You're Doing 'Jack And The Beanstalk' All Wrong
At the heart of this popular British fairy tale is a dire warning. (And yes, the Vikings had a goddess of cow manure.)
Once, many years ago, two giants threw rocks at each other. One rock landed just south of the Yorkshire village of Hambleton, and became Hambleton Hough. The other landed between Brayton and Thorpe Willoughby and became Brayton Barff.
I only heard this story once. It was told, many years ago, at a writers’ group in Selby, and came from the mouth of an old lady with white hair and watery blue eyes.
The rest of the group looked blank. No-one else had heard this story. So to my lasting regret the old lady, who wasn’t very bright, clammed up about the giants and returned to reading out her doggerel.
I suspect the tale was a variant of a more famous one. According to Yorkshire folklore two giants, the Giant Wade and his wife Bell, lived up near Whitby. They fought sometimes and their marital disharmony and various other homestead activities resulted in landscape features. This region is Viking Central and the Giant Wade appears as Vadi in Norse mythology and is known as Wate in Middle High German.
But even beyond the Danelaw, these islands are full of stories about giants. They aren’t a uniquely British motif — there seem to be Viking and Celtic influences — but they are a prevailing one. Richard Barber in his study Myths and Legends of the British Isles (1999) presents the story of the Giants of Albion as a foundational myth of English nationhood. You won’t find it in any Ladybird children’s books. Why? Try Googling it: there’s murder, incest, coupling with demons and — worst of all the horrors — liberated women refusing to submit to their husbands. See where feminism gets you? Give ‘em the vote and the next thing you know, they’re being shagged by incubi, getting pregnant and the countryside is crawling with baby ogres.
Jack and the Beanstalk is a very British tale. Other pantomime stories take their origins from France, Germany, the Middle East and, in the case of Cinderella, Ancient China. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is said to descend from the Egyptian jackal-headed god Anubis. But, though likely a variant of the 5,000-year-old Indo-European proto-tale The Boy Who Stole The Ogre’s Treasure, Jack as we know it is specifically British: versions turn up in folk tales as far afield as America’s Scots-Irish-settled Appalatian Mountains and in British-convict-settled Australia.
The fluidity of oral tales means there is no definitive version. But this is the one I absorbed during my own childhood and it seems reasonable to suppose it is now the prevailing one:
Jack lives with his mother in a tumbledown cottage. Their meagre income comes from a single cow, Daisy, who they both love a great deal. But times are hard and Jack’s mother decides to sell Daisy. At the market Jack is tricked into exchanging Daisy for some magic beans. When he returns his mother is so enraged she throws the beans out of the window, and the next morning they find one of the beans has grown into a giant beanstalk…
Let’s pause here. Most pantomimes play this scenario for laughs. Either Jack is a fool or, if the playwright has no taste for making the hero a fool, his invented brother Silly Billy is the fool. No-one in their right mind would exchange a cow for a handful of beans!
I beg to differ. A long time ago I majored in Economics. My tutor was the distinguished Dr Judith Heyer who studied rural economies in Kenya and India. So let’s give this tale a hard, financial edge.
Jack and his mother, Dame Trott, are scraping a living on marginal land — on the edge of a fjord, say, or up on the Moors. Their most important capital asset is Daisy the Cow, who provides milk they can turn into value-added products like butter and cheese. The profits enable them to supplement their meagre self-grown diet with bought-in staples — and Daisy’s dung enriches the soil.
But then disaster strikes. It might be floods, or drought, or a rampant fungus. It might be an invading army stripping the land of everything that isn’t nailed down. Whatever it is, it’s a force entirely beyond their influence or control. And it sends the price of bought-in staples soaring.
Never mind: they will switch from their preferred foodstuffs to cheaper ones. They will eat the animal feed they usually give to Daisy.
But every peasant family in the region is doing the same. So these cheaper foods rocket in price and they can no longer afford to feed the cow.
Daisy gets thinner. Daisy stops giving milk. But nobody’s buying anyway and now Jack and his mother have no cash income at all.
And they’re getting hungry.
Selling their most productive asset is not a decision Dame Trott takes lightly. But what else can she do? How, otherwise, will she and Jack survive the Hungry Gap until the next crop is ready in early June? When the roads become passable in spring she instructs Jack to drive the now skeletal Daisy to market. Perhaps he will find grazing along the way to fatten her up.
But Jack finds no grazing. It’s three days’ walk to market and the drove road is stripped and churned as though many cattle have already passed through. And when he gets to market he finds it crowded with cows as skinny and wretched as the one he’s trying to unload. The famine is widespread and everyone is selling off their livestock at the same time.
