The Naming of the Beasts: Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary 0715622382, 9780715622384

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THE NAMING OF THE BEASTS

Frontispiece. Blue (grey) lupus in defensive threat posture as it creeps towards a flock of pale sheep with curled horns. (St John’s College Oxford MS 61 f.22.)

THE NAMING OF THE BEASTS Natural history in the medieval bestiary

Wilma George & Brunsdon Yapp Frontispiece. Blue (grey) lupus in defensive threat posture as it creeps towards a flock of pale sheep with curled horns. (St John’s College Oxford MS 61 f.22.)

Duckworth

First published in 1991 by Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. The Old Piano Factory 43 Gloucester Crescent, London NWl

Contents

© 1991 by Wilma George & William Brunsdon Yapp

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocop5dng, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Preface List of colour plates Acknowledgments Note on manuscripts

ISBN 0 7156 2238 2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data George, Wilma, 1918— The naming of the beasts: natural history in the medieval bestiary. 1. Animals, Taxonomy I. Title II. Yapp, Brunsdon, 1909591'.012 ISBN 0-7156-2238-2

vii ix x xi

%

1. 2. 3. 4.

L Introduction

1

IL General Scenes

29

Creation scenes The naming of the animals Beasts Birds

29 37 41 42

III. Mammals 1. Wildnaammals (i) Beasts with claws (ii) Beasts with hoofs (iii) Beasts with nails (iv) Swimmers (v) Fliers 2. Domestic mammals

46 46 72 91 93 101 103 IV. Birds

Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd. Printed in Great Britain by Ebenezer Baylis & Son, Worcester

44

1. Non-passerines (i) Long-legged birds (ii) Swimming birds (iii) Diurnal birds of prey (iv) Nocturnal birds of prey (v) Gamebirds (vi) Pigeons and doves (vii) Other non-passerines 2. Passerines (viii) Crows and corvids (ix) Songbirds 3. Unidentifiable birds

121 123 123 130 138 147 152 158 162 169 169 173 182

V

Contents V. Other Animals 1. 2. 3. 4.

Serpentes Pisces Vermes, or terrestrial invertebrates Insects (i) Ants (ii) 'Little birds’ (iii) Bees

References Index of animals General index

190 190 202 211 213 214 215 217 220 223 229

Preface

We had known each other slightly for many years, but it was not until we found ourselves reading separate papers to a meeting of the Society for the History of Natural History that we discovered that our work had been running on nearly parallel lines - Wilma George’s on mammals, Brunsdon Yapp’s on birds. We decided, since nothing systematic on the natural history in medieval bestiaries had ever been published before, to collaborate on a book, and this volume is the result. The Introduction and the chapters on Greneral Scenes and Birds are by Brunsdon Yapp, that on Mammals by Wilma George, while that on Other Animals is a joint production. The bestiary texts on reptiles, fish and invertebrates are often difficult to interpret because the writers were less familiar with these animals than they were with the mammals and birds. Most of the reptiles are unknown in the British isles, while there are often alternative names for the same fish. Some names of invertebrates are obvious, others, such as vermes ('worms’), are more obscure. These Other Animals make up only a small part of the bestiary texts, so instead of treating each named type separately we have grouped them, picking out only the interesting points of natural history. We do not discuss the few plants or other natural or unnatural objects dealt with in some bestiaries. Although nothing (except some papers by G.C. Druce and the footnotes in White’s translation) has been published on this subject before, the book could not have been written without the labour that has gone into the study of the literary background by many other scholars, and we acknowledge our debt to them; the more important works on which we have drawn are named in the list of references. We also wish to thank various friends who have helped with translation. Oxford Cambridge

W.G. B.Y

#

Vll

Colour plates

Frontispiece. Lupus creeping towards a flock of sheep (St John’s College Oxford MS 61) between pages 16 and 17 I. Adam naming the animals (St John’s College Oxford MS 178) II. A cervus family (Bodleian Library MS 764) III. Cocodrillus (St John’s College Oxford MS 178) rV. Bos and taurus (British Librap^ MS Hartley 3244) V. Simla and satirus (Bodleian Library MS Bodley 602i) VI. Anas (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621) VII. Graculus (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621) VIIL ViconM (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621) IX. Grus (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621)

ix

Acknowledgments

Note on manuscripts

For study in libraries, and for permission to reproduce photographs of manuscripts, we are grateful to the following:

Unlike printed books, which are mechanically reproduced so that except for accidents all copies of one edition are alike, each manuscript is unique, and therefore is given some mark by which it can be named. For manuscripts in the larger libraries this is a number, to which may be added initials or words. In some libraries different groups, usually those derived from different sources or different donors, are named, and the manuscripts included in each are numbered separately, so that the number is incomplete without the name of the collection as well as that of the library. A particular difficulty arises with the Bodleian Library (which is the library of the University of Oxford, although that phrase is never used) since one of its collections is named Bodley, so that ‘MS Bodley 764’ does not mean ‘Bodleian Library MS 764’. A further difficulty is that University College Oxford is a different legal entity from the University of Oxford, so that ‘University College MS 120’ is not the property of the University, even though, to add to the confusion, the College’s manuscripts are kept in the Bodleian Library. It is customary for all but the most important national libraries to begin by stating the town where the library is, then to name the library, and then to give the number of the manuscript. The British Library in London is customarily abbreviated to BL, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris to BN. The manuscripts and books of the British Museum were transferred to the newly constituted British Library in 1973, so that older works refer to the manuscripts by the same number as at present, but preceded by BM not BL. Throughout this book the Cambridge University Library is abbreviated to CUL. For brevity, we shorten names where there can be no confusion; Harl. for Harley and Roy. for Royal, for example, are generally used. We write ‘St John’s’ for ‘St John’s College Oxford’ because although there are many medieval manuscripts at St John’s College Cambridge there are no bestiaries. ‘Corpus’ and ‘Trinity’ mean the Cambridge not the Oxford colleges for a similar reason. About 40 English manuscripts of the Bestiary written in Latin survive, and of these three-quarters are still in British libraries. They are shown in Table 1 on pp. 2-3, where the classification into families is explained. Their full references, in approximate chronological order within each group with the range of dates, are as follows:

The British Library. The Dean and Chapter of Canterbury. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster. The Curators of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Syndics of the Cambridge University Library. The Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford. The President and Scholars of St. John Baptist College, Oxford. The Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. The Master and Fellows of Trinity C^lege, Cambridge. The 10th Duke of Northumberland, on behalf of the Trustees of the 9th Duke (Library of Alnwick Castle). Phofographs of manuscripts from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library,, Fitzwilliam Museum, University'College Oxford, Trinity College Cambridge and Alnwick Castle were supplied by the libraries, the others were taken by ourselves. Copyright is reserved to the owners. The staffs of the above libraries have been very helpful, and we tharik them all.

X

XI

Note on manuscripts Bis family 1120-1275 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud miscellaneous 247. British Library MS Stowe 1067. Cambridge, Corpus Christ! College MS 22. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 602i Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 167. British Library Royal MS 2 C xii is an unillustrated bestiary of the early thirteenth century. Its text is close to that of Laud misc. 247. Transitional family 1185-1260 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 81. We have studied this only through the photographs at the Courtauld Institute, the help of which we gratefully acknowledge, and occasional illustrations elsewhere. Leningrad, State Public Library MS Saltykov-Shchedrin Latin Q v V1. We have studied this only through the colour facsimile. British Library Royal MS 12 C xix. Alnwick, Library of His Grace the Duke of Newcastle at Alnwick Castle MS 477. Cambridge, Trinity College MS R 14^ (884 in James’ Catalogue). This manuscript is grouped by McCulloch as a transitional bestiary, so we have left it as such, but it is different from the others in this group. Folios 88-95 are a normal Bis with very few differences from fjaud misc. 247; then comes on f.98 Adam naming the animals, followed by beasts, birds, reptiles, worms and fish, which follow very closely the order of IIB. If this manuscript is put in T it must at least be a separate subfamily from the others, but it is probably better looked on as a composite bestiary, like Bodley 602 and Douce 88, in which the editor has put two versions, one of Bis, the other of IIB, in a’ single volume. There is a different set of illustrations from that of Alnwick and the others of T. British Library Royal MS 2 B vii (Queen Mary’s Psalter) is not a bestiary, but a Psalter with many marginal drawings in several sets; one of these is based on a bestiary, which is possibly of the transitional type, but there is no text. Many of the pictures have no parallel elsewhere. Another English Psalter (Munich Gall. 16) contemporary with Queen Mary, also has a series of marginal bestiary drawings that correspond more or less with the transitional list. Those illustrated by Randall, which are all that we have seen, are very different from those in any bestiary. Since the psalter text has been said to have been written in France, the drawings may also have been done there. We make no use of it.

Note on manuscripts

Second family Subfamily IIA1200-1325 Aberdeen University Library MS 24. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1511. Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College MS 100 (=A 5 15). May be foreign. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 151. Oxford, University College MS 120. British Library MS Sloane 278. May be foreign. Subfamily IIB 1170-1330 British Library Additional MS 11283. Cambridge University Library MS li 4 26. This manuscript is sometimes referred to in other books as ‘the Cambridge bestiary’, as if there were not two other bestiaries in the University Library and nine others elsewhere in Cambridge. Oxford, St John’s College MS 61. British Library MS Harley 3244. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 109/178. This manuscript has only five pictures, all of mammals. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 533. British Library MS Sloane 3544. Canterbury Cathedral Library MS Lit. D 10 (formerly Y 8 3). Cambridge, GonviUe and Caius College MS 384/604. Oxford, St John’s College MS 178. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 88i. Cambridge, Fitzilliam Museum MS 379. Cambridge, Corpus Christ! College MS 53. Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale MS Hs 8827-42. Our information on this comes from a paper by F. Lyna (1939-40) who says that it resembles Caius 372/621, but the figures in the paper show that it does not. Its list of animals is, with a few omissions, the same as that of BL Add. 11283, so that, pending a comparison of the texts, it must be placed in IIB. Subfamily IIC1230-1250 British Library MS Harley 4751. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764. Subfamily IID1230 British Library Royal MS 12 F xiii.

XU

xm

Note on manuscripts Third family 1220-1300 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 254. Cambridge University Library MS Kk 4 25. London, Westminster Abbey Library MS 22. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e Musaeo 136. May be foreign. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 88ii. Fourth family 1450

Introduction

Cambridge University Library MS Gg 6 5. *

Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Reg. Lat. 258 seems never to have been properly studied, and on the information given in Morgan (1982) seems to be completely unrelated to any of the existing families. Of New York Pierpont Morgan 890 (formerly belonging to Sir Sidney Cockerell) and Copenhagen Royal Library GL. Vgl. 1633, we know nothing beyond the little information in James (1928). Other bestiaries that we have seen, or of which we have seen reproductions, appear not to be English.

The Latin of medieval manuscripts was in some ways different from classical Latin. Spelling was uncertain; consonants in the middle of a word w;ere sometimes doubled, plurals in -ae were often written -e. The aspirate was inserted or omitted at random, while f and ph, i and y, were interchanged. Case endings were often uncertain, and abbreviations, the meanings of which sometimes have to be guessed, were common. In this book direct quotations are reproduced as in the manuscript used, except that abbreviations and contractions of which there is no doubt are expanded; otherwise what seems to be the commonest spelling is used. It has not always been convenient to give a word-for-word translation; the case endings indicating singular or plural, nominative or genitive and so on in the Latin, which are as in the text, do not always agree with the forms in the English.

xiv

Brunsdon Yapp Bestiaries are probably the commonest of all illustrated manuscripts of the Romanesque and Gothic Middle Ages other than Bibles, parts of Bibles, and church service books. Over 40 copies, written in Latin, are known from the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with a few more outside these limits, as well as some fragmentary or unillustrated ones and some in various vernaculars, notably French. M.R. James listed 40 of the Latin versions in 1928, which may be compared with the 92 versions of the Apocalypse, of which some were in French, that he knew from roughly the same period in 1931. Bestiaries have been much studied, but almost entirely from a textual point of view. Little attention has been paid to the pictures, and until recently almost none to the natural history. The object of this book is to correct these deficiencies, and to show that, so far from being an ignorant collection of moralities and old wives’ tales, as has usually been assumed by scholars, a bestiary is an attempt, not wholly unsuccessful or discreditable for the time at which it was produced, to give an account of some of the more conspicuous creatures that could be seen by the reader or that occurred in legends. In spite of its name, it is not concerned only with beasts. It usually includes rather more birds than mammals (to which ^beasts’, Latin bestia, are equivalent), often some fishes and reptiles, and a few insects and other invertebrates. There are also accounts of trees and, in a few copies, of sundry natural phenomena and unnatural wonders. We shall deal mainly with the beasts and birds, where the best natural history is found. It is necessary first to deal briefly with the early history of the bestiary, and for this we rely on published sources. No illustrated manuscript is known that can be dated earlier than the eighth or ninth century, but various lines of evidence indicate that a text was first put together in Greek, probably in Alexandria, in the second century AD. As will be seen, this is supported by the list of animals it contains, all of which are or were found in North Africa. This version is called the Physiologus, because most of the chapters contain the phrase 'The 1

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

I. Introduction

Table 1. Bestiaries used in this study T

Approximate dates

Bis

1100-1130

BL Stowe 1067 Bodl.Lib.Laud misc.247

1150-1175

Corpus 22

BLAdd.11283 Leningrad BLRoy.l2 Cxix

1175-1200

1231-1260

Bodl.Lib.Douce 167

1261-1299

1300-1330

BL Roy. 12Fxiii

Fitzwilliam 254 CUL Kk 4 25

BL Harl.3244 BL Harl.4751 Bodl.Lib.Bodley 533 Bodl.Lib. BL Sloane 3544 Bodley 7 64

TCC R14 9

Canterbury Lit D 10 Caius 109/178 Caius 384/604 St John’s 178 Bodl.Lib.Douce 88i

Westminster 22 Bodl.Lib.e Musaeo 136

Fitzwilliam 379 Corpus 53

Bodl.Lib. Douce 88ii

4

1400,+ _fc

CUL li 4 36 St John’s 61

Alnwick

BLRoy.2 B vii

1

Aberdeen 24 Bodl.Lib. Ashmole 1511

Bodl.Lib.Bodley 602i

1201-1230

IIA

Caius 372/621 Bodl.Lib.Bodley 602ii Bodl.Lib.Douce 151 Univ.Coll.120 BL Sloane 278

CUL Gg 6 5

$

-9

* Not more than 15 others, some of which are doubtfully English, are known to be in Europe and the USA. Most bestiaries can be dated only approximately by such things as the figure drawing or costume, but the dates given are unlikely to be incorrect by more than one step. Within each family the manuscripts are in approximate dated order. BL = British Library; Bodl.Lib. = Bodleian Library; CUL = Cambridge University Library;

Caius = Gonville and Caius College Cambridge; Corpus = Corpus Christi College Cambridge; St John’s = St John’s College Oxford; TCC = Trinity College Cambridge; Univ.Coll. = University College Oxford. BL Sloane 278 is an aberrant manuscript, and we have made little use of it.

Physiologus says It must have been translated into Latin at the latest by the fourth century, because although no manuscripts anything like as early as this are known, the quotations from the Bible in some of those from the eighth and ninth centuries are from a version that predates the Vulgate of Jerome, which was completed about 400 The earliest Latin version that could be an ancestor or near collateral of the English manuscripts with which we are here chiefly concerned, is MS 233 in the Burgerbibliothek at Bern; it may conveniently be known as B (although that designation was applied by Carmody, who edited it in 1939 in a somewhat muddled way, to include also some later manuscripts which are very different). It is of the eighth or early ninth century, and is unillustrated. A shorter ninth-century version, which appears to be an independent translation

and is the earliest illustrated bestiary known, is also at Bern (MS 318), and is sometimes called C. By the twelfth century the bestiary seems to have been taken up in England, and from then on the majority of known copies are written in Latin and were produced in England, with some similar ones made in northern France and Flanders. The few English vernacular versions are fragmentary, but suggest that the book may have been known in late Saxon times; this is supported by the occurrence of several bestiary creatures in the Bayeux Tapestry, which was probably made in about 1080. A liber bestiarum was in the library of Peterborough Cathedral at the end of the tenth century. The developed Latin-English work, known for certain from the twelfth century, we refer to as the Bestiary, with a capital B, while bestiaries, with a lower-case b, may include other similar works.

2

3

AD.

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

I. Introduction

The English manuscripts of the Bestiary, with some closely related to them, were first put into a clear classification in 1928 by M.R. James, who divided them into four families. This arrangement seems to have been ignored by Carmody in the USA and Sbordone in Italy, but was accepted by McCulloch in 1959. She made some additions and corrections, and her book was slightly revised in 1962. In particular, she subdivided James’ first family. I have recently proposed, chiefly on the basis of the birds, a subdivision of the second family, and also a re-grouping of the manuscripts that are based partly on the Aviarium of Hugh of Folieto. The manuscripts (all of which we have seen) that we have used in writing this book are mostly in English libraries and are shown in Table 1. A few possibly important manuscripts in foreign libraries which we have not seen and of which neither text nor a full set of photographs has been available to us (these are in any case a poor substitute for the real thing) are omitted. We specially regret not having been able to give full attention to MS 81 in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, which may be a better version of the transitional group than any in England. We were refused permission to examine it when it was in London in 1984. A coloured facsmile of the other important transitional bestiary, which is in Leningrad, was published in Moscow in 1984, and has only recently become available to us. The first subfamily of James’ family! consists of manuscripts closely resembling in their text Bern 233, but having additions from the Etymologiarum of Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), for which reason McCulloch calls them Bis. They differ from each other in several details; in particular Corpus 22 is unlike the others in many respects. Most* of the rest of James’ first family are called by McCulloch transitipnal, since they have features in common with those of the second family. A few, which McCulloch calls H, since they have material from the Aviarium, a work now ascribed to Hugh of Folieto, who flourished at the end of the twelfth century, we prefer to put in the second family, of which they make the first subfamily, called HA. They follow the usual second family text for much of their length, but the section on birds begins with several chapters taken from Hugh. The Aviarium exists as a separate work, some of the manuscripts being illustrated; we have seen some of these, but they are not listed here. The illustrations, as well as the text, are largely taken into the bestiary manuscripts of IIA, but we include here also one rather late and especially beautiful manuscript, Caius 372/621, which, although it has much material from \hB Aviarium, is without most of its characteristic pictures. The majority of the second family, the typical ones, we call subfamily IIB. Two others, BL Harley 4751 and Bodley 764, which are obviously closely related to each other both in text and in illustrations, have additions from the Topographia Hibernica of Giraldus Cambrensis, which was written at the end of the twelfth century; they make subfamily IIC. Finally, one aberrant manuscript, BL Roy. 12 F xiii.

which has many more birds than others of this family, is subfamily IID. Unfortunately most of the spaces in it for the illustrations of birds have been left unfilled. For families III and IV we follow James and McCulloch. Family III has many more chapters, mostly taken from Isidore, and there are more pictures of particular species of fish and invertebrates. The only manuscript of family IV also has a long list of 70 mammals and 48 birds, but while some of the contents is taken from Isidore, probably rather more comes from the thirteenth-century encyclopaedia De Proprietatibus Rerum {On the Nature of Things) by Bartholomaeus Anglicus (or Glanville). This author quotes his sources almost like a modern scientist, and makes much use of Aristotle. In preparation for a catalogue of the manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library which was never completed, James made a list (which is kept in the library) of the chapters in this bestiary which shows those that he recognised as coming from Bartholomew. I have checked the bestiary against the 1472 printed edition of Bartholomew, and find that for some of the animals the correspondence is exact, while in others the bestiarist has either added material or left some out. Some chapters are quite independent. For example, Bartholomew makes a mistake about ciconia when he begins Ciconia vel ybis est avis fluvialis (the stork or ibis is a water bird) and then continues with the usual account of ibis. The bestiary gives a short version of the usual account of ciconia, showing that the editor did discriminate among his sources. Few bestiaries can be accurately dated, since there is rarely any internal evidence, and one must rely on general arguments from such things as the figure-drawing and hair-style of the human figures, and on the palaeography. We accept the statements of experts on these points, but sometimes they disagree with each other, so we have grouped the manuscripts in blocks of about 30 years. It is unlikely that with better knowledge any manuscript would have to be moved more than one block. The families and subfamilies may be taken as successive revisions in time, but (except where a group has only one or two manuscripts) each persists over a period of one or two centuries, so that the versions overlap. It is not even certain that the manuscripts called transitional began as a group earlier than the second family, for while one of these (BL Add. 11283) has recently been dated to about 1170 by Kauffmann, the earliest of the transitional manuscripts, Morgan 81, cannot be put earlier than 1180, and is usually held to be a few years later. It seems that, before the days of copyright, one editor after another made a new version to his liking, and each of these went on being copied side by side with the others. Everyone agrees that the Latin-English Bestiary had its origin in the Greek Physiologus. That it did so is probably true, but too much emphasis has been placed on this, with the result that the meaning of the Bestiary has been neglected and its purpose misinterpreted. There are learned books and articles about the Greek and other early

