Today, we share a post by the talented writer Chris Messenger, content writer, remote working dad, comics enthusiast and the creator of Weird Wednesdays Facebook group (well worth reading, especially if you are interested in behaviour, superstition and a touch of supernatural!).
Why this post?
Two things stand out in Chris’ debate. Firstly, the social perception of an Other (in this case a predatory species) and how that perception has changed through time. Secondly, the reliability of sources, including material culture, and how they, too, need to be examined as closely as possible.
Oftentimes, we think we know what is going on, or what happened in the past. But whether it is a current issue or working with the past, no research on any topic can be complete without considering bias, potential and actual, on all sides. In cases like conservation, our superstitions, perceptions and how we express them on a social level, and with what consequences, should always be considered. Similarly, social fears can influence topics as differing as equality, racial equity and profiling, techlash and medical science (including the vaccination debate).
Chris’ post illustrates all that brilliantly – while never failing to deliver a vibrant story that is bound to captivate.
http://www.sculpture.org.uk/artist/sally-matthews
Situated in Northamptonshire, right between the English towns of Kettering and Wellingborough, lies the small village of Orlingbury.
As of the 2011 census, there were only 429 souls dwelling there. Orlingbury is situated near to the deserted village of Wythmail, which has been so dilapidated by modern farming methods that today it can only be viewed from the air.
The village’s main place of worship is Orlingbury church, inside of which rests a most curious monument. An effigy, supposedly depicting the man who killed the last English wolf, has lain there since 1375.
According to local lore, a knight named Jack of Batsaddle fought and killed a large wolf, which turned out to be the last of the country’s native species. In some versions of the story, Jack (sometimes called ‘Jock’) kills a large boar instead, while in other versions, he fights and kills a wolf as well as a boar.
In all renditions, however, Jack dies of his injuries after the fight. It is said that he took a sip of ice-cold water from a nearby spring and was killed by the shock of the frigid liquid touching his lips.
Jack of Batsaddle is not a particularly well-known hero, but Orlingbury does feature both a farm and a small area of woodland that still bear his name. Nevertheless, in all probability, Jack of Batsaddle never existed at all.
“But hang on”, I hear you cry, “Jack of Batsaddle has an effigy, a burial site. Surely that proves his existence?” Well, actually it doesn’t. You see, the effigy in question does not depict Jack of Batsaddle at all.
Instead, it commemorates a local nobleman named John de Withmayle (apparently named for the now-forgotten village just a few miles away from Orlingbury). De Withmayle was a generous donor of land to the church and the effigy was created to commemorate him as an act of gratitude.
So who really killed England’s last wolf?
The long answer begins like this…
English wolves had long played a key role in the culture and customs of the people who lived and died in these lands.
The British Museum houses a manuscript that records several Anglo-Saxon dynasties, including a chief named ‘Wuffa’ and his tribe, who were known as ‘Wuffings’.
Wuffa prowled about his East Anglian territories somewhere around the 570’s, but was memorable enough to be recorded in the genealogy, which was written some 215 years after his death.
The famous ship burial at Sutton Hoo yielded several wolf-related artefacts as well, prompting some archaeologists to link it to the ‘Wuffingas’, themselves descendants of Wuffa’s people.
In 950, King Athelstan demanded a yearly tribute of 300 wolf skins from the Welsh King Hywel Dda. This tribute was apparently kept up until the Norman invasion of 1066.
Wolves were apparently so numerous in Britain at the time that The Anglo Saxon Chronicle records the month of January as ‘Wolf Monath’ (or ‘Wolf Month’) as this would traditionally be the start of wolf hunting season.
Indeed, the village of Woolpit, site of our very first investigation, was probably originally called ‘Wolf Pit’.
In Peak Forest, Derbyshire, there lived a family by the name of ‘Wolfhunt’, who specialised in trapping and killing wolves and were applauded for keeping the local wolf population down.
In 1212, a bounty of 5 shillings (an enormous sum of money at the time) was paid to a man in Freemantle, Hampshire for the capture of a wolf. The large bounty may well imply that wolf numbers had declined very significantly by that time, probably due to excessive hunting and trapping.
However, it was in 1281 that things became truly dire for wolves in England. King Edward I personally ordered the complete and total extermination of all English wolves. To this end, he employed a renowned hunter named Sir Peter Corbet, who dutifully scoured Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Staffordshire in search of wolves, slaughtering every single one he could find.
8 years later, Corbet (sometimes spelled ‘Corbett’) is said to have slain the last English wolf in the year 1290. The deed took place in the forest of Dean.
