The Wild Hunt in England

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: 

The hunters were black and huge and ugly, and their hounds were all black and wide-eyed and ugly, and they rode on black horses and black bucks. This was seen in the deerfold in the town of Peterborough itself, and in all the woods between that town and Stamford. And the monks heard the horns blowing that they blew in the night. Trustworthy men who were on watch by night said that it seemed to them there were about twenty or thirty horn-blowers. This was seen and heard from the time [Henry] arrived there all through Lent until Easter.

This superbly ominous story is the earliest English record of the legend of the Wild Hunt. This legend, found in folklore across northern Europe, tells of ghostly hunters who sweep through the land and sky, horns blowing and hounds baying. Their appearance was usually thought to be an omen of ill fortune, often of death, for anyone who saw them. In different variants of the tradition the leader of the Hunt might be a fairy king, the god Odin, Herne the Hunter, King Arthur, some human sinner condemned to hunt forever as a punishment for wickedness, or the devil himself.

There are other versions of this legend recorded in 12th-century British sources, so it was apparently being talked about more widely than just at Peterborough. The Wild Hunt is often associated with midwinter, since the wild winds and long nights of December and the liminal time around the solstice make a suitably frightening setting for the apparition. However, the Peterborough Chronicle is very specific that the sightings took place during February and March, prompted by the arrival of Abbot Henry. It was said that people pursued by the Wild Hunt often ended up being chased for eternity or carried off into hell. Things did not get so drastic at Peterborough: the monks continued to wrangle with their abbot for several years, until he was forced to give up the abbacy in 1132.

As well as being an important early record of the legend, this story matters because the Peterborough Chronicle has a special place in the writing of English history. In the 1120s, 60 years or so after the Norman Conquest, Peterborough Abbey was the only place in the country where a significant pre-Conquest tradition of historical writing was kept up. Peterborough’s chronicle is a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, our most valuable vernacular narrative source for England’s history between the ninth and 11th centuries. Before the Conquest, this chronicle had been continuously maintained for generations at several different places across England, recording notable events both national and local.

By the early 12th century this once lively tradition had dwindled away, replaced by a burst of historical writing in Latin and French. But not at Peterborough. There, the monks were defiantly writing their history in the old way. That’s why this chronicler records his story in vivid English – a version of English that was swiftly changing under the influence of French – as he writes about the terrifying ‘horn-blaweres’, and how ‘þa muneces herdon ða horn blawen þet hi blewen on nihtes’.

A feeling that the English language, along with the dignity and independence of an ancient monastery like Peterborough, was being marginalised must have contributed to the simmering tension behind this story of the Wild Hunt. It’s an angry tale, threatening and almost yearning for supernatural punishment to be visited on the hated Abbot Henry. Since that vengeance did not come, the anonymous writer used his chronicle to provide what retribution he could. He recorded these events for posterity, in his own language, so that Henry’s iniquities would not be forgotten: if the dark hunters did not do it, history itself would avenge the abbey’s wrongs.

 

Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford and the author of Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England (Bloomsbury, 2022).