4

5

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

I. Introduction

versions, but so far as we can discover there is no complete analysis of the text of the Bestiary or any comparison of the various families beyond their chapter headings and general contents. There are editions of Greek, Syriac, Coptic and early Latin versions, but none of an English bestiary. There are five facsimiles, two transitional manuscripts, one of IIA, two of IIB, but none of Bis or III or IV, for which one has to go to the manuscripts themselves. To make a biological analogy, it is as if zoologists, basing themselves, in the absence of any knowledge of amphibians or reptiles, on a few recondite points such as the transitory occurrence of gill-slits in the human fetus and a rather forced comparison of the bones of the arm and leg with those of the fins of a lungfish, told us that the mammals are derived from fish, with the result that research, instead of getting on with the study of the comparative anatomy of mammals, was directed to the reconstruction of hypothetical extinct fish. The fully-developed English bestiary has about as much relationship to the Physiologus as the body of a mammal has to that of a fish, or, to make a non-biological comparison, as a motor car has to a sledge. To judge from the reconstructions of Peters, Sbordone and others, and the translation of Carlill, the general pattern for each chapter in the Physiologus is: a quotation from scripture; one fact of natural history, or purported natural history, about the habits or properties of the animal; and the moral to be drawn from this for human life, sometimes supported by further biblical quotations. The early Latin versions (B, Y and C) are similar, but from Bis onward there are progressive changes of four main sorts; the omission of the scriptural quotations; the omission of the moralising; the addition of an etymology of the name; and the addition of further facts of natural history. In the third family, for most chapters only the natural history and etymology remain. This may be illustrated briefly by the accounts of aquila, the eagle. Physiologus B, Y and C begin with a quotation from Psalm 103:5 (A.V.: ‘Thy youth is renewed like an eagle’s’). This is followed by a story of the eagle, when it is ageing, flying near to the sun to singe its wings and burn the film off its eyes and then plunging into a pool, which restores its youth. The moral is that man should similarly renew himself by flying to the sun, that is Jesus Christ. Bis and IIB bring in the etymology and more natural history. Aquila comes from acumen, indicating the sharpness of its vision; it can see little fishes from high up, so that it can plunge into the water to capture them. It holds its young to the sun, and those that turn away it rejects. The quotation from the Psalm is omitted but the moral is retained. In III the moral has gone also, and the further fact, that when the bird is old its beak grows so that it cannot eat, is added. There is however a new morality or symbolism, ending with the statement that the eagle represents the ascension of Christ, just as the phoenix does his resurrection. There has been some adaptation. Ichneumon (the mongoose) and

mirmecoleon (the ratel), which may have been well known to the North African readers of the Physiologus but were unknown in northern Europe, drop out of the list of mammals. The hedgehog, under the name of erinacius or ericius or variants of these, is in the Physiologus and in most bestiaries. The story gives an interesting example of how the latter are sometimes adapted to a better natural history and to a northern climate. In the Physiologus the hedgehog is said to climb trees and shake down the fruit, on which the beast rolls so that the fruit is pierced by its spines and is so carried to the young. Transitional bestiaries repeat the story but are specific in saying that the hedgehog climbs a vine {vitem) and causes a grape {uvam) to fall. Perhaps realising that hedgehogs do not climb trees, bestiaries of the second family, such as CUL li 4 26 and Corpus 53, say only that the hedgehog cuts off a grape from the vine. The third family has changed the text to read that it cuts off an apple or a grape {pomum aut uvam) from a tree {arbore). Vines were formerly cultivated in England, but they gradually went out of use, and to judge from the rarity of true vine-scroll in the decoration of English illuminated manuscripts in the fourteenth century in comparison with those of France, by then few English artists knew what they were like. The pictures are not very helpful. Most of the fruits are the size of grapes, and none is larger than the smallest apples. It Corpus 53 the tree has one good vine leaf while in the contemporary Queen Mary’s Psalter (Roy. 2 B vii, which has marginal decorations taken from a bestiary, but no text) the leaves are similar to those of an apple tree; in both of these the fruits appear to be about an inch and a half long, but

6

7

10

^

uftts ve fefc

TtroUigir t wUt

gcimius flUt

tiiad u

flLtouii aSIcgair-fcp^Anulmi 1. Ericius (hedgehog). Note, in the line of text below the picture, (an apple or a grape). (Westminster Abbey Library MS 22 f.29/35.)

aut uva

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

I. Introduction

in Corpus they are carried in the mouth, not on the spines. Most often the trees are unrecognisable. It may well be asked, for whom were all these manuscripts made? There are at least twelve which have some evidence of ownership, in the fourteenth century or earlier, by a religious house or by an individual inmate of one, while we can find no evidence that any bestiary was owned by a layman before the Reformation. It looks, therefore, as if the book was essentially a religious production. The foundations known to have possessed bestiaries are variously Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, Franciscan and Augustinian, so they were clearly not confined to any one Order. Clark has suggested that Hugh of Folieto’s Aviarium was a book of instruction for Cistercian lay brethren, and the Bestiary might have had a similar purpose. Both the Aviarium and the Bestiary contain what may broadly be called moral instruction, and it is this that Clark stresses. But both also contain much natural history, and this too might have been a subject for teaching. Of the 44 manuscripts of the Aviarium or of the Bestiary incorporating parts of the Aviarium listed by Clark, 19 were produced in North France or Flanders, and eleven, including all those in our subfamily II, in England. Of the remainder, the majority are French. Two of the manuscripts are Italian, and there are also two Bohemian and one Spanish. It looks a§if French monasteries favoured the Aviarium, while English ones preferred the Bestiary, or this combined with the Aviarium, Subfamily IIB has some 50 more animals than the Physiologus, and of th^se only five mammals and two birds have any moralisation; two of these, both mammals, are the only ones with a biblical quotation. Most of the 30 or so further additions in III are short sentences which deal with nothing but etymology or natural history. Whatever may be argued about the earlier bestiaries or the Aviarium, it can hardly be said that these later English bestiaries could have had any other function than to teach natural history. If bestiaries were produced in monasteries for internal use, the next question is, How were they made? There is no reason to think that they were produced in any different way from other manuscripts, which was by a scribe seated at a desk, with a quill and knife in hand and usually an inkpot beside him - there are many contemporary pictures of this, including for example the bestiary Ashmole 1511 (f.95v). There are manuscripts with misspellings that come from misreadings, such as sulica for fulica in Fitzwilliam 254 and Westminster 22, showing that the scribe was copying from a pre-existing manuscript in front of him, but there are others that are mistakes of the ear not the eye, suggesting that a reader was dictating to the scribe, or more probably scribes, since this is the obvious way in which to make multiple copies. Ciconia may appear as siconia (Canterbury, Trinity R 14 9); psitacus as sitacus (e Musaeo 136) or even pitacus (Westminster). (How many of us pronounce the ‘p’ in ‘psychology’, whatever we may do in ‘pseudo’?)

The most interesting of these is cavo for pavo in Fitzwilliam 379, to which we shall refer again. The rarity of mistakes in such a difficult word as psitacus perhaps suggests that dictation was not very common. (Palaeographers tell us that this sort of mistake is more likely to have been made by the copyist pronouncing the words aloud to himself as he wrote. Wliile not denying the possibility of this, I do not believe it is the normal explanation. I remember that my mother often spoke words aloud when reading to herself, but her spelling was meticulous and she never made such mistakes as writing ‘s’ for ‘c’.) Some mistakes might be made either way; aucipiter and ancipiter, both common mistakes for accipiter, could be the result either of mishearing or misreading. So might the transference from maxillis aprinus (chapped like a boar) in the description of the yale in most bestiaries to maxillis caprinus (chapped like a goat) in e Musaeo 136. This however might have been a confusion in the names, since the Latin for wild boar is aper while the Greek is kapros. Although the justification for dictation was presumably that it enabled several manuscripts to be produced more quickly than by separate copying, no two existing bestiaries have been shown to have been produced in this way, which suggests that although many have survived many more have been lost. In fact most of the closely similar pairs, such as Aberdeen/Ashmole and Harley 4751/Bodley 764, are on general art-historical grounds said to be separated by several years. Many manuscripts have spaces that should no doubt be occupied by drawings but are not. The most notable of these are Caius 109/178, with only five pictures and 95 spaces, and Royal 12 F xiii, in which the mammals are complete but aquila and vultur are the only birds illustrated, although there are spaces for all the others. In these therefore the system was that the scribe, possibly following editorial instructions, planned which and where the pictures should be; the manuscript was then most likely given to someone else, who was presumably skilled in drawing, to complete. Although there are known to have been some men - Matthew Paris is the most notable - who were both scribe and artist, it was commoner in the Middle Ages for the two functions to be separate. There are some completely unillustrated bestiaries, but the fact that the majority, at least of those that have survived, were designed from the first to have pictures for all, or at least most, of the animals mentioned, shows that these were an important part of the book, and, since they seldom illustrate the moralities, supports the view that the Bestiary was more than just a source of these. By whom or how the spaces left by the scribe were filled we do not know, but we can consider the possibilities, and there are some internal clues. Obviously the drawings might have been done by someone just along the cloister from the scribe, and a group of manuscripts written from a single dictation might have been completed either by a group of illuminators or successively by the same artist. No two surviving examples are close enough for the second

8

9

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

possibility to be likely. If a group of manuscripts, whether produced by dictation or not, was given to different artists, these need not all have been in the same scriptorium or atelier. This brings us to the question of copying. Historians of the art of the Middle Ages have been too ready to assume that if two images are even slightly alike one must have been copied from the other, forgetting that artists are often original-minded people - there is no reason to think that those of former times were any different from artists today. Sometimes images were copied, but sometimes they were drawn from nature. Small birds mobbing an owl could have been seen in any garden, churchyard or wood, just as they can (though probably less often) nowadays. So could an owl holding a rat or mouse. Each of these scenes appears in an owl chapter in two bestiaries. The mobbing is shown for bubo in Bodley 764 (IIC) and for noctua among the bestiary illustrations in Queen Mary’s Psalter. Bubo holds a rat or mouse in Bodley 602ii (IIA) while noctua does this in Bodley 764 (IIC). The two pairs are therefore neither for the same species of owl nor from the same group of manuscripts. In addition an unnamed owl holding a mouse is among the birds being named by Adam in Alnwick, which is transitional. Both scenes occur several times in other forms of art — mobbing in stone at Norwich and Wells and in wood at Norwich and Beverley Minster ’and in the decoration of some non-bestiary manuscripts (e.g. Bodl. Lib. Rawl. poet. 223), while the mouse is in stone at Cley (Norfolk; grid ref. TG/049431) and in wood at Norwich, Beverley Minster and Newark, for example. It is an unnecessary and unlilj:ely hypothesis that all these came from the same source when it would be so easy for the scenes to have been drawn from life over and over again. The cases where one can deduce that copying did take place are those where there is some sort of pattern that is repeated in several manuscripts. The illustrations for pelicanus in Aberdeen, Ashmole, Doucfe and University College of IIA are in three panels, an arrangement that is unlikely to have been thought up more than once. Even here, copying was not slavish, for while in Aberdeen the three pelicans are in lozenges in a rectangle with its long axis across the page, in Ashmole the rectangle is similar but the spaces enclosing the birds are squares. In other manuscripts of IIA this arrangement tends to be lost, and the illustrations revert to a more normal type. Copying is probable also where the pictures tell a story in the same way in more than one manuscript, especially where they show detail that is not mentioned in the text. In nearly all bestiaries there is a picture of vulpis (the fox) lying down shamming dead and being investigated by birds. This is described in the text as an example of deceit; when a bird comes near enough the fox leaps up and catches it. A recumbent fox could be drawn simply by following this, but there is no reason why, if this were all, he should be (as he is in every one of the 27 examples known to us) supine, nor why in about a quarter of cases

2. Noctua holding a rat. (BL Harley MS 4751 f.46v; Bodley 754is similar.)

3. An owl holding a rat: Newark St Mary Magdalen misericord, c. 1524 and therefore probably too late to be copied from a bestiary.

from two to seven cubs watch from their holes. Neither the cubs nor his position is mentioned in the text, the only detail there given being that his tongue protrudes; this is shown in only half the pictures. The reconstructed Physiologus, however, and the ninth-century Latin version called Y (which is said to have left no descendants) do mention that foxes have holes (Matthew 8:20) and say that the animal throws himself on his back (but do not mention his cubs or his tongue). This suggests that when the scene had once been drawn, presumably in a lost version, it was copied without reference to the memuscript in front of the artist. Copying by itself was not enough. In no two examples are

V

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary P -V

^

the attendant birds alike. The text says that they sit on the fox’s body, but in many manuscripts they also fly around, and in some they sit watching in trees; they range in number from one to ten, the commonest numbers being three, four and five. Very few are identifiable, but some have hooked beaks or are vaguely like crows, and in five (Aberdeen, Caius 372/621, Sloane 278, St John’s 178 and Bodley 764) which are not otherwise very closely related, there are magpies. St John’s 178 (IIB) is unique in having a fully painted illustration in which the birds are two magpies, a crow, a goshawk and a finch; the jizz of the last is unmistakable, but it is not specifically identifiable. The second half of the story - the fox seizing a bird - is illustrated in only a few manuscripts, and no two are alike. The third case in which copying is likely concerns those creatures that were unknown in the area where the manuscript was being illustrated. These range from species which it is unlikely but just possible that an artist might have seen, such as the eagle or the elephant, to those whose names, whatever they may originally have connoted, had long become detached from any recognisable animal. In all these the artist could either copy a pre-existing drawing (not necessarily in a bestiary) or do the best he could by following the text. There is evidence that each course was sometimes chosen. The first elephant recorded in England was ^ven to Henry III by Louis IX of France in 1255 and was drawn from life by Matthew Paris {Chronica majora, Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 16, f.lv), but there are elephants in English bestiaries before then that look as if they might have been copied, at several removes, from some earlier picture drawn from’the life. There is a quite good elephant in Bern 318, which was presumably drawn on the continent. There’are few points that could be taken from the text, and the feet in early English bestiaries are usually wrong, being based on those of a bull or a dog. An exception is the late twelfth-century BL Add. 11283, where the elephant has good feet, and is a reasonable representation of the animal. Some of the drawings that are later than Matthew Paris, for example that in the Westminster Bestiary, which belonged to the Friars Minor at York, look as if they might have been copied from his drawing. Pelicanus meant no real bird to the English Middle Ages. The drawings of it attacking its young and then reviving them with blood from its own breast could be taken from the written story, but there is enough similarity between some of the versions to suggest copying. The later standard representation of the pelican ‘in its piety’, so common not only in ecclesiastical art but in heraldry, probably had its origin in the isolated final scene in the bestiary. Upupa and epops both clearly meant the hoopoe, for they are onomatopoeic for that bird. Hoopoes only occasionally reach England, and it is unlikely that they were any more common when the bestiaries were being written than they are now. They are striking birds, and can hardly be overlooked when they are present, as they are over the whole

of the continent. English illustrators did not know the bird, but they usually seized on the one point in the text that they could use - that it has a crest. They had no idea what this was like, so they sometimes gave the bird a crest that was entirely imaginary, but most often gave it that of a peacock. In Laud misc. 247 and Stowe 1067, the two earliest English bestiaries, which are both Bis, the bird has pretty much the jizz of a peahen, suggesting that the artist was influenced in his conception by the crest that he had drawn. The peacock-type crest is always shown conventionally, as it is when the peacock itself is drawn in bestiaries and other manuscripts, with a small number, usually three, of pin-like feathers on the heai This type of hoopoe runs right through all the groups, except IID which has no picture and IIC, from Bis to rV. In two late manuscripts of IIB (Fitzwilliam 379 and Corpus 53) the crest is that of a lapwing, and the rest of the drawing more or less corresponds. In St John’s 178 and the two manuscripts of IIC the bird is much like a lapwing although the crest is triple. This visual identification led to the general translation of upupa as lapwing (in various spellings) in the Wycliffite Bibles and elsewhere. More difficult to explain are the drawings of upupa in the three earliest manuscripts of IIB (BL Add. 11283, CUL li 4 26, St John’s 61) which are those of an owl; the first two have small pinnae. For many birds the text says that the name comes e sono vocis, from the sound of the voice, but for upupa it does not. It looks as if there was a sentence to this effect which had been lost, and that editors recognised ‘upupa’ as being like the call of the tawny owl, which it might reasonably be taken to be. At least one modern bird-book tells its readers how to distinguish the call of the hoopoe from the owl’s hoot. Finally, there are the few cases where the whole series of drawings.

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4. Vulpis shamming dead, investigated by a corvid, two magpies, a goshawk, and perhaps a greenfinch. The fox on the left may be a cub, or it may be the fox who has woken up and is about to pounce on one of the birds. (St John’s College Oxford MS 178 f.l68.)

)

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

in two or more manuscripts, are so similar that the assumption of a common source is inevitable. The best examples are Aberdeen, Ashmole, Douce 151 and University College 120 of IIA, and the pair Harley 4751 and Bodley 764 of IIC. One striking resemblance between the bestiaries in the first group is that most of the ants (formica) have eight legs. But there are many differences of detail, and the later artist sometimes corrected or improved the earlier. In general, the illustrator of Douce 151 seems to have made an attempt at naturalism by providing a grassy bank for many of his animals to rest on, in marked contrast to the formality and gilt background of Ashmole, and he places some of the birds (e.g. pica, the magpie) in an oak, with recognisable leaves and acorns, instead of in a purely formal tree. Camelus (camel as distinct from dromedary) is the same in Ashmole, Douce 151 and University College in having a rider perched at the rear and facing backwards, but whereas in Ashmole the beast has only one hump, in the others it has two. In Harley 4751 pardus (the leopard) has his tail between his legs before it curls upwards, but in Bodley 764 it sweeps in a curve over his back. The picture illustrating hyrundo in Bodley 764 is similar to that in Harley 4751, but one of the birds has been given the correct red throat of a swallow, which is not present in the earlier drawing. It is formally possible that all the types of copying just described could have been achieved by the use of model-books, but none is known. Much has been made of the fact that some bestiary drawings, including especially many of those in a thirteenth-century English manuscript of IIA originally described as the Kraus Bestiary, then Hofer-Kraus, but now Harvard College MS 22, have been pricked. This was a method of producing copies of outlines by inking through the holes, and it has been said that this manuscript was therefore a model-book, from which other manuscripts could be produced. This does not follow unless it can be shown that the holes are original, a point which those who described it did not fully consider; the holes could have been made by a later owner who wanted to copy the pictures. Right down to the time of Ruskin owners were no respecters of manuscripts; they cut them about and scribbled on them. Some bestiaries, for example Trinity R 14 9 and Harley 3244, have crude copies of some of the illustrations drawn alongside the originals, and other owners might have decided to copy them more accurately by pricking and inking onto sheets of paper. There are many statements in books and articles on ecclesiastical art to the effect that carvings, wall-paintings and so on are based on bestiary illustrations. Investigation of these shows that the connection is, to say the least, not always certain. Beasts, birds, fish and insects appear in other forms of art than bestiaries, notably illuminated manuscripts of the second half of the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth, and many of the species represented occur in bestiaries, but since they are creatures that the artist could have seen 14

5. Spoonbills on a misericord at Lavenham St Peter and St Paul. They are late fifteenth century, and so not far in date from Cambridge University Library MS Gg 6 5 (see Fig. 6).

for himself, before it can be accepted that he was copying a bestiary the same sort of analysis must be applied as we have used above. In some instances there is no possible model. There is an excellent spoonbill of c. 1200 on a capital at Wells and there are others on misericords at Lavenham in Suffolk (late fifteenth century) and perhaps at Carlisle (c. 1400). The spoonbill is never mentioned in bestiaries, and the only representation of it in them is in a picture of Adam naming the animals

6. Adam naming the animals, with a spoonbill in the tree behind. (Cambridge University Library MS Gg 6 5 f.2v.)

15

7. Bestiary animals, not now all recognisable, carved with names on a Romanesque arch. South doorway, Alne, Yorkshire, c. 1160.

in CUL Gg 6 5, a unique and late manuscript of c. 1450. The Wells and Carlisle birds almost certainly and those of Lavenham probably must have been taken from a distinctive bird that then lived in the Somerset Levels, the Solway marshes and the Broads respectively. Only where the image has some unusual characteristic that it shares with bestiaries but not with nature can weibe confident of any connection. A Romanesque doorway of c. 1160 at Alne in Yorkshire (grid ref. SE/495653) is carved with bestiary animals; they are named in Latin, so that there can be no doubt of their identity, but few could be recognised without this help. They include vulpis (the fox) shamming dead, panthera, ala (= aquila) and caladrius, the last being an unknown bird. A somewhat similar doorway at Bradbourne in Derbyshire (grid ref. SK/208527) which is rather earlier, c. 1135, also appears to have bestiary creatures, but they are unnamed. They may inclujie manticora, juvencus, cocodrillus, aquila, vultur, grus and pelicanus. The well-preserved carvings at Kilpeck in Herefordshire (grid ref. SO/445304) of c. 1140 include several birds and beasts. Some, such as the dog and hare on a corbel of the apse, are reasonably natural-looking and need have no connection with anything in bestiaries. On two corbels of the north side of the nave are carvings of what might be a bestiary antalops, or on the other hand they might be rather poor attempts at deer taken from nature. On the south doorway there is probably a manticora and perhaps a panthera, but they do not greatly resemble drawings of these creatures in any bestiary that I know. The medieval map of the world of about 1300 in Hereford Cathedral has many named illustrations of animals that are also described in bestiaries, and of monstrous men that are dealt with in some bestiaries of III; there are also some of each group that the bestiaries do not

16

I. Adam names the animals, mostly domestic beasts, with a full flush of birds, including two bullfinches and two gold¬ finches, which are paralleled at this date only in the Alphonso Psalter (BL Add. MS 24686) and the Bird Psalter (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 2-1954). (St John’s College Oxford MS 178 f.l72v.)

n.

