Codicote
Sissavernes, earlier Sissavens, Farm at Codicote probably gets its name from a historical lord of the manor, William de Sisvierne, mentioned in 1166. In the…
Cheshunt
David Hughson (Dr David Pugh) writes in his Walks through London … with the Surrounding Suburbs (1817): Passing on to Cheshunt: here is a plain…
Cassiobury
The great mansion of Cassiobury, demolished in 1927, was the home of the Earls of Essex for over 250 years and was said to be…
Aldbury
The children of Aldbury once lived in fear of the bogeyman Simon Harcourt. A barrister of the Inner Temple and lord of Pendley Manor (1694–1724),…
Agdell
Memories were still vivid in the 1930s of ‘the Agdell ghost’. Edwin Grey, in Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village (1935), remembered listening to working…
Balinese Mythology
The mythology of the Indonesian island of Bali is a mixture of Balinese Hinduism and earlier animistic traditions. It also has been influenced by recent…
Hergest Court
In the nineteenth century, many tales were told of the eerie happenings in and around Hergest Court, a fifteenth-century manor house a little over a…
Hereford
According to the Bible, to defraud others of part of their land by secretly shifting boundary markers is a particularly serious sin; ‘cursed be he…
Dorstone
In the nineteenth century and earlier, there was a fairly widespread belief that on one night of the year anyone bold enough to keep vigil…
Bronsil Castle
Richard Gough, an eighteenth-century antiquary who published in 1789 a translation of William Camden’s Britannia with additional material, describes a curious heirloom associated with the…