Folklore Map of Britain & Ireland Myths, Legends & Spectral Encounters
Giants Weston, Hertfordshire

Jack o' Legs

A giant outlaw of Weston in Hertfordshire who robbed the rich to feed the poor like a giant Robin Hood, and at his execution shot a final arrow three miles to mark his own grave.

In Hertfordshire folklore Jack o' Legs was a giant — fourteen feet tall in some tellings — who lived in a cave in the woods near Weston and behaved like a giant Robin Hood, a famous archer who robbed wealthy travellers, especially the grasping bakers of Baldock, and shared the spoils with the poor of the district. At last the bakers caught him, blinded him, and condemned him to hang at Baldock.

The story

Granted a final request, Jack asked to shoot one last arrow and to be buried where it fell. He loosed it from the gallows and it flew three miles to land in the churchyard of Holy Trinity at Weston, where two stones set some fourteen feet apart are still pointed out as the head and foot of his grave. The legend was old by the sixteenth century — the poet John Skelton alluded to 'the gibbet of Baldock... made for Jack Leg' around 1521, and the antiquary Nathanael Salmon recorded the full tale in his History of Hertfordshire in 1728.

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