Weird West’s Bible bakers and the boy
Being a seasonal GAZETEER of STRANGE and CURIOUS TALES from around the WEST COUNTRY compiled by the celebrated HACKWRITER, MR LATIMER, the self-proclaimed EMERITUS PROFESSOR of NONSENSE at the UNIVERSITY COLLEGE of HENLEAZE
HALLOWEEN, is it? That means your correspondent is contractually obliged to bring you tales of ghosts and ghouls and other things that probably aren’t true.
In the past, BT has dutifully trotted out ghost stories about the Bristol Theatre Royal (ditto the Bath one), the Llandoger Trow, talked about how the door of the Hatchet pub is coated in human skin (some sort of 17th-century weatherproofing?) and all the better-known Bristol hauntings.
Having done all the ghosts in the neighbourhood, sometimes more than once, we thought this year we’d look at some non-ghostly but still jolly strange mystic tales from Bristol and the wider west, so without further ado …
Curious death
According to a wonderful Victorian book titled Curiosities of Bristol and its Neighbourhood, there used to be a grave in the churchyard of Moreton-in-Marsh in the Cotswolds on whose stone was inscribed:
Here lie the bones of Richard Lawton,
Whose death, alas, was strangely brought on:
Trying one day his corns to mow off, The razor slipped and cut his toe off; His toe, or rather what it grew to, An inflammation quickly flew to, Which took, alas, to mortifying, And was the cause of Richard’s dying.
Alas, if it’s still there (or ever was) nobody can find it now. But Moreton is a nice place to visit anyway. The Prancing Pony Inn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was apparently modelled on the Bell Inn there. There’s a blue plaque that says so.
Bible-bash… er, bakers?
Curiosities of Bristol and its Neighbourhood, published in the early 1850s, also tells us this decidedly strange tale...
“There is a tradition still current in Bristol in reference to a society of Infidels who met weekly in the parish of St Philip, some forty years since, who among other acts of impiety resolved to roast the Bible, which was done with some ceremony. To mark their contempt for that book they basted it with beer!
“It is said that every member is now dead, and that in most, if not in all cases, their hour of dissolution was attended by circumstances of peculiar horror.”
In modern parlance, this bunch of blasphemers mostly died horrible deaths after baking a Bible.
But what on Earth were they playing at? Surely in a much more religious age, people wouldn’t do anything so outrageous?
The only possible explanation, assuming that the story has any truth to it, is that they were early 19th-century political radicals. Many of these were atheists, but the political issue they had was not so much with Christian faith, but the Church of England, which was widely seen as a pillar of the establishment, and (with good reason) as corrupt. But who they were and when they did it and whether they perished miserably as a result awaits further research.
The curious tale of Owen Parfitt
There lived, in Shepton Mallet late, Of unrecorded fame,
A taylor, born to luckless fate, And Parfet was his name.
His race from Cambrian mountains wild,
First issued, but few know when;His parents, therefore gave their child
The christian name of Owen
So begins a long and not terribly good poem by an anonymous author, published in 1799. The story of Owen Parfitt was well known at the time, and is still very mysterious.
The first published account that we know of appeared in the Bath Chronicle in 1789 and tells of how at some point in the 1760s – the exact date is disputed – an elderly and infirm tailor named Owen Parfitt disappeared without trace.
He had for some years been bedridden and “melancholy” – the deaths of his wife and young child some years earlier were said to have affected him badly – and was now living with his older sister in a cottage at Board Cross.
Nowadays, this is a narrow and rather quaint lane in the middle of Shepton Mallet, but in the 1700s was on the edge of the fields.
One day – said to have been in June – he asked his sister to help him come downstairs and sit outside. According to which version you believe, he almost never did this, or he often did it.
Either way, his sister, with the help of a neighbour, brought him down and sat him on a chair by the front door. He was only wearing his nightshirt, and they put an old greatcoat around his shoulders to keep him warm.
Half an hour later, after his sister had done some chores and made up his bed, she looked outside to check on him, and he was gone.
