Dragon of Wantley

The Dragon of Wantley is a Yorkshire dragon-legend best remembered through a rollicking seventeenth-century comic ballad. The monster — a fearsome winged, many-toothed beast — terrorises the district of Wantley (Wharncliffe, near Sheffield), devouring trees, cattle, children and buildings alike, until the desperate people beg the help of a hard-drinking local champion, More of More Hall.

More has a special suit of spiked armour made and lies in wait; in the ballad's famously irreverent climax he despatches the dragon not with sword or lance but with a well-aimed kick to its one vulnerable spot — its backside — whereupon the beast spins round and dies. Published in Bishop Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient English Poetry' (1765) and turned into a hit comic opera in 1737, the ballad was widely read as a satire on a real local lawsuit over tithes, the 'dragon' standing in for a grasping landlord. Mock-heroic and merry, the Dragon of Wantley is the great comic counterpoint to Britain's many solemn dragon-slayings.