I902 Folk-lore 255 



Folk=lore.— I. 



Shagfoals. 



By W. H. Bernard Saunders. 



I KNOW of no work by any naturalist, ancient or modern, 

 which contains a description of the Shagfoal, and I think I 

 am safe in asserting that he has never yet been figured. 

 There is no museum in Europe that contains a specimen 

 of him, and I am not aware that any geologist has dis- 

 covered any trace of him. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias 

 may be searched, even for his name, but they will probably 

 be searched in vain. 



It is to some of the quaint old villages of Northampton- 

 shire or Cambridgeshire that inquirers will have to go to 

 find what a shagfoal is. 



According to all that may be there learned of him, he 

 is an extraordinary creature, for he varies in form and 

 colour in each village. In the old-world village of Barnack 

 in Northamptonshire, with its Saxon church - tower still 

 remaining very much as it was when the King of Mercia 

 and his Saxon ealdormen held their councils there, the 

 shagfoal is a monster indeed. The villagers — not the rising 

 generation perhaps — will tell of "the great spectral bear — 

 the shagfoal." But not many miles away, in the little 

 township of Thorney in Cambridgeshire, where the Duke 

 of Bedford holds sway, the shagfoal is a spectre, " half a 

 horse and half a dog." Which half is horse and which dog 

 I am not able to state. In this case, as at Barnack, it is 

 of huge dimensions. At another village, Ailesworth, not 

 many miles from either of these places, the shagfoal has a 

 very indistinct form, but is " large and has flaming eyes." 



Let us look in at this old stone cottage in the village of 

 Barnack, where resides the aged widow Goodwin, in her 

 eighty-first year. She was born in the cottage next door, 

 and her forebears for generations have lived in Barnack. 

 She has many tales to tell of the shagfoal, and she knows 



