© Bari Hooper
Reprinted from: Saffron Walden Historical Journal No 8 Autumn 2004
The tiny settlement of Bonhunt, part of the parish of Wicken Bonhunt, four miles south-west of Saffron Walden, consists today of only four houses and the abandoned and desecrated early medieval chapel of St. Helen. The largest of the houses, a fine mid-Victorian building, is on the site of the former manor-house of Bonhunt and, up until the 1960s, together with a collection of adjacent farm buildings, it was known as Bonhunt Farm. The house is now a private dwelling and the surrounding land is part of the Quendon Hall Estate. By the 1960s the farm buildings had become redundant, and in the early 1970s most of them, including stables and cattle byres, were demolished.
At that time I was part of a team carrying out an archaeological excavation on a Middle Saxon settlement at the farm, and as the demolition of the farm buildings progressed I kept a close eye on the work. The buildings were brick and timber constructions of mid-19th to early 20th century date of no architectural merit, but nevertheless I kept a close eye on their destruction, for experience had taught me that items of historical interest sometimes turn up in the least likely locations. My vigilance was duly rewarded by the discovery of two items of folkloric significance, reminders of an old superstitious belief once widely held by horse-keepers.
The first item that came to light among the rubbish thrown out from the stable was a collection of five stones strung together on a leather thong. These are ‘hag-stones’, naturally-holed stones which the old horse- keepers used to hang up in their stables as amulets to prevent the hag, an infernal spirit in the form of a woman, from riding their horses during the night. It sometimes happened that a horse was found in the morning in its stall sweating profusely, a symptom of sickness, but the horse- keeper, if he were superstitious, and many were, attributed its condition to it having been hag-ridden during the night. Belief in the hag was formerly widespread in England, the earliest known literary reference to her being in a book written c.1290.1 The protection employed against her unwelcome visitation was either a collection of hag-stones or an item made of iron, for it was believed that the hag, like a witch, was unable to cross that metal. Horseshoes, keys and sharp-bladed tools were especially favoured as prophylactics against the entrance of diabolical visitors, and in corroboration of this, the other item I found at the farm was an old superannuated knife lying concealed beneath the wooden threshold at the entrance to the stable. The threshold was integral with the door-posts, indicating that the knife can only have been placed in position when the stable was constructed, probably in the mid-19th century, demonstrating that even at that late date there lingered in rural Essex a fear of the nocturnal hag.
The poets Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and Samuel Butler (1612-80), both allude to the fear of the hag, the former urging, ‘Hang up hooks and shears to scare / Hence the hag that rides the mare’;2 while his fellow versifier tells of one Sidrophel, a ‘cunning man’, who knew how to ‘Chase evil spirits away by dint / Of sickle, horseshoe, hollow flint’.3
The knife found at Bonhunt is a tangible memorial of an ancient superstition that apparently lingered on into the middle of the 19th century, while the hag-stones are obviously a relic of the days, perhaps before, during or just after the Second World War when horses were still employed on the farm. Examples of hag-stones being placed in stables in the 1950s have also been noted elsewhere in East Anglia.4 Horse-keepers at this time are unlikely to have believed in the night-hag. In placing holed-stones in their stables they were probably carrying on a tradition that they did not fully understand, perhaps in the belief that the stones were simply lucky charms. Indeed many people today, with no knowledge of the history of the holed-stone as a hag- repellent, will pick one up in the belief that it will bring them luck.
The night-hag did not lavish all of her attention on horses, she was not averse to paying the occasional nocturnal visit to the human sleeper, sitting upon the chest of her chosen victim and inducing a feeling of suffocation. Today we call this unpleasant experience a ‘nightmare’, and put it down to indigestion or some other natural cause. Our forefathers believed otherwise, and as a precaution against a visit from what they believed to be a real malevolent entity, they not only put hag-stones in their stables, they also hung them on their bed-heads.
Notes
I. Saint’s Lives (Early South-English legendary, I, pp 306/228, EETS (1887)
2 Hesperides (1648), p.336.
3. Hudibras Part II, Canto III, 1. P. 291.
4. Evans, G.W., The Horse in the Furrow (1960), p.275.
5. Scot, R., The Discoverie of Witchcraft, IV, xi (1584).