Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio

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It is a cold grey morning, and a whole town is standing very still.

They are standing at the edge of a field, just outside the walls. There are about forty of them. The men have pitchforks, and a few old hunting spears, and one gentleman has brought a sword that has not been out of its box since his grandfather's wedding. The women are further back, holding their children by the collar. Nobody is saying very much. Everybody is looking at the same thing.

Out in the middle of the field, a small man in a patched brown robe is walking toward the wolf.

He is not hurrying. He has no weapon. He has no stick. He has two friends who were walking beside him, and who have stopped, about a hundred paces back, because their legs have decided that this is far enough. And the wolf, which is the size of a young calf, with a grey coat and yellow eyes and a very bad reputation, has come up out of the trees and is walking toward him.

A boy at the back of the crowd whispers, "Is he going to hit it?"

And his mother says, "I don't think that's the plan."

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the old legend of Saint Francis and the wolf of Gubbio, from the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, a beloved collection of stories about him, and it is a legend, not recorded history, and the townspeople's conversations and most of the small moments are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. Saint Francis is a Catholic saint, much loved far beyond the Catholic Church. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me take you to Umbria.

If you have a map of Italy in your head, find the boot, and then put your finger on the middle of it, a little to the left of the calf. That is Umbria, the green heart of the country. It has hills, and olive trees, and little stone towns that sit on top of the hills like hats. There is no sea in Umbria at all. It is entirely inland, and it seems perfectly content about it.

In the early twelve hundreds, which is when our story takes place, those little hill towns were very proud, very independent, and very rude about each other. Assisi did not care for Perugia. Perugia did not care for Assisi. Gubbio, which is a bit to the north-east, up in the Apennine hills, did not care for anybody in particular, and kept to itself behind a good strong wall.

Gubbio is still there, and it is a lovely place. It is built on the steep side of a mountain, so that the streets go up in steps and the houses lean on one another for support. It is made of grey-pink stone. It has a Roman theatre at the bottom of the town, from the days when Rome ran everything, and at the top there is a mountain, called Ingino, with a view across the valley that makes you forget what you were about to say.

Gubbio is also very, very old. Before Rome, the people there spoke a language called Umbrian, and some of what they wrote down in it was carved onto seven great bronze tablets, which were dug up much later and which are still in the town. Nobody in Gubbio will tell you that this makes the town better than your town. They won't need to. They'll just let you stand next to the tablets for a while.

So that is the place. Now, about the time.

Life in a medieval Italian hill town was a strange mixture of tight and loose. It was tight, because everyone knew everyone, and everyone's business was everyone's business, and the whole town could be gathered in the square within about ten minutes by someone ringing a bell and shouting. It was loose, because beyond the walls, there was not very much. No fences, no motorways, no streetlights. Just fields, and woods, and hills, and whatever lived in them.

And in those woods, in the years before Francis, wolves were not a rumour. They were a fact. A hard winter could push them down toward the farms, and a farmer who lost a few sheep would shrug, and curse, and count what was left. Wolves were a bit like bad weather. You did not hate the weather. You just built your house to cope with it.

But the wolf in our story was different. The wolf in our story, the old tale says, was not a wolf that took a sheep now and then. It was a wolf that had decided, as it were, to make a career of it.

Now, before we meet that wolf, I should tell you who Francis was, because you might not have met him. Or you might have met a plaster statue of him in a garden, holding a bird, with the look of a man who has been told to stand still for a very long time.

The real Francis was not a statue.

He was born in Assisi, around the year eleven eighty-one, the son of a rich cloth merchant called Pietro Bernardone. Pietro dealt in fine fabric, and his son grew up with money, and clothes, and a talent for being the life of every party. Francis loved singing. He loved French songs about knights. He had a great many friends, and a great many ideas, and for the first twenty years of his life he spent most of both.

And then something changed. It did not happen in a single moment, whatever the pictures say. It happened over a few years, in pieces. A war, in which he was captured and held in prison for most of a year. A long illness. A dream. A meeting with a leper on the road, a man whom Francis had always feared and avoided, and whom, on this day, he got down from his horse to embrace. Francis himself says, near the end of his life, that this was the turning point. What had been bitter to him became sweet.

After that, Francis gave himself away. He sold some of his father's cloth to rebuild a ruined chapel, which did not go over well at home. There was a very awkward scene in the square at Assisi, in front of the bishop, in which Francis handed his clothes back to his father, down to the last stitch, and said that from now on he would call God his Father. The bishop, who was a practical man, put his own cloak around the young man's shoulders and no doubt thought about lunch.

