Peter Stumpp

Peter Stumpp, also called Stubbe or Stump, lived at Epprath near Bedburg, in the Duchy of Jülich, a short way from Cologne. The English pamphlet of 1590 that broadcast his case does not describe a pauper: it says he went about «in comely habit, and very civilly, as one well known to all the inhabitants», which points to a well-off farmer rather than to the starving vagrant he is usually painted as. His left hand was missing, and hence, most likely, the nickname Stumpp, «stump». The trial falls at the worst possible moment for the region: the Cologne War had just laid waste the Lower Rhine, Bedburg had been taken by Catholic troops, and the lordship was driving a harsh re-Catholicisation over an impoverished population. According to the confession wrung from him under torture, he had practised black magic from the age of twelve, and the Devil gave him a girdle which, buckled about him, turned him instantly into a wolf.

The pamphlet's count is precise and worth respecting, because it is nearly always repeated wrongly: thirteen children, two women great with child whose bellies he opened, and his own son, whom he took into the fields and whose brains he ate. Sixteen in all, the only ones that could be proved; the text adds that over twenty-five years he also destroyed an unknown number of men, women and children, and no small amount of livestock. Only his son was a relative among the victims: the notion that he killed sixteen family members is a transmission error. As for the rest of his household, the pamphlet charges Stumpp with incest with his daughter and with an affair with a gossip named Katherine Trompin, but he killed neither of them. The village fixed the figure in wood: on the execution post they nailed sixteen pieces, one for each acknowledged death.

The sentence was carried out at Bedburg on 31 October 1589, a date chance has made apt. The order the pamphlet sets down matters, because it is usually told backwards: first they laid him on a wheel and with red-hot pincers tore the flesh from his body in ten separate places; then they broke his arms and legs; only then was he beheaded, and finally the body was burned to ashes. His daughter, named in the text as Stubbe Beell, and Katherine Trompin were condemned to be burned alive the same day. As a warning, a post was raised bearing the wheel, crowned with the figure of a wolf and with Stumpp's head fixed above it, and on the timber the sixteen pieces of the tally. There was no silver bullet and no full moon: the only supernatural mechanism the court acknowledged was the girdle, which is precisely why it mattered so much to display it.

Stumpp's is the best-documented lycanthropy trial of the sixteenth century, and it is so by an editorial accident: someone translated the German broadsheet into English in June 1590 and printed it in London, so the case survived while the original Cologne records were lost. That pamphlet is now the principal source, with all due caution: it is cautionary propaganda, written to be read with horror, and it reproduces a confession obtained under torture. Sabine Baring-Gould reprinted it in The Book of Were-Wolves (1865), and through him it entered the literature on the subject. It is worth placing correctly in time: 1589 is not the Middle Ages but the full early modern period, that of the wars of religion and the witch hunts, which were a modern phenomenon and not a medieval one. Current historiography reads the file as what it probably was: a series of real crimes, or a wartime scapegoat, wrapped in the only explanation that court had to hand.