the kaleidoscopic tale

The Kaleidoscopic TaleAuthor(s): B. C. SpoonerSource: Folklore, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Summer, 1969), pp. 132-139Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258465 .

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The Kaleidoscopic Tale

by B. C. SPOONER

THIS tale has two tellers. The scene is the Land's End part of Cornwall that stretches from Genvor Cove to Sennen, and from Sennen to Vellandruchar Moor in Buryan where turf-cutters have found buried spear- and arrowheads in the peat, and the mill, it is said, once worked with blood.

The tellers are William Bottrell and Robert Hunt.' For seven years, according to the tale, the red-haired invading

Danes had settled in these parts; and many of the Cornish had fled. The burial-places of their treasure were marked by rock- markings long since forgotten.

Then came Arthur. And so and so many 'Saxon' or 'British' kinglets met round the great block of stone at Sennen called Tabel-men, rallied the remaining Cornish and fought the 'Danes' on the moors above Vellandruchar Mill, till the mill-wheel turned with Danish blood.

The Danes who survived made for the sea; but there was no escape that way. For an unknown woman had 'brought home a west wind' just by emptying the holy well against the hill and then by sweeping the church from the door to the altar.2 The ensuing gale flung the ships up high and dry on the sands; and there, thanks also to an 'extraordinary spring tide', they remained 'till the birds built in their rigging'. A few of the red-haired Danes are said to have survived. They handed on their hated colouring, for nobody cared to intermarry with their descendants and even as late as 1883 it was an insult to call anyone a 'red-haired Dane'.

Arthur and the kings feasted round the Tabel-men after the

1 Bottrell's 'Traditions and Hearthside Stories of W. Cornwall'. Hunt: 'Popular Romances of the West of England'.

2 This sweeping towards the altar would surely have got her an east wind. The west wind, I am told, is the most damaging for sail in this bay. That second spell of hers must be incomplete: in Brittany the chapel of St Marine would be swept clean and the dust taken out and thrown in the direction the desired wind would come from.

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THE KALEIDOSCOPE TALE

battle and pledged each other in water from 'St Sennan's' well. But those Cornish who had buried treasure, and fled, never came back to show where it had been buried; and the rest lived under the black threat of a prophecy they said Merlin had made: that the red-haired Danes would once more land at Sennen and fight the Vellandruchar battle again, and the kings once more dine round Tabel-men. After that, the end of the world would come.

It is rather like a glimpse through a kaleidoscope, with its bits of colour and glitter, the glint, the red, the crimson, the buried gold. But rotate the tube - and the Cornish pattern falls apart; of the same fragments of glass only say two, three, five, perhaps, catch the eye. And the background is not Cornwall.

It is Dorset: there is terrible slaughter by red-haired men; no more, except that Danes are suggested. Gloucestershire: and three Saxon kings are met round a stone at the foot of Cleeve Cloud Hill. Warwickshire: three kings; and a miller with three thumbs will lead their horses in some battle foretold by Merlin, when the little Rainsbrook will run red with blood.3 Scotland: and Thomas of Ercildoune is the prophet, the battle will be fought on the Clyde, and Partick Mill will be worked with blood for two hours and the miller will be a man with seven fingers to a hand. Or the site of the battle, he says, will be 'Threeburn Grange', and the Three Burns will run three days with blood and a three-thumbed 'wight' lead the horses of three kings.4 In Ireland, Earl Gerald and his men sleep at a table in a cave till a miller's son shall be born with six fingers on each hand. And when this man blows his trumpet they will awake and go out to do battle with the English.5 An Irish novel, 'A Lad of the O'Friels' by Seumas MacManus, picks up the theme as if from hearsay: 'As I rec'llect the Prophecy', says one of the characters, speaking of St Columcille, 'the last battles'll be so thremendious that the mill-wheel of the miller with two thumbs is to turn three times with human blood' Ireland again: and on a summer's day St Columcille sat down with the abbot of Comgell, not far from the dun or fortress of Cethirn.

' Historic Warwickshire, J. T. Burgess. London, 1875, p. 14. 4 I owe these two Ercildoune prophecies to E. D. Lyle's article on them in

Folklore, vol. 79, Summer, I968. 6 Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts, Patrick Kennedy, Macmillan, 189x.