Where did Francis go next? The old lives tell us that he went to Gubbio. A friend there gave him a rough tunic to wear. That is not a legend. That is in the early accounts. So Francis knew Gubbio. It had been kind to him when he had nothing at all. And that, I think, is part of why the later story chose that town for the wolf.

Francis went on to gather companions, a few at first, and then dozens, and then thousands. They called themselves the Friars Minor, the Lesser Brothers. They had no money, no land, and no fixed home. They walked from town to town, mending, working, begging when they had to, and telling anyone who would listen that God loved them. They were, in the nicest possible way, a sort of walking embarrassment for everyone who had ever put a lock on a door.

And Francis loved creation. All of it. He called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. He called the fire brother, and the water sister, and he wrote a song, in the Italian of his own Umbrian hills, praising God for every one of them. We still have that song. It is called the Canticle of the Creatures, and he wrote it near the end of his life, when he was ill and nearly blind, and it is one of the first great poems in the Italian language. He praised God for Brother Sun, and Sister Moon, and the stars, and Brother Wind, and Sister Water, and Brother Fire, and Mother Earth, who feeds us. And in the last verse, he praised God for Sister Death, which, when you think about the state he was in, is a brave thing to write.

So that is the man walking out into the field. Not a statue. A real man, small, thin, cheerful, a little bit ridiculous, and absolutely certain that every creature on the earth had been made by the same loving hand as he had.

Now. The wolf.

The old story says that Francis was staying in Gubbio, and that while he was there, a very large, very fierce wolf came to trouble the town. It was so hungry and so bold that it devoured not only other animals but people too.

I want to pause, there, because it is a hard sentence, and this is a bedtime story. The old tale does not linger on it, and neither will we. We will say only that the wolf was a terrible worry, and that it was a danger to anyone who left the town. Which means that, in practical terms, the whole place was shut in.

Think what that is like. In a town like Gubbio, you needed to go outside the walls every single day. Your sheep were out there. Your olives. Your vines. Your brother-in-law, who had a farm and owed you money. If you could not go outside the walls, the town started to run out of things. First the cheese. Then the wine. Then the patience.

Imagine you are the baker, and I will call him Bartolo, since nobody told us his name, and he will not mind. Bartolo bakes bread. Bartolo needs wood for his oven, and the wood is in the forest. The forest has the wolf in it. So Bartolo has been burning his own furniture for a week, and last night he got to the good chair, the one his wife's mother gave them, and he stood in front of it with the axe for ten minutes and could not do it.

"It's just a chair," said his wife.

"It's her chair," said Bartolo.

"She's dead. And it's an awful chair."

"It is an awful chair," said Bartolo. "But it's her awful chair."

And that was the point at which he decided that something had to be done.

He was not the only one. All over Gubbio, people were reaching the same conclusion. The wolf was out there. It was clever. It had been seen, and then not seen, and then seen somewhere else. A shepherd called Nello had lost half his flock and had stopped speaking to anyone except his dog, and the dog, to be fair, was holding up its end of the conversation.

So the men of the town did what men of a town do. They held a meeting. There was a good deal of shouting. Someone suggested a trap. Someone else said they had tried a trap, and the wolf had eaten the trap. That was not true, but it was the sort of thing that people said in that mood. Someone suggested hiring soldiers from Perugia, and everyone agreed that they would rather be eaten.

In the end, they decided to arm themselves, go out in a crowd, and find the beast. It was not a brilliant plan. But it was a plan, and it had the great merit that everyone could join in.

And that is when someone said, "What about the friar?"

Let me tell you how the old story puts it. It says that Francis, hearing of all this, had pity on the people. And so he said that he would go out and meet the wolf himself.

You can imagine how that landed.

"Father Francis," said Bartolo, who had by now come to the meeting with a rolling pin, "with respect, it's a wolf."

"I know," said Francis, cheerfully.

"It eats people."

"So I have heard."

"And you are going to walk out there?"

"I thought I might," said Francis. "If the Lord wills it."

The men looked at one another. One of them, a big fellow with a beard like a hedge, said, in the slow voice of a man trying to be tactful, "Father, you are not very big."

"No," Francis agreed. "I have always found it a help."

There was a silence. And then, one by one, the townspeople of Gubbio worked out something that I think is very human. They did not believe he would win. They did not believe he would be safe. But they could see that he was not afraid, and they were, and they found that they could not quite look away.

So they said, "We'll come with you."

And he said, "Please don't carry the swords."

And the man with the sword, who had only brought it because he thought it looked well, said, "Well, I'll leave it at the gate."

