Tales of the Lincoln Imp

A new anthology gathers original works by contemporary writers and poets, exploring and retelling some well-known – and more obscure – Lincolnshire folk tales. Here co-editor Rory Waterman shares some of the lore and a different perspective on the Lincoln Imp.

Shaggy-coated, stub-toothed, horned, bull-eared, his right cloven hoof resting on his left knee, his three-fingered hands holding it in place, and wide eyes glaring.

Everyone in Lincolnshire knows the Lincoln Imp: twelve inches of mischief above a column in the 13th-century Angel Choir in Lincoln Cathedral, close to the main altar. Lots of columns in the Cathedral have intriguing carvings above them, but it’s likely you can’t imagine any of the others.

Until about 150 years ago, nobody seems to have paid much attention to the Imp either, or referred to it by its current name. By 1874, however, Imp mementos were on sale in the city. Then, in 1890, the Lincoln jeweller James Ward Usher took out patents on the design, giving his business sole rights to it for five years – a shrewd move.

A startling array of Usher Imps, as they came to be called, some with malevolent ruby-studded eyes, were soon on sale in his shop, James Usher and Son. An advert in the Lincolnshire Chronicle in 1892 gave notice of Lincoln Imp spoons, tongs, and other items, which ‘cannot be obtained elsewhere’ and make ‘appropriate souvenirs of Lincoln.’ Usher and his Imp were famous: letters addressed ‘To the silversmith who makes and sells the Lincoln Imp’, or simply ‘Lincoln’ accompanied by a sketch of the Imp, reached him.

Early interpretations
The success of the Usher Imp laid the ground for a tale to go forth and multiply. The earliest rendition on record is The Ballad of the Wind, the Devil and Lincoln Minster by Arnold Frost, published in 1897, though Frost claimed to have been told the story a few years earlier by a 60-year-old North Lincolnshire man, who heard it as a boy from his father. This poem tells how the king and Bishop Remigius arrived in Lincoln after the Norman Conquest, and flattened houses to make room for the Castle and Cathedral.

The church was finished, but then the devil started a fight with Remigius, who won by praying to the Virgin Mary, the Cathedral’s dedicatee: she sent a ‘lusty and strong’ wind, battering the devil so violently that he slipped into the building to seek refuge. And this is

Where he’s been ever since, nor dare he come out,
For well doth he know,
The wind his foe
Still awaits his return at the corner sou’-west!

The devil soon ‘took shape as the Lincoln Imp’, and they have been in an eternal stand-off ever since: the godly, ethereal presence on the outside and the satanic, solid one in God’s house.

It is easy to see how this might challenge Victorian religious propriety. I suspect Frost invented the teller of the tale to excuse its irreverence, with the bonus that an apparently bona fide folk tale might be more likely to pique the interest of tourists with ha’pennies to spare.

The windy element is picked up by H.J. Kesson in The Legend of the Lincoln Imp (1904). This is much more famous than Frost’s poem, and is still sold in the Cathedral Shop. It is tame in comparison, though.

Kesson begins with the Devil sending ‘young demons’ out of Hell to cause mischief: ‘One strode on the wind as he would on a steed, / And thus to old Lindum was carried with speed.’ The wind, we are told, ‘has his faults’, but is fundamentally ‘orthodox’, so outside the Cathedral he tells the Imp he will proceed no further. The Imp slips inside the building, and causes mischief of the candle-smashing, rug-pulling variety. Finally, he picks on the angels, threatening to pluck their wings, at which point ‘the tiniest angel’ turns him to stone.

An alternative Imp story
Frost and Kesson are, more than anyone else, responsible for the versions of the tale that still circulate. My favourite Lincoln Imp legend, though, is Cecil Dye’s Love and the Lincoln Imp (1925), which gives a totally different origin myth for Lincoln’s famous little bit of petrified, beautiful ugliness.

In a preface, Dye tells us that the ‘neatly printed verses’ have got ‘the true origin of the grotesque figure’ completely wrong. ‘In 1186,’ his story begins, ‘there came to the city on the hill Hugh of Avalon’: Saint Hugh, whose extravagant tomb is in the Cathedral, below the Imp. Having laid that factual foundation, Dye then builds a turreted tale of pure imagination. Hugh sees a 22-year-old man called Saxby carving stone in the garden of a ‘rose-smothered cottage’ below Steep Hill, and is so impressed that he offers him a job. Saxby lives with his mother, who is delighted: ‘None could match his father with the long bow for miles around,’ she tells Hugh, ‘and ’tis known that the Saxbys’ eyes were aye as true as their hearts.’ He’s a good lad.

