I am by no means clear that the story may not have its foundation in the fact recorded in the following inquest:
“Coram Johannem King, coron., Wardæ de Chestræ, apud Hilton, 3 Jul. 7 Jac. 1609.” (And here follows a report in Latin.)
Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that the unhousel’d spirit of Roger Skelton, whom in the hay-field the good Hilton ghosted, took the liberty of playing a few of those pranks which are said by writers of grave authority to be the peculiar privilege of those spirits only who are shouldered untimely by violence from their mortal tenements.
“Ling’ring in anguish o’er his mangled clay, The melancholy shadow turn’d away, And follow’d through the twilight grey.”
A free pardon for the above manslaughter appears on the rolls of Bishop James, dated 6th September, 1609.
I will only add that, among the Harleian MSS., the same legend is told with some variations, in which this “cauld lad” is termed the “_Pale Boy_ of Hilton.”
This confusion of _our_ mythology is as conclusive of the fiction of all the mysterious legends of the moderns, as the jumble which the classic poets have made of _their_ monsters. If we read Lempriere, the genealogy of the classic monster is involved in a maze of impious confusion; and the mythology of _Chimera_, and _Echidna_, and _Typhon_, _Geryon_, and _Cerberus_, and the _Hydra_ and _Bellerophon_, and _Ortha_ and the _Sphynx_, and the _Nemæan Lion_, and the _Minotaur_, and the demoniac records of their origin, it is almost profanation even to reflect on.
But when Martianus Capella tells us that devils have aërial bodies, that they live and die, and yet, if cut asunder, soon re-unite; and when Bodine asserts, in his “Solution of Natural Theology,” that spirits and angels are _globular_, as being of the most perfect shape, I confess I feel more disposed to smile at their imposture than to frown, were it not for their utter worthlessness.
Yet all the allegories which adorn our legends are not so remote from truth or nature. The vampires are said to have gloated over the sacrifices of human life, while the gouls and afrits, the hyenas in human shape, not only fed on dead carcases, but, by a special transmigration, took possession of a corpse. On this fable is founded the monstrous legend of “Assuet and Ajut.” I confess it monstrous; but indeed there is little exaggeration even in these tales of horror, if we may believe, for once, Master Edmund Spenser, in that part of his record of the rebellion of Desmond, in Ireland, which treats of the Munster massacre:—“Out of every corner of the woodes and glennes, they came creeping forth upon their handes, for their legges could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghostes, crying out of their graves: they eat the dead carrions—happy were they could they find them—yea, and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves.” That episode also, in the “Inferno” of Dante, in which Count Ugolino wears out days and nights in gnawing the skull of an enemy, may well seem a fiction; but even this hellish repast is but a prototype of the savage rage for scalping and cannibalism among the Indian hordes of America.