In Search of Sawney Beane, by Lee Weinstein

It all began with a friendly argument. A friend and I were watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when the subject of Sawney Beane came up. The legend of Beane, the notorious Scottish cannibal, was the inspiration behind any number of horror stories, from Sweeney Todd to The Silence of the Lambs; Jack Ketchum’s first novel, Off Season (1980), was based on it. My friend insisted that Beane was a real, historical character, but I thought it was just too over-the-top to be believed.

The story goes that Sawney (“Beane” in the oldest accounts and “Bean” in later ones) was a Scottish lad who was too lazy to work for a living. Born in Lothian, near Edinburgh, he left home and set up housekeeping in a deep cavern on the Ayrshire coast in Galloway with a like-minded woman. They waylaid travelers, robbed, and murdered them, and then, to destroy the evidence, ate the bodies.

But the story gets better. The two of them had a number of children over the years who followed in their parents’ footsteps by also killing, robbing, and cannibalizing. And it gets better yet. The children, growing up in isolation, began to interbreed to produce yet another generation of robber-cannibals. By the time the clan was caught and brought to justice, there were 48 of them all told.

For years, the authorities were puzzled by the disappearances of large numbers of people but were unable to determine what was going on because the family kept themselves well hidden in the large caverns along the coast.

Finally, one prospective victim escaped and word got back to the authorities. The clan, which had grown over a period of 25 years, now consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Beane, eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters. They were all rounded up by several hundred men led by King James. The cavern where they lived was found to be filled with pickled and salted arms, legs, and other assorted human body parts. The clan was taken to Tolbooth prison and executed without trial in Leith the next day. The men and boys were dismembered in front of the women, then the women and girls were burnt in a large fire.

I first encountered the story several years before my argument with my friend, in an anthology called The Penny Dreadful, or Strange, Horrid & Sensational Tales (1975), edited by Peter Haining. It contained, among other things, excerpts from Varney the Vampyre by James Malcolm Rhymer, The Body Snatchers by G. W. M. Reynolds, The Raft of Death by Eugene Sue, and “The Last Batch of Pies” from Sweeney Todd by Thomas Peckett Prest.

It had never occurred to me at the time that the Sawney Beane story was in any way supposed to be factual. The book was primarily a collection of fiction. Penny dreadfuls were the British equivalent of dime novels and a predecessor of the pulp magazines. They were notable for their lurid and sensationalistic stories.

In addition, having read William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth (1979), a few years before, I was especially skeptical of the story. It was part of Arens’s thesis that cannibalism is a universal taboo that stems from an inborn repugnance to eating human flesh and that accusations of cannibalism are commonly used by cultures to denigrate other cultures. He argued in his book that historical records of cannibalism as a social norm are questionable. (Arens’s conclusions have since been widely challenged, but it seems clear that there is far more accusation of cannibalism than actual.)

That the Beane family in addition to being cannibalistic was also incestuous, breaking another universal taboo, seemed a bit too much. It was as though the story was created by someone wanting to push all the buttons, possibly for political purposes.

I decided to find out just what the truth was behind the story.

I began my search in Gould and Pyle’s Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1898), a comprehensive tome of strange medical topics. It covers among many other things such subjects as conjoined twins, gigantic tumors, and various forms of aberrant human behavior. I recalled that it had a section on cannibalism, and as I had a copy conveniently sitting on my shelf, I went to it.

I found a vaguely similar story, attributed to Scottish historian, Hector Boece (1465–1536), about an unnamed “Scottish brigand” who was, along with his wife and children, executed for killing and eating the victims. One child was exempted from execution because of her “extreme youth.” She was brought up in “good surroundings,” but at the age of 12 reverted to cannibalism and was executed. The point of the story seemed to be that her taste for human flesh was somehow inherited. This presented some interesting parallels, but it was not exactly what I was looking for so I decided to put it on the back burner and pursue other lines of inquiry.

I decided to look at some sources about present-day Scotland. I soon discovered in some hardcopy travel guides to Scotland, and also on the Internet, modern tourist attractions touted as the original Sawney Beane cave. Guidebooks placed the Beane cave on Bennane Head at the northern end of Ballantrae Bay, eleven miles southwest of Girvan in South Ayrshire.

This implied that perhaps there was something to the story.

Plowing on, I found a number of references and retellings of the Beane story on various websites. Some were illustrated with an old woodcut depicting Sawney standing by the entrance to his cave next to a corpse while in the background his wife can be seen entering the cave carrying a human leg. I soon noticed something interesting about the variant retellings. There were at least two versions. In one, the king who brought Sawney and his family to justice was James I of Scotland, who ruled from 1424 to 1437, and in the other he was James VI of Scotland (who was also James I of England) He ruled Scotland from 1567 to 1625.

