"My father and grandfather had this shop before me, and before them it was kept by a warlock, and people daursn't owe him anything!

"There was a woman lived where our kitchen is now, and she kept a cow, and when she churned she used to lock the door for fear the warlock cast an evil eye on the milk and turned it sour. His shop was upstairs, that's his window that's walled up.

"No, he never did anybody any harm. He lived to be a very old man."

- Mr George Handyside of Cambo, Northumberland, collected by Rosalie E. Bosanquet of the Cambo Women's Institute, in 1922. Included in 'In the Troublesome Times' (ed. R.E.B., published 1929), for entry into the competition for the best book compiled by a Women's Institute on old customs, beliefs, stories, and ancient monuments.

According to Mr Handyside, the warlock was still alive in 1814.

#Northumberland #Folklore #FolkHistory #WitchcraftBeliefs #OldBeliefs #RuralTradition #Stories #Storytelling @folklore

"I have heard but little reference to fairies among the people. There are vague references to men being pursued by fairies, who would ride on their horses behind them, or on the cart tail.

"Those over eighty tell me that in their young days grown up people and children believed that the fairies held their moonlight dances in an avenue of ash trees near the village, where there were well defined fairy rings in the soft turf, and aged people of that time were so convinced of the existence of these beings, that they would affirm that they had seen the dances going on, and that when a human being approached the fays would disappear.

"An old woman relates that in a field on a farm where she worked there was a deep hollow in the ground from which they said the fairies used to come, and the people at the farmhouse told her the fairies used sometimes to come to them from that place 'to borrow a sieve to sift their corn'."

- Hastings M. Neville, Rector of Ford, Northumberland, 1909

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