Black Shuck at Bungay and Blythburgh: the "Straunge and Terrible Wunder" of 1577

Sunday 4 August 1577. The people of Bungay gathered at St Mary's Church, in a town Abraham Fleming would describe as "a tovvn of no great distance from the citie of Norwich". Not far away, at Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh, another congregation did the same.

Then the weather turned. Fleming's pamphlet speaks of a "great tempest of violent raine, lightning, and thunder". The Bungay churchwardens recorded darkness, rain, hail, thunder and lightning "as was never seen the like".

Fleming wrote that a black dog appeared among the people, "or the divel in such a likenesse". Amid flashes of fire, it ran the nave with "great swiftnesse, and incredible haste" and passed between two worshippers at prayer. It "wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backwards". Both died. A third man, gripped on the back, shrank "as it were a peece of lether scorched in a hot fire" but lived; the tower clock was wrecked.

The same day at Blythburgh, Fleming has the creature perched on the beam where the rood stood. Then it swung down through the church. Two men and a lad died. Another person's hand was burned. A later commemorative verse, not Fleming's pamphlet, says: "All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew, and, passing onward to the quire, he many people slew."

Later retellings went further. The dog bursts in "through the doors of Holy Trinity Church to a clap of thunder". The steeple collapses through the roof. The beast leaves scorch marks on the north door as it goes.

Fleming, a London translator and editor, was not there. His title page says he worked "according to the written copye". No individual eyewitness statement survives. The congregations speak only as a crowd.

Other records tell a quieter story. The Bungay parish burial register names John Fuller and Adam Walker as men killed in the tempest in the belfry during prayer, but mentions no dog. Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles place the Blythburgh strike between nine and ten in the morning, as the minister read the second lesson. Lightning entered the ground almost a yard and threw down more than twenty people, killing a man over forty and a boy of fifteen. It cleft the door, rent the steeple timber and broke the chimes, again with no dog recorded.

Lightning is the explanation most commentators reach for. Scholars think Fleming relied on exaggerated oral reports, and some call him a "staunch Protestant" who shaped events into a moral lesson. Other local accounts blamed the Devil himself. In 2024 Christian Owen revisited the case in the Journal of Religious History, under the title "The Black Dog of Bungay: Religious Conflict and Supernatural Terror in a Suffolk Parish".

The marks on Blythburgh's north door are still debated. They have been read as candle or taper burns, protective marks meant to ward off evil, or wear from door furniture. Darren Naish noted that nobody can say whether the marks inspired the story, or the story found the marks. Bungay has none.

Bungay kept its dog. It sits on the town's coat of arms, and the Black Shuck Festival has been held every 4 August since 2022. The Darkness sang about Blythburgh. Assassin's Creed Valhalla made Black Shuck a mini-boss. And in 2014, when a large dog skeleton was dug up at Leiston Abbey, the local press asked, tongue in cheek, whether the hound had finally been found.