Black Shuck of Bungay

This past weekend the people of Bungay in Suffolk, together with visitors to that attractive market town, have been celebrating their Black Shuck festival. This is a recent creation but commemorates an event on August 4th 1577. It was a Sunday and whilst parishioners were in the former priory church of St Mary at morning service, and during a thunderstorm, a huge black dog - known to history as Black Shuck - came into the church to their terror, attacked and killed two of the congregation and injured a third before disappearing. It also appeared several miles away at Blythburgh church where it manifested similar behaviour.

As the parish website there recounts

“ … in a great storm in August 1577, the church was struck by the hand of God (or was it the devil?). During the morning service, lightning 'cleft the door, and returning to the steeple, rent the timber, brake the chimes, and fled towards Bongay, six miles off,' leaving on the Great North Door, clearly to be seen today, the fingerprints of the Devil in scorch marks. A man of forty and a boy of fifteen were found 'starke dead'. “

There was to be a similar event at Widecombe in the Moor in October 1638 as is set out by Wikipedia in The Great Thunderstorm

Clearly the hound in Suffolk was beyond the capabilities of the parish dog catchers to deal with.

Given that thunderstorms are not that unusual events, and even allowing that this was before Benjamin Franklin came up with the lightning conductor, there must have been something very spectacular indeed about these storms that they made such an impact - both literal and psychologically - on those who witnessed them.

There are pictures and a description of St Mary’s Bungay from the Churches Conservation Trust here 

The excellent Suffolk Churches website discusses Blythburgh at Suffolk Churches, as does the National Churches Trust site at Blythburgh Holy Trinity

Information about this year’s Bungay festival can be found on its website at Black Shuck Festival 2023

A few weeks back the Daily Telegraph reported in some detail on the legend and the festival, and the fact that Bungay appears to have the largest concentration of self-identifying Satanists in the country. The article can be accessed at Inside the Satanist capital of Britain

One might wonder, incidentally, what, in this age of ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue, the Christian denominations are doing about that particular development.

BBC News had an article in 2002 about an academic looking into the psychology of such manifestations which are quite common in local traditions and, indeed, modern reports. It can be seen at Black Dog of Bungay under study

The spectral appearance of black dogs in different parts of the country is well attested as in the article cited above. In my home county apearances by a large black dog with ‘saucer eyes’ known as Padfoot is recorded at York, Whitby, and in the area around my home town Pontefract as late as the nineteenth century. In that last instance at least it was seen as benign and a protective presence.

The events at Bungay and Blythburgh in 1577 - and at Widecombe in 1638 - doubtless indicate something of a society where the supernatural was close at hand, and the Devil a lurking and omnipresent threat. The legacy of centuries of that awareness was doubtless reinforced by a post-reformation Calvinistic sense of the elect and the reprobate under direct challenge or threat from the Evil One. To the south the county of Essex was to produce a significant number of witchcraft cases in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whilst today that is often seen as the product of a misogynistic and superstitious society as a friend once made the point to me there may have been some at least who believed they did have access to ‘black arts’ and used that, or the threat of them, to their own advantage. The post-reformation world was not one that banished superstition but rather one that promoted it in new and diverse forms. Evidence from the mid-seventeenth century of this in East Anglia can be seen in these cases documented in an academic thesis at Appendix 6

The religious profile of East Anglia was complex and must have heightened sensibilities. If Essex had developed and strengthening Protestant communities that pattern was probably less well developed in Suffolk and Norfolk, and all three counties had a still lively recusant tradition. Just over a decade later Fr John Gerard was travelling the region and finding a considerable Catholic response. Such tensions, which as we know remained lively and divisive for the coming century, with the iconoclastic actions of William Dowsing and the activities of the ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins in the region, may well underlie the response to what happened at Bungay and Blythburgh. 

With that all said the question still remains - what the hell did actually happen in the churches at Bungay and Blythburgh on that August morning 446 years ago?