Some sources I had found at the time didn’t even specify which king, including the short entry in a (now defunct) web site called SeRiAl KiLlEr FaCtS which simply mentioned “King James” in the Beane entry, without giving so much as a century.

One of the characteristics of folklore is that a story often becomes attached to different people. On the other hand, the confusion could have stemmed from the similarity of the names.

After my perusal of the Internet, I began to hunt up any book I could get my hands on to trace the variants of the story.

The World’s Strangest Crimes (1967) by Charles Eric Maine notes that the story “though scarcely credible . . . has been well-authenticated,” setting it during the reign of James VI. On the other hand, Flesh and Blood (1975) by Reay Tannahill tells us that the Beane clan was executed in 1435.

Sometimes the messages were mixed. I found that Jay Nash’s Encyclopedia of World Crime (1989) places Beane during the reign of James I of Scotland. He says that the events happened in the 1430s and that the family was captured in 1435. However, despite the year, he gives the king’s name as James VI. In his version, the family was caught by a troop of cavalrymen who happened by when a woman was being disemboweled.

Nash and the subsequent versions of the story I found in various books all placed Beane’s cave in Galloway, specifically in Ayrshire, even though modern tourist books placed it in Bennane Head some 25 or 30 miles further south.

Nash cites the Encyclopedia of Murder (1962) by Colin Wilson and Patricia Pitman in a footnote, so I sought out this book. The entry on Beane is prefaced by an editorial comment that Beane was active “during the reign of James I of Scotland (who came to the throne in 1424).” The account goes on to say Beane was born in Lothian in the “sixties of the fourteenth century” (i.e., the 1360s, which makes no sense). In this version the Beanes were caught while attacking a married couple returning from a fair, when six more fairgoers showed up, scaring the attackers off. (In Maine’s version over twenty fairgoers show up.) The man who was saved reported the incident to the magistrate in Glasgow, the king was notified, and the Bean family was caught by 400 men with bloodhounds. Wilson cites John Nicholson’s Traditional Tales of the Lowlands (1843), as his source. This pushed the origin of the story back to the mid-nineteenth century.

Now I was starting to get somewhere. After some searching, I found Nicholson’s account.

It begins

The following account, though well attested as any historical fact can be, is almost incredible; for the monstrous and unparalleled barbarities that it relates; there being nothing that we ever heard of, with the same degree of certainty, that may be compared with it, or shews how far a brutal temper, untamed by education, may carry a man in such glaring and horrible colours.

He places the events in the reign of James I of Scotland but gives no years. He evidently thought the tale was true or wanted his readers to think so.

Along the way, I had also come across a number of references to a book by Capt. Charles Johnson and also to something called The Newgate Calendar, both dating from the 1700s.

I found a reprint edition of Johnson’s book in the stacks of the library: A General and True History of the Lives and Sections of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street–Robbers, &c. was published in London in 1734 and Birmingham in 1742.

Johnson states that Beane’s criminal career took place during the reign of James VI, but no year is given. We find that the cave where he and his family set up housekeeping was a mile in length. In this version the victim was saved from the Beane family by 30 or 40 fairgoers. The king was contacted by the magistrate, and in this version, the king himself, accompanied by 400 men and a “great number of bloodhounds,” led the raiding party. As in the other versions, when the family was captured, large numbers of pickled human body parts were found in the cave.

The Newgate Calendar is a compendium of famous criminals compiled between 1750 and 1774, published in a standard five-volume edition. The Newgate version of the Beane story begins: “The following account, though well attested as any historical fact can be, is almost incredible. . . .”—word for word as given by Nicholson. He is placed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, whilst “King James I governed only in Scotland.” This places Sawney sometime between 1567, when James took the throne in Scotland, and 1603, when Elizabeth died. In this version the escaping victim was aided by 20 or 30 fairgoers.

This then accounts for the two versions of the time period. Nicholson evidently misread The Newgate Calendar and turned the phrase, “while King James I [of England] governed only in Scotland,” into “King James I of Scotland.” The mistake is understandable. This implied that Nicholson’s source was The Newgate Calendar. It also implied that the story wasn’t folklore after all. Could there be a germ of truth to it?

Having traced the story back as far as I could from Nash’s book, I went back to the anthology where I first encountered the story. This version was entitled “The Monster of Scotland.” The author was the ubiquitous Anonymous, and it was credited to something called The Terrific Register.

I looked up The Terrific Register, and found it was subtitled Records of Crimes, Judgments, Providences, and Calamities and was published in London in 1825. This book was, according to one catalogue, “a voluminous litany of crimes, misdemeanors, murder, mayhem, and supernatural occurrences, interspersed with descriptions of the odd, the unusual and the ethereal.”

