Friday, May 7, 2010

A Hideous Sussex Monster

Sussex notes and queries; a quarterly journal of the Sussex Archaeological Society, Volume 14, page 43, 1958 records a strange creature recorded from possibly the seventeenth century ‘At Birdham, near Chichester in Sussex, about 23 years ago, there was a monster find upon the Common, having the form and figure of a man in the fore-part…’

But, as Alan W. Bates 2005 work Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births…’ adds, ‘…having two arms and two hands, and a human visage, with only one eye in the middle of his forehead; the hinder part was like a lamb. A young man in the neighbourhood was supposed to have generated the monster by bestial copulation and that the rather, because he was afterwards found in the like beastly act with a mare; upon discovery whereof, he fled out of the country. This young monster was nailed up in the church porch of the said parish, and exposed to public view a long time, as a monument of divine judgement’

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