Eadric The Wild - Eadric's Byname

Eadric's Byname

In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MS D), Eadric is nicknamed Cild (literally "child"), which may signify a title of rank. He was also known as "the Wild", as witnessed by such bynames as se wild, salvage and in Latin, silvaticus. According to Susan Reynolds:

"Historians have generally treated Eadric's surname as a nickname .. A ... likely explanation is that Eadric was one of a group of people well known in their own day as 'silvatici'. Orderic Vitalis says in his description of the English risings of c.1068-9 that many of the rebels lived in tents, distaining to sleep in houses lest they should become soft, so that certain of them were call silvatici by the Normans. ... he is not the only chronicler to make it clear that the English resistance was very widespread or to describe the rebels as taking to the woods and marshes. The Abingdon chronicle says that many plots were hatched by the English and that some hid in woods and some in islands, plundering and attacking those who came in their way, while others called in the Danes, and that men of different ranks took part in these attempts ... That they should have made their bases in wild country and, like the twentieth-century maquis, have been named for it, is perfectly credible."

Reynolds further notes that:

"If it is true, however, that the silvatici were for some years a widespread and well-known phenomenon, that might help to explain aspects of later outlaw stories that have puzzled historians. Few outlaws in other countries have apparently left so powerful a legend as Robin Hood. ...The most famous outlaws of the greenwood before him were probably the Old English nobility on their way down and out."