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Water was brought for them from a nearby well. And Columcille prophesied there would come a day when the well would be filled with blood because of war in and around Cethirn.6 Even Brittany: by the menhir of Champ-Dolent near Dol, brother met brother in battle and enough blood flowed to turn a mill-wheel. Somerset - and the red-haired Danes who had come sailing in with the flood- tide were left shipless, because a woman had loosed the ropes and the Severn took the ships with the ebb. The Danes, driven to the shore again and finding themselves without means to escape, were killed; and the place was called Bleadon.7

These are the contents of the kaleidoscope, the pattern that forms and re-forms.

But each piece has its own identity. For example, the kings and the stones. A gathering of kings was almost a commonplace in those days of small kings. The three and the eleven kings of Malory's Bedegraine, the nine kings of history, who rowed Edgar of England on the river Dee, the eleven British kings whose subsequent submission to Claudius when he was in Britain (though perhaps not made all at one time), is described on a stone slab in the Barberini palace in Rome: all these at least catch the eye, if not the mind.

As for the table-stones, it is noticeable how usual it is, for a stone of some sort to be found in these tales even if it is not always a table-stone. The Breton battle is fought near a menhir, the Clyde story has a stone in the river from which ravens could drink the blood of the battle without dipping their heads: Earl Gerald in his Irish cave had probably a stone for the table, and his beard grown through it as with that other Sleeper, Olger the Dane: kings met at the Sennen stone, and at the stone at Cleeve Cloud. Such as the table-stones had their known practical uses. Innocence or otherwise of theft, has been 'tried' at the Sennen stone. Pro- clamations have been read from them, fairs held round them, and some are called 'News' stones, because men gathered round them

o The fortress of Cethirn was probably the great earthwork known as the Giant's Sconce, or Candlestick, or Ring, in Drumbo parish, Co. Down. The prophecy was made shortly after the Convention of the Ridge of Ceate in 575- And was recorded by Adamnan in his Life of St Columba written a century after the latter's death.

7 Folk-tales of England, ed. by K. M. Briggs and R. L. Tongue, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965, pp. 8o-1.

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to hear it.8 They are also country cousins to the FMl Stone, to the Limerick 'Treaty' Stone, to the Kings' stone on which they crowned Saxon kings at Kingston-on-Thames, and even to that Scone stone in Westminster Abbey.

And the enemy? The red-haired raiders of Sennen and Severn, of Wool in Dorset?

The dark Danes and the fair Norse were both 'Danes' to the Irish. The bit of history that would best fit in with a possible skirmish with them at Vellandruchar, is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 997. In that year the Danes went up the coast of Devon to the mouth of the Severn, and from thence harried the coasts of Cornwall, Wales and Devon, landed at Watchet in Somerset and played havoc there - 'and then went back round Land's End to the south side, and entered the estuary of the Tamar, and on up it until they came to Lydford - which they burned. The next year they 'pushed up into Dorset in what- ever direction they pleased'. Many a time levies were gathered to oppose them, 'but, as soon as battle was about to begin, the word was given to withdraw, and always in the end the host had the victory'. That is not written about any Land's End foray-- though there might have been such, nor is there any mention in the Chronicle of such a foray. The Vellandruchar battle may be 'compressed' memory of many incidents and raids.9 There were buried weapons. And the red hair? Even perhaps Irish.o1

After the kings and the flash of battle - comes blood. Rivers that ran with it, horses up to the fetlocks, enough blood running

8 One was near Godolphin in Cornwall, another on Bryher in the Scillies, another in Goldsithney called 'Peters Neht'. Loiterers used to meet there, C. G. Henderson was told. The place is mentioned in a charter dated 5 Edw.I I I. (fournal of the Royal Inst. of Cornwall, pt. 4. Local History of the Four Hundreds.) 'Peter' might have been petra. ' Bottrell tells of Spaniards attacking a mill at Vellandreath not far off. In the third, fourth and fifth centuries those who raided the western coasts and often settled there, were not the Danes but the Irish.

10 The Irish had it with the 'red-blond' Gaels, and it continues to this day in the red-headed Irish tinker clan. The Irish shared the old dislike of red hair with the Cornish but not so inevitably in connection with 'Danes'. At the beginning of this century, Achill Island fishermen would not put to sea if on the way to the boats they met a red-headed man. (J. H. Stone The Cornish Riviera.) This seems more like the idea of its being unlucky to meet women or clergy on the way to one's fishing than the inherited hate the Sennen men had for the 'descendants' of the enemy. In Leitrim in 1894 it was ill-luck to meet a red-haired woman when going to the fair. (Leland L. Duncan, Folklore, vol. v, I894.)