A cervus family. (Bodleian Library MS 764 f.20.)

ni. Left: Crocus-coloured cocodrillus. (St John’s College Oxford MS 178 f.l67.) ; o

•

IV. Right: Cream-coloured bos and red taurus with curls. (British Library MS Harley 3244 f.47.)

*

fpcar fint tir emu uinofos ^9111 ffht ftrtnos ttrljinicE' ttictuA 1. Adam names the animals, mostly domestic beasts, with a full flush of birds, including two bullfinches and two gold¬ finches, which are paralleled at this date only in the Alphonso Psalter (BL Add. MS 24686) and the Bird Psalter (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 2-1954). (St John’s College Oxford MS 178 f.l72v.)

n. A cervus family. (Bodleian Library MS 764 f.20.)

m. Left: Crocus-coloured cocodrillus. (St John’s College Oxford MS 178 f.l67.)

IV. Right: Cream-coloured bos and red taunts with curls. (British Library MS Harley 3244 f.47.)

L Introduction

8. A stag {cervus) on a Romanesque corbel on the north wall of the nave of Kilpeck church, Herefordshire, c. 1140. If, as appears probable (though the stone is damaged), the beast is biting a serpent, it illustrates the bestiary story. Cf. Fig. 49.

9. A manticore from a bestiary, with a serpent below. South doorway of Kilpeck church, Herefordshire, c. 1140. Cf. Fig. 26.

V. Simla with her twins. Neither she nor the one behind her has a tail, but the left-hand figure has and may therefore be cercopithecus. All have pink buttocks. Satirus with snake and staff has monkey feet and face. (Bodleian Library MS Bodley 602i f.lSv.)

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DC. Grues (cranes). Later than Fig. 79, probably done from life and perhaps showing the dancing. The crowns of the heads are correctly red. (Gonville and Caius CoUege MS 372/621 f,40.)

include. As a set, these pictures cannot be associated v^^ith any known bestiary, but there are a few resemblances. For example, eale on the map is rather like that in BL Add. 11283, which is more than 100 years earlier. Such resemblances probably derive from a common source. The secular wall-paintings at Longthorpe Tower near Peterborough (grid ref. TL/163983) include several bestiary animals, and some of these correspond very closely to the drawings in Corpus 53, which

17

V. Simla with her twins. Neither she nor the one behind her has a tail, but the left-hand figure has and may therefore be cercopithecus. All have pink buttocks. Satirus with snake and staff has monkey feet and face. (Bodleian Library MS Bodley 602i f.l8v.)

VI. Anas (duck, mallard). A good drawing of drake and duck. (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621 f.51.)

VII. Graculus, A good representation of a jay, evidently drawn from life; one of the best in any medieval manuscript. (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621 f.45v.)

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Mammals Wilma George The mammals of the Physiologus are mingled among the birds and reptiles. Several of the Bis family, like Laud misc. 247, follow this tradition but the others and the subsequent families separate the mammals from the birds and reptiles. The order in which the mammals occur is haphazard and varies in the Bis family though bestiaries in this group normally start with leo, the lion, and antalops, the blackbuck. As new mammals are added, like lupus, the wolf, they appear at the end of the list in early bestiaries of the Bis family. Later, however, the new mammals, likeye/za, the hyaena, are slotted into the list. There is no rigorous classificationv either alphabetical or natural. But the medieval naturalists grouped together the big cats and, similarly, the mammals that ruminate; and from their first appearance in the transitional family and through all the other families domestic mammals are mainly grouped together - towards the end in most families but at the beginning in the third family. A simple classification has been adopted here which would be intelligible to most readers at any period of history. The beasts are grouped as wild or domestic mammals. The wild are subdivided into beasts with claws, beasts with hoofs and beasts with nails - the swimmers and the fliers separate. The curly brackets indicate the beasts that appear in the same chapter.

(ii) BEASTS WITH HOOFS

The group includes the cloven-hoofed, like ceruus, the deer; the single-hoofed, like onager, the wild ass; and the several-hoofed, like monoceros, the rhinoceros. Elephas, the elephant, could be grouped as domestic but early bestiaries refer to the behaviour of wild elephants. Caprea is both the roe deer and the wild goat (the ancestor of the domestic goat - see DOMESTIC MAMMALS). antalops and aper bonnacon (bonasus) and bubalis Camelopardalis caprea . centaurus ) onocentaurus } hippocentaurus ) cervus \ damma I caprea capreolus / pigargus I tragelafus j

ibex leucrota onager parandrus (tarandrus) unicornis rinoceros monoceros elephas

I

1. WILD MAMMALS

(iii) BEASTS WITH NAILS

(i) BEASTS WITH CLAWS

The group includes cynocephalus, the Hamadryas baboon, and satirus, the sat3n*.

(LAEGE)

simia cercopithecus cjmocephalus sphinx

The group includes leo, the lion, ursus, the bear, and lupus, the wolf. pardus leopardus tigris ursus yena

leo linx lupus manticora panthera

j j I )

satirus j callitrix *

(iv) SWIMMERS

The group is scattered through the bestiaries and rarely confined to the mammals: balena, the whale, and foca, the seal, are usually fishes; (

44

45

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary sirena, the siren, ends up among the birds; aspidochelone, the seaturtle, becomes a huge fish; cocodrillus, the crocodile, becomes both a mammal and a fish. foca I ypotamus > amphibia lutra j aspidochelone balena ^ delfinus > porcus marinus \

cocodrillus sirena ydrus (enhydrus)

(v) FLIERS This group includes only one mammal, the bat: in the bestiaries, vespertilio is grouped with the birds. 2. DOMESTIC MAMMALS The group ranges from the camel and the horse through the sheep and the goats to the cat and the dog. Caprea, a goat, can also be caprea, a deer (see WILD MAMMALS).

I

asinus bos juvencus taurus v^cca vitulus camelus and dromedarius canis caprea j caper > h5^cus )

eale equus mulus ) burdo (hinnus) * musio (murilegus) or catus ovis , vervex aries agnus porcus and sus

l.WILD MAMMALS (i) BEASTS WITH CLAWS (LARGE) Leo Leo, the lion, is rarely omitted from a bestiary. It takes pride of place in the Physiologus and retains that position except in third-family and fourth-family bestiaries where domestic animals come first. The lion was a well-known animal in medieval times. It roamed over 46

24. Leo with cubs. One of two plates telling stories of/eo. (Bodleian Library MS Ashmole ISllf.lOv.)

47

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

III. Mammals

North Africa, the Middle East and India until quite recently. Lions were reported in Greece in 300 BC. Today, there are a few in north-west India but the rest are confined to Africa south of the Sahara. In medieval times, the ‘King of Beasts’ was a favourite royal gift. In the twelfth century, Henry I of England kept lions in his park at Woodstock near Oxford. When the royal collection was transferred to the Tower of London, a century later, the lion was still the most popular exhibit. The texts describe the might and courage of leo, the twitching tuft of its tail and its menacing brows. It is not afraid of anything except the white cock, the sting of the scorpion and the bite of the snake. But, in spite of its menacing brows, leo never attacks women and children nor a man who prostrates himself before it. When it is sick, leo eats a monkey as a cure. The texts describe its behaviour when hunted: it sweeps its tail over the ground to cover its tracks; and it sleeps with its eyes open which makes it even more difficult to catch. Its cubs are said to be born dead and remain dead for three days until the male breathes life into them. (Today, if a male lion were seen licking cubs it would be assumed he was eating them.) The texts say that the female has five cubs in her prime but that the number diminishes with age. A litter of one to five is, in fact, the normal range for the lioness, but not all cubs reach maturity. Leo is mainly well portrayed in therillustrations. The general shape of the lion is there - the tufted tail, the curled mane - though it is sometimes formalised. There is rarely any distinction made between the male and the female, but in Ashmole 1511 the female is not only blue ^ in contrast to her brown mate but she has a rounder, less curl-covered head. In Fitzwilliam 254 the female is without a mane. There dre often several illustrations of Zeo’s activities. The most common, in the Bis and transitional families, show leo with the cubs: sometimes only the male licks the cub - presumably breathing life into it; sometimes both the male and the female lick it. In Laud misc. 247 and Bodley 602i the cubs are balanced upright between them. Occasionally, the cubs are sprawled on the female’s back (Ashmole 1511, for example). There may be one cub (Stowe 1067), two cubs (Caius 372/621), three cubs (CUL li 4 26) or five cubs (Roy. 12 F xiii). A frequent illustration shows leo sleeping with its eyes open, often comfortably curled up. Several illustrations show it covering its tracks with a sweep of its tail as it runs from the huntsman. A spear threatens it in Douce 167, a sword in Westminster 22 and mounted men and dogs in Roy. 12 F xiii. In most of the second-family bestiaries there are three pictures: leo is frightened by the cock, leo eats the monkey and leo pauses in front of the prostrate men. In some third-family illustrations, leo refuses to devour Androcles. In Caius 384/604, leo is heraldic. A crafty method of catching leo is depicted in Harley 4751 and Bodley 764. There are two holes and a tethered goat. As leo

approaches, the goat disappears down one hole and leo falls into the other. Most illustrators stay close to the text in the attempt to portray the nature of leo. That leo usually ends up looking like the lion may be because, as a royal animal, the lion was frequently seen in exhibitions.

48

Linx Linx, the lynx, is not found in the Bis family of bestiaries but it is included in the early transitional bestiaries Morgan 81 and Leningrad and in the early second-family bestiary BL Add. 11283. The lynx is a northern European animal that was once widely distributed across forested mountains. Today it is confined to the mountains of Scandinavia, eastern Europe and the Iberian peninsula. In the texts, linx is described as a kind of wolf or ‘in the same category as the wolf’. But the lynx belongs to the cat family and is a solitary nocturnal hunter. The wolf was a familiar animal but there is no record of the lynx having roamed the British Isles in historic times. However, the texts describe the spots on linx and distinguish it from the uniformly coloured lupus. There is nothing about the distinctive features of the lynx: the ear and throat tassels, the short black-tipped tail and the big hairy paws. The writers were more interested in the beast’s urine which turned to stone. Linx was said to cover up its urine - like all cats, in fact - to hide it from those who sought the stone as an ornament. The texts state that, according to Pliny, linx has only one kitten. But the lynx can have a litter with as many as three. Like the writers, the illustrators were unfamiliar with the lynx although, by 1252, the animal was in the royal collection at the Tower

25. Linx with hoofs and emitting a stream of urine that turns to stone. (Bodleian Library MS Douce 88iif.8.)

49

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

III. Mammals

of London. The illustrators go straight to the texts. There is linx with a long tail like a wolf, linx making urine stones and realistic spotted linx. The linx of Douce 88i stands high on hoofed limbs and emits a jet of urine which turns to stone beneath its belly. In Bodley 764 a blue spotted linx with a good set of teeth squats to urinate red on a hard stone, a posture repeated in several other bestiaries. The Sloane 3544 linx, chased by a man, quickly covers its stone before bounding off. A beautiful blue linx, covered in spots, looks longingly at a sheep perched placidly on a red mountain in Ashmole 1511; and, less elaborately, the CUL li 4 26 linx gazes out of a circular frame at an enticing sheep’s head emerging from the letter L. The lynx mainly goes for hares and rodents but it may also take a young deer or a free-ranging domestic animal. It is not usually a farm-robber like the wolf. Some illustrators ignore the urine story and the sheep on the mountain and produce more realistic representations of the lynx: Alnwick, Leningrad and Morgan 81 depict linx with a shortish tail and a fringe of hair running down its throat. In contrast. Corpus 53 and e Musaeo 136 stray far from the texts and from reality: the Corpus 53 linx looks like a horned lion; the red linx of e Musaeo 136 is a heavy beast with cloven feet (the text describes it as being like a wolf). The linx of Sloane 3544 is heraldic with a crown. Without its name and its spots, linx would be difficult to identify from the texts and illustrations.

forsaken the pack. There is no mention of the pack in the texts. Lupus is likened to the Devil because of its deep chest and its shining eyes which can render a man speechless at a glance. But being practical, as they so often are, the writers say that the man who sees lupus before it sees him need only take off his clothes and threaten it with stones for it to run away. There is a paragraph about the Ethiopian lupus, multi-coloured and with a mane. The wolf does not live in Africa, but the description fits the striped hyena which ranges over North Africa and east to India. The surprise encounters between lupus and the man are illustrated in two pictures in Roy, 2 B vii: in one, it is lupus who is surprised and seen off by the man; in the second, lupus has surprised the man and rendered him speechless. In Roy. 12 F xiii the naked man is standing on his shirt with a stone in each hand. Most of the illustrations picture lupus stealthily approaching sheep or, occasionally, carrying off its victim. It prances away with the sheep in its mouth in Harley 3244. In two further pictures in Roy. 2 B vii lupus picks up the sheep and, turning to flee, is pursued by the shepherd and his dog. Sometimes the shepherd and the dog are snoozing. Sometimes the sheep are in the open, sometimes in the fold. In Bodley 533, Bodley 764 and St John’s 178 lupus, mouth open, walks casually through the field towards the flock of sheep. In St John’s 61 it creeps malevolently down the hill towards its intended prey (see Frontispiece). In the most common illustration, the sheep are in the fold for the night and lupus is creeping up on them with its tail between its legs in a genuinely wolf-like posture of defensive threat. It is not always easy for lupus: in Stowe 1067 it cracks a twig and bites its paw as a punishment. In Sloane 3544, head down, bristling all over with wolfish frustration and aggression, lupus has woken the snarling dog. To make matters worse, the dog has woken the shepherd and the shepherd blows the alarm on his horn.

Lupus Lupus, the wolf, appears in most bestiaries, but is absent from three manuscripts of the Bis family (Laud misc.'247, Bodley 602i and Douce 167) arid from a few manuscripts of the other families. It is not a Physiologus beast but, the wolf being widespread in Europe, lupus was an obvious addition for the medieval bestiary makers. The wolf can live in a variety of habitats - in open country and in forests - and it hunts by day in a pack of some seven to twenty animals. However, the habitat of the European wolf has been so affected by hrunan settlement that today it is confined to forested areas. In medieval times the wolf roamed throughout the British Isles. It made its last stand in Scotland in the early eighteenth century. The texts, often quoting Solinus, are full of information about lupus and much of it accurately describes the form and behaviour of the wolf. Lupus is said to be a rapacious and bloodthirsty beast with enormously strong jaws and chest. The texts note the wolf’s short annual breeding season. In fact, the female comes into oestrus for only twelve days a year, in January or February. Three months later the one-month-old whelps emerge from the den. Up to four can appear in May, the month the texts give for the birth. The whelps are hungry so, at night, moving against the wind, lupus comes with shining eyes to the sheepfold. The solitary nocturnal wolf that preys round human settlements has

50

Manticora Manticora, perhaps the cheetah, comes into English bestiaries with the transitional family. It features in the earliest of them (Morgan 81) and also in the early second-family bestiary BL Add. 11283. It is found in about half the second-family bestiaries and is always present in the third and fourth families. Manticora had been described by the Greek historian Ktesias in 400 BC, and later descriptions are mainly based on his account. There was no doubt about the provenance of the beast. It came from India, which is the reason for its absence from the Physiologus and the first European bestiaries. It returned to the natural histories with the opening of the eastern trade routes and the consequent interest in the Indian region. Manticora has a man’s face with three rows of teeth. It is as big as a

51

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

III. Mammals

lion and has a long tail with a sting on the end like that of a scorpion. Ktesias described it as having blue eyes and small ears. All agree that it is a powerful beast that can leap over any obstacle. It has often been identified as the tiger, but the tiger always has a separate chapter in the bestiaries. The description fits the cheetah better. In the bestiaries, there is so much ambiguity over the big cats that identification cannot be more than a guess (in the Physiologus, panthera could be the cheetah or the leopard, for example). The name manticora was not entered in the Physiologus but the cheetah was roaming North Africa. Taking the Ktesias description detail by detail, the cheetah fits manticora — and the cheetah was also common in India in the wild and as a domesticated hunting animal. The cheetah’s round face and long tail with a tuft on the end are characteristic. The black and white curled tuft could be likened to the curl at the end of manticora's scorpion tail. None of the wild cats has three rows of teeth nor blue eyes. It is difficult to know what is meant by three rows of teeth that ‘meet alternately’. There is nothing special about the cheetah’s teeth. In medieval days cheetahs were widely dispersed in the retinues of kings and noblemen. Frederick II brought cheetahs with him when he visited England in the thirteenth century. However, it seems that the bestiary writers saw no connection between manticora and the cheetah. The illustrations fall into two categories: where manticora'likeness to man is indicated by putting a nightcap or Phrygian cap on its head; and where there is no cap but only a mane. In most of the illustrations manticora has the face of a man and is capped, but in some of the eariiest it looks like the lion (BL Add. 11283, for example). When texts are followed literally the tail takes on curious forms: the scorpion was as unfamiliar as manticora'^ identity. There is a tail with an

extraordinary spike on the end in Harley 3244, and in several of the third-family bestiaries the tail has a tight coil in the middle. In Ashmole 1511, Douce 151 and University 120 the tail is spiked from end to end. But the majority of illustrations figure the long tail of the cat. For the three rows of teeth, most illustrators simply drew a mouthful of big teeth, sometimes with prominent canines (St John’s 178, for example). Attempts to draw three rows can be found in third-family bestiaries. The ‘face of a man’ is portrayed whenever manticora wears a cap and sometimes when it does not. In Corpus 53 manticora has a long human beard — but no teeth. Roy. 12 F xiii depicts it as a long-haired blond. For the most part, manticora is coloured red or brown and has clawed feet. Neither the texts nor the illustrations point directly at the cheetah, but they do indicate that manticora is some sort of big cat.

