The Phantom Rebel 

In Search of the Headless Horseman of the Staffordshire Moorlands

The Headless Horseman of the Staffordshire Moorlands is one of the best known pieces of folklore in the region, but where did it come from? Tracing the story of the horseman back through 650 years of local history, we uncover the shocking true story of medieval murder that may lie at the heart of the spectre’s inspiration.

Origins

All of our local myths and legends have their origins. Travelling from distant parts on the roads of social migration, many will have long since morphed away from their original state into new regional variations. Others, born from the morality tales of our common past, have survived the erosion of the centuries primarily due to their ability to adapt into popular tropes of the fireside, providing us with all manner of haunted ruins and bogeymen in the process. Yet there are sometimes to be found other, altogether more opaque, entries in our collections of folklore. 

These are stories that may initially present themselves in such a fantastically supernatural light that the idea of them belonging to actual history at first appears incredulous, and yet upon closer inspection, we may well discover that the details contained within them are so remarkably local that they conspire to suggest signs of something else entirely; the remnants of long-lost folk memories. 

I believe that one such tale, and one that has captivated me ever since I first heard it in the Roebuck pub in Leek in late 2006, is that of the Headless Horseman of Butterton; the spectral, if somewhat sinister, jewel in the crown of Staffordshire Moorlands folklore.

Today, the horseman represents the best known legend of the region, and it has been that way for the better part of 100 years, with an annual ‘hunt’ for the spectre having been established as a tradition of the Leek May Fair by the early 1930s. Modern familiarity however, is primarily provided courtesy of the regularity with which the old tales of the phantom appear in the local press around Halloween, and it is these tales, collected by local antiquarian John Sleigh in the 1860s, that provide the first real seeds of distinct fascination regarding the horseman of the Moorlands.

Headless riders, wherever they are found in our collections of lore and legend, tend to share a group of common characteristics that owe a heavy debt to a figure of Irish mythology known as the Dullahan. The stuff of nightmares, this is a creature that carries its head in one hand while the other holds aloft a whip made of human spine, as it charges around the landscape on a skull-encrusted carriage, foreshadowing ill fortune for all who see it. It is in this image that we find the genesis of those classic horseman motifs of legend. 

When there is notable deviation from this archetype to be found, it is almost always that the head is missing, and this, in turn, is usually accompanied by that most popular raison d'être of headless horseman; being a restless spirit, forever searching for a head that was severed in battle. 

Yet our horseman, beyond its general association as a harbinger of doom, not only fails to share any of these expected characteristics, it also appears to lack any origin story at all. These observations, when placed together with the lack of any similar horseman legends being present in the neighbouring boroughs and regions, suggest something quite remarkable; that the legendary horseman of Butterton may have been born wholly within the folk-psyche of the local community. As to the search for how and why this might be, there is no better place to start than with the details of those accounts collected by John Sleigh more than 160 years ago.

John Sleigh's 1862 work contained the first documented sightings of the horseman

The Accounts 

Having enjoyed a successful legal career during the mid-nineteenth century, registered at the Inner Temple, London, Sleigh was able to indulge many of his passions, one of which was a serious interest in local history. Still available today, although likely to set you back up to £1000.00 for an original edition, Sleigh's 1862 History of the Ancient Parish of Leek is a vast work touching on every topic relevant to the area, from geological speculations of the landscape to the origins of its historic buildings. As such, it provides a goldmine of material for anyone looking to inquire into the region's past. 

The creation of such comprehensive regional tomes was very much in vogue during the period of Sleigh’s writing, and alongside the more prosaic details contained within them, a section on the curious traditions of the local population was often a highlight. Thankfully Sleigh's work is no exception, and it is his reportage on the rural customs of the Moorlands that provide us with several accounts concerning the local folklore of the time, his introduction to which introduces the horseman as a key figure;

‘Ghostly legends and superstitions, still retain their sway over the minds of the denizens of those moorland wilds, more especially, the headless rider, who haunted the moors between Leek and Warslow…attested by so many credible living witnesses, that to doubt them would be worse than heterodoxy.’

Sleigh's use of the word heterodoxy sets a firm foundation for the accounts that follow, as it implies that whatever his personal perception of the legend, he found the manner of the witnesses he encountered to be nothing but sincere. Three distinct accounts are then provided, drawn from his research around the area, the first of which is a formal recording of the most popular local tale concerning the horseman, and the one most often recounted in the area today;

'A man returning from Leek, perhaps somewhat market fresh sees before him, a little beyond Leek Edge, a neighbour on horseback, whom he hails for a request for a ‘lift’ homewards. No sooner, however, has he mounted behind him than to his horror finds that his companion is the goblin horseman. The discovery comes too late for away springs the horse, covering at a bound, fields, trees, hedges and ditches…the luckless wight at one moment feeling his feet brushing through the topmost twigs, and the next borne with whirlwind swiftness over the heath. In the upshot, he is found deposited at his own door, helpless and groaning, and so maimed and bruised that death in a few days puts an end to his sufferings.'

