What happened
The copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle kept at Peterborough Abbey contains, under the year 1127, one of the oldest accounts of the Wild Hunt. The monks bitterly described the appointment of Abbot Henry of Poitou, who had come to the monastery, as they put it, to live off it like a drone in a hive. Straight afterwards, the chronicler notes, “many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting.” They were black, huge and hideous, rode black horses and black he-goats, and their hounds were jet black with eyes like saucers. They were seen in the deer park at Peterborough itself and in the woods stretching to Stamford, and at night the monks heard their horns. Reliable witnesses reportedly counted twenty or thirty riders. The ghostly hunt went on for nine weeks – right up to Easter.
Witnesses
According to the chronicle, “many men” of Peterborough and the surrounding area as well as the abbey's monks; written down by an anonymous monastic chronicler soon after the events.
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians read the account above all as political commentary: the chronicler presents the ghostly hunt as an omen of the misfortune that came to the abbey with Abbot Henry, whom the monks regarded as a greedy intruder. A similar cavalcade – “Herlechin's troop” – had been described a few decades earlier by the Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, and the Wild Hunt motif was known across Europe. It is now impossible to establish what people actually saw and heard – there is only one source, and its author had a clear reason to give the abbey's misfortunes a supernatural dimension.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Twelfth Century, s.a. 1127 (Avalon Project, Yale Law School)
- History Today – The Wild Hunt in England
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