26. Manticora. (British Library MS Royal 12 C xix f.29.)

52

Panthera Panthera, perhaps the African leopard, appears in the Physiologus and the earliest bestiaries. It continues without a break to the fourth family in the fifteenth century. The African spotted leopard has the most spectacular coat with the most variable pattern of the Old-World cats. The variability of panthera's coat is described in the Physiologus. Pliny describes panthera as a beast covered in small spots like eyes. The black panther does not figure in the Physiologus because it is a forest variant of the spotted Asian leopard. The bestiary writers describe the amazing power of panthera's breath. After a kill, panthera retires to its den to digest its meal. At the end of three days it emerges and gives a great belch. Its breath is so sweet that the other beasts come and follow panthera. Only the dragon detests the smell and disappears as fast as it can into its cave. According to the texts, the panthera female at parturition gets torn by the claws of her cubs. With few exceptions, the illustrations depict panthera as a cat: clawed feet, a long tail and short ears. But in e Musaeo 136 and Douce 88i, for example, it is hoofed. Sometimes it is beautifully spotted, as in Douce 167 and St John’s 178. It is almost always multicoloured: red, green and brown in Bodley 602i (with blue added in Bodley 764). Almost all the illustrations picture its breath streaming out. In the earliest extant illustrated Physiologus (the ninth-century Bern MS 318) a spotted panthera breathes on the beasts reaching up to smell its breath. In the Bis family of bestiaries, the beasts follow panthera, as the texts record. In other families, panthera either breathes on the beasts or the beasts follow. In Bern MS 318 the scaly snake-like dragon sits high up on a mound behind panthera. In many subsequent pictures a winged dragon takes the full brunt olpanthera's, breath and gets its head into a hole (Laud misc. 247 and Gains 109/178, for example). In other pictures the dragon has already safely installed

53

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described the porcupine as an attractive exhibit well worthy 'to be seen for money’. Formerly, the porcupine jjould be seen regularly in the mountains of southern Europe, where it can still occasionally be seen. In the illustrations to the three third-family texts, ystrix is being attacked by a dog. Ystrix is grey, not striking black and white with the huge,crest and tail of the African porcupine. In CUL Kk 4 25 ystrix looks like a rough, blown-up hedgehog but its quills point backwards. In all three pictures it has the characteristic blunt nose of the porcupine which clearly distinguishes ystrix from the hedgehog with its pointed snout.

the gland in front of the eye. The texts are good natural history. The illustrations display little variety. The beast’s horns are entangled in vegetation while the huntsman attacks it with a spear. The spear was the popular weapon for hunting antalops - only two bestiaries show otherwise: the huntsman wields a sword in Sidney 100; and in Harley 4751 he whirls an axe. In a few bestiaries antalops entangles its horns without being attacked (Laud misc. 247, Harley 3244, e Musaeo 136, for example). Usually antalops is caught in a formalised tree, but in other illustrations it thrusts its head into a clump of reeds. Curiously, the reeds do not always coincide with the river where antalops drinks. In University College 120 there are reeds and no river. In Alnwick and CUL Kk 4 25, however, antalops drinks from the Euphrates and its horns are entangled in the reeds. In Roy. 12 F xiii there is the river, with fish; but antalops, caught up in the branches of the tree, cannot drink. In several bestiaries, such as Corpus 53, the drinking episode has been dropped from the texts. In Trinity R 14 9 and Roy. 2 B vii the drinking episode and the rubbing of vegetation are illustrated separately: in one picture, antalops drinks from the river undisturbed by the huntsman; in the other, it gets entangled and attacked. Most illustrators depict antalops as an antelope: but the beast’s cloven hoofs often look clumsy for the agile blackbuck (Caius 109/178). Horns vary from long and ringed antelope horns (Stowe 1067) to a pair of coarse saws for cutting down trees in accordance with the texts (Alnwick).

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109

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

short time, it is perhaps not surprising that, on heat, the billy-goat has a bad reputation. If there is more than one billy-goat in the herd, there will be sparring for the favours of as many females as possible. The bestiary writers say that the hot blood of hyrcus dissolves stones of adamant. The hyrcus kids are fat, tender and good to eat. In medieval Britain the goat was an important source of rich milk and meat. No mention is ever made of the strong smell of the billy-goat. The illustrations are usually realistic. Whether of caprea, caper or hyrcus, the beast usually has a long beard (which distinguishes the goat from the short-bearded ibex), a shaggy coat and scimitar goat horns of varying lengths and thicknesses. There is variation in the shape of the horns, but basically they are curved back and slender compared to sheep horns. The horns never have the heavy lateral curl of sheep horns, and the bestiary artists are aware of this distinction. Often the illustrations show no difference between the overall structure of caprea, caper and hyrcus, but the beasts usually behave differently Caprea is nearly always chewing a tree, often on a ‘mountaiff. Sometimes two browse on the tree (Roy. 12 C xix). In Alnwick the two nibble at a complicated whorl of shrubbery. An elaborate picture has four beasts at the tree - two green, one brown and one blue - with some on hind legs reaching up for the leaves (Bodley 764). There are six arranged symmetrically in Sloane 3544. In St John’s 61 the blue caprea stands high up on the branch of the tree. A lone caprea reaching for the leaves figures in several bestiary families (Laud misc. 247 of the Bis-family, Bodley 533 of the IIB family and Douce 88ii of the third family, for example). In Douce, 151, Ashmoje 1511 and CUL li 4 26 two stand back to back on hind legs, heads turned and horns interlocked, with a decorative shrub between them. This illustrates the sparring that takes place in the mating season when rival male goats butt one another in head-on collisions and occasionally link horns and pull. Caper is shown pursuing more peaceful activities: it bites its hind leg in CUL li 4 26, licks its hind leg in St John’s 61, or scratches its head in Ashmole 1511 - where the bright blue caper has green horns. It grazes peacefully on the green grass in Bodley 533. In Caius 372 the caper nanny has a kid at heel. Illustrations of hyrcus are of a beast that is surprisingly unaggressive. It sits down and quietly reaches out to nibble a convenient shrub in CUL li 4 26 and Bodley 764, for example. It can be a very shaggy beast (Bodley 764) but in CUL li 4 26 it is much less shaggy than caprea or caper. In Alnwick and Roy. 12 C xix the two very long-horned beasts face one another across the mound: one rears on its hind legs to nibble at the top branches of the tree while the other stoops to eat from the lower branches. There is some action in the herd of horned and bearded caper in Roy. 12 F xiii where the brown hyrcus mounts the blue caper. The illustrations of caprea, caper and hyrcus present good likenesses 110

1\.Hyrcus. (Bodleian Library MS Douce 88ii f.74v.)

of the goat: the goat’s slim legs, cloven hoofs, beard and swept-back curved horns are all there. The goat is immediately recognisable. But the beast that walks in the frame of Corpus 53 might be a cow, except for the beard. Eale Bale, the yale - the Indian water buffalo - is not in the Physiologus. It is missing from the Bis family (it was added at a later date to Bodley 602i) but has a regular chapter in all other families. In the first century AD Pliny described eale as a black or tawny beast, as big as the river-horse, with the elephant’s tail, the jaws of the wild boar and horns more than a cubit long (about half a metre). The horns are the most interesting part of the beast for, it is said, they can be moved - raised alternately for fighting - sometimes to point straight forward and sometimes backward, according to the needs of the moment. Two centuries later Solinus described eale as an Indian beast - reduced, by him, to the size of the horse - which likes to wallow in water. In Solinus the horns of the beast have become flexible — not just moveable: they are used one at a time so that when one is blunted the other can be unfolded and brought into action. Solinus’ description is followed in the bestiaries. There are interesting variations in the description of the jaws. Pliny and Solinus had compared the jaws of eale to the jaws of the wild boar with its prominent canine teeth, and the phrase maxillis apri occurs in transitional family bestiaries and many others (CUL li 4 26 and Corpus 53 of the IIB family, for example). But there are a few bestiaries in which eale has the jaws of the goat, maxillis capri (Harley 3244 and e Musaeo 136, for example). The identity of eale puzzled authors for centuries and puzzled them even more when eale became a heraldic animal in the fifteenth century. Most writers dismiss eale as a mythical beast, but Druce, although concluding that it cannot be identified, believed that Pliny

1

111

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

identified it as a cross between the hippopotamus and 'some large horned animal’. Druce thought it might be a big antelope while others have suggested the gnu, the mountain goat or a deformed cow. Pliny’s description fits the Indian water buffalo with its heavy body and huge horns which, with a swipe of the head, can be effective aggressive weapons. The buffalo’s horns cannot move independently but the one or the other can be directed forward by the movement of the head. The bestiary illustrations may feature eale as a lightly-built antelope (Roy. 12 C xix) or a heavy bull-like beast (Westminster 22). It comes in all colours from black (St John’s 178), through grey (Bodley 533) and blue (Ashmole 1511) to brown (e Musaeo 136) and beige (Caius 372/621). There is a red eale in Bodley 602i and in CUL Gg 6 5 the beast is green with red spots. The texts differ when describing its teeth, as do the illustrations. Sometimes the illustration differs from the text: Harley 3244 reads maxillis capri whereas the hornless eale of the illustration - with hoofs on its front feet and claws on its back feet has huge wild-boar canines but the goat’s beard. Others have the boar’s canines but not the goat’s beard (Bodley 764) and others have the goat’s beard and no canines (Roy. 12 F xiii). The horns are invariably long, sometimes very long (Bodley 533); but they may be upright (Trinity R 14 9), point forward (Roy. 12 C xix), or stick out sideways (e Musaeo 136). Sometimes the horns are straight (Westminster 22), sometimes curved down (BL Add. 11283) and very often ‘flexible’ (St John’s 61). Eale may sit (Roy. 12 C xix) but it usually star^ds; it may face forward (Caius 384/604), but sometimes the beast looks back to indicate the potential swing of its horns (Bodley 764). The Indian water buffalo was a familiar domestic animal in southern Europe in medieval days. The Duke of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, introduced it into England in the thirteenth century, but it did not flourish. Both the Bodley 533 eale and the Sloane 3544 eale look rema'rkably like the Indian water buffalo.

72. Eale with the heavy build, cloven hoofs and spreading horns of the Indian water buffalo. (British Library MS Sloane 3544 f.41.)

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III. Mammals

Equus Equus, the horse, first appears in the ninth-century Bern MS 318 but is absent from the Bis family. It appears in the English bestiary Morgan 81 and becomes a regular member of the domestic group, with the exception of a few later IIB bestiaries. The texts follow Isidore closely. The beast is called equus because, when selected by shape and speed for the team, equus is matched equally {eque). Caballus, the hack, is named after the hollow (cavus) hoof mark. Equus is excited by the sound of the trumpet and delights Ln the battlefield. It does not like to be defeated. It knows its enemies and bites them, it knows its master and might refuse to let another ride it. The texts eulogise equus: the famous horse Bucephalus of Alexander the Great; the horse Cintaretus of Caius Caesar; and the horse that fasted to death when its master King Nicomedes was killed. Equus, the texts say, can live to be 70 but loses its virility if its mane is cut. The well-bred equus must have the right shape; it must have beauty and merit; and it must have the right colour. To have the right shape, it must be solid and powerful, not too tall, with long flanks and large round haunches; and the chest must be muscular, the hoof dry and well arched. To have beauty, it must have a small head, short lively ears, big eyes, wide nostrils, an erect neck, a full mane and tail and a curving hoof To have merit, it must display a brave spirit and move with a swift and nervous gait. The well-bred equus has a uniform colour: the right colour can be black {niger), chestnut {cervinus), bay {spadix), roan {roseus), golden {aureus), fawn {gilvus), grey {glaucus) or shiny white {candidus)', stripes and piebald are wrong. The Ancients are said to have considered chestnut the best colour of all. The texts describe different sorts of equus: equus the carthorse, equus the warhorse, equus the riding horse, equus the hybrid, equus the black horse of the Moors and equus the brown cob. In general, the illustrators depict equus the riding horse and equus the warhorse without the rider. In the IIC family, four are pictured: three prance as a team (unharnessed) while the fourth, perversely, sits down. In Roy. 12 F xiii, two saddled ones rear up on their hind legs and bite each other while the two riders engage on foot in a hand-to-hand sword fight. An elegant fawn equus trips along in Ashmole 1511. A heavy carthorse equus stands in St John’s 61. In Sloane 3544 a carthorse equus with big feet is led by a man with a stick. Equus comes in many colours, except black: grey is rare (Westminster 22) but blue, which probably represents the grey, is the commonest colour; it can also be brown, red, fawn, pink, green or white. It can be dappled, particularly the blue. Equus can be conspicuously male: a whitish stallion prances through the frame in Caius 384/604; and the dappled blue equus of Bodley 764 and the red cloven-hoofed equus of Bodley 533

113

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74. Mulus with the big ears of the mule. (Westminster Abbey Library MS 22 f.l0v/16v.)

l^.Equus. (Bodleian Library MS Ashmble 1511 f.32v.)

mulus - and go on to mention the crossing of the stallion and the she-ass which results in burdo or hinnus (the hinny). The bestiary writers elaborate upon the effect on offspring of what the mother sees at conception and during pregnancy. The mare at conception may see the reflection of the jackass in the river: she takes in the image and creates the jackass’s likeness in her foals. Pictures of mulus are scarce before the IIC, third and fourth families. It may be blue, grey, yellow or red and invariably has the characteristic long ears of the mule. Sometimes it sits with its front legs sticking forward (Westminster 22); sometimes it strides like the camel, two left legs forward, two right legs forward (CUL Gg 6 5). The open-mouthed braying Bodley 764 mulus — like all the domestic equines of that bestiary — has huge nails in its shoes. The texts are informative on hybridisation but the illustrations add nothing to mulus except its long ears.

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represent the stallion. To show that equus is shod, the illustrators of Bodley 764 and CUL Gg 6 5 have put nails in its hoofs. In Bodley 764 the nails are huge and stick down from the shoes. The horse’s four-legged gait defeated the illustrators. Bestiary pictures of equus (and of other mammals) depict the two right legs — or the'two left legs - moving together. This is an unstable way of walking and is characteristic only of the camel and the 'pacing’ horse. In fact the horse lifts the diagonally opposite legs at the same time. The precise mechanics of the horse’s gait were not understood until the age of photography. From the pictures of equus, the impression of the medieval horse is of a heavily built riding horse, sometimes proudly aristocratic and fine legged, often a dappled blue-grey.

Musio (murilegus) or catus Musio, the mouser, or catus, the catcher, is absent from the Bis family but is described and pictured in most other bestiaries. It always precedes mus, the mouse, and it is always associated with mustela (another mousecatcher, see above, p.66). The texts call the domestic cat musio (or, sometimes, murilegus) because it is the enemy of the mouse. It can also be called catus 'because it is always on the catch’ (Druce). Catus is a crafty catcher. It has such keen eyesight that it can see in the dark. The texts say nothing about the cat’s relationship with man or about different coloured cats.

75. Blue-striped, yellow-eyed musio with a mouse. (St John’s College Oxford MS 178 f.l77.)

Mulus and burdo (hinnus) Mulus, the mule (from the jackass and the mare), makes its first appearance in the second family and continues to the fourth family. In the chapter order it usually follows the horse. Mulus is said to get its name from mola, mill, because it turns the miller’s grindstone. The texts describe the hybridisation of jackass and mare - which results in

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Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

The illustrations usually depict only one musio or catus (Trinity R 14 9, for example). But there may be two (Alnwick); often three (Ashmole 1511); and, in Morgan 81, four. In the illustrations, musio comes in a variety of colours but the favourite colour is blue or grey. There are few yellowish, reddish or tan ones (Roy. 12 C xix, for example) and even fewer black ones (Bodley 533 and Bodley 764). The majority including some realistic gingers (Roy. 12 F xiii) - are striped. Eyes are seldom highlighted in the illustrations, in spite of the texts that say musio can see in the dark. But the St John's 178 musio is a blue striped staring beast with big yellow eyes. As with most other bestiary mammals, musio rarely has any whiskers. Whiskered ones are found in BL Add. 11283, Caius 384/604 (the whiskers are probably a later addition) and Westminster 22. The Westminster 22 musio is unusual with its white whiskers and very big ears. In most illustrations musid’s powerful claws are sheathed, but occasionally they impale a captured mouse (Harley 4751, Bodley 764). In Bodley 764 the sleeping musio has sheathed claws but the active ones have claws that stick out. Musio licks itself, cat-like: sitting, with one leg in the air (Douce 151, Aberdeen). In Bodley 533 two black ones parade: the first marches with its tail erect (announcing its status and perhaps scent-marking) while the second follows with its tail lowered. The visual portrayal of the cat's activities varies within the bestiary families but catching mice was clearly seen as its most important role in medieval days. Sometimes musio, crouched, stalks its prey with its tail sticking straight out behind (Harley 3244). At other times it crouches with its tail curled round as it idly watches the mouse (Fit^william 254). Occasionally, there is a lively chase (Roy. 12 F xiii) but, more often than not, musio has already caught the mouse in its paws. In Sloane 3544 an incredible musio with a bushy tail holds a rigid mouse crosswise in its mouth. The action has advanced further in Douce 88ii where musio eats the mouse. The hunt is often in a field (St John's 61 and Westminster 22, for example), but sometimes musio chases the mouse up a wall (Ashmole 1511 and Roy. 12 C xix). In the Leningrad bestiary three pale cream beasts occupy the picture: two of them sit, the front one holding a mouse; the third musio chases a mouse up the wall. In Caius 372/621 a fluffy musio watches the mouse foraging in a heap of circular cheeses. In Bodley 764 there is a thoroughly domestic interior: one black musio and two blue, one bl^ck mouse, a rack of cheeses and a birdcage. One of the blues curls up aild sleeps in front of the fire; the other blue, on its hindlegs, grins - with the big black mouse in its paws just before it gets to the cheese rack; and the black musio, on its hind legs, reaches into the birdcage. The action takes place at night while the stars and crescent moons shine gold in the dark sky. Medieval cats, it seems, were mainly blue-grey striped mousers.

III. Mammals

Ovis, vervex, aries and agnus Ovis, the sheep or the ewe, like other domestic beasts, makes its first appearance in the transitional family and is represented, with few exceptions, in all later families. Ovis is described in the texts as a woolly beast that lives in flocks. It is gentle and defenceless. It is a grazer and eats tremendously during the year to survive the winter. In ancient times it was burnt as an offering to the gods. The sheep was one of the earliest animals to be domesticated: according to morphological and environmental analysis at archaeological sites it was domesticated in the Euphrates basin 9,000 years ago. The bestiary texts have nothing to say about ancestry. The ancestor of the modern domesticated sheep is probably much like the mouflon, still to be found in Corsica and Sardinia. This wild sheep has short coarse hair, a short tail and wide-spreading curled horns: domestication lengthened and refined its coat to a shaggy hair or tightly curled fleece and lengthened its tail; and then first the female and later the male lost its horns. The sheep is a grazer - in contrast to the browsing goat - and spends most of its time eating and ruminating. The bestiary texts say that ovis eats a lot to survive the winter: it is not because of its fat laid down in summer that the sheep survives the winter but because it has grown a thick wool coat. In order to discover that ovis is a ruminant, the bestiary reader must refer to the dromedarius chapter.

MiatcUcigiDtiiittA ciniiCTrlttintrC^juur-~r IciWJmnCilcftotn?; mc .'tunc!

76. Ovis with hairy coat. In the flock some, like the bell-wether, have horns. In the fore¬ ground a vervex aggressively butts another. (Westminster Abbey Library MS 22 f.7v/13v.)