In this initial report, a farmer is returning home from the market in Leek, drunk, when he mistakes a figure on the road ahead for a neighbour. Alas, it is the horseman, who then sweeps the farmer across the countryside in a rollercoaster ride over hedges and bushes before dropping him, dazed and confused, at his front door. The injuries inflicted upon him in the process are gravely serious and go on to see him perish just a few days later. 

The second entry in the collection concerns the story of a young man who seems to have had repeated encounters with the phantom during return trips from a neighbouring village, and relays the events of an occasion when he was joined on his journey by an inquisitive friend;

'Again a young swain from the neighbourhood of Waterhouses, visiting his sweetheart some three to four miles away, is so frequently joined in his expeditions with the phantom as to become familiarised with it to such a degree that, to adopt our informants expression, ‘they used to walk, agen’ one another.’ Mentioning to a friend what he was in the habit of encountering, he was induced to consent to his accompanying one night. By and by the horseman makes his appearance: ‘He’s here!’ ‘Where?’ whisper’s the friend, not having the gift of double sight - ‘Gi’s thee hand,’ and as soon as palm touched palm, the young man shrank back, affrighted on perceiving the ghastly stranger at his side.'

The third and final account in Sleigh's work is one found to have several local variations; the story of a husband trying to deny his knowledge of the phantom to his wife, before conceding and confessing all;

'On another occasion, a rustic having to fetch the howdy wife from Warslow was unceremoniously joined on the road by the apparition. His horse trembled violently, the dog yowled and he himself broke out into such profuse perspiration that it settled in the shape of a heavy dew on the outside of his overcoat. On his arrival, the woman perceiving by his wild and disordered looks that he had had no ordinary journey, closely questioned him as to the nature of it, which at first he was unwilling to admit. She, however, consented to return with him, and they reached home without further molestation. On the following day the horse dropped down dead between the plough-sticks, and the dog, too, sickened and died. Ultimately seven clergymen, headed by the Rev John Reed, an old ‘familiar,’ were called in ‘to speak to and lay’ this betenoir of the moors; when he confessed that he was one of the four evil spirits cast out of Heaven and condemned to roam over the face of the earth, until the crack of doom release him from his terrestrial wanderings.'

These are the accounts from which our modern perception of the legend is drawn and however fanciful they may seem at face value, it is in the context of such tales that the lack of embellishment or traditional paraphernalia should be noted as genuinely striking. It is an exception that sits in sharp contrast to the detail that is found in its stead; names, places and the definite, clear metre of the local landscape.   

Tantalisingly, the figure of Rev. John Reed that appears in relation to the apparent exorcism in the third account is a genuine historical reference, with records attesting to a Reverend Reed being present at St Lukes in the nearby village of Onecote during the 1830s. It is an inclusion made all the more noteworthy when we see that a Reverend Reed is also mentioned in a secondary report concerning the horseman and what appears to be some form of similar exorcism.   

Published in October 1880 by local newspaper The Sentinel as part of an article entitled ‘Up and Down The County’, a man named William Hambleton - given to be a member of Butterton Parish Council - gives his own take on the exorcism story and places it specifically at a farm on Douse Lane in the village of Onecote. Having first confessed to how he is ‘sure there's something in it’ due to how many people he has met that claim to have seen the horseman, Hambleton tells of how the reverend and his band of clergy were called to a farm on Douse Lane following sightings of the spectre and reports that, in their wake, the deceased farmer’s cart had taken to veering around the farmyard by means of ‘unseen propulsion’.

Leek Edge, Onecote, Waterhouses and Warslow are all locations which firmly place the legend within the culture of the rural community and mark Sleigh's accounts as being distinctly removed from the day-to-day influences of the nearby market towns of Ashbourne and Leek. Both towns were undergoing something of a metropolitan transformation during the mid-nineteenth century, following the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and it is difficult to imagine how tales of the horseman would have remained absent from community gossip in such comparatively large population centres if the origin of the phantom belonged to any kind of drifting, migratory process. Instead, the reports leave little doubt that the origin of the legend does indeed belong to the history of the Moorlands, and to a time far more distant from us than that in which they were recorded by Sleigh.

Given that the accounts included in Sleigh's work were likely collected in the field sometime shortly before its publication in 1862, we can say with some certainty that by the year 1860, not only was the legend entrenched in local folklore, but that, as there is no historical element attached to the horsemen, all traces of origin myth had long since had chance to become detached.

