There are scattered references to oakmen in the North of England, though very few folktales about them: there is no doubt that the oak was regarded as a sacred and potent tree. Most people know the rhyming proverb 'Fairy folks are in old oaks'; 'The Gospel Oak' or 'The King's Oak' in every considerable forest had probably a traditional sacredness from unremembered times, and an oak coppice in which the young saplings had sprung from the stumps of felled trees was thought to be an uncanny place after sunset; but the references to 'oakmen' are scanty.

Beatrix Potter in The Fairy Caravan gives some description of the Oakmen, squat, dwarfish people with red toadstool caps and red noses who tempt intruders into their copse with disguised food made of fungi. The fairy wood in which they lurk is thrice-cut copse and is full of bluebells. The Fairy Caravan is her only long book, and is scattered with folktales and folk beliefs. It is probable that her Oakmen are founded on genuine traditions. In Ruth Tongue's Forgotten Folk-Tales of the English Counties there is a story from Cumberland, 'The Vixen and the Oakmen', in which the Oakmen figure as guardians of animals. This rests on a single tradition, a story brought back by a soldier from the Lake District in 1948, and may well have been subject to some sophistication, but these two together make it worth while to be alert for other examples.

[Motif: F441.2]