Dragons are typically held to be figments of medieval imagination, mythical creatures illustrating the rapacious, reptilian nature of evil. Maybe so, but in seventeenth century England they were apparently very much alive.
We learn from a 1614 pamphlet, True and Wonderfull, that a dragon or serpent was making a menace of itself in Sussex, attacking men and cattle. It lived in St. Leonard's Forest near Horsham and looked like this:
The serpent, or dragon, as some call it, is reputed to be nine feet, or rather more, in length, and shaped almost in the form of an axletree of a cart, a quantity of thickness in the midst, and somewhat smaller at both ends. The former part, which he shoots forth as a neck, is supposed to be an ell long, with a white ring, as it were, of scales about it. The scales along his back seem to be blackish, and so much as is discovered under his belly appeareth to be red; for I speak of no nearer description than of a reasonable occular distance.
The dragon was evidently proud and arrogant of aspect and had what appeared to be nascent wings. It also spat deadly venom, killing those unfortunate enough to get too close to the beast, including two dogs that were used to hunt it:
Likewise a man going to chase it and, as he imagined, to destroy it, with two mastiff dogs, as yet not knowing the great danger of it, his dogs were both killed, and he himself glad to return with haste to preserve his own life. Yet this is to be noted, that the dogs were not preyed upon, but slain and left whole; for his food is thought to be, for the most part, in a cony-warren, which he much frequents, and it is found much scanted and impaired in the increase it had wont to afford.
Some fifty years later, in 1669, another dragon was reported, the famous Flying Serpent of Henham, Essex. This beast had wings and was around the same size as its Sussex cousin, it was:
8 or 9 foot long, the smallest part of him about the bigness of a Man’s leg, on the middle as big as a Mans Thigh, his eyes were very large and piercing, about the bigness of a Sheep’s eye, in his mouth he had two rows of Teeth which appeared to their sight very white and sharp, and on his back h e had two wings indifferent large but not proportionable to the rest of his body, they judging them not to be above two hand fulls long, and w hen spreaded, not to extend from the top of one wing to the utmost end of the other above two foot at the most, and therefore altogether too weak to carry such an unwieldly body.
Curiously, stories of dragons or flying serpents persisted well into the nineteenth century, with one colony reportedly living in the woods near Penllyne Castle, in Wales. One elderly resident described them:
They were coiled when in repose, and "looked as if they were covered with jewels of all sorts. Some of them had crests sparkling with all the colours of the rainbow". When disturbed they glided swiftly, "sparkling all over," to their hiding places. When angry, they "flew over people's heads, with outspread wings, bright, and sometimes with eyes too, like the feathers in a peacock's tail". He said it was "no old story invented to frighten children", but a real fact. His father and uncle had killed some of them, for they were as bad as foxes for poultry. The old man attributed the extinction of the winged serpents to the fact that they were "terrors in the farmyards and coverts"
Interesting, but are these accounts real or fictional? And if real, were these now extinct creatures living dinosaurs?
Noxia serpentum est admixto sanguine pestis
As you reflect on this mystery, remember that venomous dragons are all too bizarrely alive today, right here in America. It's strange; how can they be alive, and yet they are.
Noxia Serpentum,
LSP
