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.