Hannah Twynnoy

Twynnoy's gravestone at Malmesbury Abbey

Hannah Twynnoy (1669/70-1703) is the first person to have been killed by a tiger in Britain, as attested to by a formal contemporary source.

Twynnoy, by repute and according to a memorial plaque now lost, was an early 18th-century barmaid working in The White Lion public house in the centre of the English market town of Malmesbury in Wiltshire.

All that remains from the time, to corroborate the narrative of her death, is her gravestone, in a corner of the churchyard of Malmesbury Abbey.

Sources

The sources are threefold: her gravestone, a 19th-century local history and ongoing oral history

Gravestone

Her gravestone records her name and death at the age of 33 on 23 October 1703, with a relatively long, evocative poem which reads:

In bloom of Life
She's snatchd from hence,
She had not room
To make defence;
For Tyger fierce
Took Life away.
And here she lies
In a bed of Clay,
Until the Resurrection Day.^[1]

Plaque recorded in a local history

Historian John Bowen has found a local history with a more detailed account of the death as, it states, placed on a plaque on the wall of the parish church in Hullavington, a village 5 miles (8 km) from Malmesbury. The plaque (see box for wording) that appeared to have been installed soon after her death, in the first years of the 18th century, was recorded in the Victorian period by a local historian and may since have been sold, melted down or stolen.

Oral history

The common thread of such stories by word of mouth from generation to generation, matches exactly the plaque, almost always with less formal wording, stating that Hannah Twynnoy was a barmaid working at a pub called the White Lion in Malmesbury (8 Gloucester Road, later converted to a private house) in 1703 when a menagerie arrived to set up in the pub's large rear yard. Among the animals there was included a tiger, which Hannah was warned against upsetting. She liked bothering the animal until one day it got tired of it and mauled her. Hannah did not survive.

Unsolved aspects of the death

Wealth or pity?

Poetic epitaphs on gravestones were popular at the turn of the 18th century, but generally only for the wealthy and celebrated.^[1] A gravestone and a plot in the churchyard of Malmesbury Abbey for any woman, who could not have been a priest or a priest's wife, would have been costly, even without engaging the services of a poet. The identity of the patron who paid for her tombstone and plot remains a mystery, although they may have been donated by the church and vestry.

Family

Her connection with the village of Hullavington, which kept family records at this time, seems anomalous. Her sole connection comes from a later local historian giving the wording and location of a plaque.

Equally, however, parish registers and Bishops transcripts for Malmesbury contain no entry, between 1635 and 1700, for anyone named Twynnoy.

Enduring legacy

In 1993 a new residential road in Malmesbury was named 'Twynnoy Close'.^[3]

In 2003, on the 300th anniversary of the death, a simple ceremony was carried out at the grave when every schoolgirl in the town, younger than 11 and named Hannah, placed a flower on the grave.^[4]

Notes and references

Notes

References

External links

• Hannah Twynnoy at malmesbury.com
• location of her tomb at maps.google.co.uk