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to work a mill-wheel; and these may be just figures of speech used to make a battle tale vivid.

But when the miller is introduced, that is a different matter. He has always one persistent peculiarity: his hands. Six fingers to a hand; or a thumb or so too many.'1

It was Cormac MacArt who brought a mill-wright over from Alba and built the first Irish water-mill on the stream of Nith, which sprang from a well near Tara of the Kings. And the name of the first miller was MacLamba, 'Hand'. Centuries later, John O'Donovan, working for the Irish Survey, came on a mill on the river Nith at a place now called Lismullen or the mill of the fort and traditionally, he learned, the site of that first mill. Still more, the miller knew the whole story of the mill's building and that his own surname would have been MacLamba, 'Hand', if the use of it 'had not died out with the failure of the main line in his grandfather'.12

There remain the prophecies, like reversed echoes of battles to come; hollow as an echo.

Columcille, who died in 592, Moling of the seventh century, Thomas the Rhymer of the fifteenth century - they all 'prophesied' through others, long after their own deaths: Ireland was a great place for prophecies. Columcille's prophecy about the battle of Cethirn was fulfilled - according to Adamnan. He heard an account of the battle from a certain Finan, who had been in it and had seen a dead body in the well. He had spoken of this that same day to two old monks of St Comgell; and they said they had been present when Columcille had made the prophecy to the abbot of Comgell. The same Merlin who said there would be more Vellandruchars in Cornwall 'foretold', it is said, the I171 landing of Henry 2 at Waterford in Ireland almost word for word with the Irish St Moling: or Henry 2 was pleased to think he had fulfilled their prophecy. There was a spate of these contrived prophecies that appear 'to have first sprung up in Eirinn after the occurence of the Danish invasion, at the close of the 8th century', O'Curry wrote, 'and have continued down so late as to about the year of our Lord I854'. Ireland's invaders and conquerors made

11 Pliny, Natural History, book I1, Ch. 99, mentions certain six-fingered Roman women called, for that reason, 'Sedigitae'. The 'thumb' is not that traditional thumb of the skilled or crafty miller.

12 Petrie, Tara., p. I62.

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good use of them, saying either their own deeds had fulfilled a prophecy, or holding the surety of its future fulfilment over the credulous Irish heads.

One of these conquerors was John de Courcy. He is under suspicion of having created the very prophecies he said he had fulfilled: 'then was fulfylled a prophecye that Colmkille seyde of thys fyght: he sayd, "that so many men sold be I-slaw yn that place, that her fomen myght waden to the knees yn her blode" ... and so hyt was then ... and other many fyghtes and aduentres of thynges that yn that contray shold betyde, whych al openly war fulfylled yn John de Courcy'.13 And Sir George Carew followed the same line. As President of Munster about the end of the seventeenth century, he made use of the following contemporary doggerel to cow the unfortunate Irish:

"From Carew's charter you'll surely find Cause of repentance for your misdeeds; Many will be the foreigners' shouts Sent forth on the banks of the Niathlach" '.14

One such prophecy had a devastating moral effect on Cornwall. On 23 July, 1595, four Spanish galleys came out of the morning

mist, landed men on the Men Merlyn off Mousehole, and burned Mousehole, Paul, Newlyn and Penzance. To the Cornish - till Francis Godolphin rallied them - this seemed their inescapable doom come upon them at last and their morale collapsed, 'for an ancient prophecy in their own language hath long run among them, how there should land upon the rock of Merlin those that would burn Paul church, Penzance, and Newlyn. And indeed so is the rock called where the enemy first stept on shore. The prophecy is this:

"Ewra teyre a war meane Merlyn Ara lesky Paule Pensans ha Newlyn" '.15

1a The English Conquest of Ireland, A.D. 1166-1185. E.E.T.S. ed. by F. J. Furnivall, M.A.

14 A river in Cork. O'Curry saw the actual written prophecy among the Carew papers at Lambeth. (E. O'Curry, Lectures on the Ms. Materials of Ancient Irish History, Dublin, 1878.)

