Abraham Fleming: - Early Music Online - Royal Holloway, University ...

Chapter Two:
A Straunge and Terrible Wunder (1577)
The pamphlet entitled Straunge and Terrible Wunder wrought very late in the parish church
of Bongay was written by Fleming in August 1577 and printed soon afterwards. It was
twelve pages long and octavo in size (approx 9cm wide and 14cm long). Within the Wunder
pamphlet’s pages was an account of two ‘strange and terrible’ incidents that took place in
Bungay and Blythburgh in Suffolk. A cross between tabloid front-page news and a zealous
sermon, Wunder was intended to be popular and cheap. It included a woodcut illustration of
the sinister dog that was the pamphlet’s main character, and Fleming closed this account
with ‘A Necessary Prayer’. Today Fleming’s 1577 Wunder pamphlet survives as a unique
copy in the British Library. 63 Yet Fleming’s black dog story is well known and still provides
a modest income from tourists visiting Blythburgh and Bungay’s churches. The dog remains
Bungay’s town mascot to this day and a modern weathervane featuring the black dog with
staring eyes and a lightning flash overlooks the town square.
The Wunder pamphlet is one of only two printed items by Fleming that can be dated almost
precisely. 64 The severe thunderstorm described in the pamphlet took place on 4 August 1577
between nine and ten o’clock in the morning. It is unlikely that Fleming witnessed the event
himself, but news it reached him quickly. The pamphlet was in circulation within four weeks
of the storm, although Wunder might have been produced more quickly than that and could
have been available to buy within days rather than weeks of the event it portrayed. Certainly
Fleming was the first person to have described the event and he did so with considerable zeal
and imagination, blending fact with fiction to produce something sensational.
63
The British Library has the only original copy of the pamphlet that I have been able to find at the time
of writing. The Bodleian and Folger Libraries each have a reprinted version from 1820. In 1937 another
reprinted version was produced that is more common. There is a microfilm of the BL original 1577 copy
in the University of Saskatchewan.
64
The other was his broadside Epitaph which was written after Lambe’s death on 21 April 1580 and must
have been in circulation before the funeral on 6 May as the date and place of Lambe’s funeral were
advertised in the broadside.
37