Cannibals in the Cave: The Sawney Bean Story

In the latter half of the 18th century there appeared a collection of biographical texts called The Newgate Calendar, named after the Newgate Prison in London. This collection came in five volumes and cataloged the lives of some of the most horrid criminals (existent and nonexistent) in history, while simultaneously presenting harsh critiques against various social issues that were relevant at the time. Many of the criminals presented in the volumes became immortalized and sometimes romanticized, the fact and fiction of their crimes blending together indiscriminately.

One such villain that appeared in the first volume of The Newgate Calendar was a man by the name of Alexander "Sawney" Bean, and his story is one of unimaginable darkness. 

Commonly dismissed as a character of folklore, Sawney Bean was said to have been born in East Lothain in Scotland during the reign of King James I (late 16th to early 17th century). His father was either a hedger or a ditch-digger and raised his son to take up the same job. Not one for honest labor, however, Sawney fled his parents with a woman as idle as he and made his home with her in a cave by the sea. There they lived for over twenty years, cut off from all society. 

In those twenty years Sawney and his wife produced a great number of sons and daughters, who then coupled with one another and produced a great number of grandsons and grandaughters, all who were just as disinclined to do honest work as Sawney himself. It was for this tendency to work that the incestuous clan got along not by laboring, but  by robbing and murdering any people who passed by their lair. After killing an unfortunate traveler they would haul the corpse into the den of the cave, dismember it, eat it, and pickle the leftovers. Sometimes they would discard a limb into the sea instead eating it, and over time the unlucky arms and unlucky legs of dozens of unlucky travelers washed up on shores all across the country. This threw the region into a state of panic, in which many innocent people were mistaken for the perpetrators and executed. The true killers, however, remained in their cave. Still robbing, still butchering, still feasting, still uncaught. 

That is, at least, until an attempt by Sawney's clan to dispatch a married couple heading back from a fair ended in failure. The couple was riding on horseback when the family descended on them. The wife was knocked to the ground and killed, her blood then drunk and her entrails eaten, but before they could reach the husband the rest of the fairgoers, thirty or so in number, came up on the road, causing the Beans to flee back into their cave for fear of being outnumbered. The husband told the band of travelers about Sawney and went with them to Glagow, where they all spread the tale even further. 

News eventually reached the king, who then organized a manhunt of about four hundred men and many bloodhounds. The hounds led the procession to Sawney's cave, which had human remains scattered about it, along with all the treasures that the Bean family had accumulated from the people they'd killed over the years. Sawney and his family was captured, and all sentenced to a gruesome execution (the men had their limbs severed and bled to death, while the women and children were burned alive). None repented before they died, but instead cursed till their last breaths. 

While on the surface this folktale may seem nothing more than a gruesome account of a cannibal family, the story of Sawney Bean also serves as a cautionary tale of sorts about the dangers of idleness, which was considered a heinous sin in era The Newgate Calendar was written in. Sawney's reason for escaping his parents with his wife, for choosing to live on the fringes of society, was to escape that which he dreaded most: work--honest work. In the end, however, the moral to this story is riddled with irony. After all, it's hard to imagine a world where being the head of a cannibalistic clan is easier than a life of trimming hedges.