Meet Herne the Hunter: Fact, Fiction, or Folklore?

To some, Herne the Hunter is a ghost associated with Windsor Great Park. He haunts the tree where he did, rattling his chains and raging against…well…something.

Elsewhere, Herne is portrayed as a demonic force tearing through the forest at speed, scooping up souls in the Wild Hunt. Some tales see him riding a coal-black horse with burning eyes. Others see him as a phantom stag that prefers to chase than be chased.

Is he simply an invention of Shakespeare, or does he have a basis in reality? And why do the legends about him vary so wildly?

Let’s find out!

The First Written Appearance of Herne the Hunter

Herne the Hunter first appears in Shakespeare – specifically, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597). In Act IV, scene 4, two women refer to “an old tale” about Herne, who was once a keeper in the forest at Windsor. According to the tale, Herne walks around an oak tree at midnight in the winter. They also mention his “great ragg’d horns”, his tendency to blast trees and bewitch cattle, turning their milk bloody, while rattling a chain.

Leah S. Marcus suggests that Herne “is apparently Shakespeare’s invention” (1991: 174). Indeed, even in the play, one of the wives notes the stories about Herne are mere inventions (Harte 1996: 27).

One thing we need to remember about Shakespeare is he often included things people would have recognised in his plays (Daimler 2024). So locally, people may have heard legends of ghosts in Windsor Park – although we don’t know to what extent his version of such local stories is ‘accurate’ (Westwood 2005: 29). As Jeremy Harte points out, he used folklore to enrich his plays, not to create “literal transcriptions of folk belief” (1996: 28).

One tree even bore the name “Falstaff’s Oak”, after the Shakespeare character who disguises himself as Herne, or “Herne’s Oak”. People couldn’t agree on which tree this was. The most likely specimen was felled in 1796, while a storm blew down another possibility in 1863. A replacement was planted in 1906 (Simpson 2003: 174).

The Story Evolves

Up until the late 18th century, this was as much information as was available about Herne. Jennifer Westwood notes the common nature of Herne or Horne as a medieval surname, making it difficult to identify a real individual behind the story (Westwood 2005: 30). Some have noted a woodsman named Horne during Henry VIII’s reign who may have provided his name, if nothing else. Herne is referred to as Horne in earlier drafts of Shakespeare’s play, so this is a possible link.

Harte also notes that The Merry Wives of Windsor was ignored until the 1720s when it enjoyed a revival. It coincided with the growth of tourism in England, and a 1742 map of Windsor noted “Sir John Falstaff’s Oak” (Harte 1996: 28). Surely, if the story of Herne the Hunter was locally famous, the map would note Herne’s Oak, and not the name of a Shakespearean character?

Yet Samuel Ireland extended the story in 1792, saying Herne had been a gamekeeper, and he’d completed suicide by hanging on the oak. This explains Herne’s continual haunting of the tree (Simpson 2003: 174). According to this version of the story, he feared losing his job due to an unspecified crime.

What’s the basis for this?

But that doesn’t explain the more bizarre parts of the tale if we take Shakespeare’s description as a representation of a local legend. Why would Herne blast trees and bewitch cattle? Why would he turn cows’ milk bloody? As Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud point out, that’s what we’d expect from witches or malicious fairies (2003: 174). It’s not standard ghost behaviour. That said, Harte does note that as a keeper of the forest, Herne would have the power to fell trees and evict grazing cattle to preserve land for deer (1996: 30). Is he a metaphor, rather than a literal ghost?

As for Herne having antlers, it’s possible Shakespeare added that himself for dramatic effect. As Westwood puts it, the antlers could be “a reference to cuckold’s horns”, something familiar to Elizabethan audiences (Westwood 2005: 30). The antlers thus become part of Falstaff’s costume when he dresses as Herne, so this could be artistic license (Simpson 2003: 174). The antlers being Shakespeare’s addition to the story is the more likely explanation since ghost stags are rare in popular belief, compared to other animals like dogs, bulls, or pigs. Harte also suggests that people in remote communities believed in wicked men taking the form of animals as ghosts up until the 19th century (1996: 30). A forest keeper would certainly be considered wicked by the rest of the community.

Authors in the nineteenth century began to add their own ideas onto the figure of Herne. In Windsor Castle (1843), Harrison Ainsworth claims Herne had been a forester who was gored by a stag, only to be spared by the Devil. The only condition was that Herne would wear antlers, except he also lost his skills as a huntsman. This link between Herne and the Devil is partially responsible for the 20th-century descriptions of him as either Cernunnos or the leader of the Wild Hunt (Simpson 2008: 137).

Herne and the Wild Hunt

I first encountered Herne the Hunter many years ago when someone named him as a leader of the Wild Hunt. I honestly can’t remember which book it was in, but this explains my confusion when I discovered the Windsor Great Park link.

According to Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, Jacob Grimm suggested Herne led the Wild Hunt (2003: 174). The link is tenuous at best. The Germanic tribes that came to Britain called the Norse God Odin ‘Wotan’. He apparently led the Wild Hunt to collect souls. His title as head of the Hunt was ‘Herian’ (Wright 2022). This sounds like Grimm’s tendency to syncretise entirely disparate deities simply because their names sounded vaguely similar.

Trouble is, the whole point of the Wild Hunt is its headlong dash from a starting point to its endpoint. In some legends, this occurs in mid-air. None of Shakespeare’s versions of Herne fit the Wild Hunt at all, and even the stories that say Herne leads the Wild Hunt describe him hanging around a specific tree. Doesn’t sound very Hunt-like, does it?

