Hag-riding in Nineteenth-century West Country England and Modern Newfoundland: An Exalllination of An Experience-centred Witchcraft Tradition

REFERENCES

• Robert Ness, ‘The Old Hag Phenomenon as Sleep Paralysis: A Biocultural Interpretation’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2 (1978), pp. 15–39; David J. Hufford, The Terror that Comes in the Night (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982); David J. Hufford, ‘A New Approach to the “Old Hag”: The Nightmare Tradition Reexamined’, in American Folklore Medicine, ed. Wayland D. Hand (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 73–83.
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• This definition of hagged may derive from the experience of hag-riding in that the victim feels a physical pressure oppressing him or her, though this is usually described as being akin to a pushing rather than a pulling force. However, in a Dorset court case involving hag-riding a witness stated how she had said to the defendant concerning his experience, that ‘she hoped he had had a good “tug”’: ‘to tug’ meaning, of course, ‘to pull with great effort’. (Dorset County Chronicle, 27 July 1871.)
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• For discussions of the Newfoundland trade see St John Chadwick, Neufoundland: Island into Province (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Glanville J. Davies, ‘Dorset in the Newfoundland Trade’, Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society Proceedings, 101 (1979), pp. 1–5; C. R. Fay, Life and Labour in Newfoundland (Cambridge: Heffer, 1956); Walter Gordon Handcock, ‘English migration to Newfoundland’, in The Peopling of Neufoundland, ed. John J. Mannion (St Johns: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1977), pp. 15–48.
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• See J. D. A. Widdowson, ‘A survey of current folklore research in Newfoundland with special reference to the English West Country’, Devonshire Association Report and Transactions, 101 (1969), pp. 183–96; Gerald M. Sider, ‘Christmas mumming and the New Year in outport Newfoundland’, Past and Present, 71 (1976), pp. 102–25.
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• See Harold Paddock, ‘The actuation problem for gender change in Wessex versus Newfoundland’, in Dialeds of English, eds. Peter Trudgill and J. K. Chambers (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 29–49.
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• Marianne R. Dacombe (ed.), Dorset Up Along and Down Along (Gillingham: T. H. Brickell, 1935), p. 99. Numerous examples of hag-riding victims hearing footsteps have been recorded by Hufford.
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• Dorset County Chronicle, 27 July 1871; Dorset County Express, 25 July 1871.
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• Somerset County Herald, 9 January 1875; Chambers’s fournal, 17 July 1880, p. 464. Amongst Hufford’s respondents one stated hearing ‘moaning’ (p. 194), another heard ‘grunting’ (p. 42), and several heard heavy breathing (pp. 90, 185, 194).
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• Thomas Hardy, ‘The Withered Arm’, in The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan & Co., 1928), pp. 73–74; first published in Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1888. It is surprising that Hardy did not use the term ‘hag-riding’ in relation to Rhoda Brook’s experience. He was certainly aware of the term, for in Tess of the d’Urbervilles a friend of Tess’s, remarking on her pale hue, exclaims: ‘Why, souls above us, your face is as if you’d been hagrode!’ (London: Macmillan, 1974, p. 375). Also, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, when Michael Henchard reprimands his daughter for her use of dialect words, Hardy recounts that subsequently, ‘when she had not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she had been “hag-rid”, but that she had “suffered from indigestion” ’ (London: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 200).
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• See Hufford, The Terror, pp. 149–70; Ness, ‘The Old Hag Phenomenon’, pp. 21–29; Yasuo Hishikawa, ‘Sleep Paralysis’, in Guilleminault et al, Narcolepsy, pp. 97–124; Sim C. Liddon, ‘Sleep Paralysis and Hypnagogic Hallucinations: Their Relationship to the Nightmare’, Archives of General Psychiatry 17 (1967), pp. 88–96.
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• Hufford, The Terror, pp. 15–16.
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• Somerset County Herald, 9 January 1875.
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• Narcolepsy is a minor nervous disorder resulting in the sufferer having an irresistible tendency to fall asleep during the daytime. Sufferers can experience abnormal manifestations of REM sleep, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis and cataplexy.
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• Somerset County Herald, 9 January 1875.
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• The Somerset Year Book, 24 (1930), p. 41; reprinted from the St. James Medley, August 1862.
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• For a discussion of early theories of the pathology of nightmares see Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (London: Hogarth Press, 1931), pp. 11–55.
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• See J. A. Hadfield, Dreams and Nightmares (London: Penguin, 1954), p. 5.
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• Somerset Year Book, 24 (1930), p. 41.
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• The following account is based on the extensive reports of the trial in the Dorset County Chronicle, 27 July 1871; Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette, 25 July 1871.
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• Cited in Michael Donnelly, Managing the Mind (Tavistock Publications: London, 1983), pp. 68, 72.
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• For a discussion of the strength of popular belief in witchcraft in the nineteenth century see Owen Davies, ‘The Decline in the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Lancaster, 1995
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• Lindgren, ‘Moncur Conway’, p. 497.
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• Ibid., p. 497.
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• C. Savage and D. C. Leighton, ‘The problem of cross-cultural identification of psychiatric disorders’, in Approaches to cross-cultural Psychiatry, eds. J. M. Murphy and A. H. Leighton (Ithaca, 1965); Neki et al., ‘Witchcraft’.
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• David Hufford has convincingly argued that one meaning of the word ‘haggard’ derives from a corruption of ‘hag-rod’. ‘Haggard’ refers, of course, to someone looking wom-out and exhausted, as people generally were after being hag-ridden; Hufford, The Terror, p. 54.
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• Ibid., p. 245.
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