A naked, bearded man hauled up in fishermen's nets off the Suffolk coast, held in Orford Castle, and never once heard to speak.
In the reign of Henry II, not long after the great castle at Orford was built, fishermen working off the Suffolk coast pulled something out of the sea in their nets. It looked like a man. It was naked, its body was covered in hair and it had a long, ragged beard, but the crown of its head was bald, as though it had been shaved.
They brought it to the castle, where it was kept for months. It ate raw fish, squeezing the water out of them first, and it slept from sunset to sunrise. When it was hung up by its feet and tortured, it said nothing at all, and when it was taken into the church it showed no sign of knowing where it was.
One day its keepers let it swim in the harbour inside a wall of nets. It dived beneath them, surfaced beyond, and seemed to mock the men on the shore before it vanished. Some time later it came back of its own accord and lived among them a while longer, until at last it slipped away to the sea and was never seen again. Ralph of Coggeshall, the monk who set the story down, could not decide whether it had been a man, a fish, or an evil spirit wearing the body of a drowned man.