Jack doesn’t exchange Daisy for a handful of beans because he is stupid. He negotiates long and hard but it’s the best he can do.
This is the iron law of famines. When the staple crop fails it brings the price of livestock crashing down with it.
Dejected, Jack plods home. When he hands the beans to his mother she is furious and throws them out of the house. She will have nothing to do with his beans.
Which is odd. Because they are in the middle of a famine. Why doesn’t she add the beans to whatever miserable potage she’s cooking for Jack’s tea?
But no. She is a God-fearing woman and she will not have any so-called magic beans in the house. No way. She will have holly in the house, and mistletoe. She will celebrate the rebranded mid-winter festival known as Christmas, and cast her wishes into a dressed well. But magic beans? Not on your nelly. The ancient Christian church, so liberal in its attitude to pagan survivals, will have no truck with any ritual involving beans — and neither will she.
What’s going on here? And why doesn’t Jack bring home a manky cabbage or some onions instead of beans? Why is a beanstalk so integral to the story?
Despite broad (fava) beans being a staple crop of antiquity (possibly the world’s first farmed crop), the classical world associated beans with death. Pythagoros noted their similarity to human foetuses and refused to eat them on those grounds. But a particularly British explanation may lie in the Celtic festival of Beltane, still celebrated into the 19th-century in parts of Ireland, Wales and Scotland with bonfires and other superstitious manifestations.
The timing of Beltane (early May) puts it squarely in the Hungry Gap. Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say:
“Beltane (the beginning of summer) and Samhain (the beginning of winter) are thought to have been the most important of the four Celtic festivals. Sir James George Frazer wrote in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion that the times of Beltane and Samhain are of little importance to European crop-growers, but of great importance to herdsmen practising seasonal transhumance. Thus, he suggests that the festival has pastoral origins.[18]”
I disagree with Frazer about Beltane being of little importance to crop-growers. But what if he’s right about the festival’s pastoral origins? Daisy the Cow might be older than we think. Almost as old as the giant beasts in cave paintings. And the plot thickens:
“According to 18th-century writers, in parts of Scotland there was [a] ritual involving the Beltane bannock. The cake would be cut and one of the slices marked with charcoal. The slices would then be put in a bonnet and everyone would take one out while blindfolded. According to one writer, whoever got the marked piece had to leap through the fire three times. According to another, those present pretended to throw the person into the fire and, for some time afterwards, would speak of them as if they were dead. This "may embody a memory of actual human sacrifice", or it may have always been symbolic.[15] ”
It is possible that the early Church associated beans with rituals of human sacrifice. (I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the notorious Scottish cannibal clan of legend was headed by a Sawney Bean.) Nowadays we count ourselves lucky if we get the coin that’s hidden in the Christmas pudding. Perhaps the person who got the bean hidden in the Beltane bannock was not so fortunate. Or maybe the marked bannock (now wheat-based) started out as a beancake.
Even more intriguing, the Nordic goddess Beyla, meaning ‘bean’, is a handmaiden of Freya. Beyla, married to Byggvir (‘barley’), is associated with cows, bees and — don’t you just love the practical Vikings — cow manure. She’s giving fertility vibes. Perhaps the rock-chucking giantess Bell who lived up near Whitby started out as Beyla.
Now stick a pin in all that whilst we consider the rest of the story.
Jack climbs the magic beanstalk, convinced that something wonderful must be at the top. He’s right! He finds the palatial mansion occupied by Mr & Mrs Giant. (There’s that pairing of giants and deities again, Gog and Magog, Beyla and Brggvir, Wade and Bell!) These are “the people of the clouds” as Japanese peasants used to call the Japanese aristocracy. Their lives of abundance are unaffected by the hard times below.
In some versions of the tale it is the giant’s rampages that have caused the hardship, as doubtless the people of the clouds often did with their wars, taxes and general mismanagement.
Because this is the thing with famines: They do not affect everyone equally. For some they are a business opportunity — during a famine there are livestock, implements, people and even land itself to be had for a song. Famines result in wealth inequality as capital becomes concentrated in a few hands.
And it gets worse. Suppose you do survive the crisis? You have sold almost everything. You have no cows, no seeds, no horses, no ploughs and no fertiliser. How do you get back on your feet?
