GhostFamous
Wild Edric Rides
When the Saxon earl rides out, war is coming.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- Hill country with old lead-mine remains
- Legend from
- Saxon history; Victorian sightings
- Tone
- Eerie
A horn sounds over the hills. Cover your face and don't speak: Wild Edric is riding to war.
Eadric the Wild led English resistance to the Normans in Shropshire and Herefordshire in 1067–70. His end is unrecorded, and in the west Shropshire hills people believed he never died. Burne heard that he is condemned to live in the lead-mines with his wife and train, punished for trusting the Conqueror; miners heard them knocking where the best lodes lay. Whenever war is coming they ride over the hills towards the enemy. A young woman told how, in 1853 or 1854, at Minsterley, she and her miner father saw Edric on a white horse, with Lady Godda riding beside him, just before the Crimean War.