‘When a lion looks at you it becomes a leopard.’
Mediæval Englishmen seem to have a partiality for strange beasts, combined with a reluctance to pay exorbitant fees for seeing them. In 1364 Edward III. had to order the mayor and sheriffs of London to protect Roger Owery and John Want, to whom he had committed the custody of a certain Egyptian beast called an ‘Oure,’ various persons, who apparently wished to see the beast without paying, having threatened to assault them and kill the ‘Oure.’ What this creature was is not clear; possibly it was the aurochs or buffalo—Borde’s ‘vengeable beast,’ the Bovy of Bohemia. Whatever it was its keepers, who had no doubt looked forward to making a good thing out of exhibiting it, seem to have had a doubtful bargain, and the same fate befell Thomas Charles, ‘squier,’ and William Lynde just about a century later when they obtained from the king the keeping of his ‘foul called an Estrich.’ They sent the ostrich round the country in charge of Richard Axsmith and John Piers, ‘for to disporte with the sight of hym the kynges true lieges,’—and incidentally, though they do not think that worth mentioning, to put money in their own pockets. ‘How be hit that oother mysdoers in certain places wher lite reverence is doon or shewed to anything of the kinges, as the dede hathe proven, have withoute cause wrongfully doon grete trespasses and offenses as wel to the said foul as to Richard Axsmyth and John Piers.’ At Royston a mob, egged on by the prior, assaulted the keepers and caused the ostrich ‘to ben seyn of alle peuple’ and the unfortunate ‘fowle’ was ‘hurten so sore that he may never be hool, as hit on hym wel appereth.’ When they came to Norwich one of the sheriffs cast them into prison as ‘false Flemings,’ and ‘caused the foul to be seyn in the common strete of alle peuple that list to come seen hym for nought.’ Nor did they have any better luck at the next town, Bury St. Edmunds, where they were again imprisoned and the bird exhibited for nothing, the townsmen ‘axing hem who made hem so hardy as to go on with the kinges foule about among his peuple without a commission.’ This seems to have been the end of their tour in the eastern counties.
‘The unfortunate “fowle” was “hurten so sore.”’
The ostrich does not often occur under that name, but its egg was often made into a cup, under the name of a griffon’s egg or ‘grype’s ey.’ Edward III. had more than one ‘oef de greffon,’ and Henry IV. had half-a-dozen ‘gryppesheys,’ but possibly by this time the term was only conventional and the true origin of the egg was known, as one of these ‘gryppesheys’ was mounted on ‘two white ostriches.’ The griffin, half eagle and half lion, was a very popular mediæval beast; that no specimen is ever recorded to have been taken round on show may have been due to the fact that this beast ‘so much disdaineth vassalrey and subjection that he will never be surprised alive.’ The appearance amongst the jewels of Richard II. of an almsdish supported by two griffons suggests an analogy with its modern relation the Jubjub, of which it is said that ‘In charity meetings it stands at the door, And collects though it does not subscribe.’ If doubt is to be thrown on examples of the griffon’s eggs, still more dubitable is the ‘drinking vessel made of the horn of a griffon, mounted in copper gilt,’ which belonged to Edward III. This may well rank with a relic preserved in the Cathedral Priory of Rochester,—‘the rod of Moses which budded,’—in view of the fact that it was Aaron’s rod which budded and that a griffon has no horns.
If our forefathers never had a chance of seeing a griffon and failed to appreciate an ostrich when they did see one, there is no question that they saw and appreciated the first elephant that landed in England. It was a present from King Louis of France to Henry III. and landed at Sandwich in 1255, whence it proceeded leisurely to London, filling all beholders with astonishment. It only lived a couple of years, and when its successor came over I do not know, but I suspect that there was a very long interval before England was again visited by an elephant. Before its lamented decease it sat for its portrait to Matthew Paris and another contemporary chronicler, and the resulting sketches are quite recognisable. The elephant was not a very favourite subject with mediæval artists, though the Earl of Arundel in 1397 had a piece of tapestry (probably oriental) ‘powdered with lions, olyfauntes and imagery,’ and if any one wants to know what it was like they have only to go to an old house in Market Street at Rye, where they can see just such a piece of tapestry, ‘olyfauntes’ and all, reproduced as a wall-painting. Talking of elephants, a learned man not many years back wrote an article with the fascinating title, ‘How the Elephant became a Bishop’; as a matter of fact it dealt with the evolution of the chess ‘bishop,’ but what a title for a fairy tale!
Elephants, to one mediævally minded, infallibly suggest dragons, for it is notorious that there was bitter enmity between elephants and dragons. And the subject of dragons is a wide one. So far as I know the last, in Western Europe at least, was killed in the Roman Campagna in 1660, its slayer himself dying from the poison in its breath, but it was less than half a century before that, in 1614 to be precise, that a young half-fledged dragon—it was nine feet long and its wings were only just sprouting—was seen in Sussex, at Faygate in St. Leonards Forest. Of course in earlier times they were much more numerous; Switzerland swarmed with them, in fact Lucerne seems to have been almost as much the happy hunting-ground of the dragon and the cockatrice as it is now of the Cook’s tourist. The northern counties, especially Durham and Northumberland, were also much pestered by ‘laidly worms’; two estates were held of the Bishop of Durham from early time by exhibiting to him annually the swords with which redoubtable ancestors of the tenants had slain the Worm of Sockburn and the fearsome Brawn of Brancepeth, a boar to which all ordinary boars were but as ordinary cattle to the Dun Cow, slain by Guy of Warwick with a sword still shown at Warwick Castle. Perhaps the most satisfactory dragon on record was that slain at Rhodes in 1345 by Deodatus de Gonzago. That wily and prudent knight constructed a pantomine dragon on the pattern of the real article and made two of his servants get inside and work it realistically; in this manner he accustomed his horse and his dogs to dragon-baiting, and his trouble was rewarded by the death of the monster and his own election to the mastership of the Knights of St. John. Another famous dragon was the Tarask. It seems that when St. Mary Magdalene landed at Marseilles she installed herself in a dragon’s cave; the dragon was unceremoniously ejected and went off higher up the Rhone; but he had no luck; the first person he met on landing was St. Martha, who gave him a good dressing down and handed him over to the peasants, who slew him but immortalised his name in Tarascon. There were a great many varieties of dragons, but I think the most curious that I have met was one of silver gilt belonging to Henry IV. which was described as ‘au guyse d’un boterflie’; anything less like a dragon than a butterfly it would be difficult to imagine. At the same time some of these terrible beasts seem to have been quite insignificant. The amphisbæna, though it developed in the Bestiaries into a fearsome dragon with a head at each end, started as quite a small worm, so small indeed that a whole one could be carried on the person without inconvenience. So carried it prevented the wearer from ever feeling chilly; in which respect it would seem to have been the opposite of the salamander, whose flesh was so cold that it quenched fire. Henry V. bought a parrot, two monkeys, and three salamanders from a fishmonger. I wonder what the salamanders were; if they were the squabby and unattractive lizard, black, with yellow spots, which now goes by that name I fear the king must have been disappointed. If he experimented upon their alleged ability to live in fire, or at least to extinguish it, I fear the disappointment would have been shared by the salamanders.