Hugo of Willerby and the Natural History of Dragons
An ill-advised analysis unravelling some, but by no means all, of the mysteries and contradictions. John Macdebs
“This is quite interesting.”
Mauve
The story which inspired my enquiry was related to me by Dan and Sally in the Green Man.
It can be found here:
…
I am contractually obliged to begin by stating that nobody knows the location of any of the seventeen copies of Hugo’s Natural History that survived the explosion and that the tracing, summary and direct quotation that I use could just as easily have come from my imagination as any historical source.
Details from the frontspiece
Hugo of Willerby
Hugh “Hugo” Netherby was born in 1876, the second son of the cadet branch of the Netherby family. There being no land or fortune to inherit, he was given the choice of going into the church or the army. He seems not to have made great progress with either, although we do know that he was ordained deacon in Lichfield Cathedral in 1899 and gained a lieutenancy in the Royal Leicestershire Regiment in 1901. In 1902 his uncle, heir to the Netherby estate, died and left him a small legacy – enough to live a frugal bachelor life in the village which is what Hugh did, occasionally supplementing his income by taking services in the church when the rector was absent and, as we now know, pursuing his interest in dragons.
It says something of his life that he is best known for writing The Natural History of Dragons – total print-run 17 – and that it is this that has left the longest-lasting mark on the world, despite all seventeen copies having mysteriously vanished. There isn’t even a gravestone in the churchyard and everything else we know about him is what could be gleaned from the pages of his book were one to be granted an opportunity to read it.
Sketch of a wing showing calculations
The Natural History of Dragons
Under the pseudonym of Hugo of Willerby, perhaps trading on the aristocratic sound and his Netherby connections, Hugh persuaded the struggling London publisher L. Upcott Gill to print his manuscript. Upcott Gill’s heyday had been a decade or two earlier when they had published the definitive guide to British dragonflies – it’s possible that Hugh’s book was thought to be a more imaginative outworking of the same theme. I’ve been unable to track down whether or not this was Gill’s last work, but it was certainly the last one printed from his offices on St James’s square.
The cause of the fire is unknown and the question of whether the explosion was cause or effect remains open, but it spread quickly through the Upcott Gill workshop, destroying the presses and paper, which were claimed for through insurance, and the stock of printed books which were not. One theory is that Upcott Gill never planned for the Natural History, which was the only book on the presses at the time, to make its way out into the world and set the fire himself as a way to take a nest-egg into his retirement.
The Natural History of Dragons was cloth-bound in forest green with gilt lettering. As was the case with many of the Upcott Gill books, the illustrations were reproduced to a high standard and allowed Hugh to display his eye for detail to best advantage. The book carries a short introduction that describes turn-of-the-century Willerby with an accuracy fitting for someone we know lived here. There are then three chapters: The Hatching of Dragons, The Laying of Dragons, and The Aging of Dragons.
The Hatching of Dragons
Hugh writes at great length about where dragons come from and it seems that it was his first-hand experience of this in Willerby that sparked his life-long (and apparently fatal) obsession with these “creatures” (Hugh never calls dragons “animals”, “beasts” or “monsters” and I’ve decided to accept his language choice in this matter). He writes:
“Each bloodline of dragons has chosen a location in the isle of Great Britain where at regular intervals of many years, a flight will hatch in early spring. Four such locations are known to scholars, villages where the boundaries between worlds are rubbed thin and where there is magic enough to sustain the fledglings.”
The Willerby dragons hatched in 1886, the summer Hugh turned ten and it seems that this is what sparked his fascination with them. Hatchlings can’t speak, but he would have seen them hunting, learning to fly and then, as the days began to draw in, leaving. As I can confirm, village records are often sketchy (and sometimes, I’m pretty sure, deliberately censored1) but the 19th century was one of scientific interest and the hatchings of 1817, 1840 and 1863 are all carefully detailed if you know where to look.
