The Boggart Sourcebook

Young Simon

Description

Comprising three parts, this book is a companion volume to The Boggart: Folklore, History, Place-Names and Dialect. Part one, ‘Boggart Ephemera’, is a selection of about 40,000 words of nineteenth-century boggart writing (particularly material that is difficult to find in libraries). Part two presents a catalogue of ‘Boggart Names’ (place-names and personal names, totalling over 10,000 words). Finally, part three contains the entire ‘Boggart Census’ – a compendium of ground-breaking grassroots research. This census includes more than a thousand responses, totalling some 80,000 words, from older respondents in the north-west of England, to the question: ‘What is a boggart?’ 

The Boggart Sourcebook will be of interest to folklorists, historians and dialect scholars. It provides the three corpora on which the innovative monograph, The Boggart, is based.

Introduction 

Abbreviations

Corpus One: Boggart Ephemera

Corpus Two: Boggart Names

I) Boggart Place-names 

II) Boggart Place-names by Landscape Type 

III) Boggart Place-names by County 

IV) Boggart Proper Names 

V) Bibliography to Corpus Two 

Corpus Three: Boggart Census 

Lancashire 

West Riding 

Cheshire

Derbyshire 

Lincolnshire 

Rhodesian, Scottish and Other Boggarts 

Addenda 

Appendix: Questions and Prompts 

Sujets

• Mythical
• Unexplained Phenomena
• Social Science
• Folk Tales
• Fairy Tales
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Folclore
• Body (disambiguation)
• Fairy tale
• 20th century
• Mythology
• Boggart
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781905816941
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Boggart Sourcebook
a companion volume to The Boggart: Folklore, History, Place-names and Dialect
https://doi.org/10.47788/KZLH9484
by Simon Young
also published by University of Exeter Press
Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief
Series Editors: Simon Young , University of Virginia (CET, Siena) and Davide Ermacora , University of Turin
Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief provides a venue for growing scholarly interest in folklore narratives, supernatural belief systems and the communities that sustain them. Global in scope, the series encompasses milieus ranging from ancient to contemporary times and encourages empirically grounded, source-rich studies. The editors favour the broad multidisciplinary approach that has characterized the study of folklore and the supernatural, and which brings together insights from historians, folklorists, anthropologists and many other branches of the humanities and social sciences.
The Boggart Sourcebook
Texts and Memories for the Study of the British Supernatural
COMPILED AND EDITED BY SIMON YOUNG
First published in 2022 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR, UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk
Copyright © 2022 Simon Young, for this selection and for all editorial content. Extracts quoted remain the copyright of individual copyright-holders.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format, for non-commercial purposes only. If others remix, adapt, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material.
https://doi.org/10.47788/QXUA4856
Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
ISBN 978-1-905816-93-4 Hbk
ISBN 978-1-905816-94-1 ePub
ISBN 978-1-905816-95-8 PDF
Cover image: a boggart throws its head after an escaping pedestrian. From James Bowker’s, The Goblin Tales of Lancashire (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1883), p. 136
Contents
Introduction
Abbreviations
Corpus One: Boggart Ephemera
Corpus Two: Boggart Names
I) Boggart Place-names
II) Boggart Place-names by Landscape Type
III) Boggart Place-names by County
IV) Boggart Proper Names
V) Bibliography to Corpus Two
Corpus Three: Boggart Census
Lancashire
West Riding
Cheshire
Derbyshire
Lincolnshire
Rhodesian, Scottish and Other Boggarts
Addenda
Appendix: Questions and Prompts
Introduction
‘Boggart’ is a generic term to describe the solitary supernatural creatures that terrified the English North and parts of the Midlands in Victorian (and in some cases later) times. In the process of researching and writing my recent University of Exeter Press book The Boggart : Folklore, History and Dialect , I built up three corpora:
(i) boggarts in ephemera (broadsides, letters, magazines and newspapers);
(ii) boggart names (boggart place-names and boggart personal names);
(iii) a contemporary boggart folklore survey (the Boggart Census ).
In the following pages I include part of the ephemera and all of the boggart names and the boggart folklore survey, hoping that the material will be useful to others. In Part I, ‘Boggart Ephemera’, there is a selection of nineteenth-century boggart writing (particularly material that is difficult to find in libraries); in Part II there are ‘Boggart Names’ (boggart placenames and personal names); part III presents the entire Boggart Census . Please note that, throughout, I use the English county boundaries as they were prior to the reforms of the mid-1970s.
I dedicate this sourcebook, as I did The Boggart , to my elder daughter, Lisi.
Abbreviations
BC : Boggart Census (part three of the present volume)
Ch: Cheshire
De: Derbyshire
ERY: East Riding of Yorkshire
La: Lancashire
Li: Lincolnshire
Notts: Nottinghamshire
OSCh: Six-inch Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire
