I expect you’ve heard of Robin Hood, and the usual versions where he fights unjust Norman/French oppression of English peasants. Maybe you’ve also heard of the historical figure Hereward the Wake who led a campaign of guerrilla warfare against William the Conqueror in the immediate aftermath of the Norman invasion in 1066. But far less famous is Eadric, Shropshire’s own woodland outlaw-rebel from the same period.
Anglo-Saxon England had the concept of the outlaw: someone who has left society to live in forests, moors, or fens, probably to escape some punishment or fine, or just to live off robbery and banditry. Outlaws had no protection in law, and you could assume the worst if you came across them. Our conventional stories about Robin Hood, with his band of dispossessed outlaws on the run from the Sheriff of Nottingham and his henchmen, are ultimately derived from this reality. “Robin Hood” first appears in the 13th century (so 200 years after the 1060s) as a name for ordinary robbers and bandits in legal documents. The stories begin to appear even later.
Even if Robin Hood wasn’t the name of a real medieval guerrilla, the stories may have been derived from the real guerrilla warfare fought by some English leaders after the Norman Conquest in the 1060s and 1070s. King William seized lands of English lords who fought him at the Battle of Hastings, but the appropriation of land went even further than that.
This was what provoked Hereward the Wake (“Hereward the Watchful”), who returned from exile on the continent to the Fens of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk to discover that his family’s lands had been taken and his brother killed. He then led a guerrilla war in the landscape of waterways, marshes, and islands, using the Isle of Ely as a refuge. He participated in the wider uprising of 1070 against the Normans, but by 1071 had been defeated and either killed or forced back into exile or obscurity.
The story of Eadric in Shropshire was similar. He was from a significant English aristocratic family, including his probable uncle Eadric Streona who had betrayed King Ethelred the Unready (“Ethelred the Badly Advised”) fifty years earlier. Our Eadric was a thegn, an Anglo-Saxon lord who owned land with tenants, but not as wealthy or powerful as the ealdormen just below the king. If most or all of the lands owned by an Eadric in 1066 and recorded in the Domesday Book survey belonged to our Eadric, then he had 52 properties, mostly in Shropshire and Herefordshire. In 1086, at the time of Domesday, only 3 were owned by someone called Eadric, all in Shropshire and Herefordshire. How did that happen?
Before we start, we need to talk about Eadric’s name. In English he is usually called “Eadric the Wild” (or “Edric the Wild”). “Wild” represents the Latin word “silvaticus” used in histories of the time. “Silva” in Latin means “woodland”, and “silvaticus” means “related to woodland” or “of the wood”. The connotation is wildness, like a wild animal rather than “wild” as in crazy or unpredictable. Like Robin Hood and his outlaw band living in Sherwood Forest, many 11th century rebels created encampments in woodland, “in the wild” rather than in the towns, cities, and castles on which the Normans based their power. Sometimes his name is rendered as “Eadric the Forester” which makes the woodland connection clearer but risks implying he was some sort of Anglo-Saxon lumberjack. So I’m going to suggest “Woodlander” as a translation for “silvaticus”, and “Woodlanders” for the plural “silvatici”, used to refer to the woodland rebels collectively.
Both the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the slightly later chronicle of chronicles by John of Worcester mention Eadric and his rebellion, but Orderic Vitalis has the most complete version written in the 1120s. Orderic himself was born in Atcham, 5 miles south east of Shrewsbury, where his father was a priest in the service of the Earl of Shrewsbury.
The Norman position was that all the land of England became William’s property after the conquest, and was his to grant to nobles under the feudal system, who could in turn grant it to their followers and so on, in the great pyramid scheme of feudalism. Orderic tells us that in 1067 many English nobles received their lands back after accepting the authority of King William, and he included “Eadric Guilda” or “Eadric the Wild” in those he named.
