Most football nicknames require some explanation. The Addicks need a fishmonger. The Grecians need an ancient siege. The Owls need a dialect word for a tree. Lincoln City’s nickname, by contrast, requires a visit to a cathedral — specifically to the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral, where a small stone carving has sat on top of a column since the fourteenth century, frozen mid-laugh, turned to stone by an angel who had run out of patience.

That carving is the Lincoln Imp, and it is one of the oldest and strangest sources of a football club nickname in the English game.

Lincoln City were founded in 1884, growing out of a club called Lincoln Rovers, which had itself emerged from a team called Lincoln Recreation FC.

Their early existence was suitably chaotic — they shared grounds with livestock, playing first at a place called Cowpaddle (where cows grazed on the pitch) and then at John O’Gaunts, where horses had the same arrangement.

They moved to their permanent home at Sincil Bank in 1895, turned professional, joined the Football League, and gradually acquired the imp as their symbol, not because they invented the connection, but because the imp was already Lincoln’s.

The Legend of the Lincoln Imp

The story of the Lincoln Imp dates back to the fourteenth century, and is a proper piece of medieval folklore. According to the legend, the Devil dispatched two imps to cause mischief on earth.

They made their way to Chesterfield first, and are allegedly responsible for twisting the famous crooked spire of St Mary and All Saints Church there, which remains visibly warped to this day, before pressing on to Lincoln with further trouble in mind.

At Lincoln Cathedral they caused considerable havoc: smashing windows, knocking people over, throwing stones, generally behaving in the manner of small supernatural creatures with nothing to lose (later a model for the 1st football hooligan ? ).

An angel was summoned to deal with the situation. One imp fled immediately. The other, either braver or less sensible than his companion, remained defiant, throwing a stone at the angel, laughing as he did so.

The angel, as a punishment, immediately turned the Imp into stone, mid-laugh, right where it sat on top of the column in the Angel Choir, where it still sits today.

Lincoln Cathedral, on the origin of the Lincoln Imp

The imp is still there; a small, horned, winged figure carved into the stonework of the Angel Choir, caught in permanent mid-cackle at a height most visitors need binoculars to properly appreciate.

It has sat there for over seven hundred years, which makes it comfortably the most ancient source material in the Nickname Files series and, depending on your view of theology, the only football nickname with a direct line to the Devil.

From Cathedral to Football Club

So the imp had become Lincoln’s symbol long before a football club existed to adopt it.

By the Victorian era it was already appearing on merchandise, jewellery and civic designs across the city.

A jeweller named James Usher held the sole commercial rights to the Lincoln Imp figure on his designs through much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — when he died in 1921, he left his entire collection to the city, which led to the opening of the Usher Gallery.

After that, the imp was available to everyone, and Lincoln City were not slow to make use of it.

The nickname predates even that, with documented references to Lincoln City as the Imps appearing before 1897.

The figure did not appear on the club badge until later, but the association was already established in supporter culture by the end of the nineteenth century.

Lincoln was the city of the imp, and the football club was Lincoln’s team. The connection required no committee decision or marketing exercise, it was simply there, waiting to be claimed.

The Imp That Spread

What is remarkable about the Lincoln Imp is how far it has travelled from that column in the Angel Choir.

The imp lends its name to Gibraltar’s Lincoln Red Imps FC, formed in 1976 with the involvement of Lincoln City’s vice-chairman, who offered a sponsorship deal on the condition that the new club named itself after Lincoln.

The Gibraltar club’s badge includes an imp similar to the design Lincoln City used in the 1970s, which means a medieval English cathedral legend is now also the symbol of a Gibraltarian football club and one that has, in recent years, caused considerable embarrassment to Celtic in European competition, which the imp would probably have found extremely funny.

Closer to home, the imp appears on the badge of No. LXI Squadron RAF, and Lincolnshire County Council use a green modern version on their logo.

Lincoln Hockey Club too, share the nickname and crest design with their football counterparts.

The city’s mascot shows up on pub signs, café menus, jewellery, Christmas decorations, and babygros.

For a creature that was supposedly sent to cause trouble and ended up turned to stone for its cheek, the Lincoln Imp has had a remarkably productive afterlife.

The Nickname That Was Always There

The Lincoln City story is different from most in this series because the nickname was not created for or by the football club; rather, it was inherited from a city whose identity had been shaped by a medieval legend for five hundred years before anyone kicked a ball at Cowpaddle.

The imp was Lincoln long before it was Lincoln City. The football club simply recognised what was already true and made it official.

There is something fitting about a club whose grounds were once shared with cows and horses adopting as its symbol a creature that caused chaos in a cathedral and refused to stop laughing even as it was being turned to stone.

Lincoln City have been relegated from the Football League, spent time in non-league football, and come back through the divisions more than once.

Through all of it, the imp has sat on the badge, mid-cackle, entirely unbothered. Seven hundred years of practice at that expression has clearly made it very good at keeping its composure.