The werewolf of Bedburg in the Cologne papers of 1589

In June 1590 a pamphlet went on sale in Fleet Street, London, about a werewolf executed near Cologne the previous October.⁶ Among his victims, it says, were two women who were pregnant:

The right-hand column only modernises the spelling. A pamphlet printed in Cologne itself in 1589 has the same thirteen children, but no pregnant women. Its adults are two men and a woman:¹

Hermann von Weinsberg, writing in Cologne, gives the same count as the Cologne pamphlet.⁵ The pregnant women appear only in the London text.⁵ That pamphlet is also by far the longest account of the case, so its version is told first.⁷

Summer rumours in Cologne

Hermann von Weinsberg (1518 to 1597) was a councillor of Cologne who kept a record of his life and of the news that reached him, meant for whoever would head the family after him.¹³ In an entry dated 31 October 1589 he wrote that “Stupe Peter” had been put to death, a farmer who lived at “E(r)perade”, three miles from Cologne, and who had been arrested and taken to Bedburg.² E(r)perade is Epprath, a village next to Bedburg.⁴ Strange rumours about the man, Weinsberg adds, had been going round all summer, inside the city and outside it.²

Weinsberg was not at the execution.¹⁴ He writes “man sagt”, people say, and he names his source for the crimes: a print had come out.¹⁴

The print, as Weinsberg sums it up, also had the belt, thirteen children of six or seven with his own little son among them, two men and a woman, and many cattle.¹⁵ He then describes the execution and names the two women burned with the body: the daughter, Stupe Beeln, and his “gefatterschn” Tringen Trumpen, the London pamphlet’s gossip Katherine Trompin.¹⁶ He does not say they were burned alive.¹⁶ People said, he adds, that a great crowd heard Peter make a good confession and ask God for mercy.¹⁶ The whole entry, with a translation, is on its own page.

Weinsberg thought the murders and the incest deserved the punishment.¹⁷ The sorcery was another matter:

Bepper, three miles from Cologne

The one German print about the case that we could read is Niclas Schreiber’s, printed in Cologne in 1589: four leaves, mostly about witches burned elsewhere that year, with the werewolf announced at the foot of the title page.¹⁸

Its werewolf has no name.⁷ He lived “zu Bepper”, three miles from Cologne, practised sorcery for 24 years, could make himself into a wolf, and was caught and tortured before he “freely” confessed.¹¹⁰ The pamphlet gives seven years with his daughter, “who was burned to powder as well”, and nothing about a second woman, a belt or a son.¹⁷ It ends with a wooden wolf set on a wheel and the head nailed on top: “Also ist diesem Wolff gelohnet worden”, that was this wolf’s reward.¹ The passage is transcribed and translated in full.

Pictures on sale

Two picture sheets of 1589 show the whole execution in one scene: Peter on the wheel, the tongs, the axe, the wooden wolf on its pole, and three bodies burning. The first is an etching that Erika Münster-Schröer knows under the name of Philipp Uffenbach and that the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin catalogues under Frans Hogenberg. Its four stanzas are spoken by Peter himself, “Bey bedbur”, and they add up his victims differently again:¹⁹

“Farwen” is, we take it, a slip for frawen, women. The sheet labels him “Stump Petter” and dates the execution 31 October 1589.¹⁹³

The second is a woodcut broadsheet printed in Nuremberg by Lucas Mayer, with the same picture and a much longer poem.²⁰ Here “Bedbur” lies four miles from Cologne, and the farmer turns into a wolf for seven hours a day. One evening a neighbour coming out of the woods fights the wolf off and cuts off a paw, which turns into a human hand. When the neighbour visits Peter, who is lying sick in bed, Peter admits that he was the wolf and begs him to say nothing.²⁰ Under torture he confesses thirteen children, his own son among them, “drey alten”, three grown people, and twenty-five years with a she-devil, and his daughter and his “Gefader”, his gossip, are burned with his body.²⁰

Ortelius laughs

By the end of the year the case had reached Antwerp, where a Dutch version of the Cologne pamphlet was printed on 7 December. Dries Vanysacker, who has edited it, gives the same details down to its last line, “Also is desen wolf geloont”.²¹ On 27 December 1589 the cartographer Abraham Ortelius wrote to his friend Dominicus Lampsonius, who had sent him verses on the werewolf.²² Ortelius liked the verses, but the engravers he showed them to would not pay for a new plate, since the picture had already been printed twice from copper.²² His own view was short:

He calls the man “Stunp Petrus”.³ Lampsonius answered in the margins of the letter on 31 January 1590. He was “between yes and no”, and he would try to get the trial record from the Count of Salm, “under whose jurisdiction this wolf was executed”.²² The letter and the replies are on their own page.