So, Saxby starts working as a Cathedral stonemason. Every day as he climbs Steep Hill, he passes the home of a beautiful young woman called Ruth, and he fancies her, but doesn’t have the courage to strike up conversation. Instead, he decides that ‘the image that he carried with him in his heart should live in the stone’ and, when the building opens, he will ‘take Ruth and point out to her the monument that symbolised his love.’ In other words, he decides to carve her face in the Cathedral.

We can sense the building storm of a coming-of-age narrative. One of Saxby’s less immediately obvious errors, however, is to share his intentions with Cedric, another Cathedral stonemason. Cedric soon meets Ruth, and decides she ‘should be his, by fair means or foul’, though she spurns his advances.

Saxby finishes his sculpture, and just before the building is reopened Cedric goes to Ruth ‘with a villainous sense of satisfaction in his heart’. He tells Ruth about her icon, and predictably also says that he carved it himself ‘out of my love for thee.’ Unfortunately for Cedric, Saxby overhears him, rushes back to the Cathedral, and hacks at his carving, turning it ‘into the grinning monstrosity that Cedric was to point out to Ruth as his tribute.’

Ruth accompanies Cedric to the grand opening, but shame prevents him from looking at the carving. Still, he directs her gaze and of course she sees Saxby’s ‘ugly little monument to a false friend’ among the ‘architectural splendours’.

She assumes Cedric is mocking her, but waits until they are well away from the Cathedral at the foot of the hill, where Cedric has left his horse, before she smacks him in the mouth. His true nature is then revealed to her: he throws her across the horse, and sets off at a gallop. Luckily, Saxby has witnessed this, his mother hands him his late father’s longbow, and he shoots Cedric as he crosses the Witham.

Cedric falls back into the swell, which closes over him as Saxby and Ruth finally embrace one another on the riverbank. How romantic. The course of true love never did run smooth.

What an intriguing little tale. Yes, it revolves around two men and a largely passive female beau – but in the hands of a gifted, ambitious writer you can imagine it as a complex, characterful feature film. The story also has a neat symmetry: having been stabbed in the back metaphorically, Saxby takes the ultimate revenge by shooting his nemesis in the back and flattening the love triangle. Moreover, the reason Dye gives for the existence of the Imp is more readily believable than in the more famous Imp tale: a small sculpture can be carved out of a big one, without need for miracles.

Why, then, has this story been completely forgotten? I suspect there are several reasons. Firstly, Dye was a Johnny-Come-Lately, and by 1925 the earlier tale had cemented itself into people’s minds. Secondly, Dye’s story is completely secular: there are no angels, good doesn’t overcome evil unless murder is good, and the Imp is a product of lust, then anger, leaving a secular icon above an altar. The Cathedral is also incidental to the plot. Tourists were therefore less likely to desire a copy of this story as a memento.

Modern retellings
Most authors’ attempts at the Lincoln Imp legend stick closer to the original, but some are naughtily irreverent. In my recent poetry collection, Come Here to This Gate (Carcanet, 2024), I include several ‘modernised’ local folk tales, including a version of the Imp story in which he bumps into ‘a thousand or more resin models’ of himself in the shop after putting a grandmother off her tea in the café.

Jane Simmons provides another modern version in Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined (Five Leaves, 2025), which I co-edited with Anna Milon. Here, the cathedral peregrines get a cameo, or at least their poo does! Both of us drew on the original Frost-Kesson story, because it is more widely known. Small literary gems like Dye’s story often get sidelined, sadly. But perhaps the Imp really was carved angrily out of the sculpture of a beautiful medieval woman’s face. I invite you to prove otherwise.

What does the Cathedral think of the Imp and the tales that have circulated? In one variant, also collected by Frost and included in a note to his poem, the Devil comes to Lincoln to meet his friend the Dean, and has been inside ever since, chatting. I recently sat down with the Reverend Canon Dr Simon Jones, the current Dean of Lincoln Cathedral, to interview him for a book I’m writing. He admitted there’s “a gentle undercurrent of unease about the presence of the Imp” in the wider Cathedral community, largely because of its close proximity to the shrine of Saint Hugh. That’s understandable. “But we’ve got it,” he said. “Why not make more of it?”

Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined (edited by Anna Milon and Rory Waterman) is published by Five Leaves Publications, https://fiveleaves.co.uk

The book is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Lincolnshire Folk Tales project at Nottingham Trent University

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