The version in The Terrific Register names James VI as the king in question, but no year is given. It is identical to the version in Johnson’s book, except Johnson begins the entry with the words, “The following narrative presents such a picture of human barbarity, that were it not attested by the most unquestionable historical evidence, it would be rejected as altogether fabulous and incredible.”

So the account I had originally read in Haining’s anthology had come right from Johnson’s 1734 book, which predates The Newgate Calendar. Try as I might, I was unable to find anything earlier than the Johnson account.

To summarize: The modern accounts I had found all told the same story but differed in the details. All seemed to stem from several sensational volumes of criminal activity dating from the eighteenth century. Johnson’s book was the earliest of these.

But none of this told me if the story was based on any kind of truth. Johnson’s book contained all sorts of sensational, dubious tales.

To determine the veracity of the story, I decided to try an approach from a different angle. It was clear at this point that the king involved was James VI and that it took place in the late 1500s. Since James was supposed to have captured the Beane clan with a small army of several hundred men, it stood to reason that there should be some mention of the event in a biography of King James or in a history of the period. So I found some biographies, including James I by Frank Dwyer (1988) and King James VI of Scotland by Antonia Fraser (1974). I also looked at some histories of the period including The Reign of James VI and I edited by Alan G. R. Smith (1973) and History of Scotland During the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI til his Accession to the Crown of England . . . by William Robertson (1759). I went to the indexes and looked under Beane and also perused the time period in question. I found absolutely nothing. Nor did I find any reference to the events in such histories of Britain in the 1500s.

If there had been a historical basis for any of this, it wouldn’t be easy to find.

About this time I went to an American Library Association convention and came across a booth demonstrating a new database on a cd-rom. Company representatives were inviting convention-goers to try out questions on it. I decided to give it a try with Sawney Beane. And I hit pay dirt. I found a 1997 paper in the academic journal Folklore (Vol. 108, 49–54). It was entitled “Sawney Bean, The Scottish Cannibal” and was by Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell. The thrust of the article wasn’t so much to determine whether Sawney Beane had existed as it was a study of the interaction of tourism with local legends. But it did confirm my finding that the trail ended in the early 1700s with Johnson’s book. The authors had discovered several early pamphlets on Sawney Beane as well, also dating from the early 1700s, but deduced that these all had very likely been derived from Johnson. It was a good feeling to have my findings confirmed. They did conclude that Sawney Beane was not a product of folklore but rather originated in eighteenth-century English commercial publishing. My initial surmise that it was not historically based was also confirmed.

Who was this Captain Johnson? He is credited with the book A General History of the Pyrates (1782). The authors cite a theory that the name is a pseudonym and that it was possibly none other than Daniel Defoe. However, this is still a matter of debate among scholars.

The authors hedge on whether the story was entirely invented, however, and cite the tale I had initially found in Gould and Pyle’s book. They hypothesize that whoever wrote the original Sawney Beane tale had access to old Scottish historical chronicles.

The passage from Gould and Pyle’s book runs:

Hector Boetius says that a Scottish brigand and his wife and children were condemned to death on proof that they killed and ate their prisoners. The extreme youth of one of the girls excused her from capital punishment; but at twelve years she was found guilty of the same crime as her father and suffered capital punishment. This child had been brought up in good surroundings, yet her inherited appetite developed.

As for the cave cited in tourist guides, the authors note that the locale of Sawney Beane’s cave had been moved from Galloway to Bennane Head as a result of a novel called The Grey Man (1896) by S. R. Crockett. If nothing else, this showed that the current cave listed in tour books is there because of a fictional decision in a novel and not because of a local tradition going back hundreds of years.

So the presence of the Sawney Beane cave in tourist books didn’t prove anything.

A question lingered. If Johnson had found the germ of the story in an old Scottish history, then was there still a historical basis?

I found a copy of Hector Boece’s History of the Scottish People, (1527) in the rare book room of the University of Pennsylvania. The version I found had been translated into Scottish by John Bellenden in 1531. I pored through it but was unable to find what I was looking for. Drs. Gould and Pyle had not provided an exact citation. Had I missed something? Or had Gould and Pyle had been mistaken? I noted that the history ends with the death of James I in 1438. But Boece’s work was continued by other hands. One continuation was by Giovanni Ferrerio, published in Paris in 1574, which extends the history by 50 years to the death of James III. I have been unable to track down a copy. According to a footnote in Princes and Princely Culture (2003) in a paper by Janet Hadley Williams, there is no modern edition of this work.

The other direct continuation of Boece’s work is The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie. Lindsay died in 1580 but the Historie was completed in 1576. It was the first history of Scotland written in Scots rather than Latin. I was able to obtain a copy, and it was there that I found what Gould and Pyle had quoted. It happened at the time of the death of James II of Scotland in 1460. This explained why I was unable to find it in Boece’s history, which ends earlier. Gould and Pyle had probably confused the original history with this sequel. It seems unlikely they had found the story in the work by Ferrario.

