LET me begin by explaining some of the background to this paper. For many years I have been interested in the ways in which tradition, belief and experience interact with each other; how they are communicated; and how the processes of communication modify the original belief, tradition or experience. These interests have brought me to the study of legends and, more particularly, memorates. Though recently there have been several attempts to undermine the traditional definition of 'legend',2 the term still persists and for most practical purposes gives rise to no great confusion. In this paper, therefore, it will be used in its most common sense to refer to a 'story told as the truth or believed to be true.'3 The term 'memorate' has had a more chequered career. After years of scholarly wrangling4 (including attempts to dispose of the genre altogether),' it has settled apparently immoveably into the vocabulary of folk narrative study. In this paper it will be used, as is now generally the practice, to refer to stories about remembered events in the narrator's own past, events in which the narrator was either a protagonist or an eye-witness.6 Memorates, however, differ from 'true' or 'personal' experience stories, which this brief definition also covers, by virtue of their kinship to legends-like the more familiar category, memorates are embodiments of communal beliefs. They may, perhaps, feature a strange or supernatural happening-an encounter with a ghost or an omen of death, for example-but, whereas a legend delivers tradition and experience at second or third hand, a memorate represents a personal experience which has been 'made over,' so to speak, by the same public expectation. Though, as the narrator so often explicitly asserts, a memorate tells of something that 'really happened,' the original experience undergoes a traditionalising process. First, the strange happening is interpreted according to community beliefs,' and then it acquires a little more traditional colouring by being mentally rehearsed and classified. Finally, it is made public in story-form and put to the test of cultural expectations in the shape of an audience, so that tradition and experience are brought into conformity with each other through hearer-teller negotiation.8 In discussion and conversation, memorates freely alternate with legends, particularly community and family legends,9 in topic-related chains and cycles, each genre being treated on equal terms as being to all intents and purposes examples of 'the same thing.' Most commonly, such stories are used as discussion documents that can shed light on difficult areas of human experience.