However, this accommodation broke down within a year:
“When many of the chief men of the English and the Welsh had gathered together, a general complaint arose concerning the injuries and oppressions with which the English were intolerably afflicted by the Normans and their associates. By means of messengers, they stirred up whoever they could, throughout all the territories of Albion, against the enemy, both secretly and openly. With the consent of all, a bold conspiracy was formed for the recovery of their ancient liberty, and a resolute plot was hatched against the Normans. A violent disturbance broke out in the regions beyond the Humber. The rebels held the forests, marshes, estuaries, and several cities as their strongholds. The city of York raged most fiercely, a fury which the holiness of its own bishop could not calm. Many of them dwelt in tents; they disdained to rest in houses, lest they should grow soft. For this reason, some of them were called “Silvatici” by the Normans.”
John of Worcester includes Eadric in this uprising of English and Welsh:
“At that time there arose a certain very powerful thegn, Eadric, nicknamed Silvaticus, son of Ælfric, brother of Eadric Streona. Because he disdained to submit himself to the king, the castellans of Hereford and Richard son of Scrope frequently ravaged his lands. But as often as they attacked him, they lost many of their knights and squires. Therefore, having summoned to his aid the kings of the Welsh — namely Blethgent and Rithwalan — the same man Eadric, around the Feast of the Assumption of Saint Mary, devastated the province of Hereford as far as the bridge over the river Lugg, and carried off enormous plunder.”
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that “Child Eadric and the Britons” doing much harm to the castlemen of Hereford. So it seems they were able to sack the town but not take the Norman castle.
The rebellion continued and Orderic records that in 1069:
“The Welsh and the men of Chester besieged the king’s garrison at Shrewsbury; the inhabitants of the town, together with Eadric Guilda, a powerful and warlike man, and other fierce Englishmen, gave them assistance … As soon as the king learned of these events, he ordered two earls, William and Brian, to go to the aid of those in difficulty. But before they reached Shrewsbury, the enemy had burned the town and withdrawn.”
So again, the rebels were able to sack the town but not take the Norman castle.
In 1070, Orderic records that Eadric had given up fighting against the seemingly impossible odds. “Eadric, nicknamed the Silvaticus, a man of the most resolute courage, of whom we have spoken before, was reconciled with King William.” In 1072, Eadric was even on campaign in Scotland with William against King Malcolm III and on the continent with William against rebels in Maine to the south of Normandy. So it seems Eadric’s military skills were valued but as Domesday shows, he was not trusted with major land holdings.
Our story ends with the legends about Eadric that sprang up beyond the events recorded by the chroniclers. The most prominent is that his historical wife, Lady Godda, was a fairy princess that Eadric had come across with her sisters in a house in the forest. To win her hand he had to promise never to scold her about her fairy origins or her sisters. After years of happy marriage he came back from hunting and could not find her. We she returned, he lost his temper and accused her of being with her sisters. At which point his promise was broken and she vanished. He searched for her in vain and eventually lead a version of the ghostly Wild Hunt that is also present in legends like Herne from Windsor.
Several people have asked how the text and images of this essay were made. I came across the name “Eadric the Forester” as an alternative to “Eadric the Wild” earlier this year, and investigated that word “forester”. When I discovered the use and origin of “silvaticus” for which I am proposing the word “the woodlander”, I then wanted to map out more of his story. I used the translations of the medieval chronicles on Archive.org to go back to the sources, and then went deeper using editions of original Latin versions which Archive.org also has.
To put together the essay I really needed some pictures but there’s nothing of Eadric to draw on from the period. I thought about using AI to generate some suitable images in the “artist’s impression” style often used in guidebooks. This is now very easy to do even with free accounts. However, I wasn’t very satisfied with this quite generic approach when I looked at the results. Then I remembered that the closest we do have from the period is the Bayeaux Tapestry, and I experimented with different AI services to see how they did at that. Grok was head and shoulders above ChatGPT and Google Gemini for this. You can see here AI images in these two styles.
The first was generated with the prompt “make an image of Eadric the Wild burning the town of Shrewsbury in 1068” and the second with “make an image of Eadric the Wild burning the town of Shrewsbury in 1068 but in the style of the Bayeaux Tapestry”. Grok worked out the Latin and then used its knowledge of the event and period to imagine and render it as 11th century embroidery. I was astonished at the quality.
All of the text of the essay is my own except the translations which I used Grok for, and then manually revised them using my own fading knowledge of Latin and comparisons with the Victorian translations on Archive.org.