Dragon of Wantley

The Dragon of Wantley is a legend of a dragon-slaying by a knight on Wharncliffe Crags in South Yorkshire, recounted in a comic broadside ballad of 1685.

The topography of the ballad is accurate in its detail as regards Wharncliffe Crags and environs, but the story, and its burlesque humour, has been enjoyed in places far from the landscape from which it appears to derive and has been used to make a number of points unrelated to it.

[5] In his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry Thomas Percy holds that the story of The Dragon of Wantley relates to a dispute over the alleged misappropriation of church tithes in Wharncliffe by Sir Francis Wortley who was opposed by a local lawyer named More.

The opera, with music composed by John Frederick Lampe, punctured the vacuous operatic conventions and pointed a satirical barb at Robert Walpole and his taxation policies.

The opera debuted at the Haymarket Theatre, where its coded attack on Walpole would have been clear, but its long run occurred after it moved to Covent Garden, which had a much greater capacity for staging.

In Carey's play, Moore of Moorehall, "a valiant knight, in love with Margery", is a drunk who pauses to deal with the dragon only between bouts of drinking and carousing with women.

The snaking stone wall culminating in a carved dragon's head can be found at the southern edge of Bitholmes Wood (Grid Ref:SK 295 959).

When it is first mentioned, in The Warden, this pub is owned by John Bold, a local doctor, who is pursuing a dispute with the church authorities over the alleged misapplication of ecclesiastical revenues.