Hurst, The Victorian Ghosts, Devils and Witches of Northern Bedfordshire
George Hurst, The Victorian Ghosts, Devils and Witches of Northern Bedfordshire: Including the legends of Bletsoe, Clapham, Millbrook, Milton Ernest, Oakley, Odell and Marston Morteyn (2020) (UK, US)
Fairies guard treasure at Millbrook; a witch tricks the devil at Oakley; a Bletsoe sexton cuts a ring from a living woman’s hand; Sir Rowland rides, dead, through the night at Odell; wild Tim lives in the woods between Clapham and Milton Ernest, gaming with Satan; and the evil one hops over Marston Morteyn and flies a man through the air near the Ouse… Author, George Hurst (1800-1899) was ‘the grand old man of Bedford’, five times mayor and local entrepreneur. In his seventies, eighties and nineties, Hurst turned to writing the folklore of the Ouse Valley, where he had grown up in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Sometimes he wrote the legends as verse (see his Rural Legends included here), sometimes as prose. In many cases these forgotten works are our only glimpse of the traditions of northern Bedfordshire before the twentieth century swept them away. The pamphlet finishes with a contemporary life of George Hurst (with many details on Victorian Bedford) and looks at the argument that Hurst wrote two anonymous folklore essays in the Bedfordshire Times in 1873.
For other Pwca books and pamphlets.
