This blog post is a little different from the usual fare published on the website so far, in that it focuses on an absence… and a desperate desire to fill it.

The Wild Hunt is a folkloric motif well known across the British Isles and on the Continent. Its basic structure is that of a supernatural procession, rushing through the night sky or along desolate roads during a storm, accompanied by an uncanny noise. The motif was named by Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie published in 1835 (translated into English as Teutonic Mythology by James Steven Stallybrass; you can find the Wild Hunt in volume 3 of the translation). Grimm most immediately connects the motif with Odin, but there are any number of variations to it: the procession can be comprised of deceased sinners, unbaptised babies, faeries, or ancient warriors doomed to haunt the earth. It may be a single supernatural hunter, guiding a pack of hounds through the night sky. The hunt’s quarry could be human souls, or game animals, or there might be no apparent quarry at all. In other words, many local legends can be swept up by the Wild Hunt’s broad definition.

The less supernatural, but no less poetic explanation of the Wild Hunt is that it is a way to explain sounds made by geese, migrating above the cloud-line. Naturalist and philosopher Aldo Leopold writes of ‘goose music’:

A flock, ‘passing overhead on a dark night, has serenaded a whole city with goose music, and awakened who knows what questionings and memories and hopes.’

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: with essays on conservation from Round River, 1970.

To him, geese remind us of the wild journeying that lives in all our hearts.

But Lincolnshire, seemingly, has no Wild Hunt of its own, despite its wealth of migrating bird species and despite the Gabriel/Gabble Ratchets (a version of the Wild Hunt) being present in multiple northern counties.

Some candidates tentatively offer themselves. The Peterborough Chronicle, a medieval document detailing the history of England and of the Norman Conquest, is often cited as the earliest mention of a Wild Hunt in England. Its first continuation contains an entry for 1127, where a hunting party is described ‘ridone on swarte hors on swarte bucces’ (riding on dark horses and dark he-goats/bucks). The riders themselves are described as swarte micele, ‘dark and large’, with the black colouring of their mounts and their dogs having supernatural associations. Though the Chronicle was written by the monks of Peterborough Abbey, now in Cambridgeshire, the episode described takes place in the woods between Peterborough and Stamford, just across the border. There’s an allusion to the episode in our Black Dog post. But shifting county borders aside, the Peterborough Wild Hunt is all too firmly lodged in the public imagination as a Cambridgeshire phenomenon.

A second candidate is St Guthlac’s alleged leadership of a Wild Hunt. St Guthlac of Crowland appears elsewhere on this website, but tracking down a reliable source for his involvement with the Hunt has been a challenge. If you know of any such source, please get in touch.

One other candidate I was able to dig up is Peter B G Binnall’s ‘On a Possible Version of the Wild Hunt Legend in North Lincolnshire’ (Folklore, 46.1, 1935). After launching into a typically Fraserian overview of similar tales anywhere in the world from the Indian subcontinent to North America which amounts to an enthusiastic ‘Look! It’s everywhere!’, Binnall outlines his evidence: up until the mid-nineteenth century, every Palm Sunday a whip, known as the Gad Whip, was brought into Caistor church and cracked over the clergyman’s head before being placed in the pew of Lord Hundon. A new whip was to be provided every year. He also notes the aforementioned whip and a purse of thirty silver pieces featured in the sale of Broughton, one of Lord Hundon’s estates, in 1846. For Binnall, the whip is necessarily a hunting whip and the thirty pieces of silver are to identify the wielder of the whip as a sinner, Judas-fashion. All this seems for Binnall to amount to the following thesis:

My thesis, then, is this. An annual offering of silver to Odin
was, perhaps in later times, accompanied by the presentation of a whip, as a symbol or recognition of his power in the capacity of ” the air-borne storm god ” or Wild Hunter. That this oblation was made at his grove or temple, hard by the eye-well to which he had imparted therapeutic powers and that these gifts were appropriated by the principal person, perhaps a priest, who dwelt in a dene, or woodland dell, which was, for some reason now unknown, especially associated with the spectral hounds whose deep-throated baying made the shivering peasants cluster closer round their cheerful fires on the stormy nights of
long ago.

His proposition is full of conjectures, and bespeaks rather a desire to have a Wild Hunt in his native Caistor, than the actual presence of one. The same sentiment is captured by Tom Herbert’s record of his sighting of George Nelson, the youth whose spectre haunts a stretch of road outside Cadeby. I write about Cadeby’s many ghosts here. In short, George Nelson died returning home from rabbiting, when his horse spooked and either threw him or overturned his cart, trapping him under it. Since his death, he supposedly appears as a ghostly rider to passing drivers. In Herbert’s account, however, he is transformed into a spectral huntsman winding a eerie horn:

As horse and rider swept by they left the road and galloped across country towards Barton Street. Intrigued I followed the distant shadow dancing elusively like a will-o-the-wisp through the transient mists.

… the dim shadow ahead was slowly fading and I knew that my horse, a working Suffolk bred for endurance rather than speed, could never catch up… The baying of hounds and the forlorn note of a hunting horn seemed to come from far away but of the horse and rider there was not a sign.

Tom Herbert, ‘The Riddle of the Stone’, Lincolnshire Life, 1992.

The appeal of Wild Huntsmen seems enduring, so that even in their absence from established folk tales, they still wynd their ways into our imagination.

How do you feel about hunting, supernatural or otherwise? Have you ever seen a Wild Hunt, or heard a call too uncanny to be merely passing geese? Get in touch to tell me all about it.

ANNA MILON