This following story is not cryptozoological in nature, but it is most definitely fortean, and it gives a useful insight into how stories can mutate.
Clovelly is a fascinating village built on the sides of a very steep hill leading down to the sea. If you are energetic enough, it is a good idea to walk down the cobbled high street to the harbour, and enjoy a drink in one of the village’s two pubs. Although the village is very touristy it is well worth a visit.
When you get to the bottom look east along the beach and, just above the high tide line you will see a large cave. This is where, three hundred years ago, a fearsome and unpleasant family were supposed to live.
Having been brought up in Hong Kong my family moved to North Devon in 1971, when I was eleven. My paternal grandmother’s family had been from the area. She had grown up in the village, and the Lady of the Manor was her godmother, and used to regale her with tales of the local folklore. As a child of eleven or twelve my Grandmother used to tell me stories, one of which was an extremely sanitised version of the story of The Cannibals of Clovelly.
Many years later, as my interest in the weird and wonderful grew, I started digging into the legend, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t just a tall-tale of my grandmother’s.
`The history of John Gregg, and his family of robbers and murderers` is preserved in an eight-page chapbook - a particular genre of pocket-sized booklet, popular from the sixteenth through to the later part of the nineteenth century - in the Pearse Chope collection at Bideford. It is anonymous, and undated, but probably dates from the late 18th Century.
It tells the macabre tale of how the Gregg family took up their abode in a cave near Clovelly, where they lived for about twenty-five years, without visiting any town or city. According to the story, during this time they became fearsome predators upon their fellow men, and they allegedly robbed over a thousand persons, and ate the corpses of all those whom they robbed.
They were eventually discovered by the powers that be, and the king himself came with 400 men to hunt them out. Their cave was discovered containing "such a multitude of arms, legs, thighs, hands and feet, of men, women and children hung up in rows, like dry'd beef and a great many lying in pickle". John's charming family, consisting of his wife, eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grand-sons and fourteen grand-daughters begotten by incest were taken to Exeter and next day conducted under a strong guard to Plymouth where they were executed without trial.
It is difficult to tell from the original chap-book whether they unnamed author was more offended by the cannibalism, or the incest. Certainly, he seemed to take a prurient interest in describing both, and – in places – the chap-book reads more like a piece of pornography than a sober account of a historical event.
There is just one problem with the story of John Gregg and his family: None of it is true!
The story is notably similar to a sixteenth century tale from Scotland.
Sawney Bean was born in East Lothian, the son of an honest hedger and ditcher in the late 16th century. He ran away with a girl and settled in a large cave below Bennane Head in Galloway, on the south-west cost of Scotland. They lived there for 25 years having a family of forty-six members by incestuous means - eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen grand-daughters.
Already we see that the accounts of the two families are startlingly similar. Indeed the fact that the figures are identical would tend to suggest that whoever wrote the chap-book about John Gregg, merely copied the relevant statistics from one of the many accounts of the capture and trial of Sawney Bean.
Bean and his family were also blamed for the disappearances of a thousand travellers. This is the population of a medium sized village even today, but it is reassuring to note that the inefficiency of local government officials is nothing new, because despite a spate of disappearances which verged towards the genocidal, it took a quarter of a century for the powers that be to do anything about it!
Dismembered limbs were washed up on local beaches, but all attempts to locate the source failed. The Bean tribe were finally uncovered around 1600 when a couple who were returning home from a fair were ambushed and captured. The husband escaped, after having witnessed his wife`s throat being cut. The female cannibals drank her blood and then disembowelled her. The appearance of other travellers then forced a retreat by the Beans who escaped through the woods to their lair. The incident was reported to the Glasgow magistrates, who in turn, informed The King.
James VI, together with four hundred men and bloodhounds took to the fields, but missed the cave entrance, not thinking that this slit in the rock could conceal such a cavern. Some of the dogs, however, entered and filled the cave with their baying.
Beyond, in the shadows, the cannibals lay and watched, and, after a fight, were finally subdued and roped together for the journey to the Tolbooth jail in Edinburgh.
No trial was held. They were taken to Leith where the men were executed by having their hands and feet severed so that they would bleed to death. They were watched by the women, who were then burned in three large bonfires.
So ended the tribe of Bean.
Recorded cannibalism in Scotland, by the way, dates back to 1339 in the Perth area, where - according to Scottish Fortean, Tom Anderson - for years, children were the prey of a local tribe before they were caught. However, most authorities now accept that the story of Sawney Bean is a complete myth. Writing in Wikipedia the free internet encyclopaedia, Sean Thomas expresses significant doubt about the accuracy of the Sawney Bean legend:
"...from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean's reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI, whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before."This dating could place the murders as far back as the days of Bruce, or even Macbeth. Thomas continues,
"Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years. Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership ... “Thomas also notes that newspapers and diaries during the era when Sawney Bean was supposedly active make no mention of ongoing disappearances of hundreds of persons.
However, the final nail in the coffin of the veracity of both stories comes from nutrition researchers, who claim that a group of forty-eight would have consumed far more people than alleged in the Newgate Calendar. In order to survive for some twenty-five years, the Beans would have depopulated the entire southwestern region of Scotland, and presumably the Greggs would have eaten practically everyone in North Devon, and probably would have started munching their way through the inhabitants of Cornwall as well!
So if the story of Sawney Bean is made up, then, as the story of the `Cannibals of Clovelly` is merely a fairly shoddy copy of the story, then it has to be fictional as well! However, we are left with the million pound (or thousand corpse) question. Why would anyone bother to make something like this up?
According to the late Anthony Hippeseley-Coxe, a well known folklorist and ghost researcher who was an acquaintance of my parents in the late 1970s, the truth behind the story is almost more interesting than the story itself. He claims that the story had been concocted by the then Lord of the Manor, the predecessor several times removed of my grandmother’s godfather, to keep unwary travellers, and the merely curious away from Clovelly Dykes where he was running a lucrative, and highly illegal tobacco smuggling operation.
Another expert, Ian Maxted, writing in A History of the book in Devon, suggests that this is merely a case of an unnamed hack writer purloining someone else’s story, and recasting it for his own use. As a hack writer myself, I am ashamed to admit that this is probably nearer the truth than the story of the tobacco smugglers but it doesn’t really matter.
I am merely looking forward to the days when I am in my dotage, and on or other of my beautiful step-daughters will have provided me with grandchildren. Then I will sit them down on my knee and give them – in turn – a delightful frisson of fear and loathing, as I tell them the story of `The Cannibals of Clovelly`.
It’s what grandparents do, innit?
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