Therefore, assuming that a local person of 70 years old in 1860 could have conceivably heard the horseman legend from a grandparent, it is logical to assume that in the years of their grandparents' youth, say around the year 1770, any sense of origin story was already missing - as if it were present in the tale at that point it would surely have made it to the years of Sleigh's work in the field. From circa 1770 then, we must move back again, and as we do, we traverse a period of political turmoil that was packed full of opportunities for potential myth-making around the image of a headless rider. 

In the late autumn of 1745, the region would play host to Bonnie Prince Charlie and an estimated 7000 Jacobite soldiers who passed through as they marched south from Scotland with the intention of re-claiming the throne for the House of Stuart. After leaving the Moorlands, and deciding to turn back when they reached Derby only to find that their anticipated support had failed to materialise, the Jacobite army would retreat to Scotland, once more passing through on a journey that would eventually lead to their slaughter at the Battle of Culloden the following spring. 

There are various accounts of local militia forces having come into conflict with the Jacobite army as they made their way through the area, and yet none of them have resulted in a horseman legend. The same too can be said of the period in the mid-1600s when the English Civil War caused significant upheaval across the area. Plenty of local legends were born from the conflict, including a massacre at Bagnall and a siege in Biddulph, but yet again, a headless horseman is not to be found anywhere amongst the relatively well-attested folk history of the conflict. And so, as we travel on this timeline we do so in the likelihood that the legend of the horsemen, so entrenched in local lore by the 1700s, has its origin before the Civil War.

It was after reaching this point in my research, as I considered next steps, that something hit me. There was of course, another headless horseman tethered to the area. A character that had come into existence almost five hundred years before Sleigh's collected accounts were first published. However unlikely a connection it seemed to me at first, it was something that I simply could not ignore.  

An Arthurian Possibility

Written in the late fourteenth century, recent years have seen the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight become one of the most studied literary works associated with the subject of King Arthur. It is a mammoth piece of work, literally and intellectually, and whole books have been written in its study. There's no way my description here will do it anything like justice, but the essence of the story tells of how one New Year's Day at Camelot, before the feast, King Arthur asks his knights to entertain him with tales of adventure. No sooner as he asked this when a giant green figure on a green horse strides into the court. He wears no armour but carries a bow of holly in one hand and a mammoth battle axe in the other, rides to the centre of the hall and asks to speak to the ‘noblest’ of the knights there present. All fall silent, until Arthur himself speaks, welcoming the visitor in. The figure in green then explains that he is not there to enjoy the feast, but rather, to offer the king and his nobles the chance to take part in a game. If any man is brave enough, he says, he will allow them to strike him once without retaliation; on the condition that a year later, he will be allowed to return the favour. 

Sir Gawain, the nephew of the king and the most eager of the group, asks for the honour of striking the challenger and swiftly beheads him. The Green Knight responds calmly, picking up his severed head, getting back up into his saddle, and reminds Gawain that, as agreed, he will see him again on the following New Years Morning, at a place called the Green Chapel. Gawain then spends the next year travelling the landscape (a process that forms the bulk of the tale) before meeting up with the Green Knight, as promised, for the rematch.

The significance of this poem in relation to our own journey is not necessarily found in the detail of the encounter itself, but rather in the distinct regionality of the poem's authorship - and potentially, the locality of the famous rematch. As suggested by the esteemed professor R.W.V Elliot, who first published his thoughts on the matter in an article for The Times back in 1958, it is now widely accepted that the poem was written in a variation of Middle English known as North West Midlands; a dialect that was used almost exclusively across the region of North Staffordshire and its Cheshire borders. Furthermore, it is also believed that the scenery of the landscape through which Sir Gawain journeys includes various local spots, not least of all, the two leading contenders for the Green Chapel itself being Lud’s Church on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border, and Wetton Mill Cave in the Manifold Valley.

The inference is that the poem was likely written locally, and by someone with a first hand knowledge of the local landscape. Quite incredible really, but this isn’t the stuff of fantasy; the story of the most famous beheaded figure in all of medieval English literature was most likely written within the very same landscape that our own headless horseman is said to traverse. Lud’s Church is less than ten miles from the village of Butterton, so central to the horseman legend. Wetton Mill, less than two. As I considered the timeframe of the poem’s creation, and its anonymous author - something that far more qualified minds than mine have struggled with for decades - a simple question occurred to me. Who, within the local region during the late fourteenth century, would be capable of producing literature to such a high standard, let alone whilst possessing sufficient familiarity with the Arthurian tradition? There were only a handful of environments in which a person might realistically have acquired the education, resources and have the free time necessary to create something like that. Most likely, the author would be connected to a major religious institution. And at that period, in this landscape, there was only one; Dieulacres Abbey. I found myself wondering whether the abbey’s own records might preserve some clue - not to the origins of the poem - but rather, to the deeper cultural atmosphere from which the whole business of phantom horsemen may have originated. Could there be something in there that might suggest an origin of our spectral horseman of the Moorlands?

