Sneezing Cats and Eggshell Witch Boats

Sussex Superstitions

If your cat sneezes once indoors, get it outside quick! Three indoor sneezes from a cat will bring the whole family down with colds. After eating an egg, break a hole in the bottom of the shell to stop witches putting to sea in it. A magpie seen on your left brings bad luck, unless you take off your hat and bow to it.

These are just three of 195 ‘startling superstitions’ collected by Charlotte Latham, wife of the Vicar of Fittleworth, in 'Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868'.

Mrs Latham tried to find out the reasons for people’s beliefs. When she asked why people took their hats off to magpies, ‘they always answered that it was a bad bird, and knew more than it should do, and was always looking about and prying into other people's affairs.’

My favourite answer to such a ‘why’ question is a note in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems: ‘I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observations to the moon to protect his flocks, replied, ‘I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t!’’

'FAIRISEES. (Fairieses.) Fairies.
By an unfortunate use of the reduplicated plural, the Sussex country people confuse the ideas of fairies and Pharisees in a most hopeless manner.'

The Reverend W.D.Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect, 1875

Pook's Dyke, a Bronze Age earthwork on Itford Hill near Southease

Charlotte Latham argues that fairies were once ‘extremely common in Sussex’, based on many place-names including ‘Pook’ (the Sussex version of ‘Puck’ or the Irish ‘Pooka’). But belief was dying out and it’s fitting that two of the best known fairy stories from 19th century Sussex are of funerals. Latham says she was shown a fairy’s burial place on the mound (Park Mount), the motte and bailey castle in Pulborough: 'The very place of burial is pointed out to you...and it would be hard to find a more fitting spot for such a funeral train to assemble at.'

William Blake witnessed a fairy's funeral in his cottage garden at Felpham:

''Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, madam?' he once said to a lady, who happened to sit by him in company. 'Never, sir!' was the answer. 'I have,' said Blake, 'but not before last night. I was walking alone in my garden, there was great stillness among the branches and flowers and more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.''

Allan Cunningham, Life of Blake, 1830

The cottage now offers a virtual tour, complete with the fairies he encountered there.

Surviving Superstitions

In 2016, the Worthing folklorist Chris Hare held a survey to find how many of the superstitions recorded by Mrs Latham survived. He discovered that Sussex people still believed in ghosts and omens, and they are still greeting magpies (asking ‘How’s your wife?’). People no longer fear witchcraft, though three respondents knew about eggshells being used as witch boats. Our disbelief has almost completely killed off the fairies, though one respondent claimed to have seen a 'rather malevolent' fairy in the bedroom of his flat as a child. 

'Every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.'  J.M.Barrie, Peter Pan

The Hartington Pub in Brighton has a Fairy Garden.

You can read about the survey in Hare’s wonderful book, The Secret Shore. Several of Hare’s respondents were retired fishermen, who described so many unlucky omens it’s a wonder that they ever managed to get to sea. He writes, 'One former fisherman told us that there was a debate as to which was more unlucky to have on board: a Royal Navy seaman or an umbrella!'

For good luck, fishermen kept holed flints in their boats. Lucky holed stones are a big part of Sussex folklore.  From the 1920s, H.S.Toms, curator of Brighton Museum, obsessively documented and collected them. He found them nailed to barn doors, hanging above beds (to prevent nightmares), tied to lobster pots, dangling from perambulators and car axles, and worn around the neck and on watch chains. In 1928, there was even one in the bar of Brighton's King and Queen pub, protecting the Australian wines. Toms grew so good at spotting these stones that he once identified a bunch, nailed to a shed, from a train ‘going at great speed’.

These are sometimes called hagstones, from the custom of hanging them in stables to protect horses from being ridden to exhaustion by witches during the night. Brasses hung around the horses' necks were also protective.

I have some hagstones of my own which I found on the beach. I’ve put them outside the back of my house, inside a horseshoe (pointing up so the luck doesn’t drain out).

Why did I do this? 

I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t!

Sources

John Behague, Lucky Sussex, Pomegranate Press, 1998 (records and photographs from the H.S.Toms Archive of Flint and Folklore)
Chris Hare, The Secret Shore: Tales of Folklore and Smuggling from Sussex and Hampshire, South Downs Society, 2016
Charlotte Latham, Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868 Folk-Lore Record, I, 1878
Jacqueline Simpson, The Folklore of Sussex, Batsford, 1973

This is an expanded version of an article published in Brighton's Viva magazine in December 2018