So out they went, the whole noisy crowd of them. Francis walked at the front, with two of his brothers beside him, and the rest of the town trailed behind, in a long uneasy line, carrying a surprising number of kitchen utensils.

I should say something here about the two brothers. The old tale says that Francis took companions, and that when they reached the edge of the wood, the crowd stopped. The companions stayed back with them, a bit further on. The brothers in our telling are an invention of ours, and the grumbling of the younger one is entirely our own. He was a nervous young man, with a long nose, who had joined the friars only that spring, and who had been under the impression that the job involved a great deal of prayer and a certain amount of soup.

"Brother Francis," he whispered. "I want you to know that I am here out of love."

"I know you are."

"And that if I run, it will also be out of love."

"I understand."

"It will be a very loving sort of running."

Francis smiled. "Stay here, then," he said, "and pray for me, and for the wolf."

"For the wolf?" said the young friar.

"Somebody should," said Francis.

They came to the place where the wood met the field. The crowd stopped. The friars stopped. The wind dropped. The old story does not say what the weather was doing, so I have given it a cold grey morning, and I am sticking to it.

And then the wolf came out.

I do not know how the people of Gubbio had pictured it. A monster, perhaps. A great black thing with a mouth full of teeth. But the wolf that came out of the trees that morning was just a wolf. A big one. Lean. Grey. Hungry in the way that makes a creature look all bones and eyes. It stopped at the edge of the shadows and looked at the crowd, and the crowd looked at it, and for a long moment nobody in the whole world did anything at all.

Then the wolf began to run toward them.

Some of the people took a step back. A woman put her hand over her mouth. Bartolo lifted his rolling pin, then thought better of it, and held it in front of him like a very small shield.

And Francis did what the old tale says he did. He lifted his hand, and made the sign of the cross toward the wolf.

I want to say a word about that. It is easy, in a story like this, to imagine that Francis has some special power over animals, that he is a sort of wizard, or a holy lion-tamer. He is not. The old story is very clear on this point. Francis does not do this by being clever or by being strong. He makes the sign of the cross, and he calls on the name of Jesus Christ. He prays. If anything happens after that, it is God's doing, and Francis would be the first to say so, probably while apologising for being in the way.

The wolf stopped. It stopped in the middle of the field, with its mouth shut, and its eyes on the little man in the brown robe.

And Francis called out, in a clear, calm, carrying voice:

"Come to me, Brother Wolf. In the name of Christ, I order you not to hurt me, or anyone else."

Now, you might think that is a strange way to speak to a wolf. Brother Wolf. But that is exactly how Francis spoke to everything. He called the birds his brothers and sisters. He called the sun his brother. He is said to have called the lamb his little brother, and the fire his brother, and the sun his brother, and he meant every word of it. To Francis, a creature was not an object. It was a relative. A distant relative, perhaps, the sort you see once at a wedding. But family.

And the wolf came.

It walked across the field, slowly now, its head low, and it came right up to Francis, and it lay down at his feet. Like a dog. Like a very large, very tired, very grey dog that has had a long day.

Behind him, a hundred paces away, a whole town let out its breath.

And the young friar, who was holding on to the sleeve of the older one, said, "Oh," very quietly, "he's actually done it."

"He didn't do it," said the older brother, who had been a friar for a good many years. "God did it. Francis just asked."

Now, here is the part of the tale I like best.

Francis does not stop there. He does not simply say, "Well done, off you go." He sits down on the grass, near the wolf, and talks to it. Seriously. Gently. The way you would talk to a friend who has made a mess of something.

"Brother Wolf," he said, "you have done a great deal of harm in this place. You have hurt and killed creatures that God made, without any permission. You have even killed men, who are made in the image of God. For that, you deserve to be treated as a thief and a murderer. The whole town is against you. And I do not blame them."

The wolf lay still, with its ears flat.

"But I want to make peace between you and them," said Francis. "I want you to stop doing harm. And I want them to forgive you."

Now, the old story understands, of course, that a wolf is not a person, and that a wolf, strictly speaking, does not commit crimes. It is a wolf. It does what wolves do. The tale is not confused about that. It is a story, and stories sometimes speak to animals as if they were people, in the way that a good story always has. Francis knew what a wolf was. He just chose to talk to it as if it were somebody. And I think there is something in that, which is worth a moment of quiet.

"Brother Wolf," said Francis. "I know you did it because you were hungry."

The wolf looked up.

"And that is the thing, isn't it?" said Francis. "You were hungry. And they were afraid. And so everyone has been hurting everyone else, over a bit of food."

