Herne in Feckenham

John de Feckenham depicted in stained glass at St John the Baptist Church, Feckenham

"The Last Catholic Abbot of Westminster had been John de Feckenham. Born in the Forest of Feckenham, a few miles from Earl's Common, he had served as chaplain to the Bishop of Worcester, John Bell of Temple Broughton .... and later, as chaplain to the Worcestershire clergyman Edward Bonner, Bishop of London. in the time of Queen Mary, John de Feckenham interceded on behalf of the Princess Elizabeth when she was sent to the Tower of London in the wake of the Kentish rebellion,..... Feckenham pleaded for Elizabeth's life and liberty. He sat in the first parliament of Elizabeth's reign but refused to alter his religion ....and was committed to the Tower in 1560.

Feckenham spent the rest of his life as a prisoner...................During the time he was subjected to persistent attempts to convert him by the ultra-Protestant reformer and priest-hunter, Robert Horne..... it was as the persecutor of John de Feckenham that Will (Shakespeare) invoked Horne the priest Hunter in the diabolical form of Herne.

Robert Horne occasionally spelt his name 'Herne'. A 1602 pirated copy of The Merry Wives even replaced 'Herne' with 'Horne'. 

                                   -Taken from Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means, by Simon Andrew Stirling




There is an old tale goes that 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: 
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know 

The superstitious idle-headed eld 
Received and did deliver to our age 
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth.

Horned Ones

    So was Helgi beside the chieftains like...the young stag, drenched in dew, who surpasses all other animals and whose horns glow against the sky itself. 
                                                                                    The Verse Edda


    Herla and Herne are variant spellings of the same word.The Romans incorporated their Latin religion into the native beliefs of the lands which they occupied. We therefore find syncretized systems of belief - Celtic gods, say, joined with Roman ones. The name of a horned god whose altar was buried beneath Notre Dame - Cernunnos - then represents the Latinised version of a Celtic name; the os ending is the suffix added to masculine nouns in Greek and old Latin. The original version of the name, we then infer, is Cernunn. Now - the prefixes Cer - and Her - are interchangeable, both being Indo-European roots which mean "horn". Cernunn may thus be rendered as Hernunn. This, as Arthur Evans(1) suspects, was "the original Celtic ancester of Herne, which is one of the oldest names for the male figure we're dealing with."

                                  From 'The Horned God of the Wytches' by Zan Fraser

             

 Illustration from the seventeenth century chapbook Robin Goodfellow: His Mad Pranks and Merry Jests.

1. Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture

Herne Steals a Stag

*Once upon a time, The Abbess of Bordesley (1) owned a beautiful white stag. It's coat was so white it glistened like snow and it's antlers sprouted from it's head like mature oak trees. The Abbess kept her stag tethered by a long golden chain on the lawn in front of the Abbey, which resided on the edge of Feckenham Forest.

Feckenham Forest was home to Herne the Hunter,(2) a wild god who ran joyously through the trees, making sure flowers bloomed, stags rutted and wolves hunted. One day in his revels he came upon the manicured lawns and herb beds of the Abbey. Sniffing the air he picked up a sent amongst the alien human smells that he recognised, a stag. Creeping quietly into the open, he spied the white stag belonging to the Abbess. Noticing the chain which tethered it, he let out a roar of protest. No wild animal should be restrained in this way, especially one as noble as this stag. Dashing from the cover of the trees, he ran to the stag and with a mighty stamp of his hoof, smashed the links of the chain. Together, the stag and Herne galloped away back into the forest. The Abbess, rounding the corner of the Abbey, was just in time to glimpse the white tail of her beloved stag, followed by the strange figure of the man-stag, Herne, bow and arrow raised ready to fire.

Enraged by his actions and believing Herne to be planning to kill her stag, the Abbess screamed a curse to ensure that Herne would be condemned to ride the night sky, leading the Wild Hunt for eternity.(3)

Many years later, a young man named William Shakespeare was spending time in Worcestershire, at the Drainer's Arms on Earl's Common,(4) where the tale of Herne was recounted to him in front of a roaring fire, one stormy winter's night. Shakespeare was from the Forest of Arden, which was separated from Feckenham Forest by the River Arrow, which flowed next to Bordesley Abbey. He knew the area well and the tale fired his imagination. In time young William became quite famous for his own stories and was called upon to write a play to amuse Queen Elizabeth 1. Remembering the story of Herne he added the character to The Merry Wives of Windsor, claiming that Herne fequented Windsor Forest.(5) Herne of Feckenham was all but forgotten.

*This story may not be true, the written word can not always be trusted.

1;Bordesley Abbey
2;Herne
3;Ghosts of Redditch
4; The Folklore of Hereford & Worcester
5;Who Killed William Shakespeare?