I gave Bartolf the position of coroner of the forest of Galtres, which is just north of the city walls. The royal forests were established to provide good sport for the king, and a complex institution of laws and officials protected the animals and their habitat. The word ‘forest’ can be confusing in this context, because within the boundaries of the royal forests were villages, manors, towns, even castles such as Sheriff Hutton in Galtres. What distinguished these properties was their placement in the jurisdiction of a particular body of law, forest law. (Though there are exceptions.) Tales of Robin Hood made familiar the strict poaching laws in royal forests. Slightly less well know is the law that dogs inhabiting the forests larger than, say, lap dogs were to have three claws removed from their forefeet to prevent their attacking deer. This rendered them ‘lawful’, from which we get the term ‘lawing’. Technically, only the nails were to be removed, but the process inevitably took off a portion of the toes as well, and sometimes the pads, maiming the dogs. A horrific practice. The dogs were to be checked every three years by officials known as regarders. As with the poaching laws, loopholes and opportunities for corruption abounded.
And what of wolves? Magda Digby asks – or rather prompts Owen: What do folk see when they see a wolf, Bird-eye? The animal? Think again. Down through time the wolf has become symbolic of our fears as we walk through the night glancing back over our shoulders. Although it is generally believed that wolves were hunted to extinction by the end of the Middle Ages, the exact dates are still debated. In his book Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages, Aleksander Pluskowski cites ‘a marked decrease in the number of documented wolf hunts in the fourteenth century and the last reliable reference to wolf trapping in England is dated to 1394-6, from Whitby Abbey in East Yorkshire.’[5] Officials boasted of wolf-free territories, but folk still feared them, especially in hard winters. We still do.
Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude to Louise Hampson, Joyce Gibb, Mary Morse, and Jennifer Weltz for thoughtful readings and insightful suggestions.
Thank you to Laura D. Gelfand and Thomas Thorp for their inspiring presentations in a session Werewolf? There, Wolf at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at WMU and follow on communications regarding Magda’s question – What do folk see when they see a wolf? Extra thanks to Laura for permission to use a quote from her talk as an epigraph.
For all domestic canine details I am indebted to Molly Gibb for sharing her considerable expertise.
Thanks to Kate Lyall Grant for inviting me into the Severn House family, and all the team, including Sara Porter and Natasha Bell, who have taken my manuscript and turned it into a beautiful book.
I am grateful to all the fans of Owen, Lucie, Magda, Michaelo and all the cast who kept asking for a new chapter in their story. Thank you for your patience!
Deep appreciation to my partner Charlie Robb for the beautiful maps and so many other graphic and logistical solutions. You are my light, my love, and my anchor.