Fact-checking the Freybug

Widespread through English folklore are black dogs and hellhounds: ghostly presences which terrify people and are portents of death. You have your Grims, your Padfoots, your Black Shucks, and your Freybugs, along with many others.

The Freybug, the black dog of Norfolk, has featured in the video game Final Fantasy and in the Dracopedia series. But there are some concerns.

As pointed out by the blog A Book of Creatures (which I stumbled across while researching other monsters), the freybug first appeared in the work of Carol Rose, specifically her books Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes and Goblins ​(1996) and Giants, Monsters, and Dragons (2000). According to ​Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes and Goblins, ​the Freybug is "a demon of the roads in English folk beliefs of the Middle Ages. It was described as a Black Dog fiend and referred to in an English document of 1555."

Rose cites no sources. What document of 1555? Where did she get this? ​There are no other sources for the Freybug, and she actually cited herself ​when she included it in her later book. That is a bad sign.

However, the root words are familiar. "Fray" means fear or panic. ​"Bug" is a hobgoblin. As a result, Freybug sounds very . . . Denham Tracts-y. 
The Denham Tracts were a series of pamphlets by Michael Aislabie Denham from the 1840s and 1850s. They include a walloping list of monsters including, but not limited to: bogies, boggles, boggleboes, boggy-boes, boggarts, barguests, bygorns, bugbears, black-bugs, scar-bugs, ​bugaboos, ​and bugs.

​A while after I learned about the Freybug, I was looking at my Denham Tracts list again, and one jumped out at me: the Flay-Boggart. This was a word for a scarecrow, but could also apply to a generic frightening monster. It appeared at least as early as 1535, in the Coverdale Bible's Epistle of Jeremiah: "For like as a frayboggarde in a garden off Cucumbers kepeth nothinge, even so are their goddes of wod, of syluer & golde." 

​Rose's books are the only sources for the Freybug. ​But what about Fraybug?

It turns out that English martyr Laurence Saunders twice mentioned "fray-bugs" in his letters.

"O Lord, how loath is this loitering sluggard, to pass forth in God's path! It fantasieth forsooth much fear of fray-bugs."

"Be not afraid of fray-bugs which lie in the way."

The word was defined by The Church Historians of England: Reformation Period (1859) as an "imaginary monster" and by Letters of the martyrs of the English Church (1884) as a "spectre." 

Saunders' letters were written in 1555 - the year so mysteriously cited by Rose.

Under the spellings fray-bug, frai-bugge, and fray-buggard, the word occurs in multiple works from the 16th and 17th centuries - it's in the Oxford English Dictionary and everything. It was also used as a verb, as in "to frighten someone." In the conclusion to book 2 of John Bale's  The actes of Englysh votaryes (1551): "They fraybugged the' with the thundreboltes of theyr excommunycacyons and interdiccyons."

Based on these books, and the date of Saunders' letters, things were looking much better for the Freybug - although there was still no tie to black dogs. 

​And then I found John Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain vol. 1 (1905). This book describes black dogs such as the Barguest or the boggart of Lancashire, and then suggests (bewilderingly), "This dog-spirit may be the malignant influence referred to under the name of Fray-bug, in a curious extract from a letter of Master Saunders to his wife, 1555."

There ​it is. I suspect that Carol Rose read ​Popular Antiquities, didn't know who Saunders was, but decided to use the creature in her book anyway. She misspelled the name and fudged the citation (it's not like Brand cited things clearly to begin with). When she returned to the subject in her later book, she rephrased it as "an English manuscript of 1555," something rather different from a letter, which would be even more confusing to anyone who later tried to fact-check it.

I can't say whether the fray-bug was in fact supposed to be a black dog. I would tend to think it's a generic boogeyman, perhaps resembling a scarecrow, although there can be overlaps between black dogs and other apparitions. The black dog called freybug is a new creation, but the fray-bug has been around for hundreds of years.