It is recorded that in AD 950 King Athelstan imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolf skins on Welsh king Hywel Dda, while William of Malmesbury states that Athelstan requested gold and silver and that it was his nephew Edgar the Peaceful who gave up that fine and instead demanded a tribute of wolf skins on King Constantine of Wales. Past presence in England and Wales Humphrey Head, a limestone outcrop at the mouth of the Kent estuary where, allegedly, the last English wolf was killed in the 14th century. The last wolf is thought to have been hunted in 1680. The species was progressively exterminated from Britain through a combination of deforestation and active hunting through bounty systems.
Unlike other British animals, wolves were unaffected by island dwarfism, with certain skeletal remains indicating that they may have grown as large as Arctic wolves. Early writing from Roman and later Saxon chronicles indicate that wolves appear to have been extraordinarily numerous on the island.
Wolves were once present in Great Britain. An Anglo-Saxon wolf hunt as depicted in Thomas Miller's 1859 novel The British Wolf-Hunters.
