Folktales in Pre-Industrial England

In William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1599), Benedict jokingly quotes the tag, “It is not so, nor “twas not so, but indeed God forbid it should be so,” saying it is from an old tale. To explain this, a scholar in 1821 put on record the story “Mr. Fox,” which he had learned from his great-aunt; it is an excellent cante fable version of ATU 955, The Robber Bridegroom. Its popularity in England is confirmed by about a dozen shorter variants found as local legends. Folktale allusions probably also underlie the Fool”s words in King Lear (1623), “Child Rowland to the dark tower came, / His word was still Fie foh and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man.” The couplet is a common tag in tales about the killing of giants, but the first line is mysterious. In 1814, Robert Jamieson claimed that it refers to the story of the two brothers rescuing their sister, but the ballad he offered in evidence is no longer accepted as genuine.

Shakespeare had a decisive-some would say, damaging-influence on the way fairies were portrayed in English literature and art. When he put them on stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), and gave a playful description of Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet (1597), wherein he spoke of them as very small, pretty, harmless creatures. His Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow) is still a mocking trickster, as in folk tradition, but never dangerous. Although Shakespeare must surely have known folktales, he never borrowed a plot from them.

Complete m€archen begin to reach print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A chapbook entitled Jack and the Giants (c. 1750-60) is the earliest surviving version of the story of “Jack the Giant-Killer,” a medley of “stupid ogre” and giant-killing episodes (including ATU 328, The Boy Steals the Ogre’s Treasure; and ATU 1088, Eating/Drinking Contest), set in the reign of King Arthur. It was widely known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as literary allusions prove; some episodes were localized in Cornwall. A lively oral telling, dating from 1909, is given in Ella M. Leather’s The Folklore of Herefordshire (1912). Equally popular was Jack and the Beanstalk (ATU 328A), but the surviving chapbooks (1807) are poor texts, so the best version is a recreation from childhood memories by the folklorist Joseph Jacobs in 1890. In Norfolk, a cycle of local tales about Tom Hickathrift was printed in a chapbook (c. 1660) and is still orally current; the tales describe his huge strength, which terrified every farmer he worked for, and how he fought and killed giants.

The History of Tom Thumb the Little is a booklet of 1621 by “R. J.” (probably Richard Johnson, 1573-1659?), but there are allusions to the story (ATU 700, Thumbling) several decades earlier. All of these publications catered to readers who liked down-to-earth stories, with humor and violence; none of the more romantic wonder tales were printed. Native English versions of the latter certainly existed, but before anybody thought of collecting and printing them, a flood of foreign ones appeared-first those of Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont; then those of the Brothers Grimm; and finally those of Hans Christian Andersen. Selections from these were soon translated and printed in chapbooks and other cheap editions, as were a few stories from the Arabian Nights; they became thoroughly integrated into English popular culture, where their foreign origins were rapidly forgotten. The native wonder tales lived on, precariously, as oral stories told among working-class people, and sometimes by nursemaids to children of middle-class families, but publishers and scholars ignored them until late in the nineteenth century.