Answer: you borrow money. The other group that may benefit from a famine — or be perceived to benefit from it — are the financiers. (And if you thought this story couldn’t get any darker, the destruction in 1190 of York’s Jewish community, which offered essential credit services to the city’s international trading merchants, allegedly started as an attempt to evade paying back loans.)
The giant and his wife have two prized possessions. One is a harp that talks, the other a hen that lays golden eggs. Jack the farmer understands cows, milk, butter and cheese. But a talking harp is an intangible asset in tangible form. The harp is education and information. It’s owning a phone so that you can call round and get the best price possible for your yams or fish, where previously you had to rely on a single merchant. A talking harp — information — gives you the edge.
And as for the hen that lays golden eggs — that’s looking a bit like the City of London to me. It’s all the magic, incomprehensible ways clever people pull money out of hats.
The Georgian audience that lapped up the first-ever pantomime performance of Jack and the Beanstalk at Drury Lane, London, in 1819 was already losing contact with its rural roots. As this process intensified during the 19th-century, elements of the story which earlier generations might have regarded as brutal, indeed horrifying, social realism were transformed by nostalgia (on the British mainland at least) into something sweetly bucolic.
But Jack, as we know, creates havoc in the clouds. He steals the giant’s harp and hen, and ultimately slays the giant — because in ancient times pillage is nine tenths of the law. He ends the story as a boy done good, and he’s very nice to his Mum.
Perhaps my analysis of the tale is far-fetched. But hopefully I’ve done enough to convince you that our distant ancestors had mixed feelings about beans, and some of the meanings they ascribed to them were very dark indeed.
And famines occur frequently in agricultural societies. The Thirty Years War (1618-48) which sundered the Holy Roman Empire resulted in a famine so savage that parts of Germany recorded a population decline of 50%. The Church received plausible contemporary accounts of ‘hunger cannibalism’.
And what does the giant bellow at Jack (ideally in the disembodied voice of actor Brian Blessed):
Fe, fa, fi-fo-fum,I smell the breath of an Englishman.Let him be alive or let him be dead,I'll grind his bones to make my bread.
So this folk tale contains not one, but two references to ritual murder and/or eating people. There is the human sacrifice that will make the good times roll again, and there is hunger cannibalism.
So laugh all you want about the cow Daisy as she gets her legs in a twist. Howl at the antics of Silly Billy, Jack’s foolish younger brother. But Jack himself is not silly. Jack is a lad who does what it takes to climb the ladder of success.
And Jack listened to his grandmother, as she sat by the fire on a cold winter’s day amusing the children by sharing her memories and her wisdom. Perhaps she was also shelling peas and beans into her apron as she took her trip down Memory Lane.
“I remember when your grandfather and I were young. Times were hard — harder than you can imagine. I don’t like to think of those times now — how we survived and what we ate. Your grandfather found a bucket of glue, you know, at the back of the byre, and we even ate that. Thank goodness he was taught by his dad to make it properly, with good animal bones.
“And don’t you be thinking, when the land is bare and folks are hungry, that you can sell a cow or two and you’ll be alright. Because it doesn’t work like that.
“And you be a good boy, and say your prayers, because there’ll be folks round here going back to the old ways, and doing the things the priests taught us not to do, to see if that does any better.
“And remember this — however bad it gets, there’s always them as do alright.
“So keep hay in the barn and gold in your belt and maybe when those times come round again you’ll do alright too, and we won’t be forced to eat glue, and worse.”
Because shit’s real and the old peasant woman knew it. She passed that wisdom on to the next generation in a coded story with elements reaching back to before the dawn of settled agriculture.
Because on the edge of subsistence, when you’re ekeing out a living on a few stony acres, your life depends on the delicate balance between beans and cows and manure. If that cycle is disrupted, you’re done for.
Jack and the Beanstalk warns of physical and moral danger when the fertility of the land is dishonoured. But it also offers hope that if you keep your wits about you, and make proper plans, you can not merely survive but thrive — without having to eat people.
I didn’t say it was a nice story.
Merry Christmas.
Liz x
Listings
Jack and the Beanstalk: The Rock’n’Roll Panto, City Varieties, Leeds, to Jan 12, £21.50-£39
Jack and the Beanstalk, CAST, Doncaster, to Jan 5, £15-£37
Jack and the Beanstalk, Bridlington Spa, to Jan 5, £19-£31.50
Jack and the Beanstalk, Barnsley Civic, to Dec 28, £15-£19
Fascinating take on an old tale, thanks for taking the time to bring it all together!
We're just down the road from Brayton Barff and I hadn't heard this specific folk tale before. If you ever find out the source I'd love to know more.