In the summer of 1669 the Essex village of Henham, near Saffron Walden, was gripped by reports of a flying serpent or dragon haunting the woods. The writer William Winstanley published a sensational pamphlet, The Flying Serpent, or Strange News out of Essex, describing a creature some nine feet long with curious feathers about its eyes and small wings, seen on the 27th and 28th of May and witnessed, it claimed, by a churchwarden, a constable and other respectable men.
The story
It was almost certainly a hoax — likely Winstanley's own — got up with a wood-and-canvas serpent worked by a hidden man and paraded about Birch Wood, the 'witnesses' being his friends in on the joke. But the dragon took root: a few years later the villagers were said to hold the Henham Fair, selling little models of the serpent, and the creature still appears on the village sign. The episode is one of the best-documented 'monster' panics of seventeenth-century England, and is sometimes counted among the inspirations for Sarah Perry's novel The Essex Serpent.