I would need to access a history of the Dieulacres, and I would be looking for a figure whose life and death contained specific characteristics connected to the horseman. Giving serious thought to the criteria that I would be searching for, I would need not only a victim that was beheaded, but also a perpetrator who could carry out such an act with impunity. This was a detail that would account for the absence of any antagonist having remained connected to the story. A tether to some kind of journey across the landscape would also be advantageous, as it is both a central theme of the nineteenth century accounts collated by Sleigh and a prominent feature of the poem in the lead up to Sir Gawain's rematch. The lack of detailed back story to the horseman legend would also suggest that any suitable victim would likely not be lifted from the nobility of the area. Rather, they would likely be a figure connected to the day-to-day lives of its peasantry and common folk. Most importantly of all though, I would be looking for an event of such seismic impact to both the rural and ecclesiastical population of the time that the idea it would not have left a considerable mark on the oral history of the region would be simply, incredulous. And finally, if such an event was to have a connection to the poem, it must have taken place before the year 1400. 

Armed with a copy of Michael Fisher’s 1984 book Dieulacres Abbey and access to various court records of the period, it was time to dive in.

Above: the Cheshire/Staffordshire border is thought to have inspired the poem's landscape

Below: Lud's Church - a potential setting for the Green Chapel

Dieulacres Abbey

Throughout the Middle Ages, religious houses and their brethren were hugely influential characters in the lives of those that lived alongside them. From agriculture to education, healthcare to justice, their hand was to be found wielding influence in virtually every aspect of day-to-day life, and so was the case in the Moorlands. 

It can prove difficult to picture now, as all that remains of Dieulacres Abbey is the repurposed masonry of nearby farm buildings and a few lonely lumps of stone in a field, but the Moorlands was once home to one of the most powerful abbeys in the north of England. Founded around the year 1214, Dieulacres had an unusual beginning even by the standards of the thirteenth century. Cistercian monks, originally located at Poulton in Cheshire, had been relocated to Leek following the ghostly dream of a powerful local figure, Ranulph de Blondeville, 6th Earl of Chester. In his dream, Ranulph is said to have been visited by his grandfather, who told him that moving the Poulton monks to a new site at Leek would provide a lasting solution to the increasing threat posed by raiders streaming into their current lands from the other side of the Welsh border. 

Translating as ‘may God prosper it', Dieulacres soon proved very aptly named. Ranulph himself was a leading adviser to King John - the very man who had granted a market charter to Leek in 1207 - and therefore a figure of considerable power; which he busily got to work putting to use on behalf of the new religious house. Dieulacres’s lands were vast, taking in not only its share of Staffordshire and Cheshire but reaching far beyond with estates in Lancashire too. With the whole enterprise overseen by its abbot, and backed by its close-knit relationship with de Blondeville, the success of its endeavours within the industries of wool, timber, and general farming served to feed an increasing ambition for expansion over the following century.

This system, enabled via a series of outlying sub-centres called ‘granges’, was in turn marshalled by the brethren that worked from them known as the ‘Conversi’. They were an organisation that would manage the resources of the land in practical terms, and held a ruthless dedication to their cause that could not help but ruffle feathers as they continually looked to push for further opportunities. Such an appetite for expansion was always bound to cause conflict, not least in the areas where the interests of other similarly inclined religious houses bordered its estates; Croxden Abbey and Hulton Abbey being two particularly recurrent examples according to Dieulacres’s records.

It is thanks to one such recorded dispute between the neighbouring granges of Wincle and Swythamley on the Cheshire border that we find our first definitive connection to the poem. A large area of woodland known as Back Forest was an integral part of the Swythamley estate, and it is within this woodland that a suspected location of the Green Knight's rematch, Lud's Church, is to be found.

The picture painted in both legal and ecclesiastical records as the years progress is one of a local society dominated by the affairs and whims of Dieulacres and its partners, with locals having to bend to their will while continuing disgruntlement grew in response. Such was the combustibility of the touch paper seemingly ready to be lit at Dieulacres come the 1300s, that a number of royal allowances were granted to its abbot by way of assistance in the management of the local population, not least amongst them, the right to administer the death penalty.