George Bores’s copy

The London pamphlet appeared in June 1590. Its title page says it was “Trulye translated out of the high Duch, according to the Copie printed in Collin”, brought to England by George Bores, “ordinary Poste”, on 11 June 1590, and printed for Edward Venge in Fleet Street.⁶ Lena Maria Kaiser, who compared every known print in a 2016 thesis, found none that could be that Cologne copy; Schreiber’s pamphlet is far too short to be it.⁷ The London text has names, the girdle, the son and the capture by hunters, none of which Schreiber prints.⁷⁹

It also contradicts itself. Its closing page says the sixteen pieces of wood round the wheel stood for “the sixteene persons that was perfectly knowen to be murdered by him”.¹² Its own account names more: thirteen children, two pregnant women and their unborn children, the son, and two men and a woman whom he met in the woods.¹²

The pamphlet says he confessed “fearing the torture” after being “put to the racke in the Towne of Bedbur”.¹⁰ The Cologne pamphlet puts the torture first as well: “gefangen / vnd gepeinigt”, caught and tortured.¹⁰

The “record” in this table is the other texts of 1589, and they are themselves prints and hearsay.¹⁴

Delrio’s fifteen boys

The Jesuit Martin Delrio put the case into his handbook on magic, first printed in 1599 and 1600.²³ In the first volume, printed at Louvain in 1599, the passage begins “Annus decimus agitur”: it is the tenth year since “Stumfius Petrus” was executed at “Bebburgi”. He had kept a succubus for more than twenty years, wore a broad belt, and “seemed to himself and others to turn into a wolf”.²³ The thirteen children have become “ter quinque pueros”, fifteen boys, and he has tried to devour his two daughters-in-law.²³ Delrio adds that all this “is established by the court records and by copper engravings openly on sale”.²³

In 1605 Richard Verstegan gave another count, in a book on the old English language, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence:²⁴

Two women and one man reverses the Cologne pamphlet and Weinsberg.²⁴⁵ The German scholar Wilhelm Hertz, in 1862, was the first to write about the case in a scholarly book.²⁵ He called Peter Stump of Bedburg “one of the few werewolves punished by a court”, with twenty years of a succubus and fifteen boys, two women and a man killed.²⁵

The occultist Montague Summers reprinted the London pamphlet in full in 1933, and wrote that he knew only two copies, in the British Museum and the Lambeth library.²⁶ In the same passage he dated the execution to “31st March, 1590”, although the pamphlet he reprinted says 31 October.²⁶

Who held Bedburg

Bedburg belonged to the counts of Neuenahr, who were Protestants. The Reformed church order issued for their county of Moers in 1561 applied to Bedburg as well, and from 1570 Reformed synods met there, at Hüchelhoven.²⁷ Hermann died childless on 4 December 1578, and Werner von Salm-Reifferscheid and Hermann’s kinsman Adolf von Neuenahr fought over the inheritance, partly with arms. The dispute became an episode of the war over the archbishopric of Cologne.²⁷ By 1589 the Count of Salm held the jurisdiction under which the werewolf was executed, as Lampsonius put it.²² In November 1591 the Dutch States were still demanding that Bedburg be given back to the widowed Countess Walburgis von Neuenahr; the Jülich council answered that the Count of Reifferscheid held it.²⁷

Erika Münster-Schröer (2017) ties the case to that quarrel. The Protestant claimant, Adolf von Neuenahr, died in October 1589, a few weeks before the execution, and she argues that so monstrous a criminal made a story that sold well as a Catholic victory, with Protestantism unmasked as the devil’s work.²⁸ Lena Maria Kaiser’s thesis reads the case another way; it is listed at the end of this page.

The count’s file

What would settle the case is the trial file. Delrio, ten years on, wrote that court records established it.²³ Lampsonius, a close friend of the Count of Salm, wrote in January 1590 that he would try to get them from him. “If he refuses,” he added, “it will make me more suspicious.”²² Nothing in his replies says whether the count answered. Münster-Schröer found no court files and no other archival record of the case, only the prints, and she asks whether it happened at all.²⁹

The court book turns up once more, a century later. Theophil Laube’s dialogue on lycanthropy, printed at Frankfurt in 1686, has a lawyer cite “dem Gerichts-Buch zu Bebburg”, the court book at Bedburg, for “Stumpff Peter”. What he takes from it, more than twenty years with a devil, a broad belt and fifteen boys whose brains he ate, is all in Delrio.³⁰

Homayun Sidky, an anthropologist, takes the crimes as real: Stubbe, he writes, was “very likely guilty of multiple murders”, and wolf attacks on livestock and children probably swelled the list.³¹