"The Sea Shall Flow To Jackdaw’s Well": Old English Mermaid Legend Traced Back Centuries

A medievalist and cultural historian from the University of Liverpool has uncovered the history of the "mermaids of Staithes", finding the legend of mermaids leaving a curse on an old English fishing village is likely centuries older than we thought.

Great Britain, being entirely surrounded by water and having a tendency to see monsters in the water, has its fair share of mermaid tales. Conwy in North Wales, for example, has its legend of a mermaid who was left to die by fishermen who ignored her cries, who cursed their town to be forever impoverished. Cornwall, if you were to believe the legends, is absolutely filled to the brim with mermaids. So much so that one even began attending church, before finding a suitor and luring them out to the sea, of course.

Finding the origin of these tales can be pretty troublesome. For example, a separate version of the Conwy mermaid myth says that the mermaid was paraded through the town by the fishermen before being suffocated and killed, using her last breath to curse the town's people and buildings. Later, several buildings were said to have burned down in that spot, with her laughter being heard above the flames. These legends tend to go back centuries, and are changed and embellished over time.

"It's very difficult to pin down where they've come from when they've circulated in oral traditions before they get captured in print," Professor Sarah Peverley, who traced the origins of the Staithes mermaids, explained to the BBC.

"It's not until the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century that collectors of folklore started recording and going around communities capturing these great stories our ancestors told."

A popular version of the legend goes like this: Long ago, when Staithes was just a small fishing village, two mermaids were caught in a storm just off the coast. Many miles from their own home and tired from the storm, the mermaids spotted the village and swam towards it, before collapsing on the shore. When they woke up, the mermaids found they were bound in ropes and surrounded by villagers glaring at them. The villagers, frightened and suspicious, kept the mermaids imprisoned for months on end. 

According to some versions of the tale, sometimes they were pelted with stones or mocked by the villagers. But eventually the locals grew used to the sight, and security was relaxed. At this point, they either charmed a fisherman or simply flopped their way back to the ocean, depending on which version of the tale you hear. 

Before going home, however, the mermaid turns to curse the village with the words: "The sea shall flow to Jackdaw’s Well".

"The Jackdaw’s Well mentioned in the curse is no longer to be found in Staithes—it has long since disappeared, but it was once sited to the landward side of Seaton Garth," Marion Atkinson wrote in Legends of the North York Moors: Traditions, Beliefs, Folklore. "Jackdaw’s Well derived its name from the large number of birds of that species that frequented the area. It could be said that the curse of the mermaid came true because since the incident all those years ago the sea has already encroached upon thirteen houses that used to stand between the shore and the well."

This version of the tale gave Peverley and co-author Chloe Middleton-Metcalfe a few clues to work with.

"Atkinson’s reference to the destruction of property at Seaton Garth historicizes the episode by connecting it to the loss of thirteen houses during a violent storm, which took place on 10 January 1830," they write in the paper. "Equally, the wording of the mermaid’s curse, which predicts the sea’s encroachment to Jackdaw’s Well, aligns the encounter with a lost landmark that embeds it unreservedly in the natural and social fabric of Staithes’s past."

Photos of the well, helpfully labeled and dated to 1897, confirm its existence. Other versions of the tale provided further clues and tied it to superstitions local to the area. In one version, tracked down by the team, after the one mermaid has finished their curse, the other asks "if she had told all" to which she answers "No I have not. I have not told what egg broth comes to". After this, there was a local superstition that the water used to boil an egg should be thrown away, which is a pain when you have to fight your way through jackdaws to get your water from a well.

These references to egg broth, missing from most retellings, gave Peverley and Middleton-Metcalfe an indication that the legend of the mermaids dated back centuries, with similar tales dating back to the 1700s.

"There's one in the Isle of Man first recorded in 1726 that has a similar story of a mermaid talking to other merfolk about how humans are silly because they throw away their egg broth - the water their eggs have been boiled in," Peverley said. "When that particular tale was being told, like the Staithes one, egg broth must have meant something later audiences are missing."

Surprisingly, to modern eyes, there are other tales dating as far back as the 17th century involving mermaids and egg water. One, asked what she had seen amongst the human folk, replied "nothing very wonderful" before adding, "but that they are so very ignorant as to throw away the water they boil their eggs in". The paper notes that eggs are often the subject of superstition, and are linked with bad luck, fairies, and are used by witches to conjure up storms, according to old legends.

The team was able to find the first modern reference to the tale, a transcript of a lecture delivered by Robert Brown in January 1924.

"It is impossible to determine how long the story had haunted the imagination of Staithes’s residents prior to Brown’s efforts to gather and preserve their customs and history, but the tale’s inclusion of the mermaid’s mysterious reference to egg-broth in its earliest known form points to the legend’s emergence in a period when the negative associations between eggs, witches, mermaids, and maritime culture were far better known," the team explains in their conclusion, adding that the curse aspect of the tale could indicate that it originated from around the time of the storm.

"By 1830 the sea had reached as far as Jackdaw’s Well, so the dramatic loss of houses that occurred during that or previous inundations of Seaton Garth may have given rise to the legend as an explanation for the tragedy," they write. "However, since Brown does not explicitly map the storm of 1830 onto the mermaid legend in the way that Croden and Atkinson do later, it is more likely that even earlier inundations inspired it."

The original event that inspired the tale (for example, how sea creatures can inspire myths) remains lost, and it's possible that the tale could have been cross-contaminated with other similar legends around the UK. But the legend, minus a little egg broth, lives on.

The study is published in Folklore.