The young Hugh may have made notes and even sketches that summer, but it seems likely that the detailed accounts and drawings of the book come from 1909 – a summer he would definitely have been waiting for.
“When first hatched, dragonlets are bright green in hue, like the fresh green leaves of late spring among which they hide. They prefer to hang from the branches of lime or chestnut trees and feed on passing insects, which they consume at such a rate that they affect the natural pollination of plants in their hatching years.”
Hugh writes at length both observationally and speculatively on the diet of dragons. It’s clear that they do hunt and feed on increasingly large animals as they grow (having even been known to take small children and, on occasion, calves as well as their normal diet of smaller prey), but they also don’t seem to consume enough to satisfy either their growth or their flight.
“Three dozen large predators – and they grow to the size of wolves before leaving – would, over a summer, destroy the livestock of a small village and make a significant dent in its human population but, whilst the dragonlets are considered pestilential for their attacks on livestock, the impact is of an irritation rather than a catastrophe.”
Hugo’s second experience of dragons came the next summer (1887), not in Willerby, of course, but coincidentally on a family holiday in Colden up in Yorkshire. There he seems to have befriended an old shepherd who was grateful for a set of younger legs and eyes for spotting and driving off the dragonlets who showed an interest in his lambs. The shepherd told him of the previous dragon-summer in Colden, back in 1850, and it was this that started Hugh theorising on the periodicity of dragon hatching.
“Each population of dragons returns regularly to their village to hatch but because of the strain this puts on the magical energy of the country the number of years in a cycle is unique to that population. The Willerby dragons return every 23 years but those of Colden only come back every 37. There is a village in Wales to which they return every 29 years and I hope to establish that there is a Scottish population with a 31 year cycle.”
One of the things that is interesting about this paragraph is the idea (later abandoned for reasons that will be explained) that dragons lived cyclic lives, that those hatching from the eggs were the same creatures as had flown off at the end of the summer. Another is the indication this gives us that Hugh found it difficult to trace the Scottish population due to poorer record-keeping in the less densely populated highlands. With Hugh’s clue and the passing of time I’ve been able to establish that he was right and the Kinloch dragons appeared in 1912, 1943, 1974 and 2005. We know that Hugh set off north in late 1911 and that he was able to confirm his suspicions before meeting whatever fate it was that prevented his return.
Hugh’s trip to Wales in the summer of 1907 is shrouded in secrecy – it’s not known exactly where he went and he is careful not to mention the village’s name. He clearly found what he was looking for, however, because he was able to describe the differences in the populations.
“As they mature, the Willerby dragons change from leaf green to shades of crimson and burgundy, patterned and flecked with shades of their original verdant hue… [there are twelve pages of descriptions of the Willerby dragons of both 1886 and 1909 with sketches and even names – when Hugh states conclusively that they were not the same population, I think it’s fair to take his word for it.] The dragons of Colden mature to blues of ice and sapphire, also flecked with green, and the Welsh dragons are of such deep shades of grey that they look black in all but the brightest sunlight.”
The next section of Hugh’s book is a confusion of sketches and calculations as he wrestles with the problem of dragon flight, both the force needed to propel them upwards and the energy they would have to consume to fuel a day in the air. Since even young dragons are larger (and far heavier) than the largest birds, this is a reasonable concern, even if Hugh’s mathematical analysis is lacking in places. The conclusion is that dragons draw energy from the magical background of the place in which they are born (a theory that suggests that the prime numbers that appear in the cycle-lengths of dragon populations could be an evolutionary advantage that makes two coincident hatchings less likely). Hugh suggests that the villages the dragons choose are places with high background magic, although it’s just as possible that the dragons pull magic from somewhere else and have created these hot-spots themselves.
“At the end of the summer the dragonlets stop eating and survive on the body-fat accumulated in the long, hot days of the feast, supplemented, or so it seems to me, by a magical source associated with the place. For a few days, perhaps a week, they circle higher and in greater numbers than before, resting in the tallest trees before circling again, drawing more of their kind into the dance. Finally one ventures far enough and from soaring upwards appears to tumble downwards, but inexplicably away from the ground as though some kind of hill had been crested. The others follow, one by one, falling into the sky and disappearing.”