The story piqued the interest of Samuel Butler (1774-1839), the headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later Bishop of Lichfield (and grandfather of the famous Victorian author of the same name).
Butler’s family owned property in the Shepton Mallet area, which may well be how he heard the story, and he asked a solicitor in the town to investigate for him.
Nothing came of this (the solicitor was probably too busy), but Butler became even more interested when in 1813 a skeleton was discovered in a garden some yards from where Parfitt had lived.
Alas, two local doctors pronounced the remains to be those of a much younger man than Parfitt. Butler had the bones examined by London doctors who said they were those of a young woman. Either way, it wasn’t Owen Parfitt.
Butler now asked a second solicitor,
William Maskell, to collect “witness statements” from elderly townsfolk who remembered the case.
According to some, the house where the skeleton was found was kept by a disreputable couple long suspected of murdering one or two of their lodgers. They always kept a light burning in the house at night to keep away the spirits of the dead!
One of Maskell’s interviewees stated that at the time of the disappearance a remarkable story went around that a man answering Owen’s description had been seen at an inn near Frome – ten miles away – enjoying a pint of ale. Yet
everyone who remembered him was certain that he was either completely lame, or only capable of walking a few yards. Besides, he would not have got very far in only a nightshirt and coat … would he?
It was also remembered that shortly after his disappearance a huge thunderstorm broke over the town. The thunderstorm is significant because it became part of the later yarns about Parfitt.
The obvious conclusion was that he was abducted, killed and his body buried or otherwise disposed of. But why?
Maskell’s witnesses disagreed on details, but all were of the view that Parfitt was harmless. He did not drink and had no enemies. He had no pension or money. He and his sister depended on outdoor relief from the parish, and had nothing worth stealing. Or did he?
Where things got interesting was the mystery of Parfitt’s past. Some said he’d always been a Shepton Mallet tailor, but others claimed he had had some adventures in the past. That he had been a soldier serving in North America and had even travelled to Africa as part of the crew of a slaving ship.
In the 19th century, long after the disappearance, various embellished accounts started to appear. By the mid-20th century a much more lurid version had emerged which – with many variations – would appear in countless newspaper articles and histories of Shepton Mallet.
The oldest tales, dismissed by most as mere superstitious nonsense, was that the locals believed that Parfitt had been a wicked man in his younger days, and the Devil himself had visited Shepton Mallet to come and claim him. Hence the mighty thunderstorm that day.
The Maskell/Butler investigations didn’t find anyone who seriously believed that, though some said other townsfolk thought it.
The more popular version, as related from the 1890s onwards, was that Parfitt had indeed been involved in wickedness. Some claim he had been a slaver, and had become acquainted with various “pagan” rites in Africa or the West Indies.
More popular, though, was the claim that he had been a pirate. He had done all manner of terrible things in his seafaring days. He had murdered, tortured and stolen and in later life had his money stashed away safely in a bank in Bristol which he visited once a month to draw out large sums.
Or, in another version, he regularly travelled to Bristol to collect money from other ex-pirates whom he was blackmailing by threatening to tell the authorities about their crimes.
So he was abducted and murdered either for his loot, or by former shipmates who wanted to shut him up. Or possibly by people who thought that he knew of some fabulous stash of hidden pirate treasure somewhere.
(Let us discount here the other story, as espoused by some UFO enthusiasts, that he was in fact abducted by aliens.)
If you Google him, you’ll find the internet age has opted for the sensational versions. But the depositions from the early 19th century tell of an altogether different and less interesting man. The best we can guess for now is that he hobbled off and took his own life somewhere where the body was never found. Or that he was murdered by someone with a grudge against him.
As that 1799 poem has it:
To tell his fate, I’ve no pretence ;Conjecture none I make ;But if the D---l Took him hence, He made a great mistake.
Good Queen Bess actually a bloke – shock claim
The story goes like this: When Princess Elizabeth was little she was taken from London to escape an outbreak of plague to the village of Bisley in Gloucestershire. The child
died of some cause unknown, but then lots of children died young back then.
