The Folklore of Discworld

authorities stopped the Chester game in 1539, but in some other places people were more stubborn; in Derby it took soldiers, special constables, and the reading of the Riot Act to finally subdue the footballers in 1849. Some towns kept their mass football till late in the nineteenth century. Indeed, there are a few places where it is still vigorously played. It can be seen at Alnwick in Northumberland and Ashbourne in Derbyshire every Shrove Tuesday, and at Kirkwall in Orkney at the New Year.
    The ‘Haxey Hood Game’ at Haxey in Lincolnshire every January is similar, though it is surrounded by more ceremonial, and though the object tussled over is not a ball but a roll of leather, like a truncheon. Allegedly, this represents the hood of a long-ago medieval lady which blew off, causing twelve or thirteen labourers to go chasing after it. Who knows, but for that unthinking piece of gallantry we might now be watching Association Archery on Saturday afternoons.
G HOST S HIPS
    In Small Gods there’s a description of a shipwreck. When the captain cries, ‘We’ll have to abandon ship!’ Death replies, NO. W E WILL TAKE IT WITH US . I T IS A NICE SHIP . And so, though the ship has been completely smashed up and everyone aboard is drowned, it seems to become whole again (in a way) and sails away, grey and slightly transparent, through darkness and silence, bearing the ghosts of men and of rats.
    Sailors on Earth also find it perfectly natural that a ship can become a ghost, since before it sank it had been a living creature, with a soul of its own – a ‘she’, in fact, not an ‘it’. She’s got a name, hasn’t she? And wasn’t she christened, just like a human being, with somebody blessing her and smashing a bottle of champagne over her? In French fishing villages, there would be a full-scale religious ceremony for a new boat, with a godfather and godmother, and a priest to sprinkle holy water; everyone was given blessed bread, including the boat herself – scraps of the bread would be put into holes in the mast.
    Many also thought that a ship had a guardian spirit. Some said it lived in the figurehead. Others, from Ancient Egypt to modern China and the Mediterranean, have painted huge eyes on the prow; these are the eyes of its guardian, to bring luck, to see the way ahead, and to outstare any evil spirits. The Swedes have a different notion; they say that when boat-builders cut a tree down to make the keel, the tree’s guardian gnome follows it, and becomes the boat’s luck-bringer.
    Ships and death go well together. Vikings thought a dead man should sail in his own boat to the land of the dead. So some of them buried or burned the man and the boat together; others lit a pyre for the corpse on board a ship, which was then set drifting out to sea; others marked the site of the man’s grave by an oval of standing stones, forming the outline of a boat. An English poet, D. H. Lawrence, wrote in the 1920s of ‘The Ship of Death’:
    We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on its longest journey.
    A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.
    There are also the phantom ships doomed to sail the seas of Earth for ever, because of some crime or sin committed on board, or because of the tragic circumstances in which they sank. To see one is an omen of disaster, or at least of very bad weather. You can recognize them because they are sailing at full speed against the wind, or when there is no wind at all. Often they have no crew; if there is one, they are skeletons. They never reach a port; they never answer when hailed. There is at least one, at Porthcurno in Cornwall, which has been seen to sail straight for the shore at dusk, rise up into the air, and go on sailing across dry land .
    The most famous of the phantom ships is the Flying Dutchman . She haunts the seas around the Cape of Good Hope, because her captain blasphemously swore he would round the Cape, despite a gale, even if it took him till Doomsday. In Britain, several ghost ships haunt the Solway Firth, as a result of crimes. Two were pirate vessels; one was deliberately wrecked by a jealous murderer as it carried a bridal party; one was a slave trader, homeward bound, whose rich but godless captain refused to go ashore to attend church on Christmas Day. There is also the Lady Lovibund , which is