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Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

The illustrators rightly differentiate ovis from the goat in three ways: by the curve of the horns, which are laterally curled in ovis\ by the convex profile of the ovis head; and sometimes by ovis grazing and the goat browsing. Ovis is usually hairy and shaggy. Sometimes, however, it has a curly fleece (as in the transitional Roy. 12 C xix and Alnwick; in the IIB CUL li 4 26; and in the IIC Harley 4751). Most illustrations depict it with curly horns, but sometimes it is polled (Bodley 533). Sometimes, as in Trinity R 14 9, it has short swept-back horns, like today’s Orkney sheep. The differences observed by the bestiary illustrators in the coat and horns of ovis might represent distinct types of medieval sheep. From the bestiary pictures, such different typ^s can be visualised: sheep with tightly curled horns and either long hairy coats (Westminster 22) or curly wool coats (Roy. 12 C xix); sheep with short swept-back horns and hairy coats (Trinity R 14 9); hornless sheep with either hairy coats (Roy. 12 F xiii) or curly wool coats (Sloane 3544); sheep in which only the males have horns (Harley 4751); and sheep like the mouflon in which the males have long curly horns and the females short straighter horns (Ashmole 1511, St John’s 61). Like the mouflon and the medieval sheep, ovis always has a short tail. Most illustrations shows a lone ovis in a frame. Sometimes it walks through a meadow. Some illustrations depict a flock: sometimes with the shepherd, in the third family; sometimes without the shepherd, in Douce 151. Sometimes a belled vervex is introduced (the bell-wether that leads the flock); unlike the rest, it usually has horns (Westminster 22, for example). In e Musaeo 136 the leader is belled but hornless. In CUL Kk 4 25 several of the flock have been shorn. In Dou6e 88i a lone ovis grazes in a meadow and ignores a tree: in the same bestiary caprea, the wild goat, reaches up to browse the leaves on the tree. Vervex, the wether or the ram, is stronger than ovis. The texts say that vervex indulges in vicious butting matches with its rivals. This constant aggression, the texts speculate, may be because it is essentially male or because it has maggots in its brain. Like typical rams - heads down, banging foreheads together - two are pictured in transitional bestiaries such as Alnwick and in the occasional IIB bestiary such as Sloane 3544. In the third family, two display in front of a flock, but in most of the other bestiaries vervex does nothing. It usually has horns which are often used to distinguish it from ovis (Bodley 533). Aries, the ram, is often mentioned but not often illustrated. The texts speculate about the origins of its name - from Mars the god of war or from the sacrifical altar - but, as White says, ‘it does sometimes become tiresome to have to unravel these readings’. Finally there is agnus, the lamb. According to the texts, ovis has only one offspring at a time and agnus can always recognise its dam from the rest of the flock by her bleat. And ovis, too, can distinguish the bleat of her offspring from a thousand others and restore it to the lost 118

77. Agnus with curly wool coat. (Gonville and Caius College MS 384/604 f.l77.)

udder. It is known that it is smell - not sound, as the bestiaries claim — that bonds the ewe to her lamb. Agnus is usually pictured as a hornless version of ovis. In Caius 384/604 two leap and frolic in their frame. In Sloane 3544 agnus distinguishes its dam from the other ovis. In the more elaborate Bodley 764, there is a flock of eight: an agnus finds the udder while the dam turns to sniff her offspring. In CUL Kk 4 25, the shepherd with his flock holds agnus in his arms. Altogether, the bestiary texts and illustrations give a realistic impression of the medieval sheep. As domestic animals become more popular in the bestiaries — in the third family, particularly — so the illustrations become more elaborate, more interesting and more full of action. Porcus and sus Porous, the domestic pig or boar, does not feature in the bestiaries until the IID and third families; sus, the domestic pig or sow, features only in the IIC family. (Verres, the domestic boar, is merely mentioned.) Porous gets its name, according to the texts, from spurcus, filthy, because it wallows in mud. Sus gets its name from the verb subigo, to dig up, because it roots for its food in the earth. The texts say that sus bristles are used for sewing skins together and that the word setae, bristles, comes from sus. In the illustrations, Harley 4751 portrays sus with four piglets, Bodley 764 with five. In Harley 4751 the piglets in a row, on their hind legs, suck at the hanging teats. In Bodley 764 two of the five piglets

78. Sus with piglets. (British Library MS Harley 4751 f.20.)

119

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

squabble over a teat. The IID and third-family illustrations portray only the male porous. Porous can be as bristly as the wild boar; it can have tusks; and it can have either a straight tail or a curly tail. The tail of sus is always curly and sus never has tusks. Both sus and porous have a limited range of colours: red in Harley 4751; brown in Douce 88 ii; grey in Westminster 22; and, in Fitzwilliam 254, porous has dark patches on its haunches and its shoulders.

IV Birds Brunsdon Yapp The birds may be grouped as follows; they are listed as species, but most of them correspond rather to modern genera. 1. NON-PASSERINES The majority of bestiary birds are non-passerines (see below), and may be put in seven groups:

I

(i) LONG-LEGGED BIRDS

These, though visually all somewhat similar, are not all closely related. In the Middle Ages there was much confusion between some of them, especially crane and stork.

a k

grus ardea ciconia

s

bucio or onocratulus [spoonbill] assida or struthio (ii) SWIMMING BIRDS

There are members of several taxonomic groups, such as ducks and grebes. olor or cignus anas anser bernace

mergus and mergulus larus diomedea pelicanus (iii) DIURNAL BIRDS OF PREY

These are the hawks and eagles of popular parlance. accipiter capus alietus herodius

120

aquila aurifrisius vultur milvus 121

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

IV. Birds

(iv) NOCTURNAL BIRDS OF PREY; OWLS

(ix) SONGBIRDS

nicticorax and noctua bubo

ulula strix (v) GAME BIRDS

There are both wild sorts, such as the partridge, and tame, such as the fowl and peacock. perdix coturnix gallus and gallina

turtur \

(vii) OTHER NON-PASSERINES

psitacus pifcus upupa and epopus

hyrundo luscinia merula turdus turdella passer

pavo fasianus

(vi) PIGEONS AND DOVES

columba palumbus

All these, except the sparrow, have musical voices and are small; examples are the nightingale and the swallow. carduelis acredula furfurio [bullfinch] alauda ficedula 3. UNIDENTIFIABLE BIRDS Some of these probably had their origin in real birds as to the identities of which we can now make reasonable guesses, but the illustrations show that the compilers of the bestiaries had no idea what they were. The best known of them is fenix, the m3d:hical phoenix, and another is alcion, miscalled the kingfisher by most writers about bestiaries. alcion or alcedo caradrius cinomolgus ercinee aves

fenix fulica ibis merops

cuculus martineta 1. NON-PASSERINES 2. PASSERINES

(i) LONG-LEGGED BIRDS

The majority of the common birds of the European countryside that are known to the general public are now included in one big group, the Passeriformes (colloquially, passerines) and within that in the suborder Oscines (or, not quite correctly, songbirds). The Passeri¬ formes constitute worldwide more than half the total number of known species of bird, but are relatively unimportant in bestiaries. They may be divided into two groups.

Grus

(viii) CROWS AND CORVIDS

These are larger than most passerines and have harsh voices; besides the obvious crows, they include the jay and the magpie. corvus cornix monedula

graculus pica

122

Grus is translated by crane, or a variant of this word, in all the medieval vocabularies, and there is no doubt of its meaning. In recent times, when cranes are no longer to be seen in England except very rarely, herons, as common long-legged birds, have been ignorantly called cranes, but the earliest example of this that I have found is by John Clare (1793-1864). The reverse mistake is found in one of the names added to the sketchbook in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College Cambridge (MS 1916), where an obvious crane is labelled 'her3m’. The dates of these names have been disputed, but they cannot be earlier than fifteenth century, and may be later. Grus first appears in T, and then continues throughout. There is very little moralising in the accounts, and the manuscripts make all or most of the following points of natural history. The name comes from the voice, as the birds mutter to each other {tali enim sono susurrant);

123

i

•

*

K

*

IV. Birds

n ^11

are shown running past each other or dancing, as in BL Add. 11283, the earliest manuscript of the second family, and CUL Kk 4 25, one of the latest of III (Fig. 81). Dancing is characteristic of breeding cranes, and since it is not mentioned in the text of the bestiaries is likely to have been drawn from life. Most of the individual cranes are reasonably accurate, and often show the characteristic red crown. The best is in Caius 372/621 (see Plate IX).

Ardea

79. Grues (cranes). This differs from the usual drawing in showing only two, not four, sleeping birds facing one which is awake holding a stone. It is unusual also in having the sleeping birds with their heads buried in their plumage (not quite correctly), a position used by many species of bird, including cranes. (British Library MS Sloane 3544 f.23v.)

they fly high in flocks, swallowing sand and small stones to give themselves ballast, and are guided by pathfinders; they support tired members of the flock in the air; at night, when they sleep, one at a time keeps guard, holding a stone in one foot as it does so. The colour darkens with age. Most of this is sound. Grus is not very onomatopoeic, hvit sussurant is fairly applied to some of the sonagrams that have been published. Migrating flocks may fly at 2000 metres or more, and the V-pattern of the flocks of cranes (and other birds) certainly gives the impression that there is a leader. Like other ground-feeders, such as farmyard fowls and pigeons, they sometimes have small stones in the gizzard, but if these have any function it will be to help to grind the food, not to add weight, which would have no effect except to increase the energy needed for flight. It is unlikely that failing birds are supported in flight by others, but it now seems generally agreed that flying in the V-formation does decrease the effort needed to stay airborne. Cranes are certainly wary and difficult to approach, but the story of the held stone is imaginary. The colour darkens not with age, but when the feathers are worn before the post-breeding moult. Most manuscripts of T and II illustrate the sleeping flock; one bird holding a stone faces from two to four others. In Bodley 764 (IIC) the eyes show that the former is awake while the other sleeps, but this is not always clear. Presumably these drawings are derived, with much individual variation, from an early prototype. In some manuscripts of IIA and IIB, and in all those of III and IV, this type of drawing is abandoned, and there is just one bird or occasionally two. In a few they 124

Ardea appears in some early Latin bestiaries as a translation of the Greek erodios, but it is here confused with, fulica, and has nothing to do with its later occurrence in English bestiaries. It comes into these through the Aviarium, and is present in IIA, IIC, IID and III, but not in Bis, T or the mainstream IIB. There is no doubt, from the habits described in the text, that it is the heron, and, most unusually, Roy. 12 F xiii translates it into a vernacular: dicitur romane herun {romane here means French). The three species of long-legged birds most often seen in Europe - crane, heron and stork - are distinct not only in colour but also in habits; for example cranes nest most often on damp ground, herons in colonies in tall trees, and storks on buildings. Falconers and others in the Middle Ages must have been well aware of these differences, although no doubt there were ignorant townspeople who were not, just as there are today. Scholars writing about bestiaries have often been confused, M.R. James for example translating ardea as bittern, and many Germans making ciconia (the stork) into Reiher (the heron). The text in IIA and IIC, following Isidore, says that the name comes

80. Ardea (heron). In spite of this being now and probably then the commonest long-legged bird in Britain, the drawing is not very good; the pose of the nearest bird is characteristic and the long neck feathers are correct, but the tail is borrowed from a crane. (Aberdeen University Library MS 24f.53v.)

125

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary MTlSiORRtnyK&mir:'

from ardea, 'high places’, because the birds fly high. It goes on to say that to avoid the storms the heron flies above the clouds, it gets its food in water, nests in tall trees, and defends its young with its beak. IID omits some of this, but adds that ardea resembles grus in its long legs {tibiae) and neck. The account in III is short, having only the first few sentences. Most of this is true. The heron does sometimes fly high, and it uses its beak both in attack and in defence. Its usual feeding place is shallow water, where it takes fish, frogs and other small creatures. It is much like a crane in its legs and neck. Finally, the text adds that some birds are white and others ash-coloured {cinereum). Albinistic individuals do occur, but the fact that they are noticed here, and also by Turner in the sixteenth century (who says that they breed with the usual form and so are the same species), suggests that in former times they were commoner than now. The pictures are disappointing. They are usually more or less correct in their shape, and sometimes show the bird standing in water, but in some of each group they have been contaminated by the artist’s idea of a crane, being given to a greater or lesser degree the characteristic bustle of that bird. No picture shows the long crest worn especially in the nesting season. Probably also there is contamination from the stork, since in several manuscripts of IIC and III a bird holds a snake; but it might, correctly, be intended^for an eel. In both manuscripts of IIC an ibis has been added to the picture (see below). In Aberdeen, Ashmole, Douce 151 and University College (all IIA) the birds are white. The best is one of the three in Aberdeen, which has the attitude of a bird about to plunge its head into the water to catch a fish (Fig. 80).

81. On the left are two grues (cranes) dancing and on the right cicoreia (stork), which could hardly be recognised if it were not named. (Cambridge University Library MS Kk 4 25 f.80.)

The status of the stork in England in the Middle Ages is a mystery. The only record of its nesting in the British Isles is on St Giles’ church, Edinburgh, in 1416, an event that was recorded in Bower’s contemporary chronicle. In spite of its apparent absence, 'store’ and later 'stork’ are in the vocabularies from the eighth century onwards as the translation of ciconia, and in other manuscripts beside bestiaries there are representations of the white stork, of which two, in Fitzwilliam 2-1954 of about 1280 and the Sherborne Missal of about 1400, are good. Ciconia is in Leningrad (T) and then throughout, but, for some reason, of the other transitional manuscripts Morgan and Roy. 12 C xix have no text, while Alnwick has neither text nor picture. The bestiary account refers to the crackling noise made in the call {vacate a sono que crepitant)’, the migration led by crows; and hostility to serpents. Further, the birds are good parents, and are in their turn looked after by their offspring during the moult. Bill-clattering, migration and feeding on snakes are sound natural history, but I can find nothing to justify the statements that migratory flocks are led by crows or that

there is any care of parents by young. With few exceptions the pictures in T and II show a long-legged bird of more or less the right shape and sometimes with red beak and legs, which is correct. In the early manuscripts of IIA and in IIC the black and white colouring is also shown fairly correctly. The colour is mentioned only in some Greek texts, and the length of leg in none. In four drawings out of 24 the bird holds a snake, but in nine it has a frog in its beak, the difference not following the familial classification. The text has serpentia hostes; in the Middle Ages serpentia were often taken to include lizards, newts and frogs as well as snakes. Neckam (1157-1217) in writing of ciconia, says ranarum et locustarum et serpentum hostis est (it is an enemy of frogs, locusts and snakes). It does in fact feed on any small animals, not only these but mammals as well. A stork holding a snake is shown in the fifth-century manuscript of Dioscorides (Cod. Vind. med. Gr. 1). All this suggests that although there was much copying, perhaps ultimately from a Byzantine model, there was enough Imowledge of the bird for continual correction. Bodley 764 is better than the earlier Harley 4751 on which it is based, and both are better than Roy. 12 C xix which is earlier than either. In many there is contamination from grus, with indications of the bustle-like wing-coverts, the sort of imaginary embellishments in which artists often indulge. The drawings in III and IV have neither snake nor frog, and are generally rather poor, the bird having legs that are much too short. Bill-clattering is a frequent form of display, performed on the nest and seldom elsewhere. Since the nest is on an exposed place, often a building, it is very conspicuous. The neck is thrown back, so that the crown of the head often touches the shoulders, and the mandibles are clattered together to make a characteristic noise. Though the sound is mentioned the movement of the neck is not, and yet it is shown in two manuscripts of IIA and two of IIB, no two of these being alike. They could hardly have been drawn other than from life. The position of the nest on a building is shown in no bestiary that I have seen, but in Douce 88i one of the storks is in a tree. In the Chronica minora of Matthew Paris (BL Roy. 14 C vii, f 4) there is a thumb-nail sketch of a stork standing in a very characteristic attitude on a tower; but

126

127

%

I

i

Ciconia

IV. Birds

82. Ciconia (stork). The red legs and beak are correct, but the other colours are not. The white bird is in the characteristic attitude of bill-clattering. (Gonville and Caius College MS 384/604 f.l82v.) See also Fig. 152.

Matthew had travelled abroad. An example of how the bestiarists sometimes rejected their sources when they knew them to be wrong is given in the account of ciconia in IV. Most of what is said about birds and other creatures in this manuscript is taken, sometimes word for word, from Bartholomew’s-De rerum naturae, but the story about ciconia in that work is what should have been said about ibis. The editor of the bestiary has noticed this, and has given the usual story from another source. An amusing misinterpretation of crepitant, which shows good knowledge of birds, is described under ficedula. \

Bucio or onocratulus These names may be taken together, since they are the same bird, the bitfern. The former occurs in III, and is an obvious scribal error, 'c’ having at some time been written for T. Three of the manuscripts reco^ise this, for CUL Kk 4 25, Fitzwilliam 254 and Douce 88ii begin Bucio sive buter nome a sono (bucio or buter is named from its sound). Onocratulus is a title in IV only. The Wycliffite translators had difficulty with this word, both Bibles rendering it twice as cormorant (Le^hticus 11:18 and Deuteronomy 14:18) but in Isaiah 34:11 and Zephaniah 2:14 leaving it untranslated. Douce alone adds to its account of bucio: et vocat in latine honocratulus (and it is called in

Latin onocratulus). The two are, then, the same. Onocratulus (or its variants) is translated in vocabularies from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries as bittore (or variants) or raredumle or mirdromel, which persisted into recent times as a northern name for the bittern. (Pliny and some other authors make honocratulus to be the pelican, but our bestiaries know nothing of this.) The brief account in III says that the bird puts its beak into water and makes a booming noise (bumbificat). Douce adds that it has a long bill. The account of onocratulus in IV is to the same effect but much longer; it places its bill in reeds and makes a noise that can be heard for two leagues in the dawn {posit rostrum suis in paludibus ... auditur per duas leucas ...in aurora). Most of this is broadly true, though the bird does not use either water or a reed when calling, though that it does the latter is a common belief The exact measure of leuca is unknown, but the booming of a bittern can be heard 5 km away. Since it lives among reeds and is seldom seen even by ornithologists, it is not surprising that none of the pictures is recognisable. In CUL Kk 4 25 it puts its beak into a reed. [Spoonbill] There is another long-legged bird, the spoonbill, a fairly close relative of the herons, storks and bitterns, which, like the first of these, nests in colonies in trees in various parts of the continent, and probably did so in England during the Middle Ages. It does not occur as a chapter nor is it mentioned in any bestiary, but is unmistakably among the creatures being named by Adam in CUL Gg 6 5 (Fig. 6). Assida or struthio There is no doubt that assida and struthio mean the ostrich, a bird which until the nineteenth century was present in much of North Africa, and at the time of the compilation of the Physiologus was probably found in the neighbourhood of Alexandria. By the time of the 84. Assida (ostrich). Probably copied at one or more removes from a drawing made from the bird, with the addition of a horseshoe to show that it eats iron. The egg and the star Virgilia are also shown. (Canterbury Cathedral Library MS Lit. D 10 f.l6.)

83. On the left horspray and on the right onocratulus (bittern). Neither shows much knowledge of the bird. (Cambridge University Library MS Gg6 5f.68v.)

128

129

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

English bestiaries it seems to have been known in northern Europe only as a legendary bird, in which form it is present in all groups. The text begins not with the common formula est avis quod dicitur ... (there is a bird called ...) but est animal quod dicitur ... (there is an animal called ...). In spite of this assida is placed among the birds, except in T, where it is among the beasts. In medieval Latin animal, like its modern English equivalent, technically meant any living creature that is not a plant, but was sometimes used, as non-zoologists use ‘animal’, to mean a beast. The text goes on that it has wings but cannot fly and has feet like a camel. When it sees the star Virgilia (the Pleiades) it lays .its eggs, covers them with sand, and goes away and forgets them. Some of this is true. The ostrich is flightless although it has wings, and each foot has only two toes, which are large and point forward so that there is some resemblance to the foot of a camel or any other cloven-hoofed beast. The eggs are not covered, but according to some authors are left unattended for a week after la3dng. Some early versions say that assida can digest iron. IIA has a long discussion of the inability to fly, in which the wings are said to be coloured like those of herodius or accipiter. The pictures mostly correspond to the text, and so are either following this or cop3dng a previous drawing. The foot is usually more or less like that of a sheep, but in St John’s 178 and Douce 88i it is that of a horse; in Corpus 53 there are three toes. Presumably in the last two the artist was following the text but did not know what a camel’s feet are like. The general shape of the body varies much; the commonest is that of an eagle, with a somewhat, hooked bepk. The Y-version of the Physiologus says that the bird is like a vulture, which is perhaps the distant origin of the aquiline appearance. In some the artist or his instructor or his model has evidently been led astray by est animal, or by the camel’s foot, and has assumed that the creature is half mammalian and so has given it a beast’s pinnae; the ostrich does have a conspicuous ear opening, but has no external flap. In no drawings are the legs long enough, but in Caius 384/604 and Canterbury they are fairly long and the bird is pretty much the correct shape. These two both show the bird holding a horseshoe in its beak (a reference to the bird digesting iron) and look as if they came from the same model, which had been based on the real thing. Canterbury is the better, and has a good ostrich beak and a fair representation of the large ear-orifice, while in Caius 384/604 the beak has been shortened and increased in depth, and the ear made into a small pinna. (ii) SWIMMING BIRDS

85. Olor (swan). A drawing probably based on life, showing the knob at the base of the beak. (University College Oxford MS 120 f.78.)

Olor or cignus There is no doubt of the identity of this bird as a swan, and from the distribution of the three European species the one most likely to be intended is the mute, the common bird of the Thames and other rivers. It is in all groups from T on. The account begins by saying that it is called olor in Latin but cignus in Greek (sic; it should be kuknos). The text of III ends here, but in the other families it goes on to say that the swan sings sweetly, and some embroider this by ascribing the quality of the song to the bird’s long curving neck, or adding that it sings most sweetly when it is about to die, or that it will sing to music and take part in concerts. One is tempted to dismiss most of this as disappointing nonsense. Although the mute swan is by no means as dumb as its name implies, none of the sounds it produces, recently described in a bird-book as snoring, snorts, grunts and growls, could be called singing, or even, in the general usage of the term, as music. As D’Arcy Thompson said, ‘the swan’s song (like the Halcyon’s) veiled, and still hides, some mystical allusion’. IV correctly says that the swan feeds on vegetation; this comes from Bartholomew, who got it from Aristotle. The pictures, on the other hand, are as consistently good as those of any bird, with fair to good jizz and often many correct details. In over one third the characteristic knob at the base of the beak of the adult is shown, and sometimes this is better in a later member of a group than in the earlier ones; University College has one whereas Aberdeen and Ashmole are without it. Alnwick shows the ‘nail’ at the end of the beak, which Roy. 12 C xix and Leningrad do not. The bird is usually shown walking, but sometimes, as in IIC, swimming. Anas

Not all the birds that habitually swim (some of which also dive) are closely related. Some of the Middle English names, and perhaps the Latin ones also, were variously applied to more than one species.

Anas also occurs in all groups from T on, but it is absent, probably accidentally, from a few manuscripts. The word probably means duck in general; the Middle Ages recognised various species, such as St

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IV. Birds

Cuthbert’s birds (eiders) and small ones {cercelli, teal), and tbe bestiary account suggests that something of tbis was known to the compiler. Historians of agriculture have held that the bird now generally known as the mallard was unknown in the domesticated state in western Europe before the twelfth century, but there are hints in medieval illuminations which suggest that farmyard ducks were kept earlier than this. The bestiary text is always short and to the same effect. After the derivation of the name from the duck’s persistent swimming {assiduitate natande)^ there follows a sentence which distinguishes the sort called germa/iie, which nourish others more, or perhaps are more nourishing. White in his translation silently emends germanie to graminiae^ so that these feed on grains; this makes rather more sense. Next comes a reference to pontic ducks. It is impossible to make much of this, but the manuscripts of IIC and III add that ducks lay their eggs in secret places in order to avoid the male, which is a robber. That the first part of this statement is true anyone who has kept ducks on free range knows, and the drake often harasses ducks other than his mate and indulges in rape, as can be seen in St James’s Park. The pictures usually at least show that the artist knew the bird to have webbed feet and a flat beak. In some there is an attempt at the correct colouring and in Sloane 3544 and Caius 384/604 (both IIB) the birds are white, which may be based on a breed similar to the Aylesbury. In St John’s 61 (IIB) Harley 4751 (IIC) and CUL Kk 4 25 (III) the correct curled tail of the drake is shown. Caius 372/621, an aberfant member of IIA, has a good pair, the drake and duck being in their correct colours (see Plate VI). In spite of the origin of the name that has been given in the text, many are shown walking.

urbibus ut [?] in vicis) have more beautiful colours {pulcriorus coloris). The wild ones fly high and in order. The goose cackles in the night, and is better than any other bird at smelling man. It warned the Romans of the approach of the Gauls to the Capitol, as says Rabanus. The account is repetitive and possibly corrupt, presumably badly conflated from more than one source. Geese, both wild and domestic, are certainly noisy, and the wild forms, from which the domestic birds are descended, are called grey geese (or grey lag geese, a tautology, since lag = goose). One would hardly call any of the present farmyard varieties beautiful, but the passage shows that under domestication more than one colour variant had already arisen. The sense of smell in birds has long been debated, on the whole being denied by zoologists because the olfactory lobes are small, but maintained by naturalists because wild birds appear to be sensitive to food or to man when sight is impossible. Ducks and geese have relatively well-developed olfactory nerves, and various odorous substances have been shown to initiate electrical impulses in them, so that a sense of smell is not impossible. At the very least the bestiarists are in good company, for wildfowlers in general maintain that for success one must stand downwind of geese. The majority of the pictures show a white bird of the correct shape with bill and webbed feet all orange. This is pretty much like the modern breed called Embden, and could well have been drawn from specimens known to the artist. In some manuscripts, usually in addition to the white bird, there is another, or more than one, of various colours - grey, brown and white. Aberdeen has one that is blue and white and another white and orange. Whether all these represent types that then existed or were invented to illustrate pulcriorus coloris we cannot tell, but some, including the two in Caius 372/621, fairly closely resemble the modern Toulouse breed. It is surprising, since geese were in early days better known as domestic birds than were ducks, that they do not occur in all bestiaries. The editors of the transitional, second and third families seem not to have noticed that at the end of their chapter on anas they have passed (as does Isidore) into a description of anser, saying that it calls if disturbed in the night and can smell man better than any other bird, thus repeating a small part only of the full story.

I

Anser The only bestiaries that have a formal chapter on anser, the goose, are those of IIA, IIC and IID, plus Douce 88ii alone in III. These all have pictures, except that in IID the space has, as for most of the other birds, not been filled. There are said to be two sorts of geese, wild and domestic, the former being always grey while the latter, which live in towns and villages {in

Bernace

86. Anser (goose). (University College Oxford MS 120 f.71.)

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In IIC there is another sort of goose, called (in the plural) bernace. The text is derived almost word for word from the History of Ireland of Giraldus Cambrensis, which had been written only a few years before Harley 4751. The pictures in this and in Bodley 764 are similar to, though not an exact reproduction of, that in an early manuscript of Giraldus (BL Roy. 13 B viii). Bernace are described as like marsh geese but smaller {aucis ... palustribus similes sed minores); barnacle geese 133

88. Mergus, drawn as a short-bodied duck. (Cambridge University Library MS Kk 4 25 f.83.)

87. Bernace (barnacle geese). The young birds hatched from rotten wood. (Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764f.58v.)

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(and brent geese, which are probably included here) are indeed smaller than grey lag or other grey geese. After that, the account tells one that bernace are produced not from eggs but from barnacles growing on rotten wood. This is nonsense, but has the excuse that the barnacle protruding from its shell does look rather bird-like, and that barnacle geese are winter visitors from the far north. Their breeding ground was not discovered until 1596, and knowledge of it took many years to become general. ' According to Nigel Morgan, bernace are present also in a bestiary at Rome (Bibl. Apost. Vat. MS Reg. Lat. 258), which he tentatively relates to CUL li 4 26. The list of mammals and birds that he gives (which is not complete, as illustrations only are mentioned and there are unfilled spaces) is in a different order from th^t of this book, and the manuscript should be re-examined. If the account of bernace is taken from Giraldus, it should be grouped as a third member of sub-family

lie. Mergus and mergulus Mergus and its diminutive mergulus are translated from the eighth century to the fifteenth by several different names, all of which show that they represent some sort of diving bird. By the fifteenth century lexicographers seem to have settled on coot (in various spellings) for mergus and dydopper (or a similar word), which has persisted as a local name for the little grebe, for mergulus. This makes sense, for the coot and little grebe are now, and probably were then, the commonest diving birds on inland waters. Mergus is in IID (where there is no picture) and III, mergulus in IV. The text for the former says that it gets its name from its repeated diving (jnergendi). This, like most bestiary etymologies, comes from Isidore, but unlike most of his it seems likely to be true. The rest of the text, also from Isidore, says that in a storm mergus often returns to the shore with loud cries {cum clamore).

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The account of mergulus in IV (see Fig. 89) begins with the same as is said in III about mergus, and then adds that it makes its nest on marshy land and the chicks follow their mother bobbing up and down on the waves. It feeds on fish and water worms. Both coot and little grebe dive, and both, especially the grebe, avoid rough waters. Both have various calls, and the little grebe is described as the noisiest of its family, but there seems no evidence that the calls are more frequent during storms. The food of the little grebe is as described, but the coot is mainly vegetarian, though it does take some animal food. The pictures of both show a chubby web-footed bird, sometimes with a duck’s beak. Neither the coot nor the grebe has webbed feet, the individual toes being flattened to make the swimming surface, so that the artist was probably influenced more by what he thought an aquatic bird ought to be like than by anything he knew of what he was supposed to be drawing. Larus Larus occurs only in the one manuscript of IV. The word is translated as meau (= mew = gull) in the eighth century, but after that it

89. Larus (gull?) above and mergulus (little grebe). The former is imaginary - the word had become unknown - but the second, except for the feet, is not a bad attempt. (Cambridge University Library MS Gg 6 5 f.69.)

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evidently became largely luiknown. It appears in no late vocabularies, and Trevisa, in his English edition of Barthomaeus Anglicus of 1397, leaves it untranslated. The first Wycliffite Bible renders it as coote, the second merely anglicises it as lare. It presumably comes into the bestiary from the Latin of Bartholomew. The text is not helpful, saying merely that larus lives sometimes on land, sometimes in water, swimming like a fish and fiying like a bird. Gulls seldom dive. The picture is of a walking bird with long toes, not in the least like a gull, and with a cock’s tail. Diomedea (birds of Diomedes) According to the Greek legend the followers of Diomedes, one of the heroes of the Trojan war, were changed into birds near an island in the Adriatic. Men of the Middle Ages, like modern scholars, could only guess at their identity, but the prevalent view today is that they were shearwaters. However that may be, the text of III, where only do the birds appear in bestiaries, is a brief account of the legend and describes them as shaped like fulicae, of the size and colour of swans, and with large beaks. It adds that the Greeks call them herodias; this, which goes back as least as‘ far as Aelian (third century AD), is a mistake, for whatever else erodios may have been it was not a seabird. The only bird which is white with a large beak and nearly as big as a swan is the gannet, and there is evidence from a description of Lundy in the mid-fourteenth century that by that time this was the identification of the birds of Diomedes. The drawings were most probably made fey following the text, but it is just possible that the artist of Fitzwilliam 254 and Westminster knew the gannet. For some reason the feet in Westminster, and probably in e Musaeo 136 and Douce 88ii, are cloven, like those of a bestiai*y assida. In Fitzwilliam 254 they appear to be webbed, which is correct for the gannet, but with a line partially dividing the web. This was probably misunderstood by the copyists.

90. Bird of Diomedes (probably gannet). Except for the feet, this is reasonably like a gannet, but it might be based on the text. (Westminster Abbey Library MS 22 f.37v/43v.)

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91. Pelicanus. This, like all bestiary pictures of the bird, illustrates the legend not the real pelican. It is impossible to say which are the young and which the adults, except for the bird in the centre which is biting itself to draw blood. (St John’s College Oxford MS 178f.l84v.)

Pelicanus I put this here because if, as it probably did, it meant the pelican, it was certainly a seabird, but it does not occur in British waters, and was completely unknown to the editors and artists of English bestiaries. It is not surprising that pelicanus has no natural history in the strict sense. Bis says that it is an Egyptian bird, and that there are two sorts, one living in water and feeding on fishes, the other on land and feeding on poisonous animals such as lacerte, crocodrilli, et onocrotalia, ‘having long beaks’. Lacerte may be translated ‘lizards’, but it is impossible to say what the other two names mean in this context. None of this, except a bare reference to Egypt, occurs in later groups. Both species of Mediterranean pelicans (the white and Dalmatian) occur in winter in Eg5^t at the present day, and since there have been great reductions in numbers it is possible, or indeed likely, that one or both species nested there in the Middle Ages. Both feed exclusively on fishes, and the suggestion that there are terrestrial pelicans, let alone that they feed on such creatures as crocodrilli (if these were crocodiles) implies that this passage is corrupt. This is supported by the facts that there are muddled variants of it in other early versions and in French ones. The rest of the account is legend. The young as they grow are said to strike their parents, who in revenge kill them and then, in remorse, restore the young to life by pouring blood from the parents’ side over the dead bodies. Most of the manuscripts of all groups from Bis on show all these scenes, sometimes in two or three pictures, sometimes in one, but some of the later manuscripts show only the last, with a parent standing on the edge of a nest and dripping blood into the beaks of chicks. By this time too it is the breast not the side from which the blood flows, and the young, now alive, are being fed by the blood. This was the origin of ‘the pelican in its piet/ of later Christian art and heraldry. The bird often looks like a hawk, perhaps because this is the 137

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

most obvious sort of bird to draw blood, and this became the standard representation. The version shown here is an unusual example. The birds are green, but otherwise look rather like crows, and the attacking of the young (which do not differ in size from their parents) takes place from a tree. Blood is invisible, perhaps because the background of the picture is brick-red, but it would in any case not fall on to the chicks. The story of the pelican reviving its young with blood probably comes from the observation that pelicans feed their yoimg by regurgitation; this is shown in a few bestiaries, e.g. Harley 4751, where the picture is coloured, and also in CUL li 4 26. (hi) DIURNAL BIRDS OF PREY

Accipiter Accipiter is a word which seems, like 'hawk', to have both a wide and a restricted meaning. In the former sense, which is suggested by the text of IID, it perhaps meant ever3d;hing that anyone would now call a hawk, while in the restricted sense, particularly in the language of ars venandi cum avibus, or falconry, it appears to have been confined to the goshawk. The bestiaries may possibly have intended it to cover also the smaller and very .similar sparrowhawk, which ought properly to be nisus, which they do not include — although Neckam does, coupling it with accipiter. Although not in Bis, accipiter is in all the other families and subfamilies. The only items of natural history in most accounts are that it catches other birds, having a courageous heart in a small body (which suggests that this, which comes from Isidore, must have been written a,bout the sparrowhawk, since the goshawk could hardly be called small), and that it drives its young away from the nest as soon as

92. Accipiter. A complete scene of catching ducks, showing a goshawk with jesses held on the falconer’s gloved left hand and a lure in his right, a duck in the water, another fl5dng up after being disturbed by a gong, and a successful strike with blood dripping from the duck’s mouth. (British Library MS Harley 4751 f.49.)

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93. Accipiter. Quite a good drawing of a goshawk. (St John’s College Oxford MS178f.l86.)

they can fly. The first is obviously true, at least up to a certain point, the second is not, for young goshawks are dependent on their parents for much longer than most birds, being fed throughout the summer until September; young sparrowhawks, hatched about the same time, are independent earlier than this. The Aviarium and manuscripts derived from it have a longer account of accipiter; after the piece already described, it goes on to quote Gregory's comments on Job 39:26 about the hawk flying towards the south, some of which is fanciful. Then it continues Due sunt species accipitres: domesticus et silvestris (There are two sorts of goshawk, domestic and wild). The former catch wild birds and return them to their master, while the latter catch domestic birds which they eat themselves. This is no doubt how it would appear to those men who had their poultry attacked by the lord's hawks. Finally there is a description of how to look after the domestic birds. IV has a similar account, but IIC tells how to look after tame hawks without having made the distinction of the two sorts. As would be expected of a bird likely to be readily available to the artists, the majority of the illustrations can be recognised as hawks, the actual quality depending more on the skill of a particular draughtsman than on anything else. Those in II are better than those in III, and one of the best is St John's 178. Several in T, IIB and IIC show the hawk attacking another bird; in Canterbury, which is uncoloured, this is a drake, with beak, webbed feet and curly tail well shown, but the hawk, though recognisable as such, is somewhat unsatisfactory. In HA, in accordance with the text, there are usually two or more drawings, one showing a tame hawk, with or without jesses, on a perch, and the others a free one. The first are probably descended from the drawings in some early copies of the Aviarium: in Aberdeen and Ashmole accipiter (with columba) sits on a perch under a dome or arch, which it does also in a copy of Hugh's Aymrjw/n at Oxford (Lyell MS 71) which was written in North Italy c. 1300, a century later than the English examples. It looks as if all three came from some early lost version. Tame hawks have also crept into IIB and IIC, where the text does not mention them. In Caius 384/604 the bird is frontal, on a perch, and in Harley 4751 and Bodley 764 the hawk is held in the hand. In Harley another hawk attacks a duck, which is bleeding from the mouth, while two more escape. The falconer holds a lure while a boy beats a drum or gong, the use of which to cause ducks to rise from 139

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary the water is described by Frederick II in his treatise on falconry. It is thus a complete scene of falconry, which must have been sketched from life. Bodley has simplified it by omitting the attacking scene, but has improved the drawing of the hawks. In two manuscripts the artist has obviously been muddled. In Bodley 533 the pictures for accipiter (f.lSv) and lucinia (nightingale, f.l9r) have been exchanged, while in Sloane 3544 f.29v he has drawn a variant of his picture for aquila (eagle), with two yoimg in the nest and a red sun above.

95. Alietus. A small falcon attacking a sparrow or finch. (Cambridge University Library MS Gg 6 5 f.58.)

Capus Not least because of the wide diffusion of the sport of falconry, the Middle Ages knew that there was more than one sort of‘hawk’, and in particular knew the difference between those sporting birds that pursued their prey in level flight, and those that stooped on them from above, now called falcons. The bestiaries, however, say nothing of this, and it is surprising that none contains a chapter on falco, the word used, for example, by the Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century for the peregrine and related birds. The nearest is that III and rV have, at the end of the chapter on accipiter, a brief reference to capus, taken with slight verbal alterations from Isidore:

Alietus CUL Gg 6 5, the only example of IV, has another type of raptor, alietus, which, following Bartholomew, is equated with falco and esmerilon. The last is the French form of ‘merlin’, so that that is perhaps what alietus is intended to mean. In various medieval vocabularies it is equated to this and to sparrowhawk; it was evidently at least a small raptor. The picture shows a reasonably well-drawn hawk or falcon (the wings are of intermediate length) with long toes, catching a finch in flight. Douce 88ii has had added to the bottom of the page dealing with accipiter and capus a condensation of the account of alietus in CUL Gg 6 5. The drawing is quite different; it looks more like an eagle than anything else, standing in a rather formal tree.

Capus itala lingua dicitur a capiendo. Hunc nostri falconem vacant, quod incurvis digitis sit.

(Capus is so-called in the Italian language because it captures; we call it falco because of its curved toes [falx - reaping hook].) I

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It is of course true that most raptors have curved grasping toes and claws, but it is doubtful if there is enough difference to distinguish a falcon from a hawk; pictures in modern books do not show any. Three of the 'manuscripts have no picture for capus\ CUL Gg 6 5 and Douce 88ii have an imidentifiable short-winged hawk, while e Musaeo 136 has a bird with a long straight beak, which is open as if it were singing.

94. Capus (above) and alietus - unknown small hawks or falcons. (Bodleian Library MS Douce 88 f. 102.)

Herodius Herodius (or erodius) is a word that has changed its meaning. It was apparently in the Physiologus, but was substituted in the Latin versions by either ardea or fulica. Whatever it meant then, by the Middle Ages it had come to mean some sort of falcon, and particularly the g3rrfalcon (not, as it is usually translated by historians, the heron). In this guise it returned to IV, where, in a passage taken from Bartholomew, it is said to be a royal bird, accustomed to be carried, that flies well and attacks its prey as much with its body as with its beak and claws. Since all falcons kill their victim partly by the

96. Herodius. A large hawk or falcon not identifiable to species. (Cambridge University LibraryMSGg6 5f67v.)

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Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

momentum with which they stoop on it from a height, and since momentum is proportional to mass, the larger the falcon the greater the blow, so that the last point is most important with the larger falcons. The picture in CUL Gg 6 5 is of a large raptor with a big curved beak and a prominent lump at the base of the upper mandible. It does not differ greatly from that for accipiter.

97. Aquila (eagle). An unusual picture, showing the casting-out of a chick that is unable to look at the sun. (British Library MS Royal 12 Fxiiif.49.)

