The story of Herne the Hunter, as now known, depends entirely on Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (1597); we cannot tell whether his allusions to local folklore are basically accurate. In act 4, scene 4, the two heroines decide to make a fool of Falstaff by persuading him to disguise himself as a ghost and meet them at midnight under an oak tree in Windsor Park. Describing this ghost, one says:
There is an old tale goes, that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
A pirated text of 1604 has different lines at this point; interestingly, they say belief in the ghost is exploited by mothers as a ‘bogeyman’ to control unruly children.
Oft you have hesrd since Horne the hunter dyed,
That women, to affright their little children,
Says that he walkes in shape of a great stagge.
There is no other early account of this Herne (or Horne), and any attempt to identify him is futile, as it is quite a common medieval surname. In 1792, Samuel Ireland stated that Herne had been a gamekeeper in Elizabeth’s reign who hanged himself on an oak, fearing he was about to lose his job for some crime; this fits the traditional belief that suicides are likely to haunt the scene of their death. The rattling chain is also frequent in ghostly apparitions, but other details in Shakespeare’s text are less usual. The form he says Herne takes on, that of a semi-stag, has very few parallels, whereas ghostly dogs, bulls, or calves are common in popular belief. Perhaps he invented it to suit the forest setting, or simply because a disguise involving antlers woud be taken as a reference to cuckold’s horns, a guaranteed source of laughter on the Elizabethan stage. Another strange feature is the ghost’s baneful influence: he causes trees to wither, ‘takes’ (i.e. bewitches) cattle, and makes cows’ milk bloody. Few ghost legends, if any, describe such permanent and far-reaching malevolence.
Shakespeare’s influence ensured that Herne became widely known. From the mid 18th century, a tree in Windsor Park was pointed out as Falstaff’s Oak or Herne’s Oak, though sources disagree on which it was. The main claimant, being half dead, was felled in 1796, and its rival was blown down in a storm in 1863; however, other oaks were planted to replace them, the current holder of the title dating from 1906.
Variant stories and speculations began in the 19th century. Harrison Ainsworth, in his novel Windsor Castle (1843), says Herne was the ghost of a forester whose life was saved by the Devil when he was gored by a stag, on condition that he would wear antlers henceforth, but who ended in despair, suicide, and damnation. Because of the epithet ‘the Hunter’, Jacob Grimm suggested that Herne had once been imagined as a leader of the Wild Hunt – a demonic cavalcade which, in European folklore, sweeps across the midwinter skies, bringing destruction in its path. Its leader may be identified as the ghost of a locally or nationally famous personage, now a lost soul who is doomed to hunt forever. This notion is attractive, and certainly there are plenty of British traditions telling how some man who loved nothing so much as hunting is doomed to ride eternally at the head of a phantom hunt, accompanied by demonic hounds. However, the Herne legend does not match that of the Wild Hunt, which, by definition, rushes in frenzy from one place to another, usually in mid-air, whereas Shakespeare’s Herne simply patrols the area round his tree.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, a tradition has grown up that Herne is seen before national disasters or the deaths of kings; moreover, from about the beginning of that century, a fair number of people have reported personal experiences of hearing his horn or hounds. Further developments have arisen among modern neo-pagans; they claim (incorrectly) that Herne’s name is derived from the Celtic antlered god Cernunnos, and see him as a spirit of nature. Shakespeare’s text give no warrant for any of these ideas.