‘The Hunting of the Earl of Rone’, in the village of Combe Martin in north Devon, was originally a series of processions and festivities that took place in the fortnight running up to Ascension Day.

... parades from Friday to Monday. The first involves a large, round-shaped hobby horse attended by a fool and a squadron of grenadiers... On Monday another parade leads to the Earl of Rone being captured in a nearby wood and brought into the village mounted back to front on a donkey. The humiliated figure on the donkey, is repeatedly shot, killed, revived and remounted [then] his dead body is cast into the sea... [This] Earl of Rone can be none other than Hugh O’Neill, second earl of Tyrone. There is simply no other obvious candidate.

The Combe Martin festivities seem to preserve memories of not only Tyrone’s time in the woods of Glenconkeyne but also the Flight of the Earls itself. The West Country was a big recruiting ground for soldiers who fought in the Nine Years’ War. Not only were many of the rank and file locals but so too were the officer corps and field commanders. Sir Arthur Chichester, who as commander of crown forces in east Ulster was closely involved in the hunt for O’Neill in the forest of Glenconkeyne in the winter of 1602–3, came from Raleigh in north Devon.

Nor did the Flight of the Earls pass unnoticed in Devon itself. At first no one in Ireland or England knew where the earls had ended up. At the start of October rumours reached London that the earl had landed in Wales, and Lord Sheffield wrote from York that the earl’s sudden departure had ‘struck in these parts a great fear'

Even though ... Tyrone’s ship had reached France, it was decided to rush 800 soldiers to Ireland as an emergency security measure. One hundred of these were raised in Devon, as had so often happened during the Nine Years’ War itself. Given these local connections with the war in Ireland, it is altogether possible that local people would have made the earl of Tyrone part of their Ascension Day folk customs, especially after the religious aspects had been toned down by the Reformation.

Brown in his Hunting of the Earl of Rone pamphlet associates both his own Combe Martin tradition and the Lancashire story as examples of the earl of Tyrone’s story being grafted onto the ancient Wild Man of the Woods legend. Either way, it is surely ironic that there should be more folk memory of the earl of Tyrone in England than in Ireland. On the other hand, the former was not subject in the early modern period to such a violent rupture with its past—namely massive conquest, colonisation and persecution.