Bromsgrove's own contribution to English monster-slaying folklore survives not as a prose legend passed down informally but as a ballad, catalogued formally in the Child Ballads as number 18 and carrying well over a hundred recorded variants collected across the country under names including Sir Lionel, Bangum and the Boar, and, in its most locally specific and rooted form, The Jovial Hunter of Bromsgrove.
The story tells of Sir Ryalas, son of a Sir Robert Bolton, who goes out hunting one day and meets a grieving woman sitting in a tree, who tells him that a wild boar has already killed her husband and thirty other men before him. Ryalas tracks the fearsome boar down and kills it in a hard-fought contest, but the story then takes a considerably stranger turn than the average dragon-slaying tale: on its death the boar transforms into a man, revealed to be the son of a local woman living nearby. Ryalas hunts her down in turn and kills her as well, closing out a ballad with considerably more moral ambiguity and unresolved darkness than the typical heroic monster-slaying story usually allows for.
The ballad states plainly that both the boar-man and the woman are buried in Bromsgrove church, and versions of the story collected locally point to a carved boar's head still visible in the church today as a lingering physical trace of the tale. Whether that carving predates the legend or the legend instead grew up over time to explain an already-existing carving is impossible to say for certain, but the ballad itself was genuinely collected from Worcestershire singers by folklore researchers, giving Bromsgrove a documented claim to a story most other English towns can only borrow secondhand.
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