Paris was occupied by the English and the famine there was so great that unfortunate Parisians spent all of their daylight hours wandering around just searching for food. The winter of 1419-1420 was equally severe over the whole country with very low temperatures and copious amounts of snow falling for prolonged periods. In Western Europe, virtually all of France had already been made wretched by the debilitating effects of the Hundred Years War which was to last, rather inaccurately, 116 years, from 1337–1453: In the east, in what is now Turkey, the Bosphorus was completely frozen over and it was possible to walk over the ice from Üsküdar to Istanbul, which was then called Constantinople. Over Europe as a whole, the weather that winter was unbelievably cold. The first wolf invasion came during the winter of 1419-1420. These were a whole series of large scale attacks by animals which broke all of our present day rules of how to be a politically correct wolf. They gleefully attacked and ate people. And not just one wolf or even one pack of wolves. What I did not realise, though, is that there are completely documented and wholly accepted historical accounts which detail attacks on Paris by wolves. The Beast of Cinglais or the Beast of Gâtinais.

Creatures such as the Beast of Lyonnais or the Beast of Cévennes/Gard/Vivarais or the Beast of Caen and Chaigny or the Beast of Orléans or the Beast of Veyreau. Or when they saw the Beast of Benais or the Beast of Sarlat or the Be ast of Auxerrois / Trucy or the others whose individual blogposts I have not yet launched out into “Le Monde du Blogging”.

The Wolves of Paris by Daniel P. Mannix