New book. The first book on the topic of Moorlands folk-lore for many decades, The Folklore of the Staffordshire Moorlands. Not a scholarly work, but the product of two decades of boots-on-the-ground fieldwork and visits by local film-maker and teacher Byron Machin. Published March 2018.
The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire, version 1.3
The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire, an annotated bibliography. A new 1.3 version with many additions.
Click to picture to download the PDF.
It’s 18 pages, so should be printable as a 6″ x 9″ booklet via the Lulu USA website (UK doesn’t offer 6″ x 9″ size) etc. Or locally with booklet-printer software. If you’re a librarian, feel free to print and archive.
A Prospect from Barrow Hill
Captain Daniel Astle, A Prospect from Barrow Hill, dated Uttoxeter, 25th June 1777, and printed by Pearson and Robinson, Birmingham. Now Barrowhill.
A curious little pamphlet, unobtainable on Archive.org or Hathi. This is how they did blog posts, back in 1777.
Tolkien Treasures
The Oxford Mail has a bit more detail about one of the new Tolkien books which accompany the Oxford exhibition.
“Tolkien Treasures highlights of the Tolkien archives held at the Bodleian. It focuses on J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood in the Midlands and his experience in the First World War, as well as his studies at school and at Oxford University’s Exeter College.”
Excellent, a nice tight focus. 144 pages and somewhat affordable too, at £12 retail. It’s on Amazon UK under the slightly different title “Tolkien: Treasures” and at an even better £10.50.
Two Historical Maps of England
Maps for Saxon Britain and Norman Britain. From Charles H. Pearson, Historical Maps of England, 1883, third edition revised.
At the edge of The Peak, “Badecan Wyl” is ‘Badecan’s Well’, or today the town of Bakewell.
Witcutt’s “Notes on Staffordshire Folklore”
Witcutt’s “Notes on Staffordshire Folklore”, sent in and printed in Folklore, 1941, Vol. 52, No. 3, pages 236-237. He had had a similar short set of entries a year later in Folklore, though those were more ghost-y and not as interesting (Black Dog / Headless Horseman / Phantom Carriage / supposed Witches).
New Tolkien letters
New Tolkien letter(s) at auction, with an interesting quote being given from one letter…
“I can only hope that the ancient proverb (attributed to King Alfred): ‘When the bale is at the highest, then the boot (betterment) is ever highest’ may prove in your case true.”
Old English bale appears to have been mostly a shorthand for ‘tormenting woe, caused by deliberate mischief and wickedness – usually arising from hate, envy and similar’. Could also include actual wounds and bodily binding arising from the same.
It was obsolete by the mid 1500s, but the use of baleful survived in poetry and today that word can still be used and understood in poetry and fantasy literature. Usefully in the descriptive context of a character or animal only having one eye, and that eye having a ‘baleful’ aspect to it. Or a star of ill-omen having a similar ‘baleful’ aspect to it.
Boot is interesting. We still have something like boot in the modern ‘booty’, meaning gathered-up and taken-away treasure. The getting of which would of course lead to betterment, enrichment.
But boot is not in Bosworth-Toller, and instead one needs to search for bót, ‘mending, repair, remedy, improvement’ (also compensation).
The original saying is found in the The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volume 3…
When the bale is hest,
Thenne is the bote nest.
Which indicates that it’s one of the sayings attributed to a wise-man named “Hendyng”, who thrived in the mid 1200s in what is now the West Midlands.
Some of the Hendyng translations at ‘The Complete Harley’ seem a bit off, seemingly skewed by the later interpretive verses that precede each saying. For instance, the horse one makes more sense and is wiser and more wryly Midlands-y as: “He is free of his horse, who never had one.” But the “boot” saying is translated there as:
“When the pain is highest,
Then is the remedy nighest”
The word bale here is presumably being translated as ‘pain’ due to the context supplied by the preceding words. But that seems only partly justified by the context, which is evidently using ‘pain’ as a shorthand for what is expanded a few words later as treye ant tene, ‘trouble and grief’, rather than as a precise pain-word meaning ‘bodily agony’. Thus the translation of bale as ‘pain’ risks misleading the modern reader. Given this, and Tolkien’s suggestion of ‘betterment’ for boot, a translation might better run:
When the woe is worst,
Then betterment is not far off.
In modern parlance, something like:
When things are really bad,
It can only get better.
Which means it’s not quite the same in sentiment as the similar modern saying…
“Every cloud has a silver lining”.
It’s a little more active that that. The ‘betterment’ here comes from the anticipation that there will soon be ‘action in-the-world’ to fix things and to actively restore things to how they were before. On the other hand the modern understanding of “Every cloud has a silver lining” suggests more of a time-delayed ‘mental reconsideration and re-framing’ of, and ‘learning from’, the misfortune. Something which then potentially leads to the discovery of a new unexpected element in the resolving situation. The addition of this unexpected element then actually makes things better than they were before.
Welsh Newspapers Online
The online English newspaper archives are locked down behind a paywall, but material was often syndicated widely (i.e. was pushed through a press syndication service, where any subscribing paper could run any of the stories or articles on offer at no extra cost). For the benefit of independent scholars and researchers, here are links to three free newspaper collections, useful for searching for syndicated material. The Welsh one is especially useful for the UK, as Welsh newspapers carried a lot of syndicated content.
Welsh Newspapers Online. 15 million articles, fast and easy to use.
California Digital Newspaper Collection. Freely Accessible Repository of Digitized California Newspapers from 1846 to the Present.
Library of Congress newspapers. Mostly to about 1923.
Doubtless family-history researchers will be aware of more, but these are the three big “go-to” ones I tend to use.
“Doin’ the Lambeth pot…”
This may interest readers fascinated by Stoke-on-Trent pottery history. A tour of Doulton’s London factory in 1895, Lambeth. The process of making and the production line was much the same there as in North Staffordshire.
“the good folks in Lambeth … call it “Doulton’s place,” and the big gates and the palatial buildings that enclose and comprise it are variously inscribed “Doulton and Co., Lambeth.” … I gathered that Messrs. Doulton and Co. possess about half-a-dozen “Pottery-Lands” scattered about in Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Lancashire, one at Paisley, and one in Paris.”
Offa’s Dyke Journal
Offa’s Dyke Journal, with Volume 1 due 2019 as a new Open Access scholarly journal.
Four historical dictionaries
Four handy online dictionaries or lookups, for those studying historical aspects of the British Isles…
Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary online.
Digital Index of Middle English Verse.
Pleasant peasants
Peasant houses in Midlands England…
“It used to be thought that only high-class houses had survived from the medieval period. Radiocarbon and tree-ring dating has now revealed that thousands of ordinary medieval homes are still standing in the English Midlands.”
