Black Annis

The single most repeated claim about Black Annis — that she is a survival of a Celtic goddess, Anu or Danu, fossilised in the name of the Dane Hills — is absent from every document that carries the story up to 1804, and it can be followed in print from 1846. The digitised full texts of those five documents — Burton's Description of Leicester Shire (1622), Throsby's history of Leicester (1791), Heyrick's First Flights (1797), and Nichols's county history, volumes I and III — contain no occurrence of "Danu", "Danann" or "Dana". "Goddess" and "Celtic" occur twelve times across the twenty-three megabytes of Nichols's two volumes, and every one of them is about something else: a Diana passage out of Ovid, a line of somebody's verse, and a run of place-name etymologies (the word "carr", the word "caer", a citation of a Celtic dictionary). The same files answer a search when the word is there: "Leice-" returns 269 hits in Burton and 8,257 in Nichols volume I, "cave" 133 and 303 in Nichols's two volumes, and "Annis" as a whole word 16 in Nichols volume I and 7 in volume III. What those documents do contain is a mundane explanation offered by the earliest witness. Burton, writing before 1645, already reads the cave name as a memory of Agnes Scott, and marks his own reading as a guess twice over: "as I guess", "as I have been credibly informed". By 1846, forty-two years after Nichols printed that note, the goddess is in print. John Dudley (1762-1856), in Naology (London, 1846), page 249, writes that "The name of Annis, to whom this cave is said to have belonged, is known to the Celtic mythologist by the name of Anu or Nannu, names signifying the mother goddess, according to the authority of Vallancey", and draws the conclusion that "the tales of the cannibal practices of Black Annis of the Bower cannot be with reason doubted". Charles James Billson reprinted that paragraph for the Folklore Society in County Folk-Lore, volume I (1895), pages 7-8. Donald A. Mackenzie, in Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe (1917), page 61, made Black Annis the English survival of "the mother-goddess of ancient Europe", "remembered as a devourer of children". T. C. Lethbridge, the author the goddess reading is usually credited to, comes last of the four: in Gogmagog: The Buried Gods (1957), pages 161-162, he writes that the name of the hills "may be derived from Danu, the Irish goddess, or from Diana", and that Black Annis "also appears to be Danu, or Anu". The rest of the standard portrait thins out the same way when checked against the 1797 text. The claws are not iron: Heyrick writes "Vast talons, foul with human flesh", with no metal anywhere in the poem. The skins are worn — "her obscene waist / Warm skins of human victims close embrac'd" — and the oak "Spreads his broad arms above the stony cell". The skins hung out to dry reach print in the Leicester Chronicle of 6 September 1874, as reprinted by Billson: children who ran on the Dane Hills were told that she had "scratched to death with her claws, sucked their blood, and hung up their skins to dry". Heyrick himself does not vouch for any of it. His third stanza is conditional: this happened "if the uncouth song of former days / Soil not the page with Falsehood's artful lays". The Easter Monday custom is also read as a ritual expulsion of the witch. John Throsby, who described it in 1791 from living memory, proposed something far duller and said so: "a custom, perhaps, originating out of a claim to the royalty of the forest". The mayor and his brethren walked in scarlet to a field that merely bore the name Black-Annis'-Bower Close; the quarry was a dead cat "prepared by aniseed water", dragged behind a horse and then trailed through the streets to the mayor's own door, where he gave his friends dinner. When Nichols reprinted the account in 1795 he opened it by noting that the custom was already "dwindling into disuse". Two men described the cave from the inside, and neither found anything in it. Dudley writes that he "was actually in the cave about seventy years ago": a round hollow "of diameter of ten or twelve feet, and height about five", cut into the sandstone and by 1846 "nearly filled up by soil carried into it by rains". William Kelly, in the Leicester Chronicle of 3 October 1874, remembered crawling in as a schoolboy to a space "some seven or eight feet long by about four or five feet wide", with a ledge of rock along each side for a seat; by then its mouth had long been closed. The only object in the whole record is the Swithland brass, and it names a woman, Agnes Scott, whom Burton read as an anchoress.