Long Lankin

Hah. So not murdered in my bed, nor did I suffer bad dreams. What I do have is an awful knot in my lower back where I slept awkwardly. Strange to think how much of yesterday may have been queueing up in my head long before the man arrived. Folk ballad ear-worms are the worst! It was Long Lankin and all I could hear was


"Where's the master of the house?" says Long Lankin.
"He's 'way to London," says the nurse to him.
"Where's the lady of the house?" says Long Lankin.
"She's up in her chamber," says the nurse to him.

There have been more than 20 versions of this song; some elements stay the same. The master of the house warns his lady to keep the place locked up to make sure 'Long Lankin' doesn't get in. Of course he does, and is aided by a 'false nurse.' In a particularly gruesome verse they stab the baby ​to bring the mother downstairs, and then he kills her too.

There was blood all in the kitchen, there was blood all in the hall.
There was blood all in the parlour where my lady she did fall.

Long Lankin is strung up for his crime, and the nurse is burned at the stake.

In some versions LL's the mason who builds the lord's castle and is cheated out of his fee, exacting his vengeance on the lord's family, but as LL lives in the gorse and hay out on the moor, he doesn't sound like a mason to me. His name changes; when I was a child I assumed it was an epithet for a very tall person, long, lanky. But he's also called Lambkin which could be an ironic joke. It's been suggested that he had leprosy, because the blood of an innocent gathered in a basin was thought to cure it, and his name might indicate the lamb-like pallor of the afflicted. It would explain why he lives out in the wilds.

I think he's just a cruel mad ruffian who entered the ranks of bogeymen long before Freddy and Jason.

Either way, he haunted my head yesterday.Maybe it was an indication of lurking anxiety. It didn't stop me working at least.