|
From:
John Prior [[email protected]]
Subject: Mother Pryor's Money
Things
have been fairly quiet on the List lately so thought you might
appreciate
this story from Essex, England.
I
came across it in a book in 'The King's England' series under Great
Hallingbury,
Essex.
An Odd story
Both
tower and chancel of Great Hallingbury Church must have been familiar
to old John
Brand in Queen Elizabeth's reign, one of the queerest characters
a village
ever had. So
queer was his story that it
came to be written in
the church
archives, and
there it is
told how his troubles began one Christmas Eve, when an
angel of
the devil
appeared before him in a vision and showed him plainly where he
could find
Mother Pryor's money. He found it,
£7 18s; but that was not the
end, for
three months later the angel came and told him it were better to
kill himself
than to marry the widow he had in mind.
Determined to take
his advice,
John Brand began on a Monday by taking a dagger, and was only
saved by
his friends. On Wednesday he put a sack over his head and plunged
headlong
into John Pryor's pond, seven feet deep. The
next Sunday he "took
rat's-bayne
and drank it in a messe of potage at his dinner, which pained
him so, and
could not die. So he took a hay halter and hanged himself upon
an oak
beside his house, and lieth buried at Hangman's Oak."
This site was last updated 04/16/00
|