Black Shuck

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• East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk) · English

  Black Shuck

  Old Shock (Forby, 1830)

  Black dogs

  

  Robert Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia (1830) defines Old Shock as a goblin in the shape of a great dog or a calf, haunting highways and footpaths in the dark and throwing down anyone foolhardy enough to confront it. Fleming's pamphlet tells of a black dog, "or the diuel in such a likenesse", running through Bungay church during a thunderstorm and wringing the necks of two kneeling worshippers, and of the "like thing" killing two men and a lad at Blythburgh ("Blibery") the same day. The deaths in the storm are what the pamphlet reports; the dog is its reading of them, which Fleming offered as a wonderful example of God's wrath.

  Earliest written source: Abraham Fleming, A straunge and terrible wunder (London, 1577), on the storm at Bungay of 4 August 1577; the pamphlet calls it only a black dog, not Shuck

  Abraham Fleming, A straunge and terrible wunder (1577), EEBO-TCP text (archived)

  Tradition · not evidence