English folklore
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A tithe surveyor arrives in an Oxfordshire parish in 1843 to map every field and account for every acre. The older records name a settlement called Slyne Birch, cleared by a local lord four centuries earlier. The dead do not want remembrance. They want someone to finish their paperwork.
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A minor landholder disputes a royal tax demand and is pushed into outlawry. Based on the 1225 Yorkshire pipe rolls entry for Robert Hod. Could this be the origin of Robin Hood?
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In 1780s Shropshire, a parish midwife watches a man called Odd Man Dodd move between three townships. Three people die. The children learn a rhyme. Nobody asks where the words came from.
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In St Barrow’s, Mistress Grimshaw’s charity opens her purse only for those who beg aloud before the parish. Judith Cox, widowed and cornered, finds a way to make the purse answer the want it knows best.
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Spearhafoc was an eleventh-century monk, artist, and goldsmith, appointed Bishop of London under Edward the Confessor. Before the crown intended for Edward could be completed, Spearhafoc vanished with the king’s gold and jewels.
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William Cox tends the gardens at Othery Grange. He also tends the truth. Five Regency courtships, five birds, and one gardener who learns that an invented omen, once spoken, never stays his alone.
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Ralph Travers, a curate in Exeter, struggles with his conscience after inadvertently making the Devil, Bucky, known to children through a rhyme. As children start disappearing, he faces the consequences of his actions.
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In a series of intertwined tales, women at fairs confront the consequences of seeking love through an ancient ash charm. Each one learns that desires shape their fates, often leading to regret.
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At St Mildred’s, every blessing has a shadow. Cecily Scratcher waits beneath the lychgate to tell seven old warnings of beauty, grace, sorrow, roads, love, labour, and goodness, and of the children made to carry what adults should not.
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About a 40-minute read or 1hr 3-minute listen. In Hagley Stile, magpies are never merely birds. One by one, the old rhyme becomes a reckoning as sorrow, joy, birth, theft, silver, gold and secrets gather beneath black-and-white wings.