Hugh will have watched the tumbling of dragons out of our world into some other existence as a ten-year-old in 1886, and it’s clear that this first parting was heartbreaking for him, that he had already fallen in love with these strange creatures. When he saw it again in 1887 in Yorkshire he would have been ready for it and by the time the 1907 (Wales) and 1909 (Willerby) departures took place he was able to watch with the scientific eye of the adult scientist, only slightly blurred by tears. He uses the word “outtumble” to describe their final flight and writes:
“The outtumble of a flight of dragonlets is one of the most poignant sights in the natural world: these wise and curious creatures who have grown from nothing over the summer now suddenly disappearing into thin air, going on to the next stage of their lives and exploring worlds into which we, poor human observers, cannot follow.”
Hugo’s impression of the transotion between the dragons’ worlds
The Laying of Dragons
Having seen the development of dragonlets in Willerby and Colden in the 1880s, Hugh had a long wait before the next known hatching of dragons in Great Britain. During this time we know he was sent away to boarding school in the southwest where he was a middling student except for his imaginative writing and skill in orienteering. He went up to Oxford in 1895, returned to Willerby in 1896 at which point he must have enrolled in some theological training college but I’ve been unable to find which one. He was ordained, as previously mentioned, but did not complete his curacy, instead joining the army as a lieutenant. The death of his uncle came just in time to avoid the despatch of his regiment to South Africa in 1902 and he spent the next four and a bit years researching and planning his visit to Wales.
It seems that he got to the unknown Welsh village in early March 1907 in time to watch the dragonlets emerge from their shells but that this only stirred a curiosity into how the eggs found their way there in the first place. He was able to watch their development carefully and with a scientific eye for detail, but he now recognised that the summer of dragons could only be a snapshot of their life cycle.
“Even the most rudimentary philosopher will recognise that if a dragon hatches from an egg then there must, somewhere, be a larger dragon that laid the egg – they do not spawn from inert earth.”
Hugh’s problem now was that he had no idea how long before hatching the dragon eggs would be laid – he could find no record of the laying of dragon eggs and from the winter of 1907 he was torn between the libraries and book auctions of London and the hillsides around Willerby, not sure whether he’d find his answer between the pages of a dusty tome or coming out of the skies with jaws of flame. The answer came at dawn one morning in the early part of January 1909 when Hugh was bivouacking in the Old Fort on the rising land above the village.
“That morning I became, I believe, the first human being in history to witness the return of a dragon to our world. I had been expecting the arrival of a great red beast belching fire, but instead she arrived silently and almost invisibly, slipping between the pages of this reality and the next.”
The question of where the dragons go after the outtumble, and what happens to those who do not return remains a mystery, but thanks to Hugh’s devotion to science we know about one dragon who did come back. The rest of Hugh’s book extrapolates wildly from this one encounter – to a careful reader it’s obvious that we are foolhardy to assume that observations of this occasion are typical, never mind universal. On the other hand, we have no other observations to work from.
“At first, I just watched her work: scoring lines in the ground with her great talons; turning over the turf to expose the good soil beneath; lowering herself delicately to deposit an egg; replacing the grass and then finally blessing the spot with a snort of flame. As the sun rose and I continued to watch I began to feel that this was not just some dragon but a specific dragon, one that, perhaps, I recognised.”
Based on this one observation, we deduce that each clutch of dragon eggs is laid by a female from the previous outtumble. About forty eggs are laid, which seems to match observations of the number of dragonlets that hatch and suggests that dragons have few predators in our world. I would say none at all except that the eggs are green, slightly duller than the dragonlets that will hatch from them, camouflaged against the grass rather than the spring leaves. Species without predators don’t evolve camouflage – even if there are no threats now there must once have been – a somewhat worrying thought.