An iron bust of a wolf’s head, which is still kept at Abbey Dore, near Hay in Hertfordshire, is said to commemorate this event. If this is so, then the wolf head of Abbey Dore is the true marker of the last wolf’s demise, not the effigy in Orlingbury.
The final official report concerning English wolves appears in that same year, when a pack of wolves is said to have killed a group of deer in a park at an unknown location.
10 years later, in 1300, a doctor, requiring wolf carcasses for some sort of experiment, was forced to import them from overseas because none could be found in England.
So is the answer Peter Corbet? Did he kill the last English wolf?
Well, maybe not. It seems that wolf skins were still being traded in Yorkshire in the 1390’s, although only one record suggests this and, frustratingly, offers few details about where the skins came from.
During the reign of King Henry VI (1422 – 1460), wolves were said to still be living in Sherwood Forest, although this could be pure fantasy, designed to evoke a sense of danger and adventure. No records that I could find actually detail any wolf being captured or killed at so late a date.
Most historians agree that, whenever they actually died out, wolves were definitely extinct in England by the time Henry VII came to the throne in 1485.
They persisted in the wilds of Scotland, however, where the last Scottish wolf, killed by Sir Ewan Cameron in 1818, was stuffed, mounted and eventually sold at auction by the London Museum.
We’ll likely never know who really killed the last wolf in England. It probably wasn’t Peter Corbet (although he did more than anybody else to contribute to the species’ extinction) and it probably wasn’t Jack of Batsaddle either (although, if Batsaddle were a real person and his story based on fact, it would take Corbet out of the running for sure).
It may just be possible that a man named Jack of Batsaddle really did kill the last wolf in Northamptonshire in the 1370’s, which would have made it one of the very last wolves left alive in England. Perhaps that’s why Batsaddle’s legend remains in the region, long after every other trace of him has disappeared?
Whatever the truth, it seems likely that wolves, distressed and beleaguered by over hunting, habitat loss and unrelenting persecution, simply gave up the ghost and faded into myth one sad, unmarked day during the Middle Ages.
The wolves that had held pride of place in the stories and songs of the Vikings had gone, replaced in the English mind by the deceitful, black-hearted wolves of fairytale and fantasy.
For centuries, the wolf was akin to a demon – and was often depicted as such. This was an age where Man battled the land, instead of living alongside it. Wolves threatened his livelihood and sometimes his life. His fascination with the creature could be easily turned to terror and that terror could be exploited for material wealth.
The rarer wolves became in England, the more they were mythologized and the more they were mythologized, the less chance they stood of survival.
The Bible, which held unflinching dominion over the hearts and minds of the English at the time, teaches that Man is the lord of the animals and steward of the land. The wolf, having no practical value for food or labor, was seen instead as a rival and purposefully linked, not to the natural world to which it belonged, but to the fiery maelstrom of Hell, where dwelt the Devil and his many minions.
Maybe the wolf reminded our forebears too much of their animal nature? Back in the 13th century, around 70 years before Peter Corbet undertook the task of ridding England of its wolves, Gervase of Tilbury (whom you may remember from our investigation of his account of flying ships) wrote one of the earliest known accounts of what would become known as a ‘were wolf’. This creature was an unholy amalgamation of humanity and the animal other that, along with similar tales, would take root in the Western psyche, becoming a staple of horror fiction to this day.
The ‘weird’ part of this week’s story, then, concerns the human passion for – and anxieties around – the conquest of nature. Perhaps, we seem to think, if the land and its creatures can be subjugated, then so too can all manner of undesirable urges and impulses, maybe even death itself.
It is also worth remarking that the English (and their descendants) repeated this extinction process in most of the other countries they would conquer over the coming centuries.
Indeed, the similarities between Edward I’s extermination order of 1281 and the 19th century bounties placed upon the head of Tasmania’s Thylacine (sometimes referred to as the ‘Tasmanian Wolf’) by the London-based Van Dieman’s Land Company are chilling to consider.
Still, extinction was not a concept easily grasped by the medieval mind. The notion that an animal species could have been alive at one time and then suddenly cease to exist, runs contrary to conventional readings of the Bible’s book of Genesis. As such, the notion of extinction still eludes some minds to this day.
Is it any wonder, then, that as they watched a species so similar to their own in so many ways, be slowly but violently ripped from their lives, the people of medieval England felt some primal, indescribably human need to record this unprecedented event? To sculpt the head of their once proud foe from valuable metal, to take a forgotten effigy in some cobwebbed corner of the local church and re-brand it as something more relevant? To tell the story, however falsified, of England’s last wolf?
Author’s note – I was indebted to the work of a woman named Ivy Stanmoore, as well as Wikipedia and the Reader’s Digest book ‘Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain.