| Abstrakt: |
Several commenters on the YouTube video of the Inkubus Sukkubus song claim that the song is based on a factual event, and that the Church ought to be deeply ashamed of its treatment of Maud and Old Margaret; they offer to send old photos of Maud's Elm to those of a doubting disposition. Maud's Elm was a historic tree of gigantic proportions, located in the Gloucestershire village of Swindon, which is today a suburb of Cheltenham. The Cheltenham printer Ernest George Built-Leonard printed a mid-Victorian pamphlet of his own, The Tragic Legend of Maud's Elm, containing the entire pathetic story from beginning to end; a new and enlarged edition was published a few years later, and a third edition as late as the 1920s. John Goding, the author of the 1853 History of Cheltenham, confidently claims that Maud's Elm was now the most famous tree in Cheltenham, after the enormous Piff's Elm nearby had been recently cut down, a process that took nine sawyers 14 full days of work. [Extracted from the article] |
