Tales of Britain, page 18
‘Boo!’ he would shout, as he went round gobbling up dogs, cats, sheep, and of course the slower villagers. The Knucker could not breathe fire, but oh dear, you should have smelled his breath! Or rather, you shouldn’t, because one whiff would have killed you stone dead. And as for the teeth, his treacherous black fangs could chew right through a cottage and not even need flossing.
The thing is, when this monster did these things, he wasn’t even nice about it. The Knucker was the most terrible gloater! ‘Haha, I like yer cottage!’ he would gloat, making horribly rude gestures as he whipped himself through the air in great leaps, like he was still floating in water. ‘Looks really nice now you’ve got no roof, dur-brains! Hope you’ve got umbrellas! Hahahaaaa!’ And off he would fly, back to his Knuckerholes.
‘Knucker been in town again, then?’ one villager would grump.
‘Aye, this time he took four pigs, two cats, all the ducks on the village pond, and the baker’s eldest, Ralph,’ replied his neighbour.
‘Aw that’s a shame, he’d only just learned the trumpet too,’ the other replied. They all agreed: ‘Something must be done!’
The Mayor of Arundel decreed a decree: ‘Whomsoever will deliver the countryside from this really horrible stuck-up monster will receive a golden guinea for their troubles! And also, quite probably the hand of my beautiful, intelligent and charming daughter Hazel! – as long as she actually fancies them.’
And so the challenge was on – but as time went by, all the poor champions who dared approach the Knucker’s three pools could be found littered in numerous unattractive pieces around the surrounding countryside. The folk all agreed that they would just have to be careful, that’s all.
One of the things the villagers had found, however, was that though the Knucker liked chomping on cottages, they were nothing to him when compared to a nice hot crispy pie – preferably with a few sheep and a PE teacher in it as a juicy filling. And so they agreed that the baker would just have to bake the biggest pies possible for the Knucker, and send his bravest delivery boys out to the three pools to dish them up. Then perhaps he’d leave them alone.
The baker’s in Lymington was the finest in the county, and it was called ‘Pulk’s’. Mr Pulk’s young apprentice was a lad called Jimmy Puttock. Jimmy Puttock had quite a belly on him, and was a bit embarrassed about his new job, because the less pleasant of the other boys and girls at school used to sing at him:
‘Who ate all the pies? Who ate all the pies? Jimmy Puttock, Jimmy Puttock, he ate all the pies!’
‘It’s not fair,’ poor Jimmy would say, ‘I can’t help being chunky. And it’s not even a rhyme, you’re just saying ‘pies’ twice!’
But though it really wasn’t Jimmy’s fault that he was a big lad, you should have seen the speed with which he scarpered off the first time he had to take a big pig pie to the Knucker. The Knucker’s enormous jaws chomped down on that steaming pie – CHOMP! – sending the dish flying and Jimmy pelting off through the woods faster than he ever thought was possible.
Jimmy was a wily lad, though. He felt sure he couldn’t carry on taking these pies to the Knucker without getting into some serious trouble, probably in the form of becoming dinner. And so, he reasoned, why not serve the Knucker up a real pie – the final pie he would ever eat?
Therefore, on the very next pie day, with the distraught baker’s reluctant blessing, Jimmy took the biggest pie dish ever created, kneaded some fine crumbly shortcrust pastry, and filled the middle of the pie dish with the most horribly dangerous and disgusting filling you could imagine: wolfsbane, deadly nightshade, arsenic, toadstools, rotten cabbage, month-old scrag-end, coriander, and his Uncle Peter’s rancid long johns, which hadn’t been washed since the dinosaurs. With a peg secured surely to his nose, Jimmy baked up this foul pastry, and when it was golden brown and humming slightly, he heaved it up onto his cart and set off to the three pools.
‘Grrr! Oi! This pie had better be tastier than the last one, fatface!’ the Knucker snarled as Jimmy’s cart trundled near, ‘You didn’t put enough Maths teachers in there last time. I keep saying, I like nice juicy teachers in my pie!’
But then, without another grumbling word – ‘table manners’ meaning nothing to Knuckers – the huge foul dragon whipped up into the air and crashed down onto the cart right where it trundled, with one almighty ‘CHOMP!’ – and he almost took a slice out of the poor horse’s behind as he did so. ‘NEIGHHH!’
