Jack O` Legs, a Hertfordshire legend
As a rule I use this blog to talk about London, or rather it`s more obscure corners, those which tend not to feature in holiday brochures or guided tours. The current pandemic has however grounded me in my home town of Hitchin, some forty miles north of the Capital in the County of Hertfordshire, no music and no tours, so what to do? Well the Government did say we may take daily exercise as long we do not meet with people from outside our household, so with my better half I`ve been rediscovering the surrounding countryside, cycling at a guess, hundreds of miles around the County.
Hertfordshire is not short of achingly beautiful villages, ancient churches and characterful rural public houses crying out to be visited and in the latter case, sampled. Alas currently pubs are closed pending reopening after `lockdown`, churches too are shut. These I love, whatever religious views one may or may not have, parish churches are historical documents, of architectural taste through the ages, the great political and religious upheavals of a 1000 years or more and most touchingly of local history, from a time when families moved around far less than we do now, staying put in one village for generations so that one sees names constantly reappearing on tombstones and memorials. I recall a particular village church I visited in which the names of four brothers appeared on the First World War memorial. It`s impossible to comprehend the depth of grief their surviving family must have endured, as well as the impact it would have on a small and close knit community.
We also have our local folklore and legends, one such, the story of Jack O` Legs, I rediscovered in the tiny village of Weston. It`s a pretty village, these days many residents are commuters, there is not the need there once was for agricultural labour. It has a school, a pub, a shop and a small factory unit where until quite recently an elderly gentleman, who held a Government contract to make the bearskin hats worn by guardsman outside Buckingham Palace. He has now taken his place in the church graveyard, where mortal remains of the departed have been interred for most of the past millennium. Holy Trinity Church Weston appears curiously remote , perched on a small hill 500 or so yards east of the Village centre. It used to stand at the centre, however when bubonic plague, the Black Death, arrived in the District in 1348, the population was so decimated that all the houses surrounding the church were burnt to the ground to prevent the spread of contagion.
I digress though for Weston`s legend is of a giant named Jack O`Legs. The story relates that a man so tall once lived in a cave just east of Weston. He was so tall in fact that he could lean on the first floor sills of a house and talk to the occupants through the window of their upstairs rooms. Unlike many mythical giants he was benevolent and thoughtful of the villagers. Like another folkloric hero, Robin Hood, he robbed from the rich to give to the poor. One year the harvest was so bad that bakers in the nearby town of Baldock raised their prices. Jack ambushed a cartload of flour and distributed it to the residents of Weston. He was eventually captured, and prior to sentence of death by hanging, blinded.Granted a last wish, he asked to be pointed in the direction of Weston so that with his longbow, so large that no one but him could draw the string, he fired an arrow toward the village, requesting he be buried wherever the arrow fell. The shaft flew three miles and landing in the Churchyard, so after he was hanged upon a knoll in Baldock Field`. It is maintained his body lies to this day, a long wooden panel inscribed with the wording `Jack O` Legs Grave` marks the spot. Two stones mark the head and foot of Jack`s grave, said to be the distance apart of fifteen pairs of size 10 shoes! The truth is that through the centuries, mischievous local children have from time to time moved the stones.
The earliest written record of the legend appears in a History of Hertfordshire`written in 1728 by the historian Nathaniel Salmon, from which we learn that Jack `was a great robber, but a generous one, for he plundered the rich to feed the poor`.The practicalities of how the bakers of Baldock were able to restrain such a giant in order to administer his gruesome punishment is not described. Salmon considered this story to be a corruption of real local history in which the manor of Weston was granted by it`s 12th century Lord of The Manor, Gilbert de Clare, to the military order of the Knight`s Templar. It has been suggested this may be behind another version of the story that prior to hanging, Jack asked for a chapel to be built for the benefit of his soul on the site where his arrow landed. Similar themes are to be found in folk legends throughout England. Gilbert`s son Richard, had the nickname `Strongbow` , which may have added grist to the story of an immense bow, was a knight during a period of dynastic strife in 12th century England and Normandy known as the `Anarchy`. The apprehending and execution locally of thieves was though a common practice in medieval England, known as `infangthief`
Human nature being as it is, history and legend are often confused or interlinked, particularly so when in an oral tradition handed from generation to generation as in this case. A local story it is though and tales of witches, giants, hermits and ghosts have been a facet of the Anglo Saxon imagination from time immemorial. To misquote Shakespeare, `of such things are dreams made on.`
