Rock. Stream. Wood. Dream.

Forest of  Bowland in flood, June 2012
Image courtesy of Martin's Bowland Blog


Recently I have received enquiries from folks researching their family history, the threads of which have led to them to The Tree I have planted on the internet.  A Tree which shelters more stories than is immediately obvious to the casual glance....or to one tunnel-visoned with tracking down  a particular person from precooked and masticated details and data.


Yesterday, I spent hours immersed in playing hide-and-seek with a particular ancestor, said to be a 'weak link in the chain', on the only basis that no evidence has been found which proves beyond doubt, that he is a descendant of those that came before him; or that he is the ancestor of those of us who have been spoonfed to believe that we are descended from him.


Thomas of Mockerkin or Moccassin as I fondly call him in a nod to his skill as a shoemaker; is purported have been born in 1603.  The same year that Elizabeth I died.


While some of the antipodean descendants squizzle over the veracity of Thomas' place in The Tree, we also have to take it on faith, that the dozens of family historians before us, checked and double-checked the connections because, bottom-line, we're connected to aristocracy. Us... and hundreds and thousands of other folks .  Certain descendants have dined-out for decades on a very famous story which links us to the Kings and Queens of Scotland and England. Would be a shame to lose the telling rights to such a rich post-prandial anecdote.


The stories in The Tree link my tribe to 'The Luck of Workington' - the agate cup given to Sir Henry Curwen by the unhappy Mary, Queen of Scots.  To Pendle Hill and young Jennet Device and old George Fox; to an enclave of Quakers nested within devout Catholic Cumbria; to the Pilgrimage of Grace and bow-bearers, shepherds, shoemakers and soulkeepers; to things that only rock, wood and stream can know. To great-grandfathers' grandmother, Mary Storey, who in the Census of 1851 was stated to be a pauper farmer's widow. 

Storey. Story. Storie. Storri. Stori. 

Names that are acrobats, shape-shifters and tricksters.


A little-known author, R. Storry Deans wrote The Trials of Five Queens in 1910 which can be read online for free.  A gift of knowledge from The Tree.

There is an abundance of lucks sheltered within the leaves on The Tree.  This talismanic tradition of lucks has been researched by James Beswick Whitehead and curiously it weaves its way back to having originated with Mary, Queen of Scots' gift to Sir Henry Curwen.  The story goes:

Mid-May 1568

After spending a night or two as prisoner-guest with the Curwens, Mary, the hapless Queen of Scots, was then conveyed to the mansion-house of my ancestor, Henry Fletcher, of Cockermouth Hall, who after playing host to Mary and her retinue, then conveyed her to Carlisle Castle.  Upon taking his leave of the doomed Queen, Henry Fletcher gifted Mary with 13 ells of crimson velvet, with which to make a robe befitting her station. 


Many decades ago I inherited 13 yards of black French velvet that belonged to my Fletcher grandmother, a seamstress.  Beautiful selkie-glossy fabric from which  my mother cut off a precious  piece so I could make a queenly robe for the Elizabeth I doll I had fashioned from an empty plastic dishwashing liquid bottle.  I was seven years old.  It was 1968.

"Picture Agate",  Scotch Pebble from Ayrshire, Scotland
Image smuggled from Minerals of Scotland


I grew up, not only reading Cinderella and  Snow White, but also the real-life historical stories of  Tudor women, such as those of the six wives of Henry VIII and the lives of his daughters and germs of ideas that I was too young to be aware of were seeded and carefully sheltered by an inner verderer.
Researchers and medical historians now suspect that Henry VIII was not so much cursed as he was poxed - syphilic.  A plausible reason for his bizarre behaviour, not to be confused with an excuse for the malignancies of narcissism.

Sew... I was never going to make good wife material.  Before Germaine Greer and the 1970s feminist movement trundled along, I had already been innoculated by the sense and sensibilities of Tudor Queens and other important females from herstory's pages. 

Cumbria was a traditional battleground in which the Scots and English squabbled.  After a few hundred years I reckon that sort of nonsense would get up the nose of the peasant farmers, and the most pragmatic message my ancestors have gifted to  me is: that the notion that humans have free will and choice is bollocks, when you consider the pre-existence of a broad range of variables called limiting factors.


Paranoia is still endemic to our human species. 

The discovery, by Dr. Glyn Davies, that the Musgrave will of 1677 explicitly refers to The Luck of Edenhall pushes back the date of the talismanic tradition to a period long before the Northern antiquities boom post-Culloden. The fact that roving antiquary Thomas Machell drew the glass in 1666 attests to an interest in it outside the immediate family. Research into family papers might uncover still earlier references to the tradition of Lucks. 

The objects themselves are very varied: glasses, drinking horns, metal bowls and even a trumpet! Sometimes they are engraved with couplets reminiscent of the fairy's warning at Edenhall and such objects are clearly tributes. Yet the new research opens the possibility that the Musgrave glass was not necessarily the first object to be called a Luck.

Is it possible that the tradition originated in 1568, when Mary, Queen of Scots thanked Sir Henry Curwen for his hospitality by giving him an agate cup or quaich with the blessing, "Luck to Workington"?

From Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser, 1969:

According to one tradition, during the four-hour journey the queen had a sudden premonition of the fate which awaited her in England, and ordered theboatman to take her after all to France; but the winds and tide were against her, and the boat went remorselessly on towards England. Nau mentions no such vacillation: when Queen Mary arrived at the small Cumberland port of Workington at weven in the evening, she seemed as elated as everby the heady wine of optimism. Queen Mary stumbled as she first set foot on English soil: this omen which might have been interpreted in a sinister light, was on the contrary taken by her followers as a sign that their queen was coming to take possession of the country.

Image: Nova Scotia Clams



At Workington, the queen rested and was given supper, while Lord Herries sent a message to Sir Henry Curwen of Workington Hall, whom he knew of old, to say that he had with him a young heiress whom he had carried off from Scotland with the hope of marrying her to Sir Henry's son (liar liar pants on fire).


The answer to this inviting proposition came back that Sir Henry was in London but that his house and servants were at Lord Herries' disposal. Already Mary's surprising and sudden arrival at the small port, combined with her mared height and dramatically beautiful appearance, were leading the inhabitants to guess only too easily that they had the famous Scottish queen in their midst. One of the Curwen servants, who was French, did not even have to guess: he recognized Queen Mary immediately and told Lord Fleming that he had seen her majesty before 'in better days'.



[Lady Fraser says nothing of the gift of a cup and there appears to be no early document to authenticate it. By 1900, a Curwen descendant was calling it The Luck of Workington and justifying the name by putting in Mary's mouth the hearty old English sentiment of "Luck to Workington". It may well be that Mary was grateful to the absent Sir Henry for the hospitality she was shown in his house. It is not impossible she did leave a cup in thanks; the fact she had little to give at this juncture makes the gesture touching. It may even be that a phrase such as "Luck to Workington" might be attempted as a courtesy to her host by the Francophone queen, though it rather misses the mark if the host is absent.

The agate cup maintains a dignified silence on these matters, aware that beauty has a limited use for truth. Like the Luck of Edenhall, it seems set to outlive the great house it was said to protect.]

I suppose the 13 ells of velvet story from my ancestor is also an embellishment of fancy.  However I did make an Elizabeth I doll from an empty plastic dishwashing liquid bottle:

Palmolive ~ you're soaking in it!