The Knucker chomped. He chewed. He licked his lips and he swallowed. He looked thoughtful. ‘Not bad,’ he growled. ‘Perhaps a tiny pinch too much of the… POISON AND DIRTY PANTS!’ The Knucker positively gargled and frothed with these last few words, before dropping down dead with a thunderous THUD!
As the Knucker didn’t want his head any more, Jimmy Puttock stepped down to hew it off and take it back to Lyminster. But, oh no! As Jimmy brought down his sword, the peg fell off his nose and the Knucker’s head let out one last foul rattling posthumous belch – ‘BLEEEEUUURGH!’ The pong was so bad, Jimmy and his poor horse both went out like candles…
But then, there was light. The darkness cleared, and Jimmy could see that he was in the Lyminster village square, surrounded by delighted cheering villagers, all hooting Jimmy’s name with glee: ‘JIMMY PUTTOCK! JIMMY PUTTOCK! THE KNUCKER KNACKERER!’
The village doctor was bending over the poor lad, relieved to see him awake, and kindly said, ‘Well done, well done, Jimmy Puttock, your cleverness has saved us all. And now you shall be rich and happy!’
‘But the Knucker’s breath…’ Jimmy gasped.
‘Oh yes, that will kill you,’ the Doctor replied gravely. ‘Nothing to be done about that. On the other hand, it is a very slow-working poison, so I’d give you maybe forty years to live. Perhaps fifty, if you don’t have too many pies.’
‘And therefore,’ the Mayor beamed, ‘you may have this guinea, and perhaps the hand of my wonderful daughter, Hazel. What do you think, Hazel?’
The charming and dazzling young lady sized him up. ‘Yeah, go on then,’ she smiled, ‘I do like ’em chunky.’
And so, the brave and clever chunky Jimmy Puttock married, was wise with his wealth and lived a very merry and ripe life until a fairly old age. He is now buried at St Mary’s church under the name of ‘The Knucker Slayer’, forever beloved for vanquishing the very last Knucker ever to be seen on these islands…
Of course, this was in the days before wildlife conservation.
THE END
LYMINSTER, W SUSSEX
When it comes to holidays, Brighton has always been the main location for anyone heading to the south-east coastline of England, but the county of Sussex boasts many great days out beyond that city’s rusty opulence. Lyminster is only a small village, but there’s still excitement to be had trying to track down the lair of the Knucker – there are Knuckerholes still to be found! And at St Mary’s church, you can even see the Slayer’s Slab, where brave Jimmy Puttock is said to rest. Bring your own pies.
westsussex.info
32. SIGURD’S HOWE
Dornoch, Highlands
A warning should be warned – this is probably not a great story for anyone who isn’t a big fan of severed heads. Those who are big fans of severed heads – perhaps you should seek professional help of some kind?
Sigurd Eysteinsson, the Norwegian lord who decided to call himself ‘Sigurd the Mighty’, was a huge fan of severed heads. Because Sigurd the Mighty was a Viking. They all had bloodthirsty names – Olaf the Merciless, Bjorn the Family-Smasher, and Conan the Serious Problem. But Sigurd the Mighty was one of the nastiest Vikings of all.
He lived up in frozen Norway, but while he and his brother Rognvald were sailing around in their longship one day they saw the green and pleasant isles of the Orkneys up in northern Scotland, and liked the look of them so much they and their band of equally violent and unpleasant Norse warriors stormed right over there, kicked the King of the Orkneys out (which is to say, sliced him into pieces) and declared the Orkneys their own private kingdom. This was the Viking way – in fact, they would soon decide to grab whole chunks of England in much the same spirit.
As Rognvald set off to find other countries to call his own, Sigurd remained behind to rule over the Orkneys. However, as a Viking, he soon got bored of all the paperwork, and decided to go and grab more bits of Scotland to add to his collection. He began snaking his way down the eastern shore, killing everyone who stood in his path.