The eggs themselves are around eight inches (20cm) in length – much larger than a bird’s egg, but small compared with the size of the adult dragon which Hugh records as twenty feet (6m) long, not including its “magnificent” tail. The dragonlets’ call is a high pitched squeal, ranging from a keening shriek when in distress or pain to the series of chirrups they use to convey delight. Hugh therefore, expected the adult to have a deeper bark or growl and was both surprised and delighted to be proved wrong.
“ I watched her from the safety of my bivouac, sketching her markings so I could later check my suspicions, and bemoaning the childish efforts that would mean I could never be conclusively sure that this was one of the dragonlets I had observed twenty three years ago. As I watched, I became aware that she had noticed and was now watching me. A shiver ran down my spine and then she turned directly to me and opened her mouth – not, Thank God, to broil me with flame, but to call my name. ‘Hugo,’ she said.”
Dragons (or this one at least) do not have names at this stage of their lives: the name is a human affectation that they are intelligent enough to use but have no need of themselves. They also, it appears, have long memories (even from their early youth) and can distinguish one human from another by something that surely goes beyond facial recognition (the thirty-three year old Hugh would have been changed hugely from his childhood self). Names may not be the draconic way, but they are indispensable to humans and Hugh christened this one ‘Zade (possibly as a result of having got caught up in the Arabian Nights.)
“When she had finished her work, ‘Zade rested against the hillside enjoying the faint warmth of the winter sun. I was able to admire the burnished burgundy of her scales, patterned with brighter crimson and shot with the most gorgeous flecks of green. Her great wings folded against her sides, not leathery like those of a bat but smooth and muscled – devices that turn the energy of the body and the magic of the land into force and thence into flight.”
The visit of a laying dragon to our world is fleeting – she arrives at dawn and spends the morning disposing her eggs, then resting for a while before hunting (in ‘Zade’s case among the flocks that Willerby’s shepherds had left grazing the hills). The journey between the worlds takes significant energy – we know that dragonlets feast enthusiastically to build up the fat stores required for the outtumble, and ‘Zade crossed into our world whilst heavily pregnant and then later the same day slipped out of it. Perhaps, therefore, we can forgive the devastation she wreaked on the flock – twenty full-grown ewes is a large meal even for a creature the size of a dragon.
“Before she left, ‘Zade promised to return and gave me hope that I would see her again. I encouraged her to stay for a few days but her nature and instincts pulled her away before the sun set that day. I pressed her on where she was going but she had no words for me – for her it was simply another place that was not like this place.”
Hugh theorised (on what I believe to be woefully inadequate data) that the laying dragons come back from wherever it is that the outtumble took them as dragonlets but that they go on to somewhere else. He suggests that some of the dragonlets don’t survive the outtumble and that a further group die either from starvation or their wounds as the dragon population fight for scarce resources. Of those that remain, just one returns to lay eggs in our world and in that moment their path is sundered from their kind – there are simply not enough sheep to fuel the full outtumble of an adult dragon and so once the eggs are laid, the dragon slips into an intermediate place, out of this world but not in the next.
“As the sun gleamed red on the horizon and the last rays lit the undersides of the clouds, ‘Zade took to the skies again, circling and circling above me. As she circled she sort of faded, changing from the solid reality against which I had leant my back as we talked in the middle of the day to a transparent image, a shadow, and then just the idea of a dragon. The last I saw of her was a final plume of flame and the call, in her deep, musical voice, of my name ‘Hugo’.”
Sketch of dragon scales with data to compare with plate mail
The Aging of Dragons
We know that Hugh spent the summer of 1909 in Willerby, observing, sketching and writing about the dragonlets that hatched from ‘Zade’s eggs. After the outtumble, he started looking for an outlet for his research. He submitted a paper on that summer’s population to the Zoological Society in London but it was rejected from there and, one would imagine from every other scientific journal to which it was submitted. Eventually, with some edits, it did make it to the public in the autumn of 1910 as an unusual feature in the “Home Tapestry” magazine (since discontinued).
