St Dunstan's own documented life gives this legend a genuine historical anchor of real substance: Archbishop of Canterbury in the tenth century, reformer of English monastic life, and, relevant to this particular story, a trained metalworker and blacksmith before entering religious life, a combination of sanctity and manual trade unusual enough among medieval saints to have generated its own distinct body of legend across the country, of which this Mayfield story is one of the most specific and geographically anchored versions.
The tongs themselves, still preserved and shown at Mayfield, give the legend a genuinely lasting physical relic to point to, even though their own thirteenth-century dating, three centuries after Dunstan's death, makes their claimed direct association with the historical Dunstan impossible to sustain, a gap the tradition itself does not appear troubled by, treating the tongs as a symbolic rather than strictly literal relic of the story. The legend's explanation for the reddish tint of the Tunbridge Wells chalybeate spring waters, an actual, chemically explained natural phenomenon caused by dissolved iron, gives the folklore a charming, if entirely unscientific, alternative account for a real and well known local feature some eight miles from Mayfield itself.
The story's wide circulation, recorded across multiple regional and national retellings of the wider St Dunstan and the Devil legend rather than being unique to Mayfield alone, situates this specific version within a broader medieval and early modern folkloric tradition about the saint, of which Mayfield's own forge and preserved tongs represent one particularly well anchored and still-visitable local claim to the story's true location.
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