The Wild Hunt in England
The monks of Peterborough told strange tales of the Wild Hunt. Were they ghostly apparitions or wishful thinking?
In the spring of 1127 something very strange was going on in Peterborough. The monks of Peterborough Abbey, a venerable institution which had fallen on hard times, were unhappy: Henry I had imposed on them a new abbot, Henry of Poitou, whom they saw as a grasping and deceitful man. He was greedily accumulating abbacies to increase his wealth, the monks alleged, ‘living like a drone in a hive’ and extracting everything he could get from Peterborough then sending it abroad.
His unwelcome presence awoke something in the woods around the abbey. The abbey’s chronicle records that not long after his arrival, many people began to see spectral huntsmen:
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