OSDe: Six-inch Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire
OSLa: Six-inch Ordnance Survey map of Lancashire
OSLi: Six-inch Ordnance Survey map of Lincolnshire
OSY: Six-inch Ordnance Survey map of Yorkshire
WRY: West Riding of Yorkshire
Corpus One: Boggart Ephemera
This section gathers nineteenth-century boggart ephemera, particularly from newspapers but also from magazines, rare books and broadsides. Given the space constraints, I concentrate on material that other researchers might have trouble finding. I have typically included here actual boggart news (everything from ‘boggart hunts’ to children dying from boggart stories, sic ) rather than incidental asides about boggart-lore. I have not (again for reasons of space) included the works of John Higson (valuable as they are). These are now available in South Manchester Supernatural: The Ghosts, Fairies and Boggarts of Victorian Gorton, Lees, Newton and Saddleworth (Pwca Ghost, Witch and Fairy Pamphlets, 2020). Nor have I included James McKay, ‘The Evolution of East Lancashire Boggarts’ (1888), as this can be freely downloaded on my academia.edu site.
The material is given in order of publication.
Boggart Pun
The following serio-comic scene, we are positively assured took place in the neighbouring town of Kirkham, about a fortnight since: One morning, (evening we should think) a tall, thin personage of ominous aspect, and most awfully enveloped in a long grey cloak, of the most ample folds we can imagine, advanced towards a young woman in the public street, and with a hollow voice and mysterious air, most condescendingly vouchsafed to open his sepulchral lips to her, with a question, which, from the poor woman’s agitation at being addressed by the ghost-like stranger, she did not comprehend. Thinking, however, at last, that if flesh and blood at all, her grim inquirer could be no other than a six feet sybil, she plucked up resolution enough to say she did not want her ‘fortin tellin’. ‘I beg pardon,’ returned the man, ‘I am no fortune-teller, – I want’ – lowering his tone again, of course, the gravest pitch – ‘I want a spirit vault.’ This plain question the poor girl, who had never ceased to associate boggarts and goblins with the dreadful stranger from the first moment she beheld him, directed him, with fear and trembling, to the church-yard, then turn to the right hand and he would see a monument (one just erected to the memory of E. King, Esq.) underneath which she could assure him he would find the object of his search – a spirit vault. Saying this, she darted off, leaving the thirsty gentleman in amazement at the extraordinary instructions he had received, for it seems his half-smothered inquiry had no other object than a drop of comfort from the nearest gin shop. Preston Pilot .
‘Practical Pun’, Berkshire Chronicle (14 October 1826), 3.
Red Boggart
On Saturday last, a considerable sensation was excited in this town in consequence of a report prevailing that a woman had cut the throat of her child and afterwards her own. From what we have been able to collect, it seems, that the person alluded to, with her child, have been for some time residing at the house of Robert Simpson, in China Lane, and the woman has been in the habit of attending a debtor in the Castle, and had passed for his wife, although her husband is still living. The woman’s name is Sarah Parker, and the child’s, a girl about twelve years of age, Amanda Parker, and daughter to the former, by her husband. Early on the morning in question a little girl, daughter to the person with whom they lodged, was ordered by her mother to go into the room which the two persons occupied, and fetch a clean cap out of a drawer for her; but she came running downstairs saying that there was a red ‘boggart’ in the room, and she durst not go in. Her mother then went upstairs, and as soon as she reached the door of the room observed the wretched creatures lying on the bed, weltering in their blood. She therefore hastened to communicate the circumstance to her neighbours, and shortly after returned with two or three of them, who accompanied her to the place, when they found the two persons in the state above described. On examining them it was discovered that the girl’s throat was cut in three different places, and both hands were shockingly mangled, in attempting to save herself; and her breasts were also scratched. The woman’s throat was likewise cut, and an incision made in the wind-pipe. A surgeon was immediately sent for, and the wounds had proper care taken of them. The woman resisted having her wounds dressed, and as soon as that on her throat was sewed up, she attempted to pull the stitches out again, but was prevented.
‘Attempt at Murder and Suicide’, Lancaster Gazette (19 Apr 1828), 3.
Dead Baby Boggart
[Editor’s Note: a baby’s body has been found at Brindle. The man who discovered it first believed that it was a ‘whelp’. John Parker who apparently discovered the baby in his house thought that it was a ‘boggart’.]
John Parker said that on the Tuesday previous he went up into the garret of a house in which his mother lives at Brindle, and in one corner of the room he saw something which he took to be a ‘boggart’. He brought it downstairs: and immediately after laid it on the grass, near a midden stead. Towards night, on the same day, he went back to see it and it was gone! On Saturday night he went again and found it near the place where he first saw it, and he then took it up, a