Wolves have a long and fascinating history in Britain, and welcoming them back home could help heal our landscape
Words byBY DEREK GOW
WOLVES ●
Our relationship with the wolf in ancient times was not always difficult. The Venerable Bede (673-735), an Anglo-Saxon monk and scholar, was the first to write about wolves in Britain. In a description of ‘Anderida’, or Ashdown Forest in Sussex, he observed its landscape to be “All but inaccessible and the resort of large herds of deer and of wolves”.
When Aelfric, the Abbot of Eynsham, wrote his colloquy more than a millennia ago, he too was relaxed in advising that it was ever the shepherd’s lot to “drive […] sheep to their pasture, and in the heat and in cold, stand over them with dogs, lest wolves devour them”.
Though there are no references to wolf hunting in Anglo-Saxon documents, when William the Conqueror defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, his triumph brought a new order to the country and hunting was elevated to the most noble of recreations. Wolves as adversaries, were, along with wild boar and deer, protected by the ‘forest laws’ for the pleasure of royals and aristocracy. Designed by the Normans to reportedly “leave the English nothing but their eyes to weep with”, this decree forbade anything to be taken from the forest, from firewood to fruit. Any person who merely disturbed a deer might find even their weeping days were over, as blinding was deemed a suitable punishment.
While the Romans may have been the first to export the white wool of their hornless sheep from Britain, by the mid-1400s these animals had become the most important of assets. Wool paid for churches, castles, wars and treasure chests. The early medieval churchmen toiled to maintain the flow produced from their bleating hordes. Wolves were “devilish” and “cruel” when they “scattered the good shepherd’s flocks” and as a result, every form of persuasion to ensure their persecution was preached. Remissions from sin or criminal activities could be obtained on presentation of severed heads or tongues. It was all so obvious once you understood that the neat, ordered, farmed lands where the ripening fruits of finance flourished were righteous, while the wastes, wetlands and woods inhabited by wolves were demonically disordered.
This twaddle, when babbled from every pulpit, ensured that people
