The Christchurch Dragon

In 1112 the cathedral of Laon, in France, burned during the Easter Insurrection. To pay for rebuilding, its canons carried relics of the Virgin Mary on fundraising tours of England, in 1112 and again in 1113. The second tour crossed southern England and reached Devon and Cornwall, to Exeter, Bodmin, Barnstaple and Totnes. In the 1140s a writer named Herman, usually identified as Herman of Tournai, set the journey down in De miraculis sanctae Mariae Laudunensis. He worked closely from two eyewitness accounts by members of the touring party.

Nine canons arrived at Christchurch, also known as Twynham, during a torrential rainstorm. It was the Saturday after Pentecost, the eve of the town's annual fair. The dean refused them his new church. The building, he said, was not secure. In truth he feared their relics would draw offerings away from his own altars.

Merchants in town for the fair gave up their rooms. The canons also stayed with a herdsman. His daughter had a deformed foot. She prayed before their portable altar, and it was healed.

The next morning the canons left. Riders passed them on the road. The town, they said, "had been set on fire by a terrible dragon that had flown in from the sea."

The canons hurried back.

The creature was flying above the town. It had five heads, it was incredibly long, and it breathed sulphurous flames. It was setting houses alight one by one. The dean loaded his valuables onto a boat on the nearby river. The dragon swooped down and reduced the boat and everything on board to ashes.

The church that had refused the canons was entirely destroyed, along with much of the town. The lodging house and the herdsman's shelter survived, and the people inside were safe. The merchants who had left the fair early escaped. The dean repented before the canons' shrine and asked for forgiveness. Alain Saint-Denis, editor of the 2008 critical edition, dates the attack to Sunday 1 June 1113.

Guibert de Nogent, a contemporary, recorded the burning of an English town the canons visited. He mentions no dragon. In his telling it was lightning, heaven-sent as a punishment for the ungodly behaviour of the inhabitants. That fits the storm in Herman's own account.

Christopher Chatfield of TORRO went further. The canons, he suggested, may have witnessed a rare example of prolonged ball lightning. He compared the storm to the Great Thunderstorm of 1638 at Widecombe on Dartmoor. To this day, no explanation has been accepted.

The story travelled. Gautier de Coincy retold it in rhyming couplets in the early 13th century, and a BnF manuscript shows the dragon over the town and river. In the early 14th century Bergr Sokkason carried it into the Old Norse Nikulás saga. In 2013 the town marked the 900th anniversary with a Christchurch Dragon Festival. Even so, the legend remains little-known in the town of its origin.

In 1997 Jim Marrs gave it a new shape in Alien Agenda. In his version, religious pilgrims watched it emerge from the sea, fly into the air and disappear into the sky. The surviving summaries of Herman mention neither the rise nor the vanishing, and the witnesses were canons, not pilgrims. Whether Vallée and Chris Aubeck included the case in Wonders in the Sky remains unconfirmed. A five-headed dragon over a burning town has become a UFO case. It began as a miracle story.