CHAPTER 41

Legends of the River

There are local myths of the Thames. It used to be said that towns still existed beneath the river; an earlier Tilbury, for example, was believed to lie beneath the waters of the estuary. The area beside Dagenham was according to local belief the site of the original Deluge. There were stories of miraculously created stone trees beside the banks. One of them, at Godstow, was the token of a nun’s apotheosis; she used to point to a tree that, she said, would be turned into stone when she was with the saints in heaven. Pilgrims, as late as the early sixteenth century, venerated this tree. It is now of course realised that stone trees do exist by, or in, the Thames; but we have another explanation for their petrifaction. At Fairford, beside Inglesham, there was a sudden invasion of frogs and toads who made their way to the house of the local Justice; here, according to a pamphlet issued in 1660, “they divided themselves into two distinct bodies, and orderly made up to the House of the said Justice; some climbing the walls, and into the Windows and Chambers.” When the Justice made his peace with the Nonconformists of the town, the creatures “strangely and unexpectedly vanisht away.” There have been rumours of black magic at Cookham and at Burnham Beeches—and of course in connection with the “Hell Fire Club” located at Medmenham Abbey.

There were deep holes by the Thames at Culham, one of them being known as “Gleddie’s” or “Glady’s” Hole. The people of the neighbourhood believed that a fisherman by the name of Gleddie fell within it and was drowned; it is said that the bubbles that rose from him to the surface of the water exploded as loud curses. There was an eyot beside Binsey known locally as “Black John’s Pit” from which, it was said, a goblin sprang who kept the heads of children under the water. The legend in these cases is clearly concerned with the fear of drowning but also, perhaps, of being lost in some strange underground world of chasms and caverns that is deemed to exist beneath the path of the river. It is the Otherworld of ancient reverence, revived in local stories that have never entirely been dissipated.

There was an area on the southern bank of the river, between Westminster and Hungerford, that in the seventeenth century was known as “Pedlar’s Acre.” The land was owned by a pedlar who, on his death, left it to the church of St. Mary at Lambeth. It is said that he was once granted shelter in the church, and bestowed the land upon it on condition that he and his dog should be commemorated in a stained-glass window. There is indeed stained glass in that church showing a pedlar and his dog, to which is attached a notice that “This window by tradition represents a benefactor who about the year 1500 left to this church a piece of land later known as Pedlar’s Acre on condition that his image be placed in the church and repaired from time to time. Mended in 1608; renewed 1703; transferred to this chapel 1884; destroyed 1941; renewed 1956.” There is nothing to dispute the legend. A marking stone, inscribed “Boundary of Pedlar’s Acre 1777,” was found when the area was being excavated. It was being prepared for the building of County Hall, which still stands on the ancient acre of ground.

It is perhaps only to be expected that the river, so anciently a home of spiritual forces, should in later days be associated with the more conventional forms of the supernatural; the presence lingers, even in predictable or risible forms. Books have been written about the ghosts of the Thames. There are reported sightings at Windsor and at Slough, at Maidenhead and at Oxford. There are supposed ghosts at Henley. There was a grey lady of Ladye Place in Hurley; the ghost of Lady Hoby has been seen at Bisham Abbey. A “lady in white” is reported to haunt a room of the George Hotel in Dorchester-on-Thames, and a small lady flits around the fifteenth-century Cockpit bar at Eton. At Kempsford a ghost looks out of the window of the ruined abbey. There is a little grey lady who, at Dorney Court, sits in a bedroom and weeps. And it is perhaps predictable that monks have been glimpsed within the precincts of the ancient abbey at Dorchester. There are many such stories, perpetually restored in legend.

Every local history of the Thames Valley, and of the towns and villages along the river, has accounts of spiritualised visitants. There seem to have been many such apparitions at Cookham, seven of them at the latest count, including a young man in a leather jerkin at Cookham Dean, and a little girl at Strande Water. Two thoroughfares by the Thames have in fact been named after their ghostly pedestrians—Monks Walk in Medmenham, and Whiteladyes Lane in Cookham. It is also said that, down Whiteladyes Lane, there can be seen on dark nights a phantom coach with headless horses. In the neighbourhood of Cookham, too, were to be found the haunts of Herne the Hunter; he is the Celtic figure, half-man and half-beast, that inhabited the popular imagination for many hundreds of years. He was reported to be seen, in the shape of a white stag, in Whiteladyes Lane itself. In legend the eponymous white lady, with streaming hair, was said to accompany Herne’s wild hunt. Similarly Herne was said to drive a wagon. So all the constituents of the ancient myth—the white lady, the horned god, the coach—appear as “ghosts” in a late variant of the same story. They are not ghosts at all, but images of lost belief. Such are the workings of the human imagination.

It is perhaps worth noticing that many of these apparitions have been described as comprising a white or semi-white vapour. In Lower Basildon by the Thames, for example, there were independent reports of a “silvery form” and a “white, mist-like figure.” At Bisham there was reputed to be a ghost “which spreads itself across the river in a thin, white mist which means death to those who try to penetrate it.” At Sonning a “grey lady” floats across Sonning Lane. Another “grey lady” walks through the grounds of Danesfield, on a bluff above the river just beyond Hurley. At Streatley a “white lady” is seen in her “night-dress,” and at Marlow “a lady in a cloak…her apparel all in grey” is observed. At Abingdon, according to ancient testimony,

it is most certain that there is a visible Ghost, which walks in the shape of a Christian, and most probably in woman’s shape…in the daie time it is seen onely as a woman’s head of hair upon the top of the water, in the night it constantly passeth over the bridge, it’s all white…it onely hisseth as a Snake or a Goos.

A “white lady without a head” has often been seen in an avenue of elms at Cliveden. These are presumably clusterings of water mist, wraith-like forms of mist emerging from the surface of the water or collocations of vapour that have been taken as human forms. The phenomena are generally said to be sobbing or sighing, and at Caversham the sound of invisible oars is heard. We may assume these to be the natural sounds of the river. The stories do at least emphasise the power that the Thames is still believed to possess. The river is haunted by its past.