Within one hundred years of its foundation, Dieulacres had become an economic powerhouse that dominated the world around it. Yet the continual growth of Dieulacres could not go on forever, and like so many similar institutions throughout Europe, it would find its ambitions heavily checked by the destruction laid bare to the country during the Black Death of the fourteenth century. The shortage of labour that came in the wake of a pandemic which killed around a third of Europe’s population, meant that the level of wages that workers could demand grew unprecedentedly, and as those governing the country made attempts to restrict earnings as a result via punitive legislation, resentment amongst the people began to build even further. It was as Dieulacres looked to repair its infrastructure in line with such measures that circumstances conspired to see the appointment of an abbot who would go on to become the most feared and unscrupulous leader in the abbey's history; Abbot William Lichfield.

It is impossible to discover much by way of detail as to Lichfield's life and history before his appointment at the abbey, but it is safe to say both his temperament and outlook appear to be in keeping with the nature of the client kingdom Dieulacres had come to represent. It is not, I should point out, my deliberate intention to paint these holy houses in a negative light, but the facts of the record attest that these were as much institutions of business as they were houses of God. This was an age where men of means could rule with little worry of recourse and the king, at this point the teenage Richard II, was in no place to bring any sense of order to proceedings for a range of reasons; not least the continuing difficulties of the Hundred Years War, a conflict with France that had also seen relations with the Cistercian mother-church of Cîteaux Abbey, and its oversight, all but severed.

As such, the power now placed in the hands of the abbots was effectively absolute. It should surprise none that in the mire of this upheaval, a scent of rebellion was in the air right across the country, and it was something that Abbot Lichfield was acutely aware of locally. So much so, that in the late 1370s he would find justifiable cause to take an extraordinary decision; the employment of his own private army, stationed at Dieulacres. By this point, the brethren at the abbey had become a kind of monastic-mafia, and their chosen means of doing business would only go from bad to worse. Lichfield wasted little time in putting his new men to work, and records show that sometime in 1379, Hugh, Earl of Stafford was appointed by Royal Commission to specifically investigate the conduct of the Abbot Lichfield following a plethora of reports concerning him and his retinue.

The Royal Commission reads;

‘One William, Abbot of Dieulacres, desiring to perpetrate maintenance in his marches and oppress the people’, had kept a band of 21 retainers ‘to stay with him . . . to do all the mischief they can to the people in the county of Stafford and that they have lain in wait for them, assaulted, maimed, and killed some, and driven others from place to place until they made a fine with them.’

How the Earl of Stafford came to hear of these crimes is, I believe, connected to the sheer scale of outrage that followed one particular event during 1379 that cuts to the very heart of our quest, and may act as a key signpost in our search for an origin to the horseman legend; the brutal murder of John de Warton.

Above: the last remnants of the abbey, on site in the 1950s

Below: the former abbey site today

The Rebel and the Abbot

John de Warton, and as we’ll hear, his wife Almarica too, are prime examples of those remarkable lives that would have been lost to history entirely were it not for the court records of the medieval age preserving the details of the grizzly events that they came to be a part of. De Wharton, appears to have been some kind of major community leader; a man important enough to carry arms and to wear military attire, and wealthy enough to have his own chambers in the town of Leek. Most likely he was minor local gentry, and likely a former solider. The fact that he appears to have retained the ‘de’ suffix element of his surname, something far more common in the gentry following the norman conquest 300 years earlier, may support the idea of him being an independent land owner too, better known as a yeoman. 

He was not the kind of figure to take the Abbot's repression lightly, and some time in late 1378 or early 1379, a feud between de Warton and Lichfield boiled over into open hostility, with an attack on the abbot's men by de Warton and a group of his supporters. According to the abbot's own testimony in legal proceedings issued at the time, de Warton's attack had succeeded in subduing Lichfield’s men, with him noting how de Warton had been able to 'disable their ability to be of service for a period of time’.

Although we can read between the lines relatively easily here, I think it worth a brief pause to consider just how big an event this must have been. An armed band stationed at Dieulacres, as we have seen from the Royal Commission, would have been a genuine source of terror for the local population. For men like John de Warton, whose independent status would have made him a difficult issue for Lichfield, news of the crimes being committed against the people of the Moorlands would have arrived at his door complete with an expectation that he could do something to help. Perhaps de Warton's actions were due to a more personal, direct slight from Lichfield; but his decision to take action and attack the abbot's men would not have been taken without serious consideration. If there wasn't judged to be a sound legal basis for such an assault, de Warton would lose everything he had. Things must have been getting increasingly desperate for armed conflict to seem the most viable option. Despite the impression of respect for due legal process that Abbot Lichfield gave in his pursuit of recompense against de Warton, he was most definitely not content to leave the resolution of the matter in the hands of the court. 

