The Hawthorn Archive
Stories, customs and beliefs preserved as individual records, with place and context kept attached wherever the evidence allows.
The Round Table became part of Arthurian tradition through twelfth-century literary development. Wace’s Roman de Brut, written in Anglo-Norman French, helped popularise the image of a circular table around which Arthur’s great knights could…
Open archive record →The medieval Welsh chronicle known as the Annales Cambriae associates Arthur with Mount Badon and with Camlann, where Arthur and Medraut are said to have fallen. These notices belong to an important early layer…
Open archive record →The Historia Brittonum, generally associated with the early ninth century, presents Arthur as a martial leader rather than the fully developed king of later romance. It assigns him a sequence of victories and connects…
Open archive record →Actor William Terriss was murdered outside London’s Adelphi Theatre in December 1897 by Richard Prince. A later theatre tradition holds that Terriss’s ghost continued to haunt the Adelphi. The murder is documented history; the…
Open archive record →A Hampton Court ghost tradition identifies a Grey Lady with Sybil Penn, a Tudor nurse associated with Edward VI and Elizabeth I. After her tomb at nearby Hampton church was disturbed during nineteenth-century rebuilding,…
Open archive record →Hampton Court tradition says that Catherine Howard escaped her guards after learning of the accusations against her and ran towards the chapel to plead with Henry VIII, only to be seized and dragged back.…
Open archive record →One of the Tower of London’s stranger ghost traditions concerns a spectral bear said to have terrified a Jewel House keeper. The story draws unusual plausibility from the character of the place: the Tower…
Open archive record →Later ghost tradition repeatedly returns Anne Boleyn to the Tower of London, where she was imprisoned and executed in 1536. Versions place her apparition near Tower Green, the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad…
Open archive record →Alongside the Roman-soldier tradition, Treasurer’s House has reports of a “grey lady” seen in rooms. The National Trust also records stories in which children appeared to react to a woman whom accompanying adults could…
Open archive record →Frank Green, the industrialist who acquired Treasurer’s House in 1897 and later gave it to the National Trust, was remembered as exacting about the arrangement of his rooms and collections. The house preserves a…
Open archive record →The National Trust’s account of Treasurer’s House records reports associated with Roman figures that pre-date or sit alongside Harry Martindale’s famous 1950s experience. One concerns a female guest of former owner Frank Green who…
Open archive record →One of York’s best-known modern ghost traditions concerns Harry Martindale, an apprentice heating engineer working in the cellar of Treasurer’s House in the 1950s. He later described hearing a sound and seeing a group…
Open archive record →