Herne the Hunter

In the conclusion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the dishonest Sir John Falstaff appears dressed in a pair of deer antlers and stands beneath an oak tree to await his fate. But who is the horned phantom of Windsor Forest he's impersonating?

Herne the Hunter is a mythical phantom huntsman who is meant to haunt an oak tree in Windsor Forest and Great Park. He is recognised by the horns on his head, rattling chains, blasting trees and bewitching cattle.

ORIGINS OF HERNE THE HUNTER

The earliest written account of Herne comes from The Merry Wives of Windsor itself, which was written around 1597. In Act 4, Mistress Page tells the story that Herne was once a Forest keeper who haunts an oak tree at midnight throughout the winter:

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 ragged 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
Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 4

Following the play’s popularity, others have added to the legend of Herne the Hunter to expand his story.

A pirated version of the play from 1602 includes a different version of Mistress Page’s monologue, which says that the ghost story was invented to scare children into obedience.

In 1792, English author, engraver and Shakespeare enthusiast Samuel Ireland posed that the keeper Herne had committed some great offence which would have caused him to lose his position and fall into disgrace, so he hanged himself on the oak tree.

Later additions include William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1843 novel, Windsor Castle, which included Herne as a character. In the story, Herne is gored by a stag, and the Devil offers to save him on the condition that he wear the stag’s antlers.

Painting of Falstaff
Falstaff Disguised as Herne with Mrs Ford and Mrs Page depicted in a painting by Robert Smirke, 1789
Robert Smirke © RSC Theatre Collection Browse and license our images
A nocturnal scene in a wood, a man wearing deer horns is flanked by two women, one in a fox costume and another in a female deer outfit
Desmond Barrit as Falstaff, Alexandra Gilbreath as Mistress Ford and Sylvestra Le Touzel as Mistress Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2012
Photo by Pete le May © RSC Browse and license our images

HERNE THE HUNTER AND THE WILD HUNT

Herne the Hunter could have been a local manifestation of the Wild Huntsman character that appears in different folklores across the world, usually leading the Wild Hunt.

Jacob Grimm – the editor of Grimm’s Fairytales – coined the term the Wild Hunt (Wilde Jagd) in his comparative study of German folklore, referring to the motif of a ghostly horde engaged in a chase lead by a mythological rider or huntsman.

In The History of the Devil – The Horned God of the West, R. Lowe Thompson suggests that Herne and all other Wild Huntsmen in European folklore come from the same source – the Celtic/Gaulish deity Cernunnos – though equally the Norse god Odin or pagan iteration Woden are similarly placed.

In post-Christian Europe, the Huntsman was often interpreted as the Devil or an evil spirit, and witnessing the Wild Hunt was an omen of doom, preceding a personal, societal or environmental disaster, such as the outbreak of war or the death of a monarch.

Merry Wives the Musical_ 2006_ Falstaff as Herne the Hunter_2006_Photo by Stewart Hemley _c_ RSC_112454
Falstaff (Simon Callow) in the guise of Herne the Hunter in Merry Wives the Musical, 2006
Photo by Stewart Hemley © RSC Browse and license our images

A LOCAL LEGEND

Others have supported the theory that the legend of Herne the Hunter was based on a real local figure.

One story poses that Herne is the ghost of Richard Horne, a yeoman (land owner) in Henry VIII's time, who was caught poaching in Windsor Forest and may have arrested or even executed. The earliest surviving text of The Merry Wives of Windsor spells the name 'Horne'.

If this was a known local story, it may have been deliberately used for comic effect to echo Falstaff's. At the beginning of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff accused of having poached Justice Shallow's deer ("Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge") and he spends the play trying to steal the wives of Page and Ford. He is then later punished while dressed as Herne the Hunter.

This curiously also mirrors an unsubstantiated rumour about Shakespeare himself, that he was caught poaching deer on Sir Thomas Lucy’s land at Charlecote Park, nearby his home in Stratford-upon-Avon before he moved to London.

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