Note 5 — Early Poems (continued 3)

This is a folk-lore story which has its variants, Mr. Alfred Nutt tells me, in almost every country in Europe. The Lincolnshire version of it is given in Miss Peacock’s MS. collection of Lincolnshire folk-lore, of which she has most kindly sent me a copy, and it runs thus:— “There is a house in East Halton which is haunted by a hob-thrush.... Some years ago, it is said, a family who had lived in the house for more than a hundred years were much annoyed by it, and determined to quit the dwelling. They had placed their goods on a waggon, and were just on the point of starting when a neighbour asked the farmer whether he was leaving. On this the hobthrush put his head out of the splash-churn, which was amongst the household stuff, and said, ‘Ay, we’re flitting’. Whereupon the farmer decided to give up the attempt to escape from it and remain where he was.” The same story is told of a Cluricaune in Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South of Ireland. See The Haunted Cellar in p. 81 of the edition of 1862, and as Tennyson has elsewhere in Guinevere borrowed a passage from the same story (see Illustrations of Tennyson, p. 152) it is probable that that was the source of the story here, though there the Cluricaune uses the expression, “Here we go altogether”.