The Black Dog of Bungay: Religious Conflict and Supernatural Terror in a Suffolk Parish

Abstract

In 1577 the market town of Bungay, on the Norfolk/Suffolk border, was riven by a grotesque and unusual event. During a storm, several members of the congregation were killed or injured, apparently by the appearance of the Devil in the guise of a demonic black hound. Anchored by this legendary appearance of “Black Shuck,” this study centres on a microhistorical investigation of the town of Bungay in the years leading up to the ominous events of 1577, through a previously neglected set of sources — two sets of unusually complete and comprehensive churchwardens' accounts for the two parishes in Bungay, which cover the entire period of the early Elizabethan Reformation. This allows us to appreciate these events in the context of a renewed interest in the 1560s and early 1570s as a time of fractiousness, insecurity, and religious uncertainty. The events of 1577 were perhaps only a dark capstone on a decade or more of severe disputes at the grassroots, engendered by growing confessional divisions and a crystallising sense of traditionalist versus Puritan cultural identities.