What follows is a story of murder, litigation, and manipulation of such extraordinary impact that not only does it provide us with an incredible piece of local history, it also shines a light across the wider political state concerns of late-fourteenth century England. Thanks to the preservation of the Staffordshire plea-rolls, transcribed for the William Salt Archaeological Society and their 1893 work Collections For A History of Staffordshire, we have a vital source of information when it comes to those local matters from Staffordshire that were deemed serious enough to require adjudication by higher courts; cases which were to be heard directly under the travelling Assize system. In the case of de Warton, the bounty these records have left to us really is something special.

The following is taken from the Easter plea rolls for Staffordshire in 1380, recorded by one Geoffrey Martin, Clerk of the Crown;

‘Here follows a special commission…commanding them to return on the oath of a jury, what malefactors and disturbers of the peace had killed John de Warton at Leek, in co.Stafford…on the Tuesday the Feast of the Apostles… that Henry de Bradeshawe of Leek, Thomas Page of Leek, Robert le Wright of Leek, Robert Tuppeheved, Richard de Bradeschawe of Leek and Thomas le Coke of Leek, came to the town of Leek on the Saturday after the Close of Easter and laid in wait for John de Warton in order to kill him…and they struck the said John de Warton in the body with an arrow, and called upon him to surrender to the peace, and the said John had surrendered, and the said Henry de Bradeschawe and the others named above, had kept him a prisoner at Leek for the space of four days, and afterwards had taken him to a place called Leekmore in the parish of Leek and had cut off his head and they had feloniously killed the said John de Warton, and that William de Lichefeld, the Abbot of the church of St. Mary of Dieulacres, had afterwards received the said Henry and the others named, and had received them up to this date knowing that they had committed the felony.’

It is a remarkable entry, directly naming the accused perpetrators of John de Warton's murder, not to mention its accusation that Abbot Lichfield had subsequently harboured the killers himself. John's widow Almarica would also give testimony to the court in person, the details of which I'm sure you'll agree, are utterly fascinating;

‘Almarica, formerly wife of John de Warton, appeared in person and appealed Henry de Bradeschawe of Leek, Thomas Page of Leek, Robert le Wryght of Leek the younger, Richard del Kychen of Leek, Richard de Bradeshawe of Leek, Richard del Fernihalgh of Leek, Thomas le Cook of Leek, Nicholas le Hunte of Leek, William Balle of Leek, John le Sompter of Leek, and Thomas Plonte of Swythomle Graunge, for the death of her husband, all as principals, except John le Sompter and Thomas Plonte, whom she appealed as accessories…came armed to Leek, on the Saturday after the Close of Easter with swords, bows and arrows, and killed John de Warton in a place called Leekmore, and had cut off his head by the command of William de Lichefeld, the Abbot of the church of St.Mary of Dieulacres, and that the said Henry de Bradeshawe and the others named had afterwards feloniously despoiled the said John de Warton…and had taken a Jacke of black fustian (de nigro fustian) worth 20s, a bow and arrows, and a sword with a belt, perno, and a brayselle of silver worth 138.4d, a horse with a saddle worth 108 and other necessaries from the chambers of the said John at Leek to the value of 40d. And that William de Lichefeld, the Abbot of Dieulacres, Edmund de Draycote, a monk and cellarer of the abbey, Robert de Beresford, William Dyke of Leek ,and William del Brugge, the vicar of the church of Leek, had received the said Henry and the others named, continually and many times nip to the date of the Inquisition at Leek, knowing that they had committed the said felony.’

There are two apparent versions of events here. In the first, de Warton is attacked and wounded by the group before being taken to Leek as a prisoner of Lichfield, his beheading coming four days later. This version may give the impression of judicial process in line with the abbot's authority to wield the death penalty, however, it is a version contradicted in detail by Almarica's own take on events. Rather, she tells of how her husband was killed in the attack itself, beheaded there and then, before being robbed. Items listed as stolen including de Warton's clothes, which have a militarian element - the ‘Jacke of black fustian’ is a padded combat jacket - weapons, and crucially for us, his horse, before the gang then went on to de Warton's home and continued their plunder.

Almarica's strength of character really comes across in this entry. This was a woman who, no matter the trauma of her husband's murder, somehow still found it in herself to take charge of a quest for justice, fully aware that the odds were resoundingly stacked against her. Accounts from the court rolls go on to comment on the result of this plea, the wording of which suggests the murder of de Warton and the apprehension of the perpetrators was, on face value at least, taken seriously by the presiding authorities. It notes that while ‘none of the defendants appeared, and the Sheriff returned they could not be found’, an order was made to place the whole group at risk of being outlawed should they continue to remain at large. It was the threat of this order that seems to have motivated Lichfield to come forward himself later in the year at the subsequent summer Assize, the consequences of which are noted in the records by the following;

‘Afterwards the said William Lychefeld, the Abbot of Dieulacres, surrendered himself in Court at this Term, on the Quindene of Holy Trinity, and was committed to the Marshalsea, but as the said Henry de Bradeschawe and the others indicted as principals had not been convicted or outlawed he was admitted to bail and found security himself at £100 and four sureties each at £40 for his good behaviour.’

