Sawney Bean

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Sawney Beane at the Entrance of His Cave
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Sawney Beane at the Entrance of His Cave

Alexander "Sawney" Bean(e) was the storied patriarch of a forty-eight member clan in 16th century Scotland brutally executed for the mass murder and cannibalisation of over a thousand people.

The story appears in the Newgate Calendar, a crime catalogue of the notorious Newgate Prison in London. While historians tend to believe that Sawney Bean never existed, his story has passed into legend and is part of the Edinburgh tourism industry.

Contents

[edit] The legend

According to The Newgate Calendar, Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 16th century.[1] His father was a ditch digger and hedge trimmer, and Bean tried to take up the family trades but quickly realised that he had little taste for honest labour. He left home with a vicious woman who apparently shared his inclinations. The couple ended up at a coastal cave in Bannane Head, near Galloway (now South Ayrshire) where they lived undiscovered for some twenty-five years. (The cave was 200 yards deep and during high tide the entrance was blocked by water, and is said to be today's Bennane Cave, located between Girvan and Ballantrae in Ayrshire).

Their many children and grandchildren were products of incest and lawlessness. The brood came to include eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons and fourteen granddaughters. Lacking the gumption for honest labour, the clan thrived by laying careful ambushes at night to rob and murder individuals or small groups. The bodies were brought back to the cave where they were dismembered and cannibalised. Leftovers were pickled, and discarded body parts would sometimes wash up on nearby beaches. The body parts and disappearances did not go unnoticed by the local villagers, but the Beans stayed in the caves by day and took their victims at night. The clan was so secretive that the villagers were not aware of the forty eight murderers living nearby.

In a frenetic quest for justice, the townspeople lynched several innocents, and the disappearances continued. Suspicion often fell on local innkeepers since they were the last to see many of the missing people alive.

One fateful night, the Beans ambushed a married couple riding from a fair on one horse, but the man proved a tough opponent, deftly holding off the clan with sword and pistol. Unfortunately, they fatally mauled the wife when she fell to the ground in the conflict. Before they could take the resilient husband, a large group of fairgoers appeared on the trail and the Beans fled.

With the Beans' existence finally revealed to the world, it was not long before King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) heard of the atrocities and decided to lead a manhunt with a team of four hundred men and several bloodhounds, soon finding the Beans' cave in Bannane Head. The cave was rife with human remains, having been the scene of a thousand plus murders and cannibalistic acts.

The clan was captured alive and taken in chains to the Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial; the men had their hands and feet severed and were allowed to bleed to death, and the women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive.

The town of Girvan, located near the crime scene, has another legend about the cannibal clan. It is said that one of Bean's daughters eventually left the clan and settled in Girvan, where she planted The Hairy Tree. After her family's capture, the daughter's identity was revealed by angry locals who hanged her from the bough of The Hairy Tree, which arguably is still located on Dalrymple Street.[2].

[edit] Sources & veracity

Whatever the truth may be, Sawney Bean is often considered a mythic figure. The Ayrshire area is known for dark folklore, and the implausibility of four dozen people evading capture for a quarter century has sown the seeds of scepticism amongst many historians.

The multitude of disappearances should have led to more expeditious investigation of the area; though mass searches for the missing persons were said to be conducted, it is odd that no one thought to look in the cave earlier on. Moreover, there is a notable lack of written sources; such a long string of atrocities resulting in the involvement of King James VI of Scotland should have generated historical records, but so far none have been uncovered.

A recent article by Sean Thomas expresses significant doubt about the accuracy of the Sawney Bean legend:

"...from broadsheet to broadsheet, the precise dating of Sawney Bean's reign of anthropophagic terror varies wildly: sometimes the atrocities occurred during the reign of James VI, whilst other versions claim the Beans lived centuries before."

This dating could place the murders as far back as the days of Bruce, or even Macbeth. Thomas continues,

"Viewed in this light, it is arguable that the Bean story may have a basis of truth but the precise dating of events has become obscured over the years. Perhaps the dating of the murders was brought forward by the editors and writer of the broadsheets, so as to make the story appear more relevant to the readership ... To add to the intrigue, we do know that cannibalism was not unknown in mediæval Scotland and that Galloway was in mediæval times a very lawless place; perhaps nothing on the scale of the Bean legend took place, but every story grows and is embroidered over time."[3]

Thomas also notes that newspapers and diaries during the era when Sawney Bean was supposedly active make no mention of ongoing disappearances of hundreds of persons.

Moreover, according to nutrition researchers, a group of forty-eight would have consumed far more people than alleged in the Newgate Calendar. In order to survive for some twenty-five years, the Beans would have depopulated the entire southwestern region of Scotland. [citation needed]

The legend of Sawney Bean first appeared in the British chapbooks (rumour magazines of the day), which today leads many to argue that the story was a political propaganda tool to denigrate the Scots after the Jacobite Rebellions. Thomas disagrees by noting,

"If the Sawney Bean story is to be read as deliberately anti-Scottish, how do we explain the equal emphasis on English criminals in the same publications? Wouldn't such an approach rather blunt the point?" (See also "Sawney" for this theory).

[edit] Sawney Bean in popular media

The legend of Alexander "Sawney" Bean has been chronicled in various media.

Mick Lewis's novel The Bloody Man also deals with the myth of Sawney Bean, which is also mentioned in the fictional novel Paying the Piper by Sharyn McCrumb. Jack Ketchum's novel Off Season is an update of the Sawney Bean legend, with the cannibalistic clan headquartered in a sea cave on the Maine coast.

The short story "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" by Harlan Ellison makes reference to the Bean family, as does Neil Gaiman's short story, "The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish", in which the titular goldfish are named "Sawney" and "Beaney". The legend also plays a part in Gaiman's 2004 novella, "The Monarch of the Glen" (in his 2006 collection, Fragile Things).

Other print sources include:

  • Historical and Traditional Tales Connected with the South of Scotland by John Nicholson, 1843
  • The Legend of Sawney Bean, by Ronald Holmes, London, 1975
  • The Flesh Eaters, by L.A. Morse, Warner Books, 1979
  • The Galloway Gazette November 28, 1994

Sawney Bean was also mentioned in a BBC radio play called "Vampirella", an adaptation of the short story "The Lady of the House of Love" by feminist author Angela Carter. In this version, Sawney's wife escapes death and finds a job working for the family of vampires in the play. Sawney talks about his life leading up to his death. (Another notorious figure mentioned in the play is one Elizabeth Bathory).

The punk rock band The Real McKenzies recorded a song entitled "Sawney Beane Clan"; British neofolk outfit Sol Invictus recorded a song entitled "Sawney Bean". Musician Snakefinger's "Sawney Bean/Sawney's Death Dance" (from his album, Night of Desirable Objects) tells the tale of the clan and its eventual comeuppance, as does the concept album, Inbreeding the Anthropophagi by American death metal band Deeds of Flesh.

Depicted in an edition of "Arcade Comics" published by R. Crumb and others during the 1970s.

Several low-budget movies have adapted the Sawney Beane story. Wes Craven directed the 1977 movie The Hills Have Eyes, which sets the cannibal clan in modern-day America; a 2005 remake of the film was made by Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur. Gary Sherman's Death Line (aka Raw Meat) depicts the Sawney character as a derelict living in the London Underground subway tunnels. In 2003 Christian Viel directed Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain (aka Samhain), a soft-core version of the Sawney legend set in modern-day Ireland. 2005 saw the release of an award-winning U.K./Canada co-produced animated short, The True Story of Sawney Beane. [4].

There is a Sawney Bean display in the London Dungeon wax museum.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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