Aquila The bestiaries include four kinds of diurnal bird of prey that are not, or not normally, used in falconry. Aquila is universal; it occurs in the Physiologus, and in all the families and sub-families. It is translated, correctly, as eagle, but both the Latin word and the English have been used at times more widely than we should now do; aquila in the Vulgate and eagle in our Bibles seem to mean, or at least to include, the vultures of Palestine. In the bestiaries the meaning is restricted, for the most important piece of natural history in the text is that aquila catches fish; it must, therefore, be what is now called a sea-eagle (or possibly an osprey, which is discussed below). The only species that is ever likely to have been common enough around the Mediterranean to be a candidate is the bird now known as the white-tailed eagle. Within historic times this was resident in Scotland and northern England, but it became extinct at the beginning of this century. How far south it nested is unknown. It has been alleged to have done so in Devonshire and the Isle of Wight, but these old records are doubted by many ornithologists. The account, from Bis, onwards, says that aquila has good eyesight (hence its name, from acumen, sharpness) and can see little fishes when it is immobile on high, plunging into the water to catch them; that when it grows old its eyesight becomes dim, but it cures this by flying close to the sun, after which it plunges into a pool to quench its burning wings. It holds its young up to the sun, rejecting those that turn their gaze away. The first statement about catching fish is broadly true, but the rest is fanciful. According to modern accounts the white-tailed eagle can see fish when it is soaring at a height of 300 m, and it sometimes hovers. Although the golden eagle occasionally eats fish, it has not been recorded as catching them in this way. A remarkable thing about the pictures is that, except for the well-known sets of HA and IIC, no two are alike. This suggests either that pictures in non-bestiary manuscripts deriving from various, possibly Byzantine, sources were being copied, or that the birds were indeed known to the artists. The white-tailed eagle wanders after nesting; examples, mostly juveniles, were recorded in many coimty avifaunas in the nineteenth century, but only on the east coast were they at all frequent. There is therefore the possibility that artists in such places as East Anglia and York could have had access to

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specimens to draw. The golden eagle, which wanders much less and so is less likely to have been seen, has fully feathered tarsi (lower legs), and this feature is not certainly shown in any English medieval drawing; some, such as Ashmole and Roy. 12 F xiii, are not clear. The majority have bare tarsi, which is correct for the white-tailed eagle, but as this is the normal condition of birds, its appearance in drawings of aquila, whether in bestiaries or as the symbol of St John, means little, since it is what an artist who did not know the bird would have drawn. None of the manuscripts of III or IV attempts to illustrate the story; they show simply a hooked-beak bird in any of various attitudes, or, in Douce 88ii, two such birds. Some of the others also have single birds, but in rather more than half, spread over all the subfamilies, one eagle holds a fish, while others plimge into the water or approach the sun. Most interesting is the picture in Roy. 12 F xiii, the one manuscript of IID. Two yoimg birds stand in a bowl-shaped nest in the top of a formal tree and stare at the sun, while an old bird behind them stands on one foot and throws out a third chick with the other. In Norway, from which most of our modern information comes, white-tailed eagles usually nest on cliffs, but there and in other parts of Europe they do sometimes use trees. The quality and interest of this illustration, which has no parallel elsewhere, makes one regret even more the absence from this manuscript of most of the pictures of birds. Aurifrisius From the description of aquila catching fish, it could equally well be the osprey, a bird which now scarcely nests anywhere round the Mediterranean, and not at all in Italy or Greece, though it occurs as a winter migrant. It was possibly described by Frederick II under the name of aquila piscatrix, which he says is smaller than aquila. On grounds of present and probable past distribution it seems more likely that Frederick’s aquila piscatrix and the bestiary aquila are both the white-tailed eagle, while he used aquila by itself for other, larger.

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Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

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species. The only palaearctic eagle conspicuously larger than the white-tailed eagle is the black eagle of Africa, which is now attempting to breed in Israel; it might have been known to Frederick. The manuscripts of IIC have a bird called aurifrisius, which is smaller than aquila, but larger than accipiter^ and dives into the water to catch fish that it has seen from above. This fits the osprey. The account comes almost word for word from Giraldus in his History of Ireland, from which it takes also the untrue statement that one foot is webbed, with which it can swim, and the other clawed, with which it seizes fish. Except for the feet, which follow the text and are clearly shown, and for the absence of the overhead sun, the pictures could just as well illustrate aquila, since they show one bird holding a fish, one diving and one fl5dng. Indeed that in Bodley, the later of the two manuscripts, is rather more like the Harley aquila than its aurifrisius. In CUL Gg 6 5 there is a drawing of a bird with a large unhooked beak and one webbed, one clawed, foot, holding a fish. There is no text to correspond, the whole of that on this page (f.88v) being about onocratulus, for which there is another, quite different, drawing. The aurifrisius drawing does not look as if it was an addition, but it is labelled ‘horspray’, in a different ink from the text, and in a hand which is later, but not much later (see Fig. 83).

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As has been said under aquila, the same name has sometimes been used to cover both eagles and vultures, and indeed eagles, vultures and hawks are closer together anatomically than are hawks to falcons, which are still popularly, and in learned'writing by non-zoologists, confused. In habit vultures are distinguished from eagles by feeding almost entirely on carrion, only some species taking live prey, and that only rarely. Eagles, however, including our own golden eagle, eat carrion as well as pursuing living animals. The bestiaries, from T on, correctly state that vultur feeds on the bodies {cadavera) which it can discern from a long way off. The verb used is sensio, which Latin dictionaries translate as 'perceive’, so that the bestiarist apparently makes no judgement on which sense the vulture uses to become aware of a corpse, even, as he says, from over the sea or the other side of mountains. There has been much discussion and bad temper over whether vultures find their food by sight or smell, but few critical experiments. The prevailing view at present is that while the American Turkey vulture uses smell, Old-World vultures use sight, and in particular follow other birds that have seen a corpse because they are nearer to it. The text goes on to say that vultures follow opposing armies and foretell by their numbers the numbers of those that will die in battle. It does not seem impossible that in times and places where there was much fighting in the open vultures would have learnt that the assembly of large companies of men would mean food.

just as insect-eating hawks in Africa are attracted to forest fires, which cause their prey to fly up, and that the size of the forces would influence the likely number of casualties and so the number of vultures that would assemble. Finally, in a quotation from Ambrose, vultures are said not to copulate, the female not needing the male, which is nonsense, and to live for as much as 100 years. It is very difficult to learn much of the expectation of life or age of creatures in the wild, but as most vultures do not lay more than two eggs a year, often only one, and may not breed until they are five years old, it is clear that they have a lower rate of replacement than most other birds, and so probably live longer. I do not think it is possible to say which of the species of vulture found round the Mediterranean was understood by vultur either by the Physiologus or by Ambrose, but the English bestiarists knew none. A quarter of the artists follow the text and show a bird accompanied by a human limb (e.g. Harley 4751) or a beast (e.g. Canterbury, which has a sheep) but the majority simply repeat the drawing of aquila. Sometimes the vulture is rather shaggier, and in most of HA and some of IIB there are two, addorsed and crossed in a rather heraldic manner. Where the drawing is on a different page from the text, as it often is, and that for vultur is merely a repeat of that for aquila, those describing the bestiary have often recorded both drawings as being of the eagle. Grifes is sometimes treated as a vulture, but it is described in the bestiary text, and shown in the drawings, as a creature with the wings

144

145

Vultur

t

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

/V. Birds

and head of an eagle and the body of a lion, so that it is neither fish, fiesh nor fowl. It is best translated griffin, and left to works on heraldry.

looks like a small dog, while in Bodley 764 (IIC) the kite attacks another unrecognisable bird. These are presumably based on the reference to domestic animals in the text.

Milvus

(iv) NOCTURNAL BIRDS OF PREY: OWLS

Milvus, the kite, is only in IIA, IIC, IID, III and IV. Either the black kite or the red could have been the original, since their range overlaps in many parts of the Mediterranean. For present purposes the only important distinction is that the red has a much more deeply forked tail than the black. Both are in habits small vultures, feeding largely on carrion and, in association with man, domestic refuse, but also catching small creatures on the ground. Their habits are described fairly accurately in the bestiary text, which says that milvus does not catch wild birds but takes domestic ones {silvestres volucres rape non audet. domesticis autem insidaret solet) and feeds on carrion. It is itself preyed on by the hawk (a niso impeditur). It is hardly likely that so small a bird as the sparrowhawk, which is what nisus usually means, could attack a kite, but fiying ‘hawks' at kites was at one time considered a great amusement by gentlemen in Norfolk and elsewhere. The species of hawk is seldom mentioned in the records, but the favourite seems to have been the Iceland falcon. The bird known m England was the red kite, which was a common scavenger in towns. In IIA and IV the picture shows a reasonably good raptor with a forked tail, sometimes exaggerated as in Ashmole 1511, but in most of the others the bird is unrecognisable. In CUL Kk 4 25 it is pretty much the same sketch as has been used for aquila and vultur. In Bodley 602ii (IIA) one bird watches another fiying off with what

99. Milvus (kite). Many of the drawings in this and similar manuscripts seem to have come from an earlier model. The forked tail is well shown, suggesting that it is a red, not a black, kite. (Aberdeen University Library MS 24 f.46v.) See also Fig. 121.

146

The owls are nocturnal birds of prey, feeding like the diurnal hawks on other animals, usually smaller than themselves. The British species take predominantly small mammals, with smaller volumes of birds and other creatures such as earthworms, in all this resembling the kestrel, the only common British falcon. They have two adaptations similar to those of hawks and falcons, a hooked beak and strong talons, but are otherwise not closely related in structure. That the similarity was recognised in the Middle Ages is shown by at least four non-bestiary manuscripts, from the Abingdon Apocalypse (BL Add. 42555 f.35v) of the mid-thirteenth century to the Luttrell Psalter (BL Add. 42130 f.38r) of c. 1335, which have as marginal decoration a monkey carr5dng an owl just as a man carries a hawk. Evidence that owls were known and handled comes from decoration in the Arundel Psalter (BL Arundel 83 f.l4r) of c. 1310, which shows a man holding one as a decoy to catch goldfinches, magpies etc, and there is reference to a dead owl being used in this way in ‘The owl and the nightingale', a poem of the late twelfth century. Bestiaries have five names altogether that mean some sort of owl, but only two or three are found in most. Those who describe and catalogue manuscripts have confused matters by omitting the Latin, calling all of them ‘owl' without qualification, or, if they do use a specific prefix, without saying how they arrive at their identification. This means that it is impossible to make comparisons even in the most general way without seeing the manuscripts themselves, or at least legible reproductions of them. The confusion thus introduced, added to that already present in the Middle Ages, makes discussion somewhat difficult. We must start with Aristotle. He was not completely clear on the subject, but three of his owls can be identified with confidence. Glaux, whose image appears on many coins, was the little owl, sacred to Pallas Athene. Hotos was an eared owl (hence its name) which is also called nuktikorax. Bruas (more often in Greek buas), was an owl as large as an eagle, and so must be the eagle owl. In the transition to Latin a linguistic confusion happened, and then or soon after any clear identification was lost. Glaux was translated as noctua, the bird which was sacred to Minerva, the Roman equivalent of Athena, and nuktikorax was transliterated as nictocorox. Buas became bubo, Isidore reduced these owls to two, by writing Nyctocorax ipsa est noctua (nicticorax and noctua are the same), but retained their distinction from bubo: noctua non est bubo; nam bubo maior est (noctua is not bubo, for bubo is larger), which might have been taken directly from Aristotle’s comparison of bruas ^ith. glaux. In the De arte 147

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary venandi cum avibus of Frederick II, contemporary with many English bestiaries, noctua appears to be the long-eared owl. This perhaps came about because of Isidore’s equation of noctua and nicticorax, and also Aristotle’s statement that nuktikorax is the same as hotos (Frederick certainly knew the works of Aristotle) so that noctua must be an eared owl.

Nicticorax and noctua Nuktikorax is in the Physiologus, which says nothing of its habits except that it prefers darkness to light. Bern 318, the earliest known illustrated bestiary, and Bern 233 have nocticorax with much the same as the presumed Physiologus text, but by the earliest English bestiaries of Bis Isidore’s identification of noctua with nicticorax was accepted, and a further gloss added: noctua avis est lucifuga. que dicitur nicticorax i corvus noctis (noctua is a bird that shuns the light which is called nicticorax, i.e. night crow). The identification continues right to the end, but in T nicticorax becomes the title of the chapter. The statement that noctua is nocturnal is obviously true, but it gives no clue to the specific identification, and the equation with night crow misled many of the illustrators, so that, leaving out for the moment IIA, in nine of the ipanuscripts, including all five of III and IV, the bird is shown as crow-like and, if not in oiitline, all black. In most of Bis and a few others it is more or less eagle- or hawk-like. Only in Laud misc. 247 (Bis), in six (about half) of IIB and in IIC is the bird shown as an owl, usually highly conventional and in about half the cases ‘horned’ or ‘ea^ed’. In some of these the protuberances are shaped much like the external ears or pinnae of a man (e.g. St John’s 61) or a cat (Douce 88i). Of the iwo manuscripts of IIC Harley 4751 has pinnae and Bodley 764 does not. The manuscripts of IIA differ from the others in having separate chapters on nicticorax and noctua. This presumably came about because material from the Aviarium was grafted on to a more normal bestiary (or vice versa). In Ashmole the chapter on noctua is the same as in IIB, including the statement that noctua and nicticorax are the same, but different from bubo. The picture is barely recognisable as an owl by the hooked beak and flattish face, but it is all black, suggesting

100. Noctua. Here dravm as a crow. (British Library Add. MS 11283 f.20.)

148

101. Noctua. Now an unhomed owl, probably a tawny. (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621 f.45.)

102. Nicticorax. A similar bird to the last. (Gonville and Caius College MS 372/621 f.31.)

that the artist was tr5dng to combine an owl and a crow. The chapter on nicticorax, which comes earlier in the text, is much longer, and in the account of the natural history says that the bird likes the dark and lives among ruins; it therefore represents Christ, who came to visit the Gentiles who were in darkness. This is expressed in the prophecy of Zacharias (Luke 1:78-9), in the canticle called the Benedictus, which is (or ought to be) read regularly at Morning Prayer in the Church of England. It should be noted that this is contrary to the usual story, that because the owl loves darkness, it represents the Jews. Living among ruins is most characteristic of the barn owl, but is true at times of the little owl, which inhabited the Acropolis, and also of the tawny owl. The picture is not distinguishable except by the accidents of drawing from that for noctua. The other manuscripts of IIA vary but few of the drawings are really owl-like. Bodley 602ii has no chapter for noctua, while for nicticorax there are two black birds not like owls but with slightly hooked beaks, one of which attacks a green duck. In Caius 372/621 both nicticorax and noctua are brown and white, and reasonably like tawny owls, and they have large eyes and hooked be£iks, but the jizz is more hawk-like. Nicticorax is in a formal tree, the other not. The text is similar to Ashmole. Caius 384/604 is unique among manuscripts of IIB in having nicticorax as the title of the chapter, which begins as does the passage for that bird in IIA, but then switches to the normal text of IIB. The picture is owl-like and eared, but nearly black and of no possible species.

103. Nicticorax. This owl has been given ears, not horns. (Gonville and Caius College MS 384/604 f.l91v.)

149

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

How then should one identify noctua and nicticorax in English bestiaries? Where the latter was thought of as the night crow (or night raven) it was entirely imaginary, and has nothing to do with the night heron, which is what it is often called. If either appears from the drawing to have been taken as an owl, it cannot be the little owl, which was not found in Britain until introduced from the continent in the nineteenth century; the most likely candidate is the tawny owl, the commonest owl in this country now and probably then. The pictures in Caius 372/621 would support this, but since in some other manuscripts the birds have horns or ears another species must be included, and this can only be the long-eared owl. It is largely a bird of coniferous woodland, and in England does not frequent buildings, ruined or otherwise, but in some parts of its range it is more eclectic, and has been recorded as hunting in graveyards in Russia and in towns in the Canary Islands. Though perhaps commoner in the Middle Ages than now, it is unlikely to have been very abundant. It has very similar colouring to the tawny owl, and so probably when an occasional long-eared owl was caught it was regarded as a variant of this. Bubo

104. Bubo. An imaginary owl with both ears and horns. The smudged little bird above may be intended for ulula. (Westminster Abbey Library MS 22 f.40/46.)

Bubo is in IIA, IIC, IID, III and IV. Whatever nicticorax ought to have been, this owl ought to have been the'eagle owl, which is not common anywhere, and which would have been completely unknown to the English Middle Ages. The text of IIA, partly following Isidore, partly Rabanus, but also perhaps partly original, says that it gets its name from- its voice, that it has thick feathers which impede its flight, and that it lives among graves and caves and dung. If it ventures into the light it is mobbed by other birds. IIC includes much of this, with repetition as if the compiler had lost his way, while III has a shortened version. Ticehurst described the song as ‘boo-hoo’ many times repeated, which except for the lengthening of the syllables might fit its name. But with a little imagination 'bubo’ could be said to be like the call of other owls, including the tawny. The plumage of all owls is thick and fluffy. I can find no recent statement that the nest is foul, but it is always possible that faeces may accumulate round a nest in a hole, which many species of owl, including the eagle owl, use regularly or occasionally. Mobbing of all owls by other birds is common and well known. IV, quoting Bartholomew, says that bubo feeds on mice and bats. Many mammals that would be included under the Latin mus^ and some bats, have been recorded as being taken. Unlike noctua and nicticorax, bubo seems always to have been recognised as an owl. The drawings, though mostly conventional and sometimes caricatured, are always identifiable as such, though not to species. In Ashmole 1511 the bird has, unusually, a white breast and a yellowish-buff back (with a very slight pink wash) and is unhorned, so that it looks like a barn owl, but it does not have the characteristic

heart-shaped facial disk of that species. Some frontal photographs of the barn owl do not however show this feature, so that its absence is probably unimportant. The majority of the drawings bear some sort of excrescences from the crown of the head. In some, these are short projections or horns, of approximately the same form as the tufts of feathers that they represent, but in the majority they have the appearance of mammalian pinnae, placed at the side of the head instead of on top. Presumably this is derived from the adjective 'eared’, but the earliest occurrence of this applied to an owl that I can find in English is by Ray in 1672. The Latin of the bestiaries does not mention either horns or ears or tufts of feathers, so that when horns are drawn they must be based on knowledge of the long-eared owl (or on an earlier drawing so derived), and when ‘ears’ are shown they are taken from an unrecorded vernacular name. Westminster 22 shows an owl with both horns and ears. Both manuscripts of IIC illustrate mobbing with a rather poorly drawn unhorned owl surrounded by a magpie and two unrecognisable small birds. This could have been drawn from an actual scene that the artist had witnessed; something like it is found carved both in stone and wood in churches. In my experience the birds that usually discover a roosting owl and start mobbing are thrushes and blackbirds, but robins and finches soon join in. I have never seen a magpie doing so, but it is not impossible. Bodley 602ii has four caricatured owls, two of which stand on a rat. A scene parallel to this also is common in sculpture, and in the illustration for noctua in Bodley 764 one of the two owls holds a rat or mouse in its feet. Two unnamed pictures in Queen Mary’s Psalter (ffl28v, 129), in which

150

151

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

IV. Birds

many illustrations are based on a transitional bestiary, show first two magpies mobbing an unhorned owl in a tree, and then three magpies pursuing it as it flies away. Its position in the series suggests that these represent nicticorax.

inconspicuous, but some of the Asiatic species are brightly, even spectacularly, coloured, and have long been kept in captivity both for food and for show. Perdix

Ulula Manuscripts of IIC, IID and III have yet another owl, ulula. In III it is placed, with a short text, between noctua and bubo. It is said to get its name from its wailing cry, which foretells sorrow, while its silence presages prosperity. The variety of notes produced by the tawny owl best fits this description of the sound, while the foretelling of doom is a common folktale. IIC and IID both refer to Isaiah 34:11, but not in the same words, and IID runs off into saying that ulula makes a horrible noise by putting its beak into a reed; this is a confusion with onocratulus, which occurs in the same verse of Isaiah. The Vulgate in this verse has not ulula but ibis, while the Authorised Version has owl and the New English Bible has screech owl, so presumably the editors of the bestiaries must have been using some pre-Jerome version of the Bible in Latin. Few pictures seem to belong to ulula. In IIC Harley 4751 has two birds with long beaks and tufted tails, which are not owls, and Bodley 764 has two cranes; both these perhaps reflect the confusion with ibis. Douce 88ii has a conventional horned owl much like its bubo but smaller. A small bird in Westminster 22 may be intended for ulula (see Fig.-J04).

