“Rare now, but at the time a plague of wolves around Poperinge” (Historic)

And the bell continued to ring until World War I, even though wolves had long since disappeared.

Wolves in ancient times

There may have been wolves in Poperinge in ancient times. In the fourteenth century, when the cloth industry switched to agriculture, they formed a major problem. Also knows historian Kristof Smeyer who will soon publish a book about it.

Kristof Smeyers, historian UAntwerp: “You get sources that talk about farms and villages in the area around Poperinge that are under siege, where there is a plague of wolves and where people are in a kind of war situation with another animal species.”

(continue reading below the photo)

Bounties to kill wolves

Bounties are paid to who can kill a wolf. Roughly converted, you would get about 100 euros per cadaver.

“You had people who really made their career out of it. In the Poperinge area there are known families who, over the generations, made a reputation for being very skilled at shooting and killing wolves. Individuals are known in West Flanders and also in Limburg, which easily shot down 500 wolves a year.”

Curfew against wolves

There will even be a wulveklokske in Poperinge.

“That’s a kind of curfew that rang every night at nine o’clock from the early seventeenth century. It was supposed to say, people go inside. It’s dusk. It’s time to go inside. Wolves can come into town. And that The bell has rung until the twentieth century. It has rung every night. After a while there were no more wolves, but that bell continued to ring as a kind of ritual.”

In Poperinge, many place names refer to wolves, such as the Wulfholstraat. Which proves that they were prominent here for a long time.