A messenger came to the king. Syr king he sayd, lysten me now, For bad tydinges I bring you. In Northumberlande there is no man, But that they be slayne everychone; For there dare no man route, By twenty myle rounde aboute, For doubt of a fowle dragon, That sleath men and beastes downe. He is blacke as any cole, Ragged as a rough fole; His body from the navill upwards. No man may it pierce it is so harde; His neck is great as any summere; He renneth as swift as any distrere; Pawes he hath as a lyon; All that he toucheth he sleath dead downe, Great winges he hath to flight, That is no man that bare him might, There may no man fight him agayne, But that he sleath him certayne; For a fowler beast then is he, Ywis of none never heard ye.
The said Guy, amongst other marvellous exploits, killed at "Winsor,"
A bore of passing might and strength, Whose like in England never was, For hugenesse both in breadth and length.
Mr. Barrett, a saddler, of Manchester, with antiquarian taste, in an illuminated MS., now in the Chetham Library, refers to an old tradition concerning a dragon whose den was amongst the red sandstone rocks in the neighbourhood of Lymm, about five miles from Warrington. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in Merlin's prophesy especially, often refers to these mythical monsters; and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is equally expressive in attributing disaster to their influences. In the latter work we read: "A.D. 793. This year dire forewarnings came over the land of the Northumbrians, and miserably terrified the people; these were excessive whirlwinds and lightnings; and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these tokens." Mr. Baring-Gould says, as recently as the year 1600,--"A German writer would illustrate a thunderstorm destroying a crop of corn by a picture of a dragon devouring the produce of the field with his flaming tongue and iron teeth."
That this tradition at Winwick respecting a "monster in former ages, which prowled over the neighbourhood, inflicting injury on man and beast," is a legitimate descendant from our Aryan ancestors' personification of natural phenomena, seems very apparent, and aptly illustrates what Sir G. W. Dasent terms the "toughness of tradition," especially when interwoven with the marvellous or supernatural. Mr. Walter K. Kelly, in his "Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk-Lore," says--"These phenomena were noted and designated with a watchfulness and a wealth of imagery which made them the principal groundwork of all the Indo-European mythologies and superstitions. The thunder was the bellowing of a mighty beast or the rolling of a wagon. The lightning was a sinuous serpent, or a spear shot straight athwart the sky, or a fish darting in zigzags through the waters of heaven. The stormy winds were howling dogs or wolves; the ravages of the whirlwind that tore up the earth _were the work of a wild boar_."[27] Mr. Fiske, in his "Myths and Myth-makers," says that these mythical monsters "not only steal the daylight, but they parch the earth and wither the fruits, and they slay vegetation during the winter months."