The Second Edition of Sussex Roots: What We Changed, and Why

When we started Sussex Roots, we were, if we are honest, fairly certain that our enthusiasm for Sussex Pharisees and Iron Age earthworks was the kind of enthusiasm best expressed quietly, in a corner, to people who already knew what a knucker was.

Folklore is a peculiar obsession. It requires you to spend significant portions of your life consulting books that are out of print, cross-referencing sources that contradict each other, and attempting to unpick centuries of retellings — each of which faithfully reflects the preoccupations of its own era rather than the tradition it claims to record — in the hope of finding something older underneath. And then, having done all that, you write it up and wonder if anyone will care.

It turns out that people care rather a lot. The folklore enthusiasts who found us, the readers who wrote to us, the people who corrected us — occasionally with great firmness — have made the second edition of Sussex Roots what it is. This is their book as much as ours.

Here is what changed, and the somewhat undignified reasons why.

Part One: Cowardice

Several first-edition choices were not editorial decisions. They were failures of nerve.

The most egregious is 'fairies.' The correct Sussex term is Pharisees — documented by Charlotte Latham in 1868, arising from the county's peculiar plural reduplication of 'fairieses' into 'fairisees' into, somehow, Pharisees, generating no small confusion among Victorian clergymen who found the references in their parish records. We knew this. We used 'fairies' anyway because we were not yet confident that readers would follow us into unfamiliar territory.

They would have. Sussex Pharisees are considerably stranger than generic fairies: they travel as lights, leave no footprints in snow, and have no wings. We gave them wings in the first edition. This was incorrect and also a shame, because the Pharisees' documented uncanniness stems from wrongness in space and physics, which is more unsettling than flight and, far more specifically, Sussex.

The Dobbs of Sussex

The same nervousness produced a boggart (a northern English creature) where there should have been a Dobbs, and a dryad (Greek, arriving in English fiction via classical education) where there should have been a Weald-wight — an Old English supernatural being, rooted in the Andredesweald, which is the actual ancient forest and deserves an actual English creature.

We know better now. More precisely: we always knew better, but we now trust that you do too.

Part Two: Ignorance

Folklore research has a way of humbling you. Just when you think you have a tradition pinned down, you discover another version — older, stranger, inconsistent with the first — which is itself inconsistent with a third. The sources that do exist are frequently out of print, occasionally wrong, and sometimes wrong because they are copying an earlier source that was also wrong. It is, depending on your temperament, either deeply frustrating or completely charming. Usually both simultaneously.

We also made mistakes.

The Black Death reached England in 1348, not 1347. In 1347, it was devastating Sicily, not Sussex.

The Cuckmere Valley in the first edition is the Cuckmere Valley as it exists today: drained, managed, and pastoral. Before nineteenth-century drainage works, the lower valley flooded seasonally to the village of Alfriston itself — boggy, brackish, closer to a tidal estuary than a meadow. The Felicia of the first edition walked through a landscape that did not exist in 1375. She has now been redirected.

We also wrote that a church had been built by the Anglo-Saxons before the Romans. The Romans left Britain around 410 AD. The Anglo-Saxons arrived after. We cannot fully account for how this sentence reached print. We can confirm that it no longer appears.

Each of these errors was caught — by readers, by enthusiasts, by people far more expert than us who were generous enough to say so. We are grateful for every correction, including the ones delivered with the quiet devastation of someone who has been waiting quite some time to say it.

Part Three: Decisions

Some changes were not corrections of errors but revisions of choices we had deliberately made and since thought better of.

The beech trees at Chanctonbury were planted in 1760 by Charles Goring, aged seventeen, as an act of adolescent ambition. The story was set in 1375. We knew this. We kept the trees anyway — they are atmospheric, readers expect them, and the supernatural traditions associated with Chanctonbury Ring have accumulated around the trees rather than the hill fort beneath them. We have now removed them. What remains is an Iron Age earthwork with scattered Romano-British temple foundations, which requires no chronological sleight of hand and is, on reflection, considerably stranger.

This is what folklore research keeps teaching us, and what the second edition helped us see: the real version is almost always more interesting than the convenient one. Jack in the Green is first documented as a Georgian chimney sweeps' custom — but first documented is not the same as first existed, and where the idea began is anyone's speculation.

Jack in the Green of Hastings, Sussex

The 'Green Man' as a unified concept was assembled in 1939, drawn from foliate heads in medieval stonework that had been sitting in churches for centuries, meaning something, to someone, that we can no longer quite recover.

The Long Man of Wilmington is probably sixteenth or seventeenth century — probably. This is, more or less, the condition of all folklore: what was radical becomes tradition, what was tradition becomes ancient, what was ancient is forgotten and then rediscovered and reimagined into something new, which will itself become tradition in due course.

One cannot find the origin of a folk custom the way you find the origin of a parliamentary act. There is no document, no date, no unambiguous first instance. There is only a trail of tellings, each one a little different, each one reflecting the world it was told in. Trying to reach the bottom of it is as futile as trying to find the bottom of a knuckerhole — and, in much the same way, we intend to keep trying regardless.

Modern retellings of Sussex folklore

Sussex Roots

Sussex Roots began as an experiment by people who were not sure anyone would come with them. The second edition exists because you did. We have learnt an enormous amount — from the research, from the folklore community, from the readers who knew things we didn't and told us so — and we are braver for it.

There will probably be more editions. There will definitely be more investigations. The folklore of Sussex and Kent is not close to running out of surprises, and neither, it turns out, are we.

Sussex Roots, second edition, is available here (UK) and here (US).

The Untruth Seekers are dedicated investigators of the legends, ghost stories, and historical mysteries lurking beneath the surface of Sussex and beyond. Their confidential files document the folklore, hauntings, and half-buried histories that most people walk past without a second glance. All findings are published under the series From the Confidential Files of the Untruth Seekers, for readers who suspect there is always more to the story.