Jack-In-Irons

Also Known As: also written Jack-in-irons; the name is a plain description, Jack being the everyday stand-in for a man whose name is not known, and irons the word for a prisoner’s fetters
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: He is a gaunt, enormously strong man at least ten feet high who goes about hung with clanking chains at his feet and wrists.
Role in Mythos: He is a town ghost of the West Riding, a street terror who takes people off the road after dark.
Relation to Humans: He waits for the unwary pedestrian, springs out of a dark corner, and carries them off to what the record calls unknown regions. No account describes anyone coming back from them, and no account offers a charm, a weapon or a bargain that works against him.

The chains came first. In the mill and colliery towns of the West Riding a street could empty inside twenty minutes once the shift ended, and what was left behind was gaslight, coal smoke and a long run of setts with nobody on them. That was his hour, and his hour was generous: any time after dark would do.

He stood at least ten feet. Gaunt, the record says, and terribly strong, with clanking chains at feet and wrists. It gives him no face, no coat, no colour, and no name beyond the one everybody used, which is barely a name at all. Jack is what you call a man when you do not know who he is. Irons are what the law puts on a prisoner’s ankles. He is a description walking around with nothing behind it.

That description belongs to Miss M. W. E. Fowler, who wrote the Yorkshire folklore chapter of *Memorials of Old Yorkshire* in 1909 and said plainly at the top of it that she had gathered her material some years before, mainly in the manufacturing districts and colliery villages of the West Riding. Jack-In-Irons gets three sentences there, filed between a grey spectral cat that walks in front of women on their way home and a section on witchcraft. Four years later Elizabeth Mary Wright gave him a single line in *Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore*, her Oxford survey of dialect and country belief, and set him among the Yorkshire boggarts: a supernatural being of great stature, wearing clanking chains, who may at any moment spring out on a passer-by in the dark. Between the two of them, that is all of him there is.

Picture the walk home. A man goes down a street he has used for thirty years, the lamps set twenty yards apart and the dark between them absolute, his own boots loud on the stone. Somewhere in one of those gaps the iron starts up, ankle height, unhurried. It is not behind him.

What happens next is short. Fowler’s Jack does not fight, does not moan, does not haunt a house or a bridge or a particular crossroads. He appears suddenly in a quiet street, or springs out of a dark corner, and carries the unwary pedestrian off to unknown regions. That is the phrase, and it is also the end of the account. Nobody says where the regions are. Nobody comes back to describe them.

There is no origin. He is not a hanged man, not a murdered blacksmith, not a giant killed on a moor and walking ever since; the record does not claim he was alive to begin with. There is no way to be rid of him either. The West Riding was generally well supplied with remedies, iron and rowan and running water and the right words said at the right moment, and Jack gets none of them. The single limit anyone put on him is the daylight, and that is less a weakness than a timetable.

He belongs to a crowded field. Wright lists him shoulder to shoulder with the barghest, the church grim, the guytrash, padfoot and the skriker, and nearly all of that company is better recorded than he is, mostly because nearly all of that company is a dog. Yorkshire’s night horrors run heavily to black hounds with saucer eyes. Jack is the one shaped like a man, which is why the Victorians walking home found him worse, and also why later illustrators found him so useful.

The giant in circulation now is a different creature. Thirteen feet tall, swinging a spiked club, hung about with the severed heads of his victims, prowling lonely country roads: none of that is in Fowler, and none of it is in Wright. It accumulated in the late twentieth century, when Brian Froud and Alan Lee put him into *Faeries* in 1979 and gave a great many half-remembered British sprites a definitive picture, and the games and novels that mined that book carried him on from there. The thirteen feet repays a look. It is the height of Uther Squarefoot, the tusked, pig-headed jack-in-irons in Laurell K. Hamilton’s novel *A Kiss of Shadows*, published in 2000. The Yorkshire one is ten feet, carries nothing, and has no head described at all except his own, which is not described either.

What he can actually do is brief and physical. He is strong enough to carry off a grown adult without any struggle being worth recording. He is tall enough that a man looking up at him in a dark street would be looking at a chest rather than a face. He is quick enough to cover the ground from a corner before anyone gets past it, and he chooses his ground well: quiet streets, the gaps between lamps, the hour when the road belongs to one person at a time. Against that the tradition offers nothing whatsoever. The chains that ought to mean he is bound do not appear to bind him to anything, and the only protection the West Riding ever suggested was the obvious one, which was to be inside.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Jack-In-Irons?

Jack-In-Irons is a town ghost of West Riding Yorkshire folklore, described as a gaunt, terribly strong man at least ten feet high with clanking chains at his feet and wrists. He appears in quiet streets after dark and carries off people walking alone. He was recorded by M. W. E. Fowler in *Memorials of Old Yorkshire* in 1909 and by Elizabeth Mary Wright in *Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore* in 1913.

How tall is Jack-In-Irons?

The folklore record gives Jack-In-Irons as at least ten feet high. The thirteen-foot figure that circulates widely online does not come from the Yorkshire sources; it matches Uther Squarefoot, a jack-in-irons character in Laurell K. Hamilton’s novel *A Kiss of Shadows* from 2000.

Where does Jack-In-Irons appear?

He appears in the streets of West Riding towns, in the manufacturing districts and colliery villages where his story was collected. Fowler calls him a town ghost specifically, and describes him springing out of dark corners in quiet streets rather than haunting country roads. He can be met at any time after dark.

Does Jack-In-Irons carry a spiked club and the heads of his victims?

Not in the folklore record. The club and the belt of severed heads are later additions, popularised by illustrated fairy books of the late twentieth century and the fantasy games and novels that followed them. The Yorkshire sources give him chains at his wrists and ankles and nothing else.

How do you escape Jack-In-Irons?

The sources describe no way to fight, banish or bargain with him. No charm, weapon, saint’s name or rule of iron or running water is recorded against him, which is unusual for a Yorkshire bogey. The only limit given is that he is met after dark, so the practical advice the tradition offers is to be indoors.