“His guilt is disputed, but his name is enough even now to make tithe barns seem colder than churchmen intend.”
As the villages of the tithe country tell it
It was a famine year, and the villages went hungry while the tithe barn stood full. That is how they tell it. The keeping of the grain was Canon Bertram Halden’s, who held a canonry and the granary office under it, and the grain was not let out. The villages say he held it back on purpose, so that obedience might rise with hunger, and they have called him the Granary Wolf ever since.
Nobody has proved it, and the villages do not pretend otherwise. Asked in 4586 whether the Granary Wolf was a slander, Dean Frere said the chapter had no means of knowing, had never had any, and that a body which claimed to know would be lying. The valleys liked that answer, and quote it still, with approval. It is why the chapter has never lost more by the story than it has.
The name has outlived every other scandal of the house because of what it lets a village say. When the bailiff is in the tithe barn at reckoning, a man may mention the Granary Wolf and nothing more. The bailiff understands him exactly. Nothing actionable has been said, and the barn seems a little colder than the churchmen meant it to be.
What is known
Less than the story requires. Bertram Halden held a canonry and a granary office under it. He appears in one chronicle, in a passage of eleven lines written forty years after the events by an author with an interest in the chapter. The passage does not say he hid grain. It says that grain was not released, that he had the keeping of it, and that men said what men say. No verdict survives. In 4586 Dean Frere said the chapter had no means of knowing.
The story belongs to the shortages of the late eleventh century and, like the other Halden story, sits in a famine year. A house whose authority rests on feeding the realm attracts, when the realm is not fed, the suspicion that the failure was chosen. The famine is long past; the name is still used in the tithe country of Oxford.