Until, one day, he came upon the castle of Máel Brigte, otherwise known as ‘Máel Brigte the Buck-Toothed’. You wouldn’t have money on poor Máel Brigte to be the man to vanquish the mighty Sigurd. He was as skinny as a rake, no more than five feet tall, rather spotty and, as his name suggested, had big goofy teeth jutting from his overbite. When he saw Sigurd advancing on his castle, it was all he could do to stammer out:
‘Who… whoooo… hoo-hoo… WHO GOES THERE?’
‘It is Sigurd the Mighty, and your castle is pretty much mine already!’ roared the Viking, to hooting laughter from all his soldiers.
‘My castle is secure!’ squeaked Máel Brigte. ‘We shall defend it with all our might!’
‘As I said,’ Sigurd replied, ‘all your might won’t be enough, so I’m already trying to decide what colour to paint those ramparts.’
Máel Brigte’s soldiers did not like being laughed at, and they nudged their lord.
‘Go on, sir, we’re as good as that lot, we can beat them! Tell him!’
‘We won’t give up that easy, Sigurd!’ cried Máel Brigte, with growing confidence. ‘Any man of this land is equally able as any of you Norse nuisances! We shall do battle!’
‘Indeed we will, goofy!’ Sigurd replied, to bigger laughs. ‘Forty of my men will face forty of your men in the field of combat, and the winner gets the castle!’
‘Forty men?’
‘Only forty, yes.’
Máel Brigte did a quick headcount. He had a total of thirty-eight men. But there was nothing else for it. He gave a little scream, asked his old grannie and cousin Elspeth to put on some armour, and replied to Sigurd, ‘Very well, let the battle commence at dawn!’
‘Any time is good with me,’ Sigurd laughed, ‘but we’ll see you in the morning, toothy-boy!’
The next morning, Máel Brigte and his forty soldiers waited, shields before them and swords drawn and sharpened. Out of the morning mist stepped Sigurd, and forty other figures stood behind him.
‘I do love a bit of a morning scrap!’ Sigurd laughed. ‘Those are your forty men?’
‘They certainly are, the finest fighters of the North!’ Máel Brigte bravely replied. ‘Each able to take on anything you throw at us.’
‘They look as if they couldn’t even plunder a carrot from a bunny rabbit!’ hooted Sigurd with a snarl. ‘In fact, they look like such weaklings we probably didn’t even need to… cheat!’
And with that, each of the forty figures behind Sigurd suddenly doubled to eighty – half of them had been hiding behind another soldier’s back! Máel Brigte barely had a second to react to this treachery before Sigurd’s cry went up:
‘VIKINGS! BLOODY SLAUGHTER BEFORE BREAKFAST! HAHAHA!’
And the fight began. It was not a pleasant sight. You certainly wouldn’t have wanted to try and put a tent up in that field, not during the torrents of unspeakable violence which immediately burst forth, or afterwards, where barely a blade of grass was visible among the butchered remains of Máel Brigte’s army.
Máel Brigte himself fell victim to Sigurd’s own sword within the first 42 seconds of the battle, and true to form, Sigurd hacked off the poor buck-toothed loser’s head for his collection before trotting off to claim the now empty castle for himself. He put Máel Brigte’s head on his saddle, where all Vikings liked to show off the heads of soldiers they had killed, and he set off for home.
It was rather a long return journey to Orkney, though, and before too long Máel Brigte’s big buck-teeth began to rub against Sigurd’s rump. Sigurd was tough, of course; he barely noticed when the head’s teeth broke his skin, and just thought he’d put some cream on it later when he got home.
But as they camped that night, the wound in Sigurd’s leg seemed worse than he first thought. Máel Brigte’s teeth had sheared right through the skin as the head jangled around on Sigurd’s saddle, and the whole of Sigurd’s bum was already looking blackened, and smelling nasty. In the morning, he tried to walk, but failed. All his soldiers backed away at the foul stench – and, to cut a sickening story short, the greedy cruel Viking never saw another dawn. He was buried where he died, near a small Scottish town now known as Dornoch, and his burial mound was called ‘Sigurd’s Howe’.
Máel Brigte had beaten the big bully Sigurd the Mighty after all! Admittedly a bit late for him to celebrate it in any way, but as Sigurd’s servants gathered together his collection of severed heads after his funeral, they swore that one of them had a great big buck-toothed grin.