Perdix, the partridge, is in the Physiologus, but at the present time no bird so called is found anywhere near Alexandria; the species intended by the original compilers is most likely to be one of the geriMs Alectoris, either the rock partridge, the red-legged or perhaps the Barbary partridge of North Africa (but not Egypt except the north-west). All these are of very similar appearance and habits. The only partridge that could have been known in England in the Middle Ages is the common or grey partridge, of different appearance but not greatly different in habits. All this raises a difficulty, because 'perdix^ with a trilled r is a good echoic representation of the call of the English bird, but can hardly be made to correspond to any of the calls described for the others. Isidore says that the bird is named from its voice, and this is copied into the bestiaries. Probably what happened is that at some time during the early Latin life of the bestiary the bird was switched

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These are birds of a wide variety of habitat but living mainly on the ground; they have flesh which is generally good to eat, and often strongly flavoured. The European species are mostly rather 152

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153

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Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

IV. Birds

from soa Alectoris to the grey partridge, which is found in Italy (but not now anywhere near Seville in Spain, of which Isidore was Archbishop). The grey partridge was formerly found in Greece and presumably had the name perdix^ the Alectoris species having the other Greek name, kakkabe, which also is onomatopoeic. Perdix is found throughout the English bestiaries except for IV. Most of what they say about it refers in one way or another to its sexual habits, some of which stems probably from Aristotle. From IIA and IIB on it is reported to steal eggs from the nest of another bird, to hide the chicks from the male lest he should kill them, and to be lecherous and to indulge in buggery. This is not correct in detail, but does reflect observation of the bird’s habits. The hen bird lays up to 20 or more eggs, and sometimes she makes a second nest in which she lays eggs that the cock incubates. Two hens may also lay in one nest. The chicks are early led away from the nest. Adolescent young indulge in sex-play, without distinction of male or female. (Not all these points have been reported of all the species.) The text says also that perdix is protectively coloured, and that it pretends to be injured so as to draw intruders away from the nest. Both these statements are true. None of the birds in the pictures is much like a partridge. Several, in T and II show a bird stealing an egg, and in some an old bird leads or faces a line of chicks. A few manuscripts show a solitary bird crowing, or two facing each other and apparently challenging. These could be good observation, not mentioned in the text. That partridges were known, and caught in nets, is shown by the drawing in Queen Mary’s Psalter (f.ll2).

accent on the first syllable, is onomatopoeic. It is a summer migrant, and in England is commonest in the south-east quarter. Its numbers fluctuate, and it is possible that following the cold period that set in towards the end of the thirteenth century it was absent. Coturnix comes into T, and is thereafter general. The brief account says that it migrates in flocks, feeds on poisonous seeds, and suffers from the falling sickness. Quails do migrate on a broad front and feed on seeds, but not exclusively or especially on poisonous ones. Those of poppy and hemp have been recorded in their diet, but opium and cannabis are derived not from the seeds but from other portions of these plants. The last item perhaps comes from the observation of quails apparently falling from the skies, as happens with many migrants. White records that he has seen a heron collapse when confronted by a man, so that this sort of behaviour is another possible explanation. None of the illustrations shows any knowledge of the bird. Sloane 3544 (IIB) has three nondescript birds fl5dng over the waves, while both manuscripts of IIC show a hawk attacking the leader of the flock, as described in the text. Several vocabularies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries translate coturnix not as quail but as curlew. Even if quails were absent from England at this time, as suggested above, it is difficult to see why the curlew should have been chosen as a substitute, since although it forms flocks its main food is small invertebrates, and it eats only a very little vegetable matter. Whatever the reason, seven bestiary manuscripts, mostly late, confirm the misidentification, for their pictures show a bird with moderately long legs and a long or longish down-curved beak. The best are in Canterbury and St John’s 178.

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There is no doubt that coturnix is the quail, although as we shall see it was not always interpreted as such. It is a bird seldom seen, even where it is common, but often heard, and the name in Latin, with the

106. Coturnix. This should be a quail, but is quite a good drawing of a curlew. (Canterbury Cathedral Library MS Lit. D 10 f.21v.)

154

Gallus The remaining game-birds in bestiaries are not native to Europe, but had been imported from the east, especially India. Gallus^ the farmyard fowl, was very early domesticated, and it was present in Britain at least from Celtic times. It is one of the birds in the early Latin manuscript Bern 318, but is not in Bern 233 or the Bis manuscripts derived from it. It is present from T to the end. The chapter is called simply gallus, which is strictly the cock, but the text says gallina, the name for the hen, is derived from this. Most of the chapter is in praise of the value of the cock’s crowing; waking the sleeper, disturbing the thief and so on. That cocks crow in the night is true. An unusually large number of the pictures oigallus are missing from or have been cut out of the manuscripts, but on the other hand pictures of cocks appear elsewhere than in the named chapter, notably in that on leo, the lion. Including these, a rough classification of the 155

IV. Birds

107. Gallus (cock). The wattle is good, but the comb is something between the t3^es known as single and rose. (St John’s College Oxford MS 61 f.55v.)

truth-to-nature of 27 drawings makes 7 poor, 16 fair and 4 good. This is a little surprising, since the bird can hardly have been unknown to the artists; probably they thought they knew it well enough to draw without looking at one while doing so, but were not as skilful as they thought. In nearly half of the drawings the comb is well shown, and can be seen to belong to the types called single (5 examples), pea (4) or rose (4). There are none of the form called walnut, which is obtained by crossing pea with rose. This distribution, coupled with the occurrence of both brown and ^yhite birds in the drawings, suggests that different breeds were known, and that some attempt was made to keep them pure. In some illustrations the brilliant colours of the cock are shown. The hen is sometimes shown as a distinct bird. In IIC chicks are present also. I

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carvings, manuscripts, and one bone, been in Britain continuously since late Saxon times. The distribution of pavo, its Latin name, in English bestiaries is similar to that oigallus. There is nothing in the text that can be called natural history, except perhaps the statement that its flesh is not easily cooked. This is untrue; it tastes rather like pheasant, and according to Larousse Gastronomique may be cooked in the same way as that bird. Since in some parts of Europe there was much ritual in connection with the ‘Peacock Feast’ perhaps the statement was meant to deter the vulgar. The long chapter in IIA is largely based on I Kings 10:22 - the importation by Solomon of ivory, apes and peacocks from Ophir and its interpretation. There is also some more or less correct reference to the peacock’s beautiful colours. The drawings are good enough to confirm that the bird was known, but there is always some degree of formalisation, the number of feathers making up the crest and the number of ‘eyes’ in the train being reduced, for example. Rather surprisingly the train is shown erected in display in only five out of 27 drawings. St John’s 61 shows a rare example where the artist has used the bird to make a formal pattern. The crest (three pins as usual) is scarcely visible, but the toes are correct and so is the notch in the ‘eyes’, directed towards the base of the feathers on which they appear. An amusing error has occured in Fitzwilliam 379. The scribe evidently mis-heard and wrote cavo instead of pavo. The artist had no clue as to what this meant, so he drew an ordinary passerine-type bird flapping its wings and singing, perhaps being influenced by the first sentence of the text, which says that cavo gets its name from its voice.

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Pavo

Fasianus

The peacock, like the fowl, comes from India, and has been kept in captivity for a long time. It is portrayed in Romano-British mosaics, and, even if it disappeared during the Dark Ages, it has, to judge from

The pheasant, native to regions of the Caspian and Caucasus, was kept by the ancient Romans, but in spite of many statements to the contrary there is no evidence that it was known in Britain before about 1300 at

108. Pavo (peacock). One of the few shown frontally in pride. (St John’s College Oxford MS 61 f.55.)

109. Fasianus (pheasant). The only bestiary drawing of this bird. As often in birds with long tails, the feathers are shown separated. Passer (sparrow) is shown below. (Cambridge University Library MSGg6 5 f 70.)

156

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157

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

the earliest; the few references to fasianus in English documents before this probably mean the capercaillie. The pheasant did not become common or feral until a century later than this. Correspondingly the only bestiary in which fasianus occurs is CUL Gg 6 5 of c. 1450. The brief text says that it comes from the Island of Phasis, from which it was first brought by the Argonauts. This is the usual legend, except that Phasis is a river, though there is a town of that name at its mouth. Fasianus has beautiful wings and glistening feathers; this is true. The picture is reasonably accurate, with the long tail split to the base.

110. Columha (dove). This illustrates the silvered dove of the Aviarium, and is perhaps a fantailed pigeon. (Aberdeen University Library MS f.27v.)

(vi) PIGEONS AND DOVES

Columba Columha is, in a medieval context, usually translated ‘dove’. It was present in the Physiologus, and continues throughout the bestiaries. In I and II what is said of its features and habits is, even more than usual, mixed up with allegorical explanations; this is perhaps because the dove is mentioned many more times in the Bible than is any other species of bird, and because it is of special allegorical significance as representing the Holy Spirit. IIA has an unusually long section dealing with the different kinds of dove and their meaning, which comes from the Aviarium; something of this is present in IIB also, while III, as usual, has rejected the allegories. When these have been removed the chief points are that doves are of many different colours; they live in fiocks; they kiss in love; they feed on the better seeds; they lack bile; their voice is mournful; they nest in holes in the rocks, and they have two chicks. Ill adds that they produce these in every month of the year except December. Most of this is correct. The description of the many different colours of doves shows that tame pigeons are being referred to, but those that live in holes in rocks must be the wild ancestors, the rock doves of many European coasts. Tame pigeons, as everyone knows, readily become feral, and in former times there was probably more interchange between the wild and domestic populations than there is now. Both form fiocks and feed on seeds, and it has been shown that in Yorkshire, where they have the choice, they prefer barley to the seeds of weeds. Two is the commonest number of eggs in a clutch. Whether the cooing of a dove is mournful or not is a matter of opinion; some will say that continually repeated it is pleasant, others that it is irritating. The voices of most pigeons are more or less like that of the rock dove, and one species in Africa, more closely related to the turtle dove, and another similar to it in America, are commonly known as mourning doves. In pre-copulatory display pigeons peck and caress each other, which may well be called kissing, though it is more often now called (in

158

association with the voice) billing and cooing. They are not without bile, but the statement that they are is a reasonable mistake, since they do not have a gall-bladder, the bile going straight from the liver to the intestine by two bile-ducts. Most pigeons have a wide breeding season, and it may be that eggs are laid in every month of the year, including December. The rock dove was domesticated in very early times, but there is some evidence, mostly negative, that it was not kept in large numbers in England at the time when the bestiaries were being compiled. This may account for the fact that the majority of the illustrations do not look much like pigeons, although the text is often followed in showing several birds of different colours. The symbolic white doves representing the Holy Spirit in religious manuscripts are usually rather better, and this may be connected with the fact that some of the best of the bestiary doves are similar to these, white with red feet. Among the colours, one of special interest is the columba argentata (silver dove) with which the Aviarium begins and which is sometimes used as its title; in Aberdeen the picture of it appears to be a representation of a fantail. If this is genuine and not an artist’s conceit, it is the earliest record of this type of pigeon in this country, and one of the earliest anywhere. About a quarter of the manuscripts show a dovecot, but it is always small. Palumbus Most of the manuscripts of Bis, but not Corpus 22, add at the end of their account of columba a few lines about palumbes, which live chastely if they lose their partner. The same passage, which comes from Isidore, is present also in Leningrad, while IV has it as a distinct chapter, with a picture. Palumbus is translated in the eleventh century as wudeculfre, and in the fifteenth as stockdove or cushat (in various spellings). It was thus taken to mean either the stockdove or 159

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111. The birds shown here are palumbus (woodpigeon) above, and then merula (blackbird) and carduelis (goldfinch). None is recognisable, but the beaks are more or less correct. (Cambridge University Library MS Gg 6 5 f.69v.)

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112. Perindens tree. The birds, described in the text as columbae, are only vaguely pigeon-like, and the fruits on which they are feeding are unrecognisable. (St John’s College Oxford MS 61 f.59v.)

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manuscripts there are quite different interpretations. In Canterbury alone is the tree recognisable; it is an oak (probably Quercus robur) complete with acorns, and one of the doves is fljdng, or perhaps merely falling, into a dragon’s mouth.

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the woodpigeon, or probably both, since they would hardly have been distinguished in th,e Middle Ages. The statement about the chaste life is not true. The picture in CUL Gg 6 5 is, if it is a pigeon, rather a bad one.

Turtur Turtur, which is onomatopoeic for the turtle dove, was present in the Physiologus, and is found throughout the bestiaries. The description of it varies, but includes the following points^ it gets its name from its

Perindens »

It is convenient to take here the tree called perindens or peridexion, which is found in India and has sweet fruits on which doves icolumbae) feed. Beneath the tree there is a dragon which moves about to avoid the shade; under certain circumstances, which are not clear, the dragon may devour the doves. The reason for puttingperidexion here is that the rock dove does not feed on fruits whereas the woodpigeon sometimes does. Probably, however, in the original Greek the bird referred to was one of the fruit pigeons, of a different genus (Treron), which is not found in western Europe. The drawings for perindens, in some of which the birds are rather pigeon-like, in others not, illustrate very well the general principle mentioned in the Introduction, that where there is a story to be illustrated the pattern may be copied, whatever may happen to the text. Alnwick (T), Aberdeen and Ashmole (IIA), CUL li 4 26 and St John’s 61 (IIB) and Bodley 764 (IIC) all have a formal tree with eight or six doves in the branches and two symmetrical dragons with usually a bird sitting on their tails, below. The details however differ widely. In Bodley the doves face inwards not out (as in IIA) and there are no doves on the dragons’ tails; the leaves of the tree are different. Only in St John’s 61 are the birds eating luscious-looking fruits. In other

113. Turtur (turtle dove). These have somewhat the shape of turtle doves, but are hardly recognisable. They carry pieces of squill in their beaks. (Trinity College Cambridge MSR14 9f.94.)

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161

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

voice; it is solitary and lives in waste places {desertis, which need not be translated 'deserts’) and avoids the houses of men; in winter, when it moults, it lives in holes in trees; it covers its nest with squill to protect it from the wolf; and if its mate dies it remains chaste (the point to which most attention is given in the morality). Some of this is an approximation to the truth. Turtle doves do not form flocks as rock doves and woodpigeons do, although several pairs may nest fairly close to one another; they live in open country with trees, but not, as do woodpigeons, in thick woods, and they have not, unlike the rock dove and their close relative the collared dove, which has arrived in Europe only recently, taken to being commensal with man. The turtle dove is a migrant, so that the idea that it wintered in hollow trees is in line with a once common view of the disappearance of birds which did not obviously leave the country. There is no evidence that the turtle dove remains celibate after widowhood. None of the pictures shows a recognisable turtle dove, and some simply repeat the picture for columba. The only drawing that attempts to show the wolf and the squill (Corpus 53) has a nest with trilobed leaves, which are certainly not squill, but Trinity R 14 9 has six indeterminate birds each carrying a worm-like object in its bill. (vii) OTHER NON-PASSERINES

There remain a few non-passerine birds of small or medium size; they are not closely related to each other. A I

Psitacus I

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There are many species of parrot, mostly tropical and highly coloured, living in Africa, America, the Far East and Australia, but only one, the Indian roseringed parakeet, was known in Europe of the Middle Ages

114. Psitacus (parrot). A characteristic attitude of a feeding bird. (British Library MS Harley 4751 f.39v.)

162

115. Psitacus. This, perhaps about 20 years later than Fig. 114, is probably based on it, and is improved by making the half collar, the zygodactyl feet and the way in which the food is held to the mouth, all clearer. The colouring for a roseringed parakeet is also improved. (Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764f.63r.)

or, probably, in the western ancient world, except as a very rare importation. (There is a reference to, and a drawing of, a white cockatoo, which must have come from the Far East, in the De arte venandi cum avibus of Frederick II.) It is this species, as both text and illustrations show, which is meant by psitacus in the bestiaries. It comes into T, and is then general, with the same account in all groups. This says that it comes from India, is green with a red collar {torque punicea) and a large tongue. It says ave or here by nature, but it can be taught to say other things, especially when young. That its call sounds like ave (Hail!) or the Greek here (Lord) — both are familiar in the liturgy: Ave Maria and Kyrie Eleison - is perhaps imaginary, but the rest is true. Ill adds that its beak is red, which it is. The usual account goes on to say that if the bird falls from a height it lands on its beak, which is so hard that it is saved from harm, and that when it is being taught to speak it should be hit. Since parrots will seldom fall, the first statement seems pointless, and the second is perhaps a reflection of methods of pedagogy in the Middle Ages. More than half of the pictures divided among all the groups show a bird that could be recognised without the name, although the accuracy varies. That some at least were drawn from an actual parakeet is shown by five of them (Caius 372/621) and Douce 151 of IIA; Harley 3244 and Canterbury of IIB; Bodley 764 of IIC) in which the bird is zygodactyl, that is with two toes pointing forward and two backward. This is characteristic of parrots and a few other orders, but of no other bestiary bird; it is not one of the errors, like making the toes 2+1 163

Natural History in the Medieval Bestiary

TV. Birds

instead of the normally correct 3 + 1, that often occurs in drawings of other birds in manuscripts. No two of these bestiary drawings are alike in details. Harley differs from the others in having no red. The absence of the collar is correct for the female, and the lack of colouring of beak and feet is a venial mistake. The best is Bodley 764. The birds are dark green with red beaks; in the left-hand one there is a thin half-collar of black on the throat, in the other none, so that they could be a pair. The attitude of the right-hand bird, standing on one leg and nibbling something held in its other foot, is typical of parrots. The artist of Bodley has corrected details in Harley 4751, which was probably his model. Another correct detail, found in three manuscripts (Alnwick of T; Caius 372/621 of IIA and Douce 88ii of III) is that the long tail is split to the base. This can be seen only when the bird flies, and not always then, so that it was probably taken from life. By contrast, some drawings were made neither from observation nor by following the text. This is especially true of the early members of IIB (BL Add. 11283, CUL li 4 26 and St John’s 61) all of which have a very ordinary bird with a straight beak, uncoloured in the first two and green with red, white and blue wings in St John’s. Add. 11283 had picked up and misunderstood one point in the text, for the bird is shown with a solid ring, as it might be of iron, enclosing its neck like a collar. This feature .occurs again in eJMusaeo 136 (III). Caius 384/604 shows a boy instructing an unrecognisable parrot with the help of a birch.

the word. Could it be that picustpica and pied as adjectives originally meant black and white, and that the birds’ names are secondary? The text for picus, which in T, II, most of III, and IV is run on after pica, with no chapter-heading, says that the name comes from Saturn’s son Picus, that the bird is used in auguries, and that no nail will hold in a tree in which the bird has nested. Since woodpeckers (especially perhaps the great spotted) make their nesting holes only in rotting trees, this must be broadly true. The only possible picture is in Westminster, where there is a pink bird with a woodpecker-like beak, but this is so placed that it might equally well be intended for cuculus; since the beak is open, suggesting singing, this is perhaps more likely. In CUL Gg 6 5 an undoubted green woodpecker is described under the name of ficedula, which is dealt with below.

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Picus

The naipe picus applies to woodpeckers, and perhaps especially to the green woodpecker, but there has been also confusion with pica, the magpie, which could hardly be mistaken for any woodpecker. It does, however, agree with the spotted woodpeckers in being black and white. The Oxford English Dictionary derives the word 'pied’ from the magpie, but goes no further back and gives no early or cognate forms of

116. Picus (woodpecker). It is not clear whether this bird is meant to be picus or cuculus (cuckoo). It is not much like either, but the beak and reddish head suggest the former. (Westminster Abbey Library MS 22 f.39/45.)

Upupa and epopus Upupa, with its doublet epopus, is one of the most interesting birds in the bestiary, since not only is it one which, like nicticoraxinoctua, was originally one species but became split into two, but it eventually became identified with a totally different bird from that as which it began. The Greek versions have a bird called epops or koukoupha, both of which words are onomatopoeic for the hoopoe. This was equated in the Latin of Bern 233 and Isidore with upupa, and a chapter on this continues throughout the English bestiaries. Those derived from the Aviarium (IIA) introduce another equivalent name, epopus, much closer to the original Greek, with its