Herne the Hunter

In English folklore, Herne the Hunter is a ghost associated with Windsor Forest and Great Park in the English county of Berkshire. He is said to wear antlers upon his head, ride a horse, torment cattle, and rattle chains. The earliest mention of Herne comes from William Shakespeare's 1597 play The Merry Wives of Windsor, and it is impossible to know how accurately or to what degree Shakespeare may have incorporated a real local legend into his work, though there have been several later attempts to connect Herne to historical figures, pagan deities, or ancient archetypes.

There is little written evidence for Herne the Hunter before the 1840s, and the details of his original folk tale have been filtered through the various versions of Shakespeare's play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Officially published versions of the play refer only to the tale of Herne as the ghost of a former Windsor Forest keeper who haunts a particular oak tree at midnight in the winter time, wearing horns, shaking chains, and causing cows to produce blood instead of milk:

The earliest written account of Herne comes from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1597:

An early, pirated version of the play from 1604 includes a different version of this text, which states that the ghost (spelled "Horne" in this version) was invented to scare children into obedience, and that mothers tell their children the tale of a ghost who walks the forest in the form of a great stag. Because it is a common surname, it is not possible to further identify Shakespeare's Herne, and no earlier references to his legend exist.

Two hundred years later, in 1792, Samuel Ireland slightly expanded on Shakespeare as follows: “The story of this Herne, who was keeper in the forest in the time of Elizabeth, runs thus: – That having committed some great offence, for which he feared to lose his situation and fall into disgrace, he was induced to hang himself on this tree.” It has been noted that the reference to Herne's death as a suicide fits a traditional belief that this sort of death is more likely to produce a haunting. Shakespeare's reference to rattling chains also fits a very common ghostly motif. However, other elements of the tale are unusual for other ghost stories of Shakespeare's era. Ghostly cattle or dogs were common, but there are few contemporary examples of a ghostly stag. It is possible that Shakespeare invented this detail to better fit the forest setting, or to lead into the humorous image of a character wearing antlers, which would have resembled cuckold's horns to an Elizabethan audience. It was also unusual for ghosts of this period to produce such damaging effects. Herne is described bewitching ("taking") cattle, bloodying their milk, and causing trees to wither.

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