In the spring of 1127 one thing very unusual was happening in Peterborough. The monks of Peterborough Abbey, a venerable establishment which had fallen on arduous occasions, have been sad: Henry I had imposed on them a brand new abbot, Henry of Poitou, whom they noticed as a greedy and deceitful man. He was greedily accumulating abbacies to extend his wealth, the monks alleged, ‘residing like a drone in a hive’ and extracting every thing he might get from Peterborough then sending it overseas.
His unwelcome presence awoke one thing within the woods across the abbey. The abbey’s chronicle information that not lengthy after his arrival, many individuals started to see spectral huntsmen:
The hunters have been black and big and ugly, and their hounds have been all black and wide-eyed and ugly, and so they rode on black horses and black bucks. This was seen within the deerfold within the city of Peterborough itself, and in all of the woods between that city and Stamford. And the monks heard the horns blowing that they blew within the night time. Reliable males who have been on watch by night time stated that it appeared to them there have been about twenty or thirty horn-blowers. This was seen and heard from the time [Henry] arrived there all by means of Lent till Easter.
This fantastically ominous story is the earliest English file of the legend of the Wild Hunt. This legend, present in folklore throughout northern Europe, tells of ghostly hunters who sweep by means of the land and sky, horns blowing and hounds baying. Their look was often regarded as an omen of sick fortune, usually of dying, for anybody who noticed them. In several variants of the custom the chief of the Hunt is likely to be a fairy king, the god Odin, Herne the Hunter, King Arthur, some human sinner condemned to hunt endlessly as a punishment for wickedness, or the satan himself.
There are different variations of this legend recorded in Twelfth-century British sources, so it was apparently being talked about extra extensively than simply at Peterborough. The Wild Hunt is usually related to midwinter, for the reason that wild winds and lengthy nights of December and the liminal time across the solstice make a suitably horrifying setting for the apparition. Nevertheless, the Peterborough Chronicle may be very particular that the sightings happened throughout February and March, prompted by the arrival of Abbot Henry. It was stated that folks pursued by the Wild Hunt usually ended up being chased for eternity or carried off into hell. Issues didn’t get so drastic at Peterborough: the monks continued to wrangle with their abbot for a number of years, till he was pressured to surrender the abbacy in 1132.
In addition to being an necessary early file of the legend, this story issues as a result of the Peterborough Chronicle has a particular place within the writing of English historical past. Within the 1120s, 60 years or so after the Norman Conquest, Peterborough Abbey was the one place within the nation the place a big pre-Conquest custom of historic writing was saved up. Peterborough’s chronicle is a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our most beneficial vernacular narrative supply for England’s historical past between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Earlier than the Conquest, this chronicle had been repeatedly maintained for generations at a number of totally different locations throughout England, recording notable occasions each nationwide and native.
By the early Twelfth century this as soon as vigorous custom had dwindled away, changed by a burst of historic writing in Latin and French. However not at Peterborough. There, the monks have been defiantly writing their historical past within the previous means. That’s why this chronicler information his story in vivid English – a model of English that was swiftly altering below the affect of French – as he writes concerning the terrifying ‘horn-blaweres’, and the way ‘þa muneces herdon ða horn blawen þet hello blewen on nihtes’.
A sense that the English language, together with the dignity and independence of an historical monastery like Peterborough, was being marginalised should have contributed to the simmering rigidity behind this story of the Wild Hunt. It’s an offended story, threatening and virtually craving for supernatural punishment to be visited on the hated Abbot Henry. Since that vengeance didn’t come, the nameless author used his chronicle to offer what retribution he might. He recorded these occasions for posterity, in his personal language, in order that Henry’s iniquities wouldn’t be forgotten: if the darkish hunters didn’t do it, historical past itself would avenge the abbey’s wrongs.
Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose Faculty, Oxford and the creator of Conquered: The Final Kids of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).
