The Wild Man of Orford
The chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall wrote that fishermen at Orford, Suffolk, caught a naked, hairy 'wild man' in their nets in the reign of Henry II; he was held in the new castle for six months, questioned under torture, and eventually escaped back to the sea.
1167 CE · 52.09, 1.53 · status: legend
The account
The man ate raw fish, never spoke, even when hung upside down, and showed no knowledge of the church. He was allowed to swim in the harbour inside a triple line of nets but dived under them, came back for a while, then vanished for good. Later retellings made him a merman, and the story may have inspired the 'wild men' carved on some twenty Suffolk baptismal fonts.
The sceptical view
Explanations range from a seal or a shipwrecked foreigner to a moral tale; the account was written decades after the event.