In the early years of the 19th century, Shrovetide in Derbyshire was not merely an event, it was a suspension of order.
For one afternoon, the town belonged to the crowd.
Church bells rang with a sound that did not call people in, but drove them out. Doors were bolted, windows boarded, and sensible folk kept to the edges while the rest surged into the streets. The Shrovetide football was released like a spark, and the town ignited around it.
Tallow Jack had been waiting all year.
He worked by candlelight in a narrow workshop that smelled permanently of warm fat and smoke. His trade was humble but necessary; candles lit homes, churches, and workshops long before gas lamps became common. Jack’s hands were always slick with tallow, his sleeves darkened by years of use. He had a habit of dipping wicks a moment too long, letting the wax gather thick and uneven, “better it lasts than looks pretty,” he’d say.
On Shrove Tuesday, he closed his shop early.
He wrapped his scarf tight, pulled his cap low, and smeared his face with berry juice and soot, not to hide, but to become something else. A version of himself that belonged to the day. The bell rang, and Jack joined the press of bodies with a grin that bordered on reckless.
The ball came fast that year.
No one could later agree who struck him first. A shoulder. An elbow. A boot swinging wide in the crush. Jack felt the impact before he saw it, an explosive, blinding force that snapped his head sideways and dropped him hard onto the frozen ground. He laughed as he fell, convinced it was nothing.
But when he stood, the world tilted.
A dark bloom spread across one eye, swelling almost instantly. Above it, a knot rose on his head, large and angry, pulsing beneath his cap. Someone shouted that he should sit down, that he was bleeding, that he was done for the day.
Jack waved them off.
Shrovetide was not a day you left early.
He pushed back into the crowd, one eye half-sealed, vision blurred, pain ringing like a struck bell in his skull. Each blow after that seemed to land harder, each jolt sending a fresh shock through the growing lump. The swelling became grotesque, stretching the skin, pressing beneath the cap until it sat crooked on his head.
Still, he laughed.
Witnesses later said he looked possessed, not angry, not afraid, but driven by something bright and dangerous. By dusk, Jack’s movements slowed. The crowd thinned. The ball was claimed. The town limped home.
Jack did not.
He was found near the edge of the square, seated against a wall as if resting. His cap lay beside him, misshapen where it had been stretched over the swelling. One eye was completely closed. The lump on his head had grown massive, an unmistakable mark of the day’s excess.
They said he simply never woke.
After that, strange things began to happen each Shrovetide.
Candles burned unevenly, wax pooling thick and lopsided as if poured by an unsteady hand. People reported seeing a figure in the corner of their eye, head tilted slightly, cap askew. Children claimed the bells rang a fraction too long, and adults felt an ache behind one eye with no cause they could name.
Tallow Jack lingers not in anger, nor regret.
He remains as a reminder of the day Derbyshire forgot restraint, and of the price paid by those who loved the chaos a little too fiercely. His spirit is marked forever by that great lump and darkened eye, the physical memory of Shrovetide itself, refusing to smooth away with time.
When the bells ring, Jack listens.
And sometimes, the town listens back.
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