Almarica's petition of the court had landed Abbot Lichfield, one of the most powerful men in all of Staffordshire, a stay in the Marshalsea prison. It was quite a feat. An institution originally founded in 1373 to house, amongst others, political prisoners charged with sedition, the Marshalsea was no soft option. Although the amount required to secure his release represents a considerable burden - approximately £250,000 in modern currency according to the National Archives - his ability to pay it clearly demonstrates the level of financial clout that Lichfield had at his disposal.

Returning to the abbey, Lichfield was keen to return to business as normal and soon got to work with initiating a curious project of stage-managed surrender on the behalf of the other men involved in the attack. Over the next two years, each would come forward and give themselves up voluntarily to the courts, and as they did, each would miraculously present a royal pardon specifying nullifying any crimes they may have committed prior to 1381. Suddenly, the justice that Almarica may have thought underway, evaporated into the air like the illusion that it was ultimately always destined to be.

How Lichfield managed to provide such pardon for his collaborators must have appeared a complete mystery at the time, but the distance of history can help us make better sense of it today. At the time of the feud between de Warton and Lichfield, the power balance of England was under genuine review due to the aforementioned fall-out of the Black Death and the Crown's responding policies. Uprisings in the provinces were common, and they were growing increasingly dangerous. This is the time of the infamous Peasants’ Revolt, the most famous of the uprisings that took place in the period, taking the rebel leader Walter ‘Wat’ Tyler to the walls of London and the eyes of King Richard himself. 

This event had been a wake-up call for Richard, and in the aftermath, it appears a great number of pardons were issued to figures such as Abbot Lichfield in a move that suggests Richard, in realisation as to the level of disquiet in his kingdom, felt he needed to retrospectively condone the brutalities that had taken place at local level under the banner of maintaining control across the preceding years. It was an opportunity Lichfield would have been prime placed to seize upon for himself and all connected. And so it came to pass, that despite all the eye witness testimony, the oaths, and the initial imprisonment of Lichfield himself, by the summer of 1381, every man implicated in the murder of John de Warton was lawfully acquitted of culpability.

Memory as Legend

The impact that de Warton's death would have had on the common population of the Moorlands is difficult to overstate. He would have already been a well-known figure locally before his feud with Lichfield, but his attack on Lichfield's men would have ensured his name reached every corner of the region. It is not without reason that the medieval hero Robin Hood is more often thought to be an amalgamation of different figures from the medieval period rather than a specific historical individual of the time, and it may be that de Warton is a local inclusion on that list. 

From the evidence of the record, the years following de Warton's murder would have brought countless further moments of injustice from the abbey, and with each one, the story of the man who once stood against the tyranny of Dieulacres would further embed itself in the collective consciousness of the locals. As the years passed by, it would be only natural that the story would turn into legend; and it is at this point that the details of de Warton's death really bare through onto the matter of the horseman legend.

We have that element of countryside surprise in abundance, with the ambush on de Warton by Lichfield's men. He was, as shown in Almarica's testimony, travelling on horseback, and the matter of his beheading is well beyond doubt. We also have a connection to local fairs and festivities around the time of the attack, not quite a May Fair granted, but both ‘the close of Easter’ and ‘the feast of the apostles’ are mentioned directly in the testimony in relation to the date of the assault. Meanwhile, Lichfield is a perfect foil for the contention that the perpetrator of de Warton's murder must have been someone of sufficient power to forgo prosecution.

On the issue of the poem, the locality of the author, as a man of literary education and means, is potentially - and somewhat logically - to be found in connection to Dieulacres Abbey, with their grange at Swythamley less than an hours walk from that suspected location of the Green Chapel, Lud's Church; and as we have seen, a ‘Thomas Plonte of Swythomle Graunge’ is named in Almarica's court pleas. Yet what is more striking still, is the connection made on the timeline.

Warton's death in 1379 is followed by the poem's creation at some point in the early 1380s. We may also even consider that at its heart, at its crudest, it is the story of a warrior in green - the colour of the yeoman - travelling on horseback who has his head cut off in the presence of a powerful local group. There could even perhaps be a correlation between the feast taking place upon his arrival and that of the festivities mentioned in the testimony. That the creation of the poem could well be the result of an ecclesiastical in-joke is a hypothesis that merits real consideration, because if the poem was indeed penned at Swythamley, or in fact in any way connected to Dieulacres Abbey, then the author’s superior would most definitely have been Abbot William Lichfield. 

