"Were there any real dragons in Essex, Daddy?" The answer may well surprise you!

My daughter asked me this question a few weeks ago. She is a very smart five year old, she takes her dragon research extremely seriously and was seemingly preparing a full report to her younger brother based on my answer. She was looking at me with the particular expression she reserves for questions she already thinks there's going to be a very silly answer. It was time to not disappoint her!

So, I considered my options.

I could have mentioned Basildon on a Friday night. I have witnessed things in that particular dark corner of Essex, affectionately known in certain circles as 'Bas Vegas', that a medieval villager would absolutely have classified as supernatural or dragon-esque! The sounds. The outfits. The unpredictable nature of the natives. The ability to blow smoke and fire as the night wore on.

A lot of dragon-like behaviour that I had seen with my own innocent eyes.

I decided against this. She is five and really doesn't need to know about Bas Vegas just yet.

Instead I told her about the Bures Dragon.

Her expression changed immediately from sceptical to completely riveted. Which is the correct response, because the Bures Dragon is one of the strangest, funniest and most thoroughly Essex stories in the entire medieval period.

And the best part? It is real! People in Essex believed that a dragon was responsible for the killings of villagers and cattle. Yikes!

The Legend

The villages of Bures and Wormingford sit in the Stour Valley near Colchester, beautiful, quiet Essex countryside that gives absolutely no indication of its extraordinary past. In 1405, a monk named Henry de Blaneford recorded something the local villagers had presumably been discussing with considerable alarm for some time and when you read thre below you will see why...

"In these days there appeared lately an evil dragon of excessive length with a huge body, crested head, saw-like teeth and elongated tail in land near the town of Bures near Sudbury, which destroyed and killed a herd of sheep."

The dragon was not, by all accounts, a pleasant neighbour. It terrorised the surrounding villages, made short work of the local sheep population, and demanded to be fed virgins until the supply began to run out. Ok, so the latter part might not be exactly true.

The locals tried everything. They attempted repeatedly to pierce its hard scaly skin, arrows, apparently, were useless. Eventually, having apparently had enough of Essex, a feeling with which many can sympathise, the beast dived into the river and swam downstream towards Wormingford, never to be seen again.

The nearby village promptly renamed itself in the dragon's honour. Wormingford takes its name from "Wyrm", the medieval word for serpent or dragon. Seven hundred years later, the village shows absolutely no signs of changing it back. There is a stained glass window in the local church depicting the whole episode, complete with, and this is entirely real, the long white legs of a virgin dangling from its teeth.

My daughter found this hilarious (I did not mention what the dragon was eating), but will take her to see the church window at some point this side of the scholl summer holidays.

The Crocodile

Here is where the story takes its magnificent turn. Legend says that Richard the Lionheart kept a "cokadrille", a crocodile, at the Tower of London, given as a gift by King Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, during the Crusades. As gifts go that is a hard one to beat and the Tower of London's history as a keeper of exotic animals is certainly going to be explored in a future post, but...

A crocodile. In the Tower of London. Gifted by a Sultan. To a king.

Sounds like a perfectly normal diplomatic present to me.

Medieval gift-giving was, evidently, a considerably more adventurous business than it is today. And you've guessed it, the crocodile escaped. It found its way to the River Stour, where it started making itself very well known to the local sheep.

Now consider what this looked like to Essex villagers who had never seen a crocodile in their lives. An enormous armoured reptile, emerging from the river. Crested head. Saw-like teeth. Elongated tail. Skin so tough that arrows bounced clean off it. Moving with a speed and aggression that nothing in their experience had prepared them for.

They called it exactly what it looked like. A dragon.

They were not wrong to be alarmed. Crocodiles have the most powerful bite force on earth, virtually impenetrable skin, and attack their prey with a death roll, twisting around to remove muscle from bone (I've watched plenty of Sir David Attenborough's documentaries to know quite a lot about crocodiles). There had even been descriptions of arrows bouncing off of the creatures skin, its armour perfectly built for deflecting medieval archers.

So if you had encountered one in the Essex countryside in 1405 with absolutely no prior knowledge of what a crocodile was then a perfectly good and reasonable description would have been "did you see the size of that EXPLETIVE dragon EXPLETIVE, EXPLETIVE, EXPLETIVE?" It was clearly a dragon. They had no idea that they were dealing with an escapee from the Tower of London that had somehow made its way across the Essex countryside to eat sheep, villagers and be a general pain in the butt!

What my daughter now knows...

I told her that yes, there was a real dragon in Essex. That it lived near Colchester. That it ate sheep and frightened everybody and that arrows bounced right off it. That a knight eventually came to deal with it. And that the village it visited still carries its name today.

She asked if the dragon was friendly. I told her it was certainly friendlier than the dragons I met in Basildon twenty plus years ago. She looked at me as if I was stupid (fair) and informed me "Fire Pud would have been friends with it."

She is absolutely right. Fire Pud would have been friends with it immediately. He would have recognised a fellow creature being catastrophically misunderstood by the people around it, and he would have done something about it.

That, when you think about it, is what the whole series is about.

A Note on Essex

As a resident of Leigh-on-Sea and someone who spent formative years in the general vicinity of Basildon, I will say no more than that, I have always felt that Essex's reputation deserves more nuance than it typically receives. After all, it turns out, had a dragon all along.

Local lore has it that the creature lives on in Wormingford Mere to this day, and mysterious bubbles are seen when the beast is displeased. If you are in the area then it is definitely worth popping in to the local church to see the stained glass window depicting this fascinating part of Essex-life.

Who knew, Essex. Home of the dragon.