Peterborough has the oldest written account of the Wild Hunt anywhere in England, and the monks who recorded it were quite sure of what they had heard.
In 1127 a Norman abbot named Henry de Angeli arrived to take charge of the abbey. The monks disliked him from the start. They thought he cared more about the abbey’s income than its soul, and they said so in the chronicle they were still writing in English long after the Conquest had made English unfashionable.
Soon after Henry came, the noise began. Huntsmen were seen riding through the deer park at Burgh and through the woods stretching away towards Stamford. They were black and huge and dreadful to look at, mounted on black horses and black goats, with black hounds running beside them whose eyes were far too wide. At night the monks lay awake and listened to the horns. Steady witnesses counted twenty or thirty horn blowers out in the dark. The hunt went on from the abbot’s arrival all through the spring until Easter.
The chronicler never says who the riders were hunting. He simply sets the story down beside the arrival of a bad abbot and leaves the reader to draw the obvious conclusion.
Where: Peterborough Cathedral, and the old woodland between the city and Stamford.