When her guardians, Katherine Ashley and Thomas Parry, learned that her dad, King Henry VIII, was on the way to see his daughter they panicked, fearing he’d have them executed. So they got a gingerhaired village boy (there were no girls who looked remotely like the princess) and dressed him in girls’ clothes.
Henry, who didn’t see his daughter often, was taken in. And so (the story goes) the deception continued all the way to “the Bisley Boy” becoming your actual Queen Elizabeth I, a queen who, by the way, never married and never had any obvious lovers.
Embellishments include the discovery – allegedly! – at Overcourt House in the village of a grave found to contain the remains of a nine-year-old girl dressed in rich Tudor-era clothing.
The story remained a tradition in the village, but was spread more widely by writer Bram Stoker of Dracula fame when he visited the village in the late 1800s and was intrigued to find the May Queen they chose each year was always a boy in an Elizabethan dress.
Weston – the Devil’s favourite resort
Weston-super-Mare was home in late Victorian times to one of the “temples” of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society interested in the paranormal, magic, astrology etc.
Though founded by three Freemasons, the Golden Dawn’s most (in)famous member was Aleister Crowley, who enjoyed playing up his media image as a Satan-worshipper, though he wasn’t really (the problem was that it would mean accepting the Christian idea that Satan existed at all, and he definitely wasn’t a Christian).
Weston’s Temple of Osiris, founded in the 1880s, was really more about studying ancient religions and alchemy, and – as with so many small town clubs and societies – members falling out with one another in bitter faction fights.
This curious heritage has led to all sorts of strange Weston tales; one being that Crowley himself placed a unique curse on the town – that anyone born there would never be able to leave.
There’s also a story which BT would absolutely love to confirm; that Golden Dawn members bought a series of properties in the town which, when linked by lines on a map, would form a pentagram!
Just like in The Exorcist
Pandaemonium, or, The Devil’s Cloyster, a book by one Richard Bovet, published in 1684, tells of how the four children of “Mr Merideth of Bristol”, the youngest eight years old, the eldest 14, seized with strange fits.
They started out complaining of terrible pains in their heads and bodies, “suddenly upon which their Limbs, Mouth, and Eyes would be distorted into unimaginable alterations, and their Arms and Legs, though of those tender years, extended for some time beyond the strength of the stoutest man to reduce them.”
They sometimes laughed or cried uncontrollably, and would hang from the walls or ceilings of the room “like Flies, or Spiders … Sometimes they would foam at the mouth, then fall down as dead, & in a short time repeat their Actions, appearing in the room in the same strange, and stupendous postures.
“Towards night their fits always left them, and they slept undisturbed most part of the night, but instantly upon their awaking, their Fits returned, and tormented them more or less, with very little Intervals all the day.
“One of the Daughters three days following, in the height of her Fit repeated in a solemn majestick sort of manner the same form of speech; which was a praedicting her own death to be in some few days, and the happy state she was entring into, as also several things which should speedily befal her Father, and Family; but nothing of it ever came to pass. Another of them vomited pins.”
Prayers from the local clergy did no good, nor did the ministrations of the “ablest doctors in the city”.
They then recovered, had no more fits, and seemed none the worse for their experiences.
Back from the dead
In September 1884 George Chilcott, a labourer of Wembdon, Bridgwater, Somerset, collapsed and appeared to have died. His family, being poor and not wanting to incur a doctor’s bill, took him to the local church for burial.
But the local Vicar, the Rev. Arthur Newman, wasn’t so sure. He thought the body too warm to be a corpse so just to be on the safe side he left poor George lying in his coffin in the church.
Three days later, after the wake and everything, the body was observed to move, the doctors were finally called for and not only did he make a full recovery but lived for some years afterwards.
The Rev Arthur Newman later ran off to America with his mistress but it didn’t work out and so he returned to his parish to find the locals had attached a petition to the church door demanding his removal. We later find him in the role of local parson in Axminster and back with his wife once more.