In 1669 a London printer issued a pamphlet titled The Flying Serpent, or Strange News out of Essex, describing a creature seen repeatedly over several days on the common at Henham-on-the-Hill by a number of local residents. The description it gives is unusually specific for the genre: a winged serpent some eight or nine feet long, with large eyes described as being the size of a sheep's, capable of flight but also seen resting coiled in the undergrowth, and reportedly avoided by dogs and cattle in the area.
What makes the Henham case a genuine point of interest for historians of English folklore, rather than merely another entry in a long list of dragon reports, is the survival of a contemporary printed source describing it as current news rather than legend. Most English dragon and serpent traditions, the Wormingford dragon among them, reach us only as chronicle entries recorded well after the fact, or as oral tradition with no fixed date of origin. The Henham pamphlet, by contrast, presents itself as reportage: a strange thing seen by named or nameable local people, written up and sold within the same year, in the same idiom used at the time for reporting monstrous births, comets and other portents treated as genuine occurrences rather than stories.
No satisfactory natural explanation has been agreed for what the Henham witnesses actually saw. Suggestions have ranged from an escaped exotic animal to a large snake native to England (adders and grass snakes, wildly exaggerated) to simple invention for the pamphlet trade, which had a healthy commercial appetite for exactly this kind of report. The pamphlet itself offers no resolution, and no later seventeenth-century source appears to follow up on the Henham serpent's fate. Unusually for an English "dragon" story, this is a case that was reported once, with some care, and then simply dropped.
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