Jack o’ Kent

Also Known As: also Jack-a-Kent, Jacky Kent, John o’ Kent, John a Kent, Sion Cent; the surname is the Marches place-name Kentchurch rather than the English county
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Welsh Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A cleric and magician who holds the Devil to the exact wording of every bargain he makes with him, and wins on the wording every time.
Role in Mythos: He is the trickster hero of the Herefordshire and Monmouthshire borderland, credited with its bridges, its scattered standing stones and the notch in its skyline.
Relation to Humans: He works among ordinary farmers and labourers, hiring himself out as a crow-scarer or building a bridge the district needed, and the profit of his cheating usually lands with them rather than with him. Mothers on the border were still invoking him to frighten children into obedience in the early twentieth century.

The bridge over the Monnow near Grosmont went up in a single night, and by the last hour of darkness there were two of them standing at either end of it admiring the work. One was a labourer with the mortar still wet on his sleeves. The other had done the heavy lifting and wanted paying. The price agreed was the soul of whoever crossed first, and the Devil, who could feel the sky beginning to thin behind him, gestured graciously at the span and invited Jack to try his own bridge. Jack had a bone in his pocket. A starving dog had been circling the site half the night. He whistled, showed the bone, and threw it over the water, and the dog went after it flat out. The cock crowed. The Devil got a dog.

That story is told across the Welsh Marches with the same shrug of satisfaction, and it is only one of a great many. Jack o’ Kent belongs to the border country between Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, a cleric of some kind who was also a magician, and the whole point of him is that he beat the Devil at contracts. He reached print in the 1590s in Anthony Munday’s stage comedy John a Kent and John a Cumber, where he turns up as an old hermit with supernatural powers and no particular need to explain himself, which tells you he was already common property before any writer got hold of him. The manuscript is in Munday’s own hand and sits in the Huntington Library, one of the earliest surviving English playbooks of its kind.

Who he was underneath is a genuine mess. The National Library of Wales entry for the poet Siôn Cent lists the men whose lives got folded into his: Siôn Cent himself, writing bleak religious verse about death and judgement somewhere between 1400 and 1430; a learned Grey Friar called Dr John Gwent, buried at Hereford in 1348; Dr John Kent of Caerleon, a scholar famous late in the fifteenth century for the breadth of his learning; John Kemp, who died a cardinal; and a John a Kent who was simply a raider making a nuisance of himself along the Marches in 1482 and 1483. Later writers added Owain Glyndŵr to the pile, on the strength of the Scudamores of Kentchurch Court having married one of his daughters and possibly hidden him there after he vanished. He was probably never one man at all.

The stories certainly do not agree on his size. Munday’s hermit is human enough. So is the wild-looking priest that Kentchurch tradition remembers walking the lanes. But in the tales that explain the landscape he is enormous, and the border hills carry the evidence. He jumped from the Sugar Loaf and came down on the Ysgyryd, and the great cleft in the western flank of that hill is where his heel went in. He and the Devil held a throwing match on Trelleck Beacon, hurling stones out across the fields; Jack lost the first round, threw harder on the second, and the Devil stalked off in a temper, which is why three tall stones stand in a Monmouthshire meadow with nothing between them. In 1903 a woman at Kentchurch told the folklorist Beatrix Wherry that whole sequence as current local knowledge, jump and stones and all, and Wherry printed it in Folklore the following year.

His best trick was verbal. Standing beside a newly sown field, Jack offered the Devil half the harvest and let him pick which half: the tops or the butts. The Devil took the tops, and the crop came up turnips, so he carried away a cartload of leaves. The following season, wiser, he chose the butts, and Jack had sown wheat, so he got stubble. The joke is old and travels widely, but on the border it is Jack’s, and the farmers telling it were the ones with the turnips and the grain.

Not all of it was so grand. Hired as a boy to keep crows off a field of corn, and wanting instead to go to the fair at Grosmont, he called the birds down, drove them into a roofless barn and shut them with a spell. The farmer found him at the fair and marched him back furious, and there the crows still were, hopping about under an open sky they could not use. He is also supposed to have kept horses at Kentchurch Court that could fly, and to have left one morning with a hot mince pie for the King and reached London in time for breakfast, losing a garter on the way when it snagged on a church weathervane he was clearing.

All of this ran on borrowed power. The bargain behind it, in most tellings, was struck when he was young: his soul, for the Devil’s service. Everything he could do afterwards was really the Devil doing it, which is why the stories are never about strength and always about phrasing. He could not break a contract. He could only make sure the contract said something other than what the other party thought it said, and every win bought him a delay rather than a release. The debt stayed on the books, and eventually it came due.

So he arranged his grave. He gave orders to be buried exactly beneath the chancel wall, so that he lay neither inside the church nor outside it, and the terms of the compact, which specified one or the other, had nowhere to grip. Both Grosmont and Kentchurch have shown a stone for him. One local version is grimmer than the rest and says his organs and eyes were set on spikes on the Grosmont churchyard wall, where a crow and a dove come back to fight over them and neither ever wins. For centuries after, along both banks of the Monnow, his name was the one used to make children behave.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jack o’ Kent?

Jack o’ Kent is a folk figure of the Welsh Marches, remembered as a cleric and magician who repeatedly outwitted the Devil in bargains. He is associated above all with Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, particularly Kentchurch and Grosmont on the River Monnow. His first appearance in print is Anthony Munday’s play John a Kent and John a Cumber, written around 1590.

Was Jack o’ Kent a real person?

No single real person lies behind him. Tradition mixed together several men with similar names, including the Welsh poet Siôn Cent, a Grey Friar called Dr John Gwent who died in 1348, Dr John Kent of Caerleon, the cardinal John Kemp, and a raider named John a Kent active in the Marches in 1482 and 1483. Later writers also proposed Owain Glyndŵr, who is said to have sheltered with the Scudamore family at Kentchurch Court.

How did Jack o’ Kent trick the Devil over the bridge?

Jack got the Devil to build the bridge over the Monnow near Grosmont in one night, promising him the soul of the first to cross it. Before dawn Jack threw a bone across the span and a starving dog chased after it, so the Devil’s payment was a dog. The cock crowed and the bargain was closed.

What is the tops and butts story?

Jack offered the Devil half of a crop and let him choose the tops or the butts. The Devil chose the tops and Jack had planted turnips, leaving him with only leaves; the next year the Devil chose the butts and Jack had planted wheat, leaving him with stubble.

Where is Jack o’ Kent buried?

Tradition says he was buried directly under the chancel wall so that he lay neither in the church nor out of it, defeating a compact that named only those two possibilities. Both Grosmont and Kentchurch have been said to hold his grave. One darker local version has his organs and eyes placed on spikes on the Grosmont churchyard wall, where a crow and a dove return to fight over them.