Regency Folklore: The Devil at St. Albans

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This 17th century story was resurrected in an anthology in the Regency era, and then again in the 20th century, so tells of a popular account of the Devil at St. Albans.  St. Albans, in Hertforshire, is an old and holy city.

A desire of relieving the reader's tædium may possibly excuse a wider deviation It is well known that the personality of the Devil has been exemplified by extraordinary personifications of him and by relations of his appearance under almost every form but a personation that he is represented to have as sumed in Hertfordshire is accompanied by circumstances that have never perhaps been paralleled In turning over John Bagford's collection of Title pages at the British Museum Harl MSS 5419 I find one in his own writing from a tract that must have been so rare at that time that he could not possess it or his collecting hand would have mercilessly torn off the title page and I suspect it to have been almost if not quite unique for its existence is not now traceable by me after very long and diligent inquiry Although therefore I can do no more than lay before the reader the following copy that I made from Bagford's copy yet that is sufficient to inform him of all that he can perhaps ever know of the alleged event Here it is THE DEVIL seen at St ALBAN's Being a true relation how the Devil was seen there in a Cellar in the likenesse of a Ram and how a butcher came and cut his throat and sold some of it and dressed the rest for him inviting many to supper who eat of it Attested by divers letters of men of very good credit in this towne Printed for confutation of those that believe there are no such things as spirits or devils 4to 1648 Hone, W. (1823). Ancient mysteries described, especially the English miracle plays. United Kingdom: Ludgate Hill.

**Reminder you can click on the excerpts below to read a larger version**

 

ST ALBANS APPARITIONS The Ghost Stories of a Pageant City induced tracted assistant flung away the wine which he had been drawing and found refuge among the neighbours Ulti mately a stout and sceptical trades man of St Albans was to descend into the cellar and then the devil knowing by in stinct that he could not prevail prevail against true valour suffered himself to be dragged upstairs like a sheep The narrator graphically describes the open mouthed horror of the people of St Albans when a night or two later the tradesman gave a feast to a few of his more sceptical friends and regardless of consequences they ate the flesh of the supposed devil and picked his bones The charm of this story as of the others is the particularity and gravity of the relation Mr Benson the Master of the St Albans pageant has had recourse to many old records in order to give a proper setting to the forthcoming cere monial but it may be doubted whether he has thought it worth his while to dip into the ghost stories of the ancient city Spectres cannot well be repre sented in a serious pageant and although a study of folk lore is neces sary to a thorough grasp of history it is beside the purpose of an historical drama Nevertheless these stories of St Albans are abundant and their titles are enticing Half a dozen little books most of which were published in the seventeenth century testify to the credulous state of mind of the Hertford shire peasantry of that period and it was in Hertfordshire more than in any other county that conjurers persons practised in evil arts abounded in the Middle Ages The queen witch To begin with there is the story of Mother Haggy the queen witch of the St Albans countryside This good lady has two volumes all to herself in the British Museum One of them is entitled The Story of the St Albans Ghost or The Apparition of Mother Haggy published in 1712 Of a some what earlier date is the account of The Devil seen at St Albans in the likeness of a Ram Then there is A Wonderful and Strange Passage which befell Cer tain Soldiers at St Albans in 1642 and finally the extraordinary Five Nights of St Albans Wild and creepy 6 The last named is one of the wildest stories ever written The creepy writer does not pretend that it has a vestige of truth For five successive mid nights we are told the people of St Albans watched their abbey assume the appearance of one solid mass of deep red fire resembling a furnace Dismal yells and piercing shrieks were heard from within and in the daytime a mysterious man with an iron hand appears among the townfolk and exer cises a species of hypnotism upon them Thus the story drags its length through hundreds of pages until one is compelled to send it back to the oblivion in which it has remained for nearly a century The cloven foot The account of The Devil seen at St Albans possesses a latent humour We cannot shirk a feeling that the decorous seventeenth century writer is winking at He tells of an incident which took place on a November night in 1648 at the Bull Inn at St Albans The inn keeper and his assistant were terrified on finding a huge black thing resembling a ram which had taken refuge in the wine cellar It had glassy eyes shaggy hair and which assured them that it was demoniac a cloven foot The inn keeper cast himself backward and never left off playing the somerset till he had remounted the stairs The dis Mother Haggy But it is Mother Haggy who takes the most prominent place in the pageant of St Albans spectres Mother Haggy which her real name was Jennings as Mrs Gamp would say lived in the flesh during the reign of the Tudors and in the spirit during that of the Stuarts Her spectral appearances made such a noise both in St Albans and out of it that up to the beginning of the eighteenth century the country people could not hear the mention of her name without fear and trembling During her lifetime her reputation as a witch began when on one occasion at a merry making her high crowned hat was metamorphosed into a glittering coronet The story is excellently vouched for A lady of good standing told the writer of the narrative that her grandmother who was a person of con dition told her that she knew a man who knew a woman who was in the room at that instant From this time forth we are gravely told Mother Haggy was often seen to ride full gallop upon a broomstick at midday and to swim over the river in a kettle drum When she was about pigs grunted scratch owls hooted and old folks died very fre quently There was talk of sending her to be tried for a witch but she was of service to the ladies of St Albans for she had a wine that would make the skin of a blackamoor as white as alabaster what the alderman saw After her death she made spectral appearances in order to punish wrong doers her advent being accompanied by every circumstance that could excite horror or loathing the croaking of toads and ravens the singing of crickets fantastic appearances in the sky and sounds like the rolling of peas from the top of the house to the bottom Her own appearance on such occasions was quite in keeping flames of fire issued from her nostrils sulphurous smoke from her mouth and on one occa sion a worthy alderman of St Albans saw her cloven foot Perhaps after all it is as well that a pageant should keep the ghost stories in the background and give us only the perfumed violet of a legend us T. P.’s Weekly. (1907). United Kingdom: Walbrook & Company.

