Hero
The Jovial Hunter
Wind well thy horn, good hunter. The boar is listening.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- Hilltop parish church with medieval tombs
- Legend from
- Folk ballad, recorded 1840s
- Tone
- Curious
He blew his horn to the four winds, and from the deep wood the boar came running.
A ballad long sung in Worcestershire tells of Sir Ryalas, son of Sir Robert Bolton. Riding by the woodside he saw a lady in a tree, who told him a wild boar had killed her lord and thirty men. He blew his horn north, east, west and south; the boar came, whetting its tusks, and they fought four hours before he cut off its head. Out flew a wild woman crying that he had killed her pretty spotted pig, and she too was slain. The ballad ends: in Bromsgrove church they both do lie. Allies took the boar's head to be the Stafford crest on a tomb there.