16 The Survey of Cornwall, by Richard Carew of Antony, pub. 1602. Carew's Cornish is not highly rated. Nicholas Boson of Newlyn who about the same time wrote 'The Dutchesse of Cornwall's Progresse to see ye Land's End and to visit ye Mount' for his children, embodied Cornish folklore and gives the same proverb. (Lhuyd's MS. Io0714 Bodleian.)

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One cannot charge Cornish Carew with having invented the prophecy, though he is the first to have put it on record. It had had a 'long run' among the Cornish, and he had not the President of Munster's wish to crush the people. Also he appears to have got his account of the whole Spanish incident from Godolphin himself. It was not a Carew matter but a Celtic habit.

And Cornwall shared it. 'As 1588 and the Spanish Armada drew near, Europe seethed

with talk of the ill omens for the year based on biblical numerology. Johan Muller of Konigsberg, mathematician and astronomer, drew up a chart of the heavens for that year and put the unhappy result in latin verse beginning: Post mille exactos a partu virginis annos. .. . But the most extraordinary thing is the anonymous account Cardinal Allen received - and sent on to the Vatican, of a marble stone discovered buried under the ruined foundations of Glastonbury Abbey and bearing, of all things, these words: Post mille exacto a partu virginis annos . . ! Merlin's work, of course. No contemporary German could have done it. Merlin had caused it to be discovered, "just in time to warn Britons of the impending destruction of the empire of Uther Pendragon's seed".

'There is no means of knowing Cardinal Allen's reaction to this nor if the idea was really current in England. But opposite "atque decresunt Imperi" a sceptical contemporary hand wrote in Italian: "It doesn't say what empires or how many"."16

That is what lies behind the design-forming pieces in the kaleidoscope.

What first brought them together I do not know. But those that memory has preserved seem to come together in England, Scotland and Ireland, like spilled quicksilver. The Cornish tale has them all, save the miller; but it is not the master-tale - even if there ever was one.

Here and there are some other things, that seem a little familiar. With Malory, the 'prophecy' takes the form of a dream dreamed

by one of the eleven kings who were against Arthur: it was of a great wind and a flood that swept everything away, and betokened the coming battle of Bedegraine. With Lovelich, Merlin himself

16 The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, by Garrett Mattingley (Jonathan Cape,

1959).

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conjures up the great wind - not against ships, but to overthrow the enemy's tents and discomfit him. Bedegraine itself grew out of Geoffrey of Monmouth's battle of Lincoln, when the defeated Saxons were told to leave, with their bared ships and their promises of future tribute and no returning. But return they did: to Totnes.

There is the battle of Clontarf, fought on the Good Friday of 1014. And on that day Brian Boroimhe and his allies broke the power of the Dane in Ireland. They fought from sunrise to sunset, and from flood-tide to flood-tide again. And the blood was blown back in the fighters' faces and the wind wrapped blown hair round their spear-heads. It was full tide when they began, and full tide again 'at the close of the day, when the foreigners were defeated; and the tide had carried away their ships from them,". so that they had not at the last any place to fly to, but in the sea ... so that they fled simultaneously; and they shouted their cries for mercy; and whoops of rout and retreat; and running; but they could only fly to the sea, because they had no other place to retreat to, seeing they were cut off . . . and they were pursued closely, rapidly, and lightly; and the foreigners were drowned in great numbers in the sea, and they lay in heaps and in hundreds ... .'18

Irish influence is strong. There is Cethirn, there is Clontarf, there is the shared post-Danish prophecy business. And MacLamba or 'Hand' is surely the original odd-thumbed miller.

But are these contents of my kaleidoscope anything more than a patchwork of local tales? Were they the set pattern for the telling of all similar happenings? Or a web of tradition, that spread and spread till it wore thin and time tore it; and these are the bits of it, clinging here and there?

There is hardly enough evidence for a suggestion, even. And a kaleidoscope is only a toy. Unless, perhaps, when one tries to see how it works ....

17 The Danish ships were habitually beached. They drew little water: and the rise of the tide at Dublin might easily drown a man at flood, when the ebb- tide had left ships grounded and dry. (The Fair Hills of Ireland, Stephen Gwynn.)

18 The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, ed. by Rev. T. H. Todd, D.D. Record Publications, I867.

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the kaleidoscopic tale

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