There may be one natural feature that may have linked the area with the Devil, and in fact became a major tourist attraction in the Victorian era:

hamstead Ayot St Lawrence Ayot St Peter and Sandridge meet together There are in England many dykes the construction of which is attributed to Satanic power I can scarcely remember any artificial mounds or depressions but that the merit of their construction is popularly assigned either to the Romans Oliver Cromwell or the Devil Many widely divergent opinions have been put forth by archæologists respecting the purpose these dykes were designed to serve but there can I think be little doubt but that they were for the most part entrenchments made by the Britons to mark the limits of their petty territories and to serve as a means of defence against their hostile neighbours That the Devil's Dyke about a mile south of Bournbridge in Cambridgeshire had even in Roman times survived its purpose is evident from the fact that in one place it is partially filled up and the Icknield Way carried over it The Devil's Dyke at Sandridge does not appear to have been designed as a means of defence Leaving the hainlet of Marford and proceeding due south the road leads straight into the Dyke but instead of entering it it turns aside and runs parallel to it at a distance of some twenty or thirty yards on its western side There is no indication of the road ever having passed through the Dyke indeed the sudden dip which it takes at its commencement precludes the idea of its ever having been used as a cart way The Dyke continues in a southerly direction for a quarter of a mile when it
gradually rises to the surface and is lost in a field Judging by the eye the greatest depth of the Dyke is about thirty five feet its width at the top seventy or eighty feet and at the bottom from six to twelve feet A short quarter of a mile east of the Dyke is a moat running nearly parallel to it about a third of a mile in length locally known as The Slud It is always even in the dryest summer filled with water and although it is never cleaned out it is stated to be very deep in the centre I found the depth close to the bank to be from four to five feet How it is always supplied with water is a geological mystery It stands on a high ridge of land higher than the Devil's Dyke which is always dry and although the land on both sides certainly inclines towards it yet the surface drainage of that land is far too inconsiderable to account for the constant presence of water That the Dyke and the Slud are parts of one design there can be little reason to doubt but what that design was I do not hazard a conjecture As a means of defence they could have been of little value for their length is so inconsiderable that an enemy could easily attack the entrenched on both flanks Cussans, J. E. (1881). History of Hertfordshire. United Kingdom: E.P. Publishing.

The Devil’s Dyke

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