Black Leopards In British History Are NOT Rare

 

 I have an index card entry on The Black Beast of Bungay":

1577 Aug 4 At the time a violent storm rages: clawing was heard on a church door and a "big black dog" was said to have entered and attacked parishioners. The account has been called into question as evidence seems to suggest a cat NOT dog. A lady born and bred in Bungay says it was a cat and quotes a song sung in school as a child:

"Scratch cat of Bungay,

Take a stick and knock it down

And it won't come back anymore"

Many articles and books have been written on the legends but the obvious cat aspects have been ignored.

You get a lot on a index card if you use a typewriter.

"The encounter on the same day at St Mary's Church, Bungay was described in A Straunge and Terrible Wunder by Abraham Fleming in 1577:

"This black dog, or the divel in such a linenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a mome[n]t where they kneeled, they stra[n]gely dyed."

So it scratched, it seems to have snapped necks and other accounts mention the climbing ability.

All of this ignored as "exaggeration of superstitious people" BECAUSE it was obviously the supernatural black dog -Shuck.

Putting this into perspective, a friend born and raised in Suffolk told me one day how his mother, a Suffolk woman, had been delivering post in the dark during WW2. At one point a long, sleek black animal with long curving tail rushed across the road and through hedgerow. I asked her about this as she was obviously describing a leopard. No. "It was THE black dog" (Shuck).

Rare? No.

In West Somerset Romantic Routes & Mysterious Byways by Rev. Alan L. Holt (1984 - I have a signed copy) there is the story of two undertakers carrying a body in a coffin which at one point falls head first onto the road. Immediately ahead of the they see what sounds like a black leopard rush across the road silently. But no, this mid 1800s story explains that it was the man (in the coffin) spirit. NEVER mentioned by anyone but me because I do the reading!

So black leopards were about for a very long time -no question of black puma in most of the cases as America had never been officially discovered and animals from there never brought to England. My archives have a lot more than the accounts above.

Lost history.