Sawney Bean

Sawney Bean
Sawney Beane at the Entrance of His Cave. Note the woman in the background carrying a dismembered leg.

Alexander "Sawney" Bean(e) was the legendary head of a 48-member clan in 15th- or 16th-century Scotland, reportedly executed for the mass murder and cannibalisation of over 1,000 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.

The legend

According to The Newgate Calendar, Alexander Bean was born in East Lothian during the 1500s. His father was a ditch digger and hedge trimmer, and Bean tried to take up the family trade but quickly realized 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 Bannane 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 fifty murderers living nearby.

As more significant notice of the disappearances was taken, several organized searches were launched to find the culprits. One search took note of the telltale cave but the men refused to believe anything human could live in it. Frustrated and 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 was skilled in combat, deftly holding off the clan with sword and pistol. The clan 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 400 men and several bloodhounds, soon finding the Beans' previously overlooked cave in Bannane Head. The cave was rife with human remains, having been the scene of hundreds of 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 genitalia cut off, hands and feet severed and were allowed to bleed to death, and the women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive. (This recalls, in essence if not in detail, the punishments of hanging, drawing and quartering decreed for men convicted of treason while women convicted of the same were burned. Presumably—whether or not the story had an actual basis—cannibalism was considered the equivalent of treason.)

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.

Sources and veracity

Sawney Bean is often considered a mythic figure. A 2005 article by Sean Thomas notes that historical documents, such as newspapers and diaries during the era when Sawney Bean was supposedly active, make no mention of ongoing disappearances of hundreds of persons. Additionally, Thomas notes inconsistencies in the stories but speculates that kernels of truth might have inspired the 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. 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.

The Sawney Beane legend closely resembles the story of Christie-Cleek, which is attested much earlier — in the early 15th century.

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).

In popular media

• The legend of Alexander "Sawney" Bean has been chronicled in various media, including such print sources as 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; and Cannibalism: The Last Taboo, by Brian Marriner London; Arrow, 1992

• Mick Lewis's novel The Bloody Man also deals with the myth of Sawney Bean, which is also mentioned in the 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 stories "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" by Harlan Ellison and "They Bite" by Anthony Boucher make 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". Furthermore, in Gaiman's novella addition to his American Gods universe, The monarch of the Glen, the character Smith tells the protagonist Shadow the legend of Sawney Beane.

• The horror story "The New Wing" by F.R. Welsh deals directly with the Bean legacy, with the legendary events said to have occurred during the reign of James I of Scotland.

• Sawney Beane: The Abduction of Elspeth Cumming is a work of historical fiction by author Frieda Gates. It takes the Legend of Sawney Beane and examines it through the lens of a young girl, Elspeth Cumming, abducted by Sawney and his family.

• 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.

• 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.

• JB Nelson recorded Sawney Bean and Hairy Tree for his Weeping Willows album

• In 2006, American Psych rockers Dead Loretta, recorded a song entitled "Sawney Beane".

• He was depicted in an edition of "Arcade Comics" published by R. Crumb and others during the 1970s. Also depicted in "D.O.A. Comics, No. 1" by Jim Osborne, published 1976, where Beane's dates are given as ca. 1390 to 1437.

• The book Madhouse by Rob Thurman features Sawney Beane as the main villain.

• Certain editions of the Guinness Book of World Records (for example, the 1973 edition) mention the "Beane" family in their Crime section.

• Wes Craven directed the 1977 movie The Hills Have Eyes, which sets the cannibal clan in modern-day America; a 2006 remake of the film was made by Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur and reimagined the cannibal clan as deformed mutants. The Hills Have Eyes: The Beginning graphic novel details the fictional history of the clan.

• 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 UK./Canada co-produced animated short, The True Story of Sawney Beane. .

• 2006 saw the release of The Asylum's Hillside Cannibals, with Bean portrayed by Leigh Scott, although in this case, Bean was a pilgrim settler in New England rather than a Scotsman.

• Nicholas David Lean's film Hotel Caledonia is a modern re-telling of the Sawney Bean story.

• There is a Sawney Bean display in the London Dungeon wax museum. Along with other London Dungeon displays relating to cannibalism, this is located just outside the snack bar. There is also a boat ride set in the caves inhabited by the Sawney Bean family in the affiliated Edinburgh Dungeon.

• The Sawney Bean clan were the inspiration for the fictional Reavers in Joss Whedon's cult sci-fi series Firefly.

• McAdam's Torment theatre play is a Gothic adaptation of the legend of Sawney Beane by Irish writer Audrey Devereaux

See also

• Christie-Cleek, another legendary cannibal.

External links

• BBC Scotland - The Grisly Deeds of Alexander Bean
• Photos and information
• The Legend of Sawney Bean Mysterious Britain & Ireland
• The Full Legend of Sawney Bean, the cannibal clan
• Newgate Calendar: Sawney Bean Mysterious Britain & Ireland
• Sawney Bean - A Famous Scottish Cannibal/Mass Murderer
• The Complete Newgate Calendar (Sawney Bean(e))
• Sawney Bean: Scotland's Hannibal Lecter
• The Sawney Beane legend, from post to soc.culture.celtic
• Sawney Bean: Myth or Myth by R.H.J. Urquhart
• The Lords of Darkness
• Debate on the existence of the Hairy Tree in Girvan
• Sawney Bean from MurderUK
• Forbidden Novel based in part on the legend of Sawny Bean