‘bull-begger’: an early modern scare-word
Henk Dragstra
The Bull-Begger: Spirit, Thing, or Human Being?
In modern fairy dictionaries produced for the popular market, the ‘Bull- beggar’ appears as a ‘tricksy spirit’, lying in wait on the road playing dead in order to scare travellers.1 This description of it can be traced to Ruth L. Tongue’s reports on the folklore of Creech Hill, Somerset, in the early twentieth century.2 But Tongue’s ‘Bull-Beggar’ was as exceptional as it was local: to represent it as if in this particular guise it were generally known throughout England and throughout English history would be a falsification.3 It was generally well-known once; but the question what it was is much tricksier than fairy catalogues would have us believe. The earliest known uses of the word ‘bull-begger’, or rather, those occurring in the earliest extant texts, date from the 1580s.4 In his address ‘To the Readers’ prefacing his The Discouerie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot spoke of ‘Robin goodfellowe’ as ‘that great and ancient bulbegger’.5 In an oft-quoted chapter ‘Of vaine apparitions, how people haue been brought to fear bugges’, he enumerated the many terrors with which English chil- dren of his generation had been scared into obedience:
1 So e.g. in Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures (London, 1976); Carol Rose, Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes and Gob- lins: An Encyclopedia of the Little People (Bodmin, Cornwall, 1998); Mark Alexander, A Com- panion to the Folklore, Myths, and Customs of Britain (Stroud, 2002), all art. ‘Bullbeggar’; the phrase quoted is used by Alexander. 2 R. L. Tongue, Somerset Folklore, ed. K. M. Briggs (London, 1965), pp. 121–22. Under the heading ‘The Creech Hill Bull-Beggar’, Tongue (or Briggs) cites three stories collected orally from unidentified informants; in none of these is the word ‘bull-beggar’ actually used, so that it may be merely the collector’s or editor’s label. But the word was known in Somerset; see next note. 3 Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary (London, 1898) mentions instances in Scotland, the North Country, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and Devon, but his definitions go into no further detail than ‘A hobgoblin; anything that causes a scare; a scarecrow’. In the example from West Devonshire he cited, Wright rendered bèol-bagúr as ‘ghost’. 4 Although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources spell ‘bull-beggar’, I shall use the spelling with e as default to emphasize the word’s emergence in the sixteenth century. 5 Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, Wherein the Lewde Dealing of Witches and Witchmongers is Notablie Detected . . . (London, 1584), sig. B ii recto. 172 henk dragstra
our mothers maids . . . haue so fraied vs with bull beggers, spirits, witches, vrchens, elues, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the can- sticke [sic], tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, coniurors, nym- phes, changlings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob- gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes . . .6 A year later, John Higins in The Nomenclator translated Latin terricula- mentum as ‘A scarebug: a bulbegger: a sight that frayeth and frighteth’.7 Both Scot’s and Higins’s instances testify that the bull-begger was scary, and the words ‘bugs’ and ‘scarebug’ suggest that it was an imaginary crea- ture; nevertheless Scot made it clear that those childhood fears continued to haunt the adult imagination, especially at night and in churchyards.8 Higins translated Maniae as ‘Hobgobblins, robbin goodfellow, bloudy- bone, raw head, and such like imagined spirits, as nurses doe fraye their babes withal, to make them still’: the absence of a specific reference to the nursery when he mentioned a ‘bulbegger’ seems to imply that the latter was also feared by adults.9 Scot considered such fear a mark of weakness: phantoms like bull-beggers ‘specially are spied and feared of sick folke, children, women, and cowards, who through weakness of minde and body, are shaken with vain dreames and continual fear’.10 Both authors therefore seem to have looked upon bull-beggers, though feared by some people, as purely imaginary creatures. A close look at Scot’s list shows that it includes witches and conjurors, qualities commonly ascribed to existing individuals; but as the 1651 title of his book declares, he regarded these too as ‘but imaginary erronious conceptions’.11 What must be an earlier instance of the word has been recorded in John Strype’s late seventeenth-century biography of Sir Thomas Smith, who died in 1577. The appendices to the book include an oration by Smith in which he says:
6 Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, pp. 152–53. 7 The Nomenclator, or Remembrancer of Adrianus Iunius Physician, trans. John Higins (London, 1585). 8 Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, p. 153. 9 Cf. Louise Sylvester, ‘Naming and Avoiding Naming Objects of Terror: A Case Study’, in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen et al. (Berlin, New York, 2000), pp. 277–92. 10 Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft, p. 152. 11 Scot’s Discovery of VVitchcraft: Proving the Common Opinions of Witches Contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars . . . To Be But Imaginary Erronious Conceptions and Novelties (London, 1651).