Either alongside this, or as a consequence of his rejection, Hugh was working on a book and looking for a publisher for what became his masterpiece. He wrote at a feverish pace – there is a satirical sketch by an unknown author “Observations of Willerby Life” that was published in the winter of 1911 to raise money for the church roof. Hugh may or may not have been pleased with the description “Our own Dickens sits at the window of his cottage, surrounded by clouds of ink and a flurry of quills, industriously turning fresh white paper into stacks of imaginative calligraphy.”
Alongside his writing, Hugh was wrestling with the question of what happened next, what dragons did after laying their eggs, where they went and whether they came back. He read legends of dragons from the Mordiford Wyvern and Sir Eglamor to the Lambton Worm, seeking the sniff of truth from years of imagination and storytelling (in some ways Hugh is both an inspiration and a warning to later Willerby historians). Most fruitfully, he began a correspondence with Jean Douglas, the widow of the famous Professor Douglas Douglas of Edinburgh university. By this time, she had returned to her home town of Stirling and was a collector and sharer of the folklore, quirks of everyday life and legends of Scotland.
It seems that Hugh had already tracked down the Scottish dragon population to Kinloch and had been planning to go north to celebrate the new year 1911-12 and to be ready for the laying. Jean Douglas now put him on the trail of Black Billy of Ben Mhaigdean, a legendary dragon of the remote northwest. He was said to be the wisest creature of all Scotland, but that the price of his wisdom was being devoured and so it would take a great fool to approach him with a question. Hugh now planned to extend his trip further north to confirm his suspicions about legendary dragons in general and Black Billy in particular.
“Both male and female dragonlets hatch but it is only females that return to lay eggs and therefore only females who remain attached to our world to grow old. We can therefore deduce that, whatever gender may have been assigned to the beast over the years, all the dragons of legend are female.”
Although the laying seasons are spread out, they are too common for it to be possible that all mother dragons return to our world – across the four sites known to Hugh there were fourteen clutches of dragons in the 20th century alone, far too many for the agriculture of the country to sustain (never mind whatever burden this would apply to the magical framework). Most of these mothers, therefore, must remain until they die in the liminal world they fly off to after laying, and we have no way of knowing how long this might be. The only data we have on this is ‘Zade’s confident promise to return, although even Hugh acknowledged that the promise of a dragon is not always something one can rely on.
“The dragons of legend are known for their intellect, whether this be described as wisdom or low cunning, and for their deception. Many dragon-hunters have been tricked into believing promises and lies, often to their doom. This is at least partly a survival mechanism: despite their monstrous size and fearsome claws, they are inevitably vulnerable to sufficiently well-armoured and numerous humans.”
Legends describe dragons as being tens of metres long and blocking out the sun with their passage. It’s not possible to confirm a maximum size, but the legends of mountain ranges being formed of the fossilised bodies of long-dead dragons seem unlikely. A curious clue to their lifestyle comes from their appetite – despite tales of dragons carrying off cattle, sheep and people, there are few stories of the extended devastation that such a large carnivore would require.
“Dragons can live, if not forever, then at least for several hundred years: the legend of Black Billy can be traced back to the early 18th century but (s)he may be even older than that. Most of their time is spent in solitary rest: dragonlets may be born in a village, but adults do not stay there. This is interspersed with hunting, those terrible seasons when a region is plagued by a dragon and calls on the services of a questing knight.”
Those stories invariably recount an extended battle (often spun out with choruses of “Fa la lanky down dilly” and the like) that results in victory for the heroic knight and the death or departure of the dragon. Hugh was very suspicious of these tales and filled pages with calculations of arm strength and sword length that would be required to break through the scales of even a modestly sized dragon based on scaling up from smaller creatures (as well as the scales of the dragonlets’ first moulting, he calculated based on what was known of snakes and crocodilians all of which parallels are clearly of dubious worth.) Hugh therefore sought to reconcile his calculations with both the legends and the undoubted fact that the country has not been overrun by dragon populations.
