The Suspicious Story of the Bygone Beggar

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n William Thoms, in addition to bringing Notes andnQueries into being and coining the word ‘Folklore’, was also annauthor of some interesting, if characteristically strange, books. Take his HumannLongevity, Its Facts and Its Fictions, of 1873, for example. In it, Thomsnexamines those claims of extreme longevity that are a constant of folknmemories.

William Thoms – Human Longevity – 1873

nPersonally, I blame the Old Testament for putting ideas intonpeople’s heads in the first place – you know, all those patriarchs and prophetsnwho lived for donkeys’ years. Take Methuselah, who was Noah’s grandfather, andnwas reckoned to have lived to be 969 years old. Or Noah himself, who didn’t pegnit until he was 950. Or even Adam, who popped his clogs when he was a merenstripling of 930. Now, people will tell you that the reason for this is becausenthe Bronze Age shepherds responsible for writing this stuff were using andifferent sort of a calendar and by year they meant month, or onenof their year is equal to ten of ours, or they were related to dogs and younneed to divide it by seven or something like that.

Caution – Elderly Pickpockets Ahead

nAnyway, I think that borednrustics heard all this blather when they were sitting in a cold pew of a Sundaynmorning, listening to a preacher giving it his best from the pulpit and itncrossed their fertile minds that they could pass themselves, or their parents,nor their grandparents, off as potential rivals to these biblical examples andnwho knows, there could be a couple of shillings to be had, if the curiousntourists come looking for the latest marvel.

Henry Jenkins

nWhich is, in my opinion, thenreason for folks like Henry Jenkins, a pauper from Ellerton-on-Swale, NorthnYorkshire, who was said to have lived to be 169 years of age. His story wasnrecorded by one Anne Saville, of Bolton, North Yorks, written in about 1662 orn1663, who had seen Jenkins around the place when she moved into the area, andnhad heard tales of his advanced years. One day, she spotted him approaching,nbegging alms, so she stopped him and asked him to tell her his life story. Henwas then, he said, either 162 or 163 years old, so Saville asked him aboutnwhich kings he remembered, to which he replied he recalled the reign of HenrynVIII.

Henry Jenkins

nSo Saville asked him what was the oldest memorable thing he couldnremember, and Jenkins took a minute and said that when he was a boy of aboutntwelve, he had been sent to Northallerton to deliver a wagon filled withnarrow-heads for the English troops on their way to the battle of Flodden, whichnhad taken place in 1513, but an older boy had actually delivered the arrowheadsnfrom Northallerton to the army. When asked if the King was there, he repliednthat the King was then at Tournay in France and that the Earl of Surrey hadnbeen in command. There were other elderly folk in the village, all said to bencentenarians, who said that they remembered Jenkins from their youth and, evennthen, he had been an old man. He had been, so the story went, a butler to LordnConyers, and he remembered well the abbot of Fountains Abbey, long before thendissolution on the monasteries by Henry VIII. He had then gone on to be anfisherman and had ended his days as a beggar.

Henry Jenkins cited in Transactions of the Philosophical Society – 1753

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nThere existed a legal bill, swornnin a legal case of 1665, taken at Kettering, between Anthony Clarke andnSmirkson, where a labourer, Henry Jenkins, then aged 157 years, had been producednand sworn as a witness. And there’s the rub. If he was 157 in 1665, then whennFlodden was fought, in 1513, he would only have been 7 or 8 years old, not 12,nand unlikely to have been entrusted with a wagonload of arrowheads.

Inscription on Henry Jenkins’ memorial

nHowever, inn1522, the Scots had invaded the north of England near Carlisle, and the Earl ofnSurrey had engaged them, and it is possible that Jenkin’s father might havenbeen a boy who remembered a story about arrowheads and his son, in his dotage,nwas merely conflating a story that his father had told him about when he was anboy.

Account of the life of Henry Jenkins – Transactions of the Philosophical Society – 1753

nIt’s not beyond the realms of possibility. When I was a child, myngrandmother would tell me that if I wasn’t a good boy, then Old Boney wouldncome and get me. Old Boney was, to me, a skeleton, just another bogey, likenJenny Greenteeth or the Boggart, and it wasn’t until I was older that Inrealised that my grandmother was threatening me with a figure that had beennused by her grandmother to threaten her when she was a child. Old Boneynwas, I later realised, Napoleon Bonaparte. Maybe, just maybe, I am the last mannin Europe who has been threatened with Bonaparte’s wrath.

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