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The Faithful Servant
A fairly widely reported story tells of a servant at Girsby Manor in 1784 who is threatened with being flayed alive by a band of robbers if he doesn’t help them to rob the home. Instead, he tells his master, and the robbers are captured and later executed and gibbeted. The story doesn’t end there,…
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In the Box
During a cholera outbreak, a farm labourer heads home to Frog Hall, south of New York (the little one near Coningsby), and sees a horse and cart bearing a coffin, so he asks who is in it. ‘Your own wife’, he is told…
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King John’s Lost Jewels
In 1216, King John was campaigning against rebel barons, which took him through Norfolk and on to Lincolnshire. It is said he sent his baggage ahead, via a more direct route than the one he would take himself, and that all was lost in a tidal surge…
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The Langrick Werewolf
The story of a man who, in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, is said to have dug up the body of a human with a wolf’s head on Langrick Fen, and taken it home. That night, the living manifestation of the beast apparently smashed his window…
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The Haxey Hood
The Haxey Hood is a game, played annually on the twelfth day of Christmas. It involves a ‘lord’, a ‘fool’, eleven ‘boggins’ including a ‘chief boggin’ and anyone else who wants to join in – usually a few hundred people.
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Havelok and Grim
The name Grimsby comes from the Old Norse male name Grímr, and the suffix ‘by’, which denotes a settlement. That is all we know for fact, but there hangs a tale. The tale is as follows: Havelok, rightful king of the Danes, is brought up by a lowly…
Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project 