He looked back at the crowd, and then at the wolf again.

"Here is what I propose. If you will promise to hurt nobody, neither man nor animal, again, then the people of Gubbio will feed you. Every day, for as long as you live. You will never go hungry. And they will never be afraid. Do you agree?"

The wolf, in the old story, did something wonderful. It bowed its head. It showed, by moving its body and its tail and its ears, that it accepted. And then, because Francis held out his hand and said, "I want you to give me your pledge, so I can trust you," the wolf lifted its great grey paw, and laid it in the friar's hand.

And that was that. A treaty. Signed, as far as we can tell, in paw.

There was a silence in the field. And then somebody at the back of the crowd, I think it was Nello the shepherd, burst into tears. Not out of sadness. Out of something else, a great loosening, like a rope let go. And the man with the hedge for a beard put his arm around him. And a small girl, who had been told a hundred times not to go near the wolf, began to wriggle out of her mother's arms.

"No," said her mother.

"But it's friends with the friar."

"The friar is not a good example," said her mother, though she was smiling when she said it.

So Francis stood up, and the wolf stood up beside him, and together they walked back toward the town. The old story says that Francis led the wolf into the very middle of Gubbio, to the marketplace, and the whole town came out to see.

I would like to have been there. Can you see it? All of Gubbio crowded into the square, the windows full of heads, the little boys up on the walls, the old women at their doors with their arms folded, ready to say that they had known all along. And down the middle of the street, the small man in the brown robe, and the great grey wolf padding beside him, quiet as a cat.

They reached the square. And Francis climbed up onto something. A step, a barrel, a stone. The story does not say. And he preached to them.

He told them that they must not be afraid. That God had permitted this wolf to trouble them, he said, in the old tale, because of their sins, and that the thing to fear was not a wolf at all, but sin itself, which is far more dangerous than any wolf. He told them to repent, and to turn to God. And then he told them the terms of the treaty.

"This wolf," he said, "has promised to make peace with you. He will do no harm to you, or to your animals. And in return, you must feed him each day. He is your brother. He is hungry. And I will stand surety for him, that he will keep his word."

And there was a pause. And then Bartolo the baker, who had been hugging his rolling pin through the whole business, called out, in a voice that cracked:

"What does he eat?"

"Whatever you would give a dog, I should think," said Francis.

"A dog I can manage," said Bartolo. "A dog does not take much. I can do a dog. I have scraps." He looked down at the wolf, which looked back at him with its yellow eyes, and he said, in a different tone, "You do know I am not very good company before sunrise."

And the wolf, I like to imagine, thumped its tail.

Now, here comes the part that surprised me, when I first read it.

The story does not end in the square. It goes on. For two years, the old tale says, the wolf lived in Gubbio. He lived, in the words of the old story, like a tame animal. He went from door to door. He did no harm to anyone, and no one did any harm to him. The people fed him courteously. And here is the line I like best: the dogs, in all that time, never barked at him.

Two years. A wolf, going door to door.

I try to picture how that worked. On the first day, I imagine, everyone peeping around their shutters. On the second day, a bit less. By the end of the first month, I think, the wolf had probably got a route. Bartolo in the morning, for the end of the loaf. Then the shepherd, Nello, who it turned out had a soft spot for him, and whose dog, to everyone's surprise, took to the whole thing with enormous dignity. Then the butcher's. Then the house with the nice step. I imagine the children learning to walk beside him. I imagine mothers saying, "Don't pull his tail," and fathers saying, "He is not a pony," and the wolf bearing it all with the weary patience of a creature who knows that it is in a very good situation, and has no intention of spoiling it.

Is there a lesson in that? There is, I think, more than one. But the one I like is quite simple. It is that the people of Gubbio had to do something. Francis did not just fix it, and go away. They had to feed the wolf. Every day. It cost them. It cost them bread, and scraps, and a bit of dignity, and a good deal of getting used to a thing they had been taught to fear. Peace in that town was not free. It was a daily piece of bread.

And the wolf kept his word, too. That, I think, is the other part. Whatever the wolf was, in the old story, it was faithful.

After two years, the old story says, the wolf grew old. And it died. It died of age, the tale says, quietly. And the people of Gubbio were sorry. Truly sorry. For the old story says that they mourned him, because as he went about the town, so gentle and so patient, he had reminded them all of the virtue and the holiness of Saint Francis.

I find that very moving. They did not weep for a monster. They wept for a neighbour.

