Where the great medieval stories came from: the Wandering Jew, Prester John, the Seven Sleepers, William Tell, the dog Gellert, the men with tails. Sabine Baring-Gould was a Devon parson who wrote a hundred and fifty books and collected folk songs from farm labourers. He traces each legend back through its versions until it stops being a legend and becomes a rumour with a date. Sixty plates, from Rossetti and Doré to a Roman villa and a Victorian portrait, show how later painters kept turning these old legends into pictures.