As time moved forward, the actions of those in charge of Dieulacres would grow no more palatable. Just over one hundred years on from de Warton's death, the monks of the abbey were found to be amongst a group that had been involved in a raid on a property in Cheddleton, and similar events are found to litter the history of Dieulacres right up to the point of dissolution in 1568; the instance in which the Abbot William Albion used a longbow during a Leek riot of 1517 being a particular personal highlight of mine.

Not only does the story of de Warton's murder absolutely satisfy the criteria imperative for any serious contenders for the horseman origin myth, but it is the stand-alone example of fitting circumstance recorded in the region during the entire period. For the common folk of the Moorlands, John de Warton’s death is the seismic personal story of the later medieval age. The lack of justice following his murder would have undoubtedly served to ensure his legend continued to grow, the story of his rebellion and death seeing his memory re-cast as a symbol of popular resistance. As the years passed by, and names and places became lost from the narrative, the process by which his story transferred to that of the restless spirit is in itself the very mechanism by which of folklore is created. Many will find the connection to the Green Knight a little far-fetched I am sure, and I too am inclined to join them; yet the history is, what the history is. It is not a theory without valid connection, as wonderful as it may at first seem.

John de Warton was many things. He was a man of the Moorlands. He was a husband. He was a yeoman. He was a local rebel leader with the courage to stand up in the face of the regime at Dieulacres and maybe, just maybe, it could well be that his memory endures still, throughout the region he once called home, in the legend of the Headless Horseman of the Staffordshire Moorlands.

Eli Lewis-Lycett 2020

Sources and Further Reading

Reports of the Headless Horseman;

• Sleigh, John. A History of the Ancient Parish of Leek, in Staffordshire: Including Horton, Cheddleton, and Ipstones. Leek: Robert Wall, 1862.
• The Staffordshire Sentinel, 8th May 1933
• The Staffordshire Sentinel, 2nd October 1880.

Regarding Sir Gawain and the Green Knight;

• Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon, eds. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 2nd ed. Revised by Norman Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
• Elliott, R. W. V. “Sir Gawain in Staffordshire: A Detective Essay in Literary Geography.” The Times, 21 May 1958.

Regarding the Dullahan;

• Briggs, Katharine. A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language. 4 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970–71.
• Briggs, Katharine. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. London: Pantheon Books, 1976.

Regarding politics in the fourteenth century;

• Hilton, Rodney. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. London: Temple Smith, 1973.

Regarding Dieulacres Abbey, Abbot Lichfield and John de Warton;

• Baggs, A. P., M. F. Cleverdon, D. A. Johnson, and N. J. Tringham. “The Abbey of Dieulacres.” In A History of the County of Stafford, Vol. III, 230–35. London: Victoria County History, 1970.
• Collections for a History of Staffordshire. Vol. 6, Part I: Staffordshire Plea Rolls, Easter 1380. Stafford: William Salt Archaeological Society, 1885.
• Fisher, Michael. Dieulacres Abbey. Leek: Churnet Valley Books, 1984.

A variety of online resources are also used including British History Online, Historic England, various genealogy databases and folklore collections. For any further specifics, please contact the author directly.

Notes on this feature...

1) There are several additional accounts concerning tales of the horseman in existence locally that a curious reader may have occasion to come across. Whilst they all offer their own fascinations, ultimately they prove to be either variations on those accounts already shared here or origin stories for which there is no historical basis at all. Most popular among them is that of William Ferm of Bottomhouse, who is said to have dressed as the horseman to aid his work as a highwayman in the area before being hanged at Stafford. Whilst this isn't impossible, if true it demonstrates that the horseman legend was already firmly established in the region before Ferm's exploits took shape, however there is no historical record of his life, nor his hanging at Stafford. 

2) In September of 2021 I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak to the Butterton History Group regarding the legend of the horseman, Butterton being the village in the Staffordshire Moorlands traditionally connected with the spectre. During the Q&A at the end of the evening, I was informed that sightings of the phantom continue to this day, with one example being shared with me concerning a very well respected local woman (now passed) by the name of Hannah Wood and her sighting on the lanes near to the village hall. Another local attendee told of how their grandson had also encountered the figure locally more than once. Naturally, I can't speak to the validity of such sightings, but I was honoured that they were shared with me. And to quote John Sleigh himself, I too felt that to doubt them would be "worse than heterodoxy." 

Below: newspaper reports regarding the horseman legend from the 1930s. Courtesy of Maggie Risby, Butterton History Group.