THE END
DORNOCH, HIGHLANDS
You would be easily forgiven for raising an eyebrow if a small town up in the far north Highlands of Scotland advertised itself for beach holidays. But Dornoch does have a distinct climate of its own, due to its sheltered position, which makes the usual perils of the frozen north less noticeable. It’s an ancient settlement with a cathedral – where Madonna had her son baptised, no less. But if you want to find Sigurd’s burial mound, you may need to cross a golf course or two to find Cyderhall Farm nearby, near the road to the disused Meikle Ferry. But as Sigurd Eysteinsson died in 892, there’s not a lot to see besides a lonely mound.
visitdornoch.com
33. LADY GODIVA
Coventry
Tax, believe it or not, can be a wonderful thing. The idea is that everyone in the country who makes a living gives a portion of what money they have to help the whole nation – this pays for security, health and wellbeing for every last woman, man, child and pet in the land. The problem starts when the powerful people who collect the taxes become greedy.
Very nearly one thousand years ago, a little before the Normans invaded and decided that they liked England rather a lot and would have it all, thank you very much, times were hard for most people. The Saxon nobles could swan around in their jewel-encrusted trousers, setting up churches and feeling good about themselves, but for most peasants, scratching a living in the fields, survival from season to season was challenge enough. There were very few nobles who even gave these poor people a second thought. But then there was Godiva.
Lady Godiva was married to a very powerful Earl called Leofric. This nobleman wasn’t necessarily a villain, and had happily used his enormous fortune to build a number of nunneries and suchlike in his Earldom of Mercia – a vast expanse of the English Midlands. Leofric and Godiva had also paid for the establishment of a monastery which had grown into the tiny city of Coventry.
The problem was that the King, Edward the Confessor (who wasn’t always confessing to crimes or anything, it was just a silly nickname which had stuck) found himself forever fighting off Vikings and other invaders. This cost lots of gold, so the King was always crying out to his nobles to raise taxes to pay for it all. These posh Saxons could have easily footed the bill themselves, obviously, but it was decided instead that it was much more fun to make the lowest of the low all put their hands in their pockets and pay for everything.
Godiva was a tall, striking woman, with the longest blonde hair that stretched right down to her shins. She was inclined to be a little vain, and loved her rich gowns and fine clothes, but she was not blind to the world around her. As the kindly Lady Godiva rode her fine chestnut mare through the dirty streets of Coventry, she could see that few people could afford to house and clothe themselves properly, let alone pay for the King’s endless battles.
The problem with people who have everything, like Leofric, is that they can easily forget that not everybody is quite so rich and cosy. Godiva was not like that. At bedtime one night, she brought up the subject of this tax unfairness with her husband, and the rich man groaned.
‘Oh, they can afford it all right!’ Leofric grumbled, ‘I swear I once saw one serf wearing a shoe on EACH FOOT!’
‘That is not funny,’ Godiva replied. ‘The taxes are too much! You have taxed their grain, their houses, their horses and their hats! You have taxed their beer and their cats and dogs and carts and their knees! It is not fair.’
‘Well okay, darling,’ Leofric laughed, ‘How would it be if we were to only tax their horses from now on?’
‘That would be a good start, my dear,’ Godiva replied.
‘Good. Then we will just add up all the taxes on the other things, and add that amount of money to the horse tax. Job done.’
‘How does that solve the problem?’ This was not at all a solution, as far as Godiva was concerned, it still that meant people would pay more than they could afford. Despite her husband’s patronising smirk, she insisted that all the taxes had to be scrapped – and that Leofric would be well advised to go and sleep on the sofa until he agreed to it. At this, Earl Leofric laughed fit to bust. He ignored Godiva, and climbed into bed.
‘I’ll tell you what, Godiva,’ he snorted, ‘You love your fine gowns so much, I’ll cancel all the taxes the day that you ride through the streets of Coventry stark naked! Not even a sock!’
And, still giggling, he turned over and slept. While Godiva formed a plan.
The next day at noon precisely, Earl Leofric stood in the city square preparing to order the people to pay his new ridiculously high horse tax. But what people? Where was everybody? The streets were empty, and silent besides the odd coughing dog.
