Herne the Hunter
“Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.”
So Shakespeare sums up the story of Herne the Hunter in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act IV, Scene 4). Herne appears as a half-human, half-stag chimera, and haunts Windsor Great Park, a former royal hunting preserve in Berkshire, and was used by parents to scare their errant children from mischief.
Shakespeare provides the earliest account of Herne the Hunter, but an origin for the legend is given by Samuel Ireland in 1792. Herne was a gamekeeper during the reign of Elizabeth I (suggesting Shakespeare was up-to-date with his Berkshire gossip), who hanged himself from an oak tree in fear of losing his job and falling into disgrace. More ominously, in 1843 the novelist Harrison Ainsworth wrote that Herne was the ghost of a forester whose life was saved by the devil after being gored by a stag, on condition that he wore antlers thereafter, but ended up committing suicide anyway.
Herne is said to travel wide distances, accompanied by a pack of hounds, causing mischief and terror wherever he treads. As such, many claims to have seen his revenant, and one witness is said to have been Henry VIII, which fits in with another origin hypothesis. According to James Halliwell-Phillipps, a poacher named Richard Horne was caught poaching deer in Windsor Great Park, and was hung for his crimes, during Henry’s reign. As recently as 1962, students from nearby Eton College claimed to have accidentally summoned Herne by blowing an ancient hunting horn they found in the Great Park.
The folklore behind Herne is relatively common. Suicides are often said to haunt the place of their death, a tradition perhaps derived from Judas Iscariot, who committed suicide out of guilt for betraying Christ and was believed in medieval folklore to wander the earth in despair as punishment. An oak tree in Windsor Great Park long-reputed to be the tree on which Herne hung himself blew down in 1863, and its replacement is still known as ‘Herne’s Oak’. The terrifying Herne is still seen today, and the deer of Windsor Castle is said to call his name at dusk.