According to this account, a Scottish brigand lived with his family away from other men in a part of Angus called Fiend’s Den. It is told as one of a number of “marvells” preceding the death of the king, including the birth of a hermaphrodite and a “blazing star,” or comet. If there was a connection this was yet a third time period. And Angus is a very long way from Galloway on the other side of Scotland.

But it wasn’t entirely clear there was a connection. Though the history was completed in 1576, it wasn’t published until 1728. I will quote from From the Slauchter of King James the First to the Ane thousands fyve hundreith thrie scoir fyfein zeir by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie Vol. 1 (Blackwood and Sons 1899). Chapter 31 begins:

. . . there were many marvels about that time [when James II was pronounced dead]. About this Time there was apprehended and taken, for a most abominable and cruel Abuse, a brigand who haunted and dwelt, with his whole family and household, out of all Men’s company in a place of Angus, called The Fiend’s Den. This mischievous man had an execrable fashion to take all young Men and Children, that either he could steal quietly or take away by any other moyen without the Knowledge of the People, and bring them home and eat them, and the more young they were, he held the more tender and the greater Delicate. For the which damnable Abuse he was burnt, with his Wife, Bairns, and Family, except a young Lass of one Year old, which was saved and brought to Dundee where she was fostered and brought up. But when she came to Woman’s Years she was condemned and burnt quick, for the same crime her Father and Mother were convicted of. It is said, That, when this young woman was coming forth to the Place of Execution that there gathered a great Multitude of People about her, and specially of Women, cursing and warying that she was so unhappy to commit so damnable deeds. To whom she turned about with a wood and furious Countenance, saying, “Wherefore chide ye with me as I had committed an unworthy Crime? Give me credit, and trow me, if ye had experience of eating of man’s and woman’s flesh ye would think the same so delicious that ye would never forbear it again.” And so, with an obstinate Mind, this unhappy creature, without sign or outward token of repentance, died in the sight of the whole people for her Misdeeds that she was adjudged to.

The story also appears in Holinshed’s Chronicals, first published in 1577, again as one of several marvels that happened around James II’s death. It is known that Holinshed used Lindsay as a source of material and his account differs only in slight variations of the wording.

According to Hobbs and Cornwall, this may have been the origin of the Sawney Beane saga. But I went back to the footnotes of their paper and found a couple of interesting antecedents.

One was a book by Ronald Holmes entitled The Legend of Sawney Beane (1975). The book was out of print, and there was another edition in 1985. Nonetheless, I had to send away via interlibrary loan to obtain a copy from another state. Holmes had done a great deal of detective work and cited numerous folktales and legends concerning cannibalism, monsters and ogres that derived from the pagan cultures who once inhabited the region. He showed how regional legends persist over long periods of time, including Pittscottie’s account as well as such legends as Bloody Baker and Mr. Fox. He traced the story of Sawney Beane from such legends and folktales through the early seventeenth-century broadsides and Johnson’s book and Crockett’s novel up to the present.

What really struck me, though, was that his book had had so little impact. At the time I started my research at least 15 years had passed since the last edition of the book, and yet modern accounts still repeated the idea that the story was true.

The other was a chapter in the book Rogues Walk Here by William Roughead, which was much longer out of print. Roughead was a British lawyer and writer who was interested in the history of crime. He came to the conclusion that Sawney Beane never existed because, despite the outrageousness of Sawney’s crimes and the involvement of King James, he was unable to find a single reference to Beane earlier than Johnson’s account. He concluded Johnson’s source was probably the aforementioned accounts in the Pittscottie and Holinshed chronicles: my initial finding when I began my research. I had come full circle. The kicker was that Roughead’s book came out in 1931, roughly 70 years before I began my research. I had repeated much of his work, which was long out of print.

What can we conclude from all this? For one thing, the Sawney Beane story that has been passed down from the 1700s is a work of fiction. It is probably rooted in a legend from the old Scottish chronicles. The legend as recorded, suggesting that the child of cannibalistic parents inherited the same tendency, is almost certainly folkloric hyperbole. The existence of a couple who were robber-cannibals cannot be proved or disproved, but there is sometimes a germ of truth in old legends.

Another decade has passed, and the Internet has grown considerably. Wikipedia has sprung up, which notes that “while historians tend to believe that Sawney Bean never existed, his story has passed into legend and is part of the Edinburgh tourism industry.” Its wording does leave room for doubt, and there are numerous other web sites that repeat the story as true.

So perhaps in a few decades, yet another researcher will again have to debunk the Scottish mass murderer.

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Lee Weinstein lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.