, thought that Sir Murdure was a flashy little twerp, and that Almayne wasn’t a very important place.

  Now, one of the worst things about being a lady was that your father had you brought up just to have you married off. Some fathers were better than others, but really they never paid much attention to the feelings of their daughters; they just wanted to make connections with other kingdoms and become more powerful.

  Murdina’s father didn’t think much of Sir Murdure as a match for his daughter, but he had heard of another knight, a knight who was definitely looking for a wife. This was Sir Guy, and Sir Guy lived in Southampton, which was nearly as far away as Almayne. Southampton w
as important because it was a port, and ships from Southampton traded with faraway places such as Genoa, Sicily and Marseilles. Sir Guy’s last wife had sadly died of the marsh fever after a visit to Portsmouth, so he needed a new one. Murdina’s father thought to himself, ‘Aha, if I marry her off to Sir Guy I’ll make an important partnership with Southampton, and Southampton is a prosperous city.’

  But Murdina had fallen completely in love with Sir Murdure, and they used to sneak out of the castle keep to have a kiss and a cuddle round the back of the bottle dungeon (a very nasty prison with a sloping floor which made it impossible to be comfortable; it was where Murdina’s father would put people he didn’t like – and that was quite a lot of people).

  So when Murdina heard that she was to be married off to Sir Guy, she cried, ‘No father, I love Sir Murdure. He is handsome and fit, and he has very shiny teeth – I hear that Sir Guy is old and daft, and for all I know he has false teeth made out of whale bones.’

  ‘You’ll do what you’re told, young lady,’ said her father, who always managed to say things in an annoying and patronising way, ‘and as for that flash git, Sir Fancy Pantsy Murdure, he can just bog off back to Almayne.’

  So a very resentful and angry Sir Murdure was sent packing, and Murdina was put on a boat that had to sail all the way down the east coast of Scotland and England, turn right at Kent, past Dover, Fairlight and Beachy, then along the south coast to Southampton.

  Now that was a very long journey that took several weeks, and Murdina consoled herself by thinking that Southampton was going to be a warmer and sunnier place than her father’s castle. She hoped that it would be like the places it traded with – Genoa, Sicily and Marseilles – and that the sky would be blue, and the sea would be blue, and warm breezes would come fluttering in from the Mediterranean.