This legend concerns a wise man known as Fiddler Fynes. A farmer is robbed, and approaches the wiseman asking for help to find the robber. The wiseman tells the farmer to look into a mirror, and he will see the thief’s face. He does so, and recognises one of his labourers. Fynes then tells the farmer to crack the mirror, and the next day the thief will have a cut in the corresponding place on his face. The next day, he confronts the farm hand, who indeed has a cut on his cheek, and forgives him.

A different tale concerning Fiddler Fynes is told by James Alpass Penny in Folklore Round Horncastle (Morton & Sons, 1915). In this anecdote, Fynes helps a man to recover a stolen watch and chain, and to avoid being poisoned by arsenic.

Maureen James tells the former tale in Lincolnshire Folk Tales (2013). James Obelkevitch, in Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825-75 (OUP, 1976), notes that in the nineteenth century, a schoolmaster from Kirkstead called ‘Fiddler’ Fynes, set himself up as a wise man or cunning man. In the early seventeenth century, Sir Henry Fynes had converted the ruined Kirkstead Abbey (of which only one tall, thin fragment now remains above ground) into a country house, though by the start of the nineteenth century the site had been abandoned.

Words by RORY WATERMAN