The Hampshire village of Wherwell, once home to a great abbey of Benedictine nuns, keeps the legend of the cockatrice — a serpent with a cockerel's head, hatched, as the old belief held, when a toad broods a cock's egg. The monstrous creature is said to have been born in the cellars beneath Wherwell Priory and to have grown until it terrified the whole village.
The story
Unable to slay it by force, the people drove the cockatrice into the dungeons below the priory and sealed it in, offering a prize of land to anyone who could kill it. At last a man named Green hit upon a cunning plan: he lowered a polished steel mirror into the vault. Believing its own reflection to be a rival, the cockatrice fought itself furiously against the glass until it dropped exhausted, and Green climbed down to dispatch it.
For his courage Green was rewarded with an estate near the village still remembered as Green's Acres. A weathervane in the shape of the cockatrice once turned above the village church and is now preserved in Andover Museum, keeping the tale fixed to its place long after the priory itself was dissolved.