The Folklore of Discworld

one can pick up a stone with a hole in it; these are called ‘dobby stones’, just as they are in the Yorkshire Dales, and are said to be lucky. Tiffany keeps one in her pocket, though she is unsure what use it is; if she lived in Yorkshire, she would know you can hang them at your door or window to keep evil spirits out, and over your bed to prevent nightmares. She also keeps a fossilized sea urchin, which she once used as part of a shamble; it is the sort which looks like a bun with grooves on it making a five-pointed star, which on the Sussex Downs is called a ‘shepherd’s crown’. It’s said that if you put them on the kitchen windowsill they will keep thunderstorms away and prevent milk from going sour.
T HE S HEPHERDS’ L IFE
    Iron-wheeled shepherding huts like the one Granny Aching used were once common all along the South Downs, and indeed in other sheep-rearing regions too. Shepherds lived in them at lambing time, when it was essential to stay near the ewes day and night; they were also used at other times of year, but less regularly. They were sturdywooden structures, warmed by a small stove, with a chair, a table, a simple bunk bed, and plenty of shelves, boxes and hooks to hold the shepherd’s gear – a horn lantern, crooks, shears, knives, a hay fork, a feeding bottle for sickly lambs and a saucepan to warm the milk for them, tins and bottles of sheep medicines, one or two spare sheep bells, and so on. The huts would be set up close to the lambing-fold; farm horses could draw them from place to place, if need be. The stove made the hut very cosy indeed, though sheep tended to creep under it on cold nights, their stomachs gurgling and rumbling till the dawn – but the shepherd would probably snooze in his chair at busy times, and be too tired to notice.
    To count their flocks, Discworld shepherds have special words and a special way of reckoning, known only to them (and to the Nac Mac Feegle). It begins with ‘yan tan tethera’ for ‘one two three’, and goes up as far as ‘jiggit’ for twenty. There it stops. The same system was used by English shepherds, and sometimes also by fishermen reckoning their catch and women counting the stitches of their knitting. Bits of it are still remembered by children when they are ‘counting out’ to start a game. The names of the numbers vary a bit, but they are always grouped in fives and make a kind of rhyme; for instance:
    Yan, tan, tethera, pethera, pimp;
    Sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick;
    Yaner-dick, taner-dick, tether-dick, pether-dick, bumfit;
    Yaner-bumfit, taner-bumfit, tether-bumfit, pether-bumfit, jiggit.
    Maybe one reason children have remembered this ditty is that some of the words do sound a bit rude.
    When he reached ‘jiggit’, the shepherd would cut a notch on a stick, or put a stone in his pocket, and start over again. When all the sheep were counted, he would reckon up his notches or stones; suppose there were 123 sheep, this would mean six notches, plus three extra beasts – ‘six score sheep and three’.
    It sounds cumbersome, but in fact comes easily to any creature that has two hands, with five fingers on each hand. The idea of reckoning by twenties has left traces on the English language even where the special words are not used, as when a psalm says: ‘The days of our age are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength but labour and sorrow.’ In French too, the word for ‘eighty’, quatrevingts , means literally ‘four twenties’. Come to that, in English currency there used to be twenty shillings to the pound.
    At lambing time, shepherds are extremely busy, too busy to come down off the hills. And so they are at sheep-dipping time, sheep-washing time, sheep-shearing time, and in the run-up to sheep fairs. This rather gets in the way of regular religion, and may cause offence to some of the more touchy gods, who dislike being neglected. To make sure there were no unwelcome consequences in the afterlife, precautions were taken at the funerals of Discworld shepherds:
    Granny Aching had been wrapped in a woollen blanket, with a tuft of raw wool pinned to it. That was a special shepherd thing. It was there to tell any gods who might get involved that the person being buried there was a shepherd, and spent a lot of time on the hills, and what with lambing and one thing and another couldn’t always take much time out for religion, there being no