The tale then stops, as these tales do, without a moral spelled out. It says only that the wolf was gone, and Francis was remembered, and Gubbio went on. And that, I think, is as it should be.

Francis himself went on, too. He did not stay long in one place. He never did. He walked, and preached, and prayed, and tried to find a way of being poor that was also a way of being glad. In the year twelve twenty-three, at a little place called Greccio, he set up the first nativity scene, with a real ox and a real donkey, so that people could see what it had been like for the Lord to be born in a stable. The next year, the early lives tell us, he received the wounds of Christ on his body, on a mountain called La Verna, and he spent the rest of his life carrying them quietly. By then he was ill, and half blind, and nearly worn out. It was in those last years that he wrote the Canticle of the Creatures, and sang it, and, according to the early lives, asked his brothers to sing it for him when he was dying.

He died on the evening of the third of October, twelve twenty-six, in the little chapel of the Portiuncula, beneath Assisi, lying on the bare earth, because he wished to meet Sister Death as poorly as he had lived. He was about forty-five. He was made a saint less than two years later, in twelve twenty-eight, by Pope Gregory the Ninth, who had known him personally.

As the evening goes on, and the lamp burns lower, it might be worth saying where the wolf is now.

The people of Gubbio have never let go of this story. There is a church in the town, dedicated to Saint Francis, that stands, they say, near the place where the wolf lived. There is a tradition in the town that the wolf is buried there. Whether that is true, I cannot tell you, and I will not pretend to. It is a story that the town tells, and it is a kind one.

And on a hillside above the town there is a basilica to another Gubbio saint, Ubaldo, who was bishop there a generation before Francis was born, and every May, the people carry three enormous wooden towers through the streets at a run, in his honour, and it is the loudest and most cheerful thing you ever saw. The wolf is not part of that. But I like to think that, somewhere in all that noise, he would have felt at home.

And what about us? What are we to take from the wolf?

I think there are three things, and I will say them slowly, because it is late.

The first is that Francis was not afraid. And he was not afraid, I think, because he was not at the centre of his own story. He had given himself away. A man who has nothing to defend can walk out into a field.

The second is that peace is something we make together, and that it costs something. The wolf had to stop. The town had to feed him. Neither of them got everything they wanted. Both of them got something far better.

And the third is the smallest, and perhaps the one I love most. It is that Francis, who could have simply driven the wolf away, or scolded it, or made it go, looked at it instead, and saw a hungry creature. And that is a way of looking at the world that is worth having. Not soft, and not silly. Just attentive. The kind of looking that notices who is hungry.

There is a line in the Gospel of Matthew, where the Lord says, look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Francis took that very seriously. And I think the people of Gubbio, who fed their wolf every day for two years, took it seriously too, even if they never put it quite like that.

Now, for the curious.

Here is what we know, and what we do not.

Saint Francis of Assisi is a real, well-documented man. We have several of his own writings, including the Canticle of the Creatures, and we have several early lives of him, the oldest by Thomas of Celano, written within three years of his death. The details I gave of his life, his birth in Assisi, the cloth merchant father, the scene with the bishop, the nativity at Greccio, the wounds on La Verna, his death at the Portiuncula, and his canonisation in twelve twenty-eight, are all from those early sources or from careful modern histories.

The wolf of Gubbio is a legend. It does not appear in Thomas of Celano, or in Bonaventure. It appears in the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, the Fioretti, which was put together in Italian in the thirteen hundreds, about a century and a half after his death, from older Latin stories. It might be a true memory, handed down for a hundred and fifty years. It might be a parable. It might be a bit of both. Careful historians, like Augustine Thompson, treat it as a beautiful story whose origin we cannot recover, and I think that is the honest position. I have told it as a legend, because it is one.

I should also say that the old tale makes the point, in its way, that the wolf's behaviour is a lesson for people, and not a rule about wolves. Please do not try this with a real one.

What we invented tonight: Bartolo the baker and his wife's mother's chair, Nello the shepherd and his dog, the young friar with the long nose and his loving sort of running, the little girl in the crowd, and nearly all the conversations. The old story gives only a town, a wolf, a saint, a pledge, a preaching in the square, and two years of a wolf going from door to door.

If you would like to read more, the Fioretti is short and very readable, and Raphael Brown's English translation is a good one. For the real man, Augustine Thompson's biography is careful and fair.

That's the story of Saint Francis of Assisi for tonight. His feast is the fourth of October, in the Catholic Church. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

Here is a short prayer, from the one attributed to Saint Francis and loved by so many, though it first appeared in print in France in nineteen twelve, long after his day. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. And where there is sadness, joy.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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