At Orford Ness close by the sea There stands a great stone tower
To guard against invasion And display the royal power
From atop its mighty ramparts You could once observe the shore
Where once they found a monster That had not been seen before
The fisher folk of Orford Dragged their nets onto the beach
To see what fish had been ensnared And drawn into their reach
One of the nets bulged with its catch To their delighted eyes
But when they looked within They got a terrible surprise
For tangled up within the net No wriggling fish were there
Instead their catch appeared to be A wild man covered in hair
They took the wild eyed stranger off To Orford Castle keep
To see what could learn about This mystery from the deep
The wild man was subjected to An interrogation
But only spoke in strange sounds To the Constable's frustration
And so, to learn his secrets And to make the wild man speak
He was thrown into a dungeon And tortured for
a week
The fisher folk in pity Gave the wild man liberty
To take a little exercise By walking by the sea
They rigged their nets around him To make a sort of pen
But the wild man slipped into the sea And was never seen again
Now Orford Ness is peaceful And the fisher folk are gone
But the legend of the wild man of Orford lingers on
The wild man of Orford story is taken from a 13th century monk's account about a weird
human-like creature plucked out of the sea off East Anglia. The wild man of Orford was
allegedly a weird human-like creature fished up out of the sea off the then busy port of
Orford with its crowning castle in the late 12th century. The story as we have it is that
Orford fishermen were out doing what fishermen do best and their nets caught a wild man.
He looked exactly like an ordinary man except that was naked, covered in hair and lived
in the sea. They took him back to Orford and tortured him to try to get him to explain
who he was and what he was doing and after wasting a lot of time with this cruelty realised
that he really didn't understand English and there was no way of communicating so they
hosed him down and apologised and kept him as a pet for a while. Then they took him out
to sea and put him in a pen of nets to see if he'd like that. They forgot to put a bottom
in the pen so he simply swam underneath but in explicably came back to Orford and lived
with them for a couple more months before he got bored and suddenly swam off down the
estuary and disappeared.
Wild men are big items in the medieval imagination. They go on through it from the earliest times
to the end. The middle ages were fascinated by the boundary of what's human. Scholars,
especially based in monasteries, loved collecting stories about human-like creatures that weren't
human. The kind of people we'd now call fairies or elves or gnomes or pixies in particular
but also mermaids, and the wild man was great to think with because he is the ultimate savage.
He's the human being gone back to nature with no ties left with civilisation at all, so
the middle ages striving to preserve and create civilisation, the wild man was a real mirror
image.
I personally don't think the wild man ever existed and I'm ashamed to say this because
the story itself is so wildly improbable. You get this poor guy from the sea, you torture
him and abuse him and he escapes and then he comes back for more. It just doesn't ring
true. But certainly it's a great story. It gives this little east-anglian sea port something
that no other sea port has. It's a story of its own literally written into its fabric.