Essex Marshes have long been a magnet for the mysterious and macabre
The county of Essex is a strange place; part London overspill, part criminal hang-out, part dated seaside resort, part hayseed farming community, part home to the tasteless newly-made wealthy, and part strange, forbidding Anglo-Saxon fenland, full of superstitions, bloody battles and literary demons.
The region has even influenced G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (GoT), with the author purloining the River Blackwater and the Battle of Maldon for his opening tome in the series.
GoT’s The Crown Lands - even looks a little like Essex:
The bleak marshes have also played home to other literary characters, including Bram Stoker’s blood-sucking Dracula (Purfleet) and Magwitch, Dickens’ misunderstood criminal miscreant.
Magwitch: "[a] fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin."
The Battle of Maldon (11 August 991 AD)
This was a real GoT-style donnybrook between the Essex Fyrd of Anglo-Saxons under towering, white-locked, sixty-year-old Earl Byrhtnoth and the Northmen led by the younger, gold-obsessed Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway.
It is a tale of honour to the point of foolishness, as Byrhtnoth refused to pay the Vikings off to leave, and then agreed to let the raiders cross the causeway from their base at Northey Island and fight his militia one-on-one. The Earl, predictably enough, died in the ensuing melee, but only after taking out at least three Vikings.
The clash was the subject of the alliterative classic Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien's playlet, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son, which takes place on the battlefield of Maldon and the search for Earl Byrhtnoth's decapitated body.
The Essex Serpent
Author Sarah Perry on the inspiration for her novel of the same name, ‘I first heard of this mythical serpent courtesy of my husband, who’d been reading a little 1938 book called ‘Companion Into Essex’. The book includes an excerpt from a pamphlet printed at Clerkenwell in 1669, which relates the appearance of “a Monstrous Serpent”. The pamphlet goes on to show “the length, proportion, the bigness of the Serpent, the places where it commonly lurks and what means hath been used to kill it.” I’m still uncertain why this pamphlet detonated my imagination in quite the way it did, but four years later I’d completed a novel in which the Essex Serpent returns to menace the 1890’s coastal village of Aldwinter. As I wrote, I relied on Google images of the original pamphlet, which is headed STRANGE NEWS OUT OF ESSEX and bears a wonderful wood-cut of a quite benevolent-looking animal being poked at with lances by men on horseback.’
It was a long time before I thought to consult the British Library catalogues: perhaps I’d convinced myself that the entire business had only been in my imagination. But there it was, on my laptop screen in my Norwich study: The Flying Serpent, or, strange news out of Essex, being a true relation of a Serpent seen at Henham on the Mount, etc. London, [1669?].
I recall feeling a little nervous, convinced up to the last moment that the pamphlet I’d pored over online for so long could not be real.
The pamphlet was kept inside a hard binding to protect it. When I opened the covers, there was the vanillin scent of old paper. And there he was, just as I’d seen him in the dead of night on my computer screen, or printed out on a reused sheet of paper: the Strange News, the Essex Serpent, with his owl-like eyes and his dear little wings and his slightly gormless smile. Not a bit like the near-invisible malevolent presence that saturates my novel, but as familiar to me as an old pet. I sat with it a long while, reading again that wry opening, imagining a laconic Essex farmer reading it out: “Guests, fish and news go stale in three days’ time, and nothing delights an Englishman’s fancy so much as new novelties…”
Liz Trenow, author of The Secrets of the Lake:
‘But this is not the only story of mysterious creatures from the county. There is another, much earlier, myth of a serpent or dragon that terrorised the villagers of Bures and Wormingford near Colchester.
Indeed Wormingford, originally Withermundford, was renamed in honour of the legend, ‘worme’ being a medieval term for a dragon. It was first reported in 1405 by a monk who thrillingly described ‘an evil dragon of excessive length with a huge body, crested head, saw-like teeth and elongated tail... arrows sprang from its ribs as if they were metal or hard stone’.
One theory is that this 'dragon' was in fact a crocodile given as a gift by King Saladin to King Richard I during the 12th century Crusades and originally kept at the Tower of London. It somehow escaped – perhaps from a travelling menagerie – and found its way to the River Stour, where it started stealing sheep and, so the legend goes, demanding to be fed virgins until the supply began to run out. In desperation the villagers turned to a local knight, Sir George of Layer de la Haye, who efficiently despatched the beast as though his mother had named him for the task.
However, local lore has it that the crocodile or dragon lives on in Wormingford Mere to this day, and mysterious bubbles are seen when the beast is displeased. If it is disturbed, the story goes, evil things will happen in the community. I was brought up in a nearby village and one of my earliest memories is of visiting Wormingford Church to see the stained glass window in which the ‘dragon’ is dramatically depicted being slain by a knight on a white charger.’
https://blogs.bl.uk/living-knowledge/2016/08/on-the-trail-of-the-essex-serpent.html
Stephen Arnell’s debut novel THE GREAT ONE is available worldwide on Amazon Kindle:
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