Cave-dwelling Scottish cannibals

A few years ago, I was in a conversation about the most useless academic books or articles we'd read. A journal article about the history of chairs, gender-based division of labor in 18th century Massachusetts, butchering cows with Stone Age flint knives, bird motifs in barbarian belt buckles, the effects of nanoparticles on the viscocity of plastics and so on. It was a painful discussion. Fortunately, someone had read something interesting - a book about murderers who took refuge in caves! Murderers, it seems, a drawn to hide out in caves. Caves are scary. So are murderers. They make a good team. No cave/murderer team was scarier than Alexander "Sawney" Bean and the Bannane Head cave system in Scotland. The story is widely known, so I apologize if I'm writing about something you already knew, but really its your fault for being a know-it-all.

Alexander Bean was the son of a ditch-digger and hedge-trimmer in the 15th Century when those things were apparently professions. The uppity Bean did not want to follow in the family business, and decided that the area would find someone else to dig its ditches and trim the hedges. Instead of finding his way to an occupation suitable for his station he found a particularly cruel and loutish woman to run off with. Having cast off the laws of lesser men, Bean and his wife took refuge in a coastal cave and set about making a clan of cruel and loutish children. These children contributed yet more children until the Beans had a large pack of cave dwellers. And while caves are perfectly suitable places for incestuous clans to propagate they provide little in the ways of sustenance. But Bean, idle, incestuous and Scottish though he was figured a way out of this problem. The local villages were full of people, and soon the clan was busying themselves ambushing people at night, taking them back to their cave and eating them. For 25 years the family continued to prey on people until King James VI of Scotland (James I of England) sent a band of men to capture the incestuous anthropophagi.

Although Alexander Bean's story appears in various gossip papers and books of the 17th century, most historians consider it to be anti-Scottish propaganda. Many similar stories of men refusing to follow the proscribed social order running off to committ various atrocities were popular in that area of Scotland, with many being set before the time of Sawney Bean. In any event, Bean is often listed as Britain's worst serial murderer and the area does a lot to use the grisly legend to promote tourism. His story has been republished so many times and remade in so many forms that its obvious there's just something about a clan of cave-dwelling cannibals that holds people's attention for centuries.