Antlers don’t make you a forest god

Some try to link Herne’s antlers with dancers at various festivals, suggesting he may have been a common character portrayed during midwinter rites. Others try to claim Herne is a variation of Cernunnos. The evidence for this is scant at best, other than them both having horns (or antlers). Margaret Murray even invokes Herne the Hunter as the English Cernunnos, because of course she does (Harte 1996: 32). Though Gregory Wright points out that stories portray Cernunnos as a nature defender, whereas Herne does the opposite (2022).

In 1922, Harold Peake tried to link him to the harlequin, an evil spirit that in French legends was the leader of the dead, or related to “a group of ghosts who rode abroad like a cavalcade of wild huntsmen” (1922: 28). He suggested that such a character “became” Herne the Hunter in Windsor (1922: 28). This makes little sense given the lack of information about him prior to Shakespeare’s play. It depends more upon the Wild Hunt than it does the descriptions given in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Sightings!

It seems this link between Herne and the Wild Hunt stuck. In 1926, the wife and daughter of a justice of the peace claimed to have heard “the deep-throated baying of the spectre hounds” twice at midnight (Daily Chronicle 1926: 7). The news story even goes out of its way to say Herne and “his ghostly pack of hounds” was immortalised in The Merry Wives of Windsor. That’s despite the fact that the dogs make no such appearance in the play.

Mrs Legge described the baying as faint, growing louder, and then dying away as it moved towards Windsor Castle. She even likened it to the baying of wolf hounds (Daily Chronicle 1926: 7). She and her daughter then heard it again two weeks later. It was her daughter that assumed they were Herne’s hounds.

In 1947, Mr K. Stone wrote to the Daily Mirror and asked to hear about the legend of Herne the Hunter. The response focused on “a ghostly hunter who, with his pack of dogs, frequented certain forests” (1947: 10). Further, this hunter appeared in the Black Forest in German lore, and Fontainebleu in French lore. Herne the Hunter became England’s variation. Even here, the newspaper includes his background as a keeper in Windsor Forest, seeing him appear at midnight in the winter, rattling a chain. Why use Shakespeare’s description if you’re going to link him to the Wild Hunt?

The mistakes just pile up. I found a newspaper from 1943 that described Herne as “a famous outlaw of the Middle Ages who lived in Windsor Forest and plundered the townspeople for food” (Evening Telegraph 1943: 4). I won’t lie, that makes it sound like Herne was eating the townspeople.

Herne the Omen

Herne took on a different aspect in the 20th century; that of a predictive omen. According to legend, people see him before the death of the monarch or national disasters (Simpson 2003: 175).

At least, that’s what the folklore says. I couldn’t find any mention of sightings before the death of the late Queen in September 2022. And the newspaper stories in the 1940s focus on his legend, not sightings. Nothing seems to appear after 1952.

It seems the conceit of Herne as head of the Wild Hunt, scooping up the souls of the dead, has somehow morphed into him becoming a death omen.

What do we make of Herne the Hunter?

Herne might be a real person onto which Shakespeare overlays a ghost story because it suits his plot to do so. Rather than reflecting local folklore, he might have given local gossip a supernatural flavour. Writers have done worse.

In turn, this inspired other writers to further embellish the legend. The story gets distorted every time someone linked it to something else. Perhaps the legend of Herne the Hunter takes us from a despised local forest keeper to an ancient Celtic god through a folkloric version of ‘Telephone’.

And who knows? If you believe in the concept of egregores, if enough people now believe Herne the Hunter is a forest god, maybe he is.

Given much of what we ‘know’ comes from The Merry Wives of Windsor and Windsor Castle, we have to be wary of taking folklore from fiction. Writers take artistic license with their creations. True, they might simply retell the folklore, preserving it for readers. Or they might add their own inventions. This makes it difficult to know what is fact, what is fiction, and what is folklore.

Herne becomes the ideal candidate for the both/and approach. We can know all of these contradictions and believe none of them, since they all tell us something about the time in which they emerged.

Though, as always, it might be an idea to keep your wits about you if you find yourself wandering about in Windsor Great Park at midnight…

What do you make of Herne the Hunter?

References

Daily Chronicle (1926), ‘Spectre Pack of Herne the Hunter’, Daily Chronicle, 23 October, p. 7.

Daily Mirror (1947), ‘Myth’, Daily Mirror, 9 April, p. 10.

Daimler, Morgan (2024), ‘The Ambiguous Nature of Fairies with Morgan Daimler’, Fabulous Folklore Presents, https://youtu.be/tmn1tuaEtjs.

Evening Telegraph (1943), ‘Guardsman was Modern “Herne the Hunter”‘, Evening Telegraph, 17 September, p. 4.

Harte, Jeremy (1996), ‘Herne the Hunter – as case of mistaken identity?’, At The Edge, issue 3, pp. 27-33.

Marcus, Leah S. (1991), ‘Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (2), pp. 168–78.

Peake, Harold (1922), ’17. Horned Deities’, Man, 22, pp. 27-29.

Simpson, Jacqueline (2008)’ Seeking the Lore of the Land’, Folklore, 119 (2), pp. 131–141.

Wright, Gregory (2022), ‘Herne the Hunter’, Mythopedia, https://mythopedia.com/topics/herne-the-hunter.