Thomas of Dundale

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Thomas of Dundale, sometimes known as Thomas Dundale, Thomas de Dundelle, Tom Dundell or Thomas de Donvil, was the younger son of a Norman magnate. A victim of the heinous fairy practice of carrying off human children, Dundale disappeared at Christmas of 1096 [45]; he returned to England in 1110 however accompanying the young John Uskglass, and was the latter's first human servant [28, 42]. Despite some fourteen years of captivity in Faerie Thomas had retained enough of his native tongue, Norman French, to interpret between Uskglass and King Henry when the two met to discuss terms after Henry's defeat at the Battle of Newark.

Like the Raven King, Dundale appears to have led a remarkably long life. In the mid-13th century he was noted to have joined with William of Lanchester in pleading (unsuccessfully) with the Raven King to abstain from the use of a particularly brutal method to discover the plots of a traitor [31].


Dundale was also the subject of a poem, Thomas de Dundelle by Chrétien de Troyes [28].

His name may derive from Dundale, a rather imprecise part of Hertfordshire. (Dundale appears on some, but by no means all, Hertfordshire maps, and on those maps where it does feature it is sometimes also named "Dundell".) When it can be found Dundale is apparently just outside Tring.