The story of the Holbeach Gamesters is set in 1793 and concerns a small group of card-playing friends, drinking as they usually did at the Chequers Inn in Holbeach, who fell to talking one night about a member of their own circle, sometimes named in the retelling as Codling or Farmer Guymer, who had recently died and been buried in the ordinary way. According to the tale, drink and a genuinely dark sense of humour got the better of the group that night, and they made their way to the churchyard, dug up their dead friend's body, and carried it directly into All Saints' Church, where they propped the corpse up against the altar itself and dealt him his own hand of cards, as though inviting him to rejoin the game he had left unfinished.
The story caused enough genuine local scandal at the time, and in the decades that followed, that it was eventually picked up and reworked by Victorian poets keen to draw a suitably moral lesson from it: Thomas Hardwicke Rawnsley published a ballad titled The Three Revellers, or Impiety Punished: A Legend of Holbeach in 1800, and the Chartist poet Eliza Cook later wrote her own separate version, The Sacrilegious Gamesters, in 1843, each poet finding in the tale exactly the kind of cautionary material Victorian moral verse thrived on.
Whether the events actually happened precisely as described, or indeed happened at all, is genuinely impossible to verify at this distance from 1793, but the tale has remained, regardless, one of the most retold and most gleefully macabre pieces of Lincolnshire folklore for well over two centuries since, its enduring popularity owing as much to its sheer audacity as to any question of its literal truth.
Comments