Actually, I think the place to start is not wolves, but woods.
Rackham (1980) in the major work Ancient woodland: its history, vegetation and uses in England (London: Arnold) tells us to distinguish Forest – a royal preserve that generated food and timber for the king and “a vast range of technically illegal activities” (p180) for the common people – from woodland. There was, we are told (p181ff), management of trees and underwood (subboscus) coppiced for hurdles, fencing &c in the medieval Forest, but that woodland is not necessarily the same thing: he distinguishes wood-pasture, managed woodland spaces affording access for grazing animals, hunting (legal and illegal) and timber cultivation/collecting from the wildwood, or primeval woodland. Rackham’s view is that this type of woodland was cleared very early in the settled history of England, leaving a landscape that by the time of Domesday was “a land in which nearly half the settlements had no wood”… and that “tracts of uninhabited woodland six miles across… were almost unknown” (pp112-113), although he admits that contiguous woodlands made for larger tracts than the records immediately show. It is interesting to note, too, that large areas of deep woodland are found in France still at this period – a salutary note, especially if we were trying to establish a pan-European view of the folklore of woodland.
This view might be evidenced as a by-line by anthologies of English folk-tales: moors, rivers, markets figure largely, whereas woodland does not. (The Grimm collection, on the other hand, tells of Hansel and Gretl, the Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, Rapunzel and many other stories set in the woods. One of the few stories to exist in both the Englishand German collections, Rumpelstilzen (Tom-tit-tot in England) has the deep wood as the dwelling of the demonic creature at the centre of the tale.)
Imagine a Germanic village – it could be in England, too, for much of England’s inhabited history:, and similar stories exist worldwide, so we might make this a global context: a clearing, with fields, a small group of dwellings, some field system &c, and surrounded by woods. In England they may not have been extensive, but they may have been a barrier to travel as well as an economic resource. Patterns of kinship and maybe feudal loyalty keep this a close-knit community. People who don’t “fit in” might be excluded: travelling families; foreigners; outlaws. Dangerous people on the margins of society. This link – refreshingly, for a Wikipedia entry – has some interesting insights into an intinerant mugger who "who having no liflode, ne sufficeante of goodes, gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers, beynge of his clothynge, and, in manere of insurrection, wente into the wodes in that countrie, like as it hadde be Robyn Hude and his meyne.
Managed or not, the woods, therefore, might be the place where the unwary get into trouble.
We see this echoed in the folk literature. We see Snow White taken out somewhere lonely to be done away with; she finds anonymity (for a while) among marginalised miners. In ”The Green Lady” (collected in Neil Philip’s Penguin Book of English Folktales), the unwary Red Riding Hood protagonist finds herself mixed up with pagan practice, and in “Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman” the boys confront not only non-Christian practice but child-sacrifice and cannibalism.
So where are the wolves?
Wolves are ambiguous, or at least are represented ambiguously today. We have images of the Wolf as symbolic of an eco-friendly world represented in human terms by American First Peoples and subject to cheesy but well meaning manipulation. Beautiful, free, social: there is even something aspirational about the wolf.
We also have the Wolf in story. Here it (should we be honest and say "he"?) can be dangerous (as in the Red Riding Hood stories collected by Jack Zipes, of whom more later), and, where outwitted, looks rather silly – 
so silly that the constant defeat of the stupid wolf in Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf is funny partly because of the inevitability of the wolf’s downfall.
But when we get to these wolves, the ones that positively queue up to be overcome by young and resourceful heroines, we are actually meeting the wolf of our central concern. The Big Bad Wolf is not a wolf at all. It is – he is – so humanoid (or humanised) that we cannot escape the conclusion that this is a werewolf. Well, one of the werewolves, perhaps. As Agamben notes (Homo Sacer, trans D Heller-Roazen, 1998, p 105), "the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou."
The werewolves will have to wait.