“When resting, dragons can slip between the worlds, vanishing for years at a time. It is not known whether or what they feed on in the other place, but they certainly gain enough sustenance whilst there to be able to survive periods of relative fasting in our world. The longer they live and the more often they slip between the worlds, the easier the transition becomes for them. It seems likely, then, that the dragon-hunters who have claimed to slay or drive off the dragons have usually simply provoked the creature to vanish for a little while.”
The question of why some dragons live this life and others don’t is not one that Hugh was able to satisfactorily resolve. It’s possible that many simply die quickly after laying, either because of natural causes or due to predators in the liminal space (other dragons would be prime suspects); Hugh, however, perhaps through sheer hope, found another potential explanation. He, of course, offers it as a certainty without any justification whatsoever.
“Few of the tales explain what it is that draws dragons back to our world, thin and hungry as it is, but my observations have brought me to the conclusion that it is the random coincidence of having formed a relationship with a specific human. The immediate, fierce, connection that is apparent to anyone who has spoken with a dragon is binding not just on the human, whose life will never be the same, but on the dragon. It is the call of this relationship that brings the dragon back through the wall between the worlds and it is only after the death of the frail human, a mere handful of decades later, that the dragon becomes cruel and avaricious.”
The avarice of dragons is well known and may have been one of the reasons that the ever-impecunious Hugh was drawn to Black Billy. The question of how they would get their talons on gold is, despite this, a fraught one. It’s possible that they may have picked up some from their victims but even allowing for the longevity this would never exceed the wealth of the area on which they predated. The idea of a dragon resting on a pile of gold bigger than herself is sheer fantasy as is Hugh’s rendering of the eventual death of a dragon.
“The end of a dragon’s life is a pitiful thing, hundreds of years after its first outtumble, after it soared high in the sky after laying its eggs, after the brief years of its passionate relationship with its human. As the centuries pass the dragon becomes twisted, weighed down by its own growth, which never stops, tortured by the thoughts of cruelties past and those yet to be practised. It also grows hungry, spending more time in the liminal world and less in ours, but it seems that there are limits even there, that the enormous bulk requires more sustenance than can be hunted. Eventually, then, and inevitably, the dragon begins to feed on the only source of meat large enough: its own body. Methodically, systematically, she rips the flesh first from her tail, then her hind legs and then her torso, literally feasting on her own body until there is nothing left but a pile of scales and another legend for the storytellers.”
Final Notes
I have managed to confirm that Hugh made it to Kinloch in December 1911 and stayed there until the outtumble in the late summer of 1912. From there he said that he was heading for Ben Mhaigdean, which he hoped to reach before winter began to bite. Whether he reached the mountain, and whether he got to speak to Black Billy we don’t know – this is where the trail runs cold. The last correspondence from Hugh was confirmation to Upcott Gill that he was happy with the proofs of his Natural History and that they should go ahead with publication.
The first printing of the book, and the immediate (though not necessarily consequent) destruction of the press, took place in May 1913. It’s not clear whether this delay was due to Huh’s disappearance or to financial problems within the business – the court records of the winter of 1912-13 contain two attempts to reclaim moneys owed and a bankruptcy proceeding seems only to have been averted by the wrapping up of the business after the fire.
There is just enough evidence to suggest that Black Billy is more than just a legend, and that it’s possible that Hugh could have met her although it’s not clear whether she is still alive a hundred years later. There is no evidence that ‘Zade has been back to Willerby: perhaps she came and found Hugh gone; perhaps she forgot or never intended to return; or perhaps, just perhaps, they were reunited in the autumn of 1912 somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland.
If that’s the case then their story may have continued, although if it did then it has gone far beyond the reach of a humble historian.
You been told the reasons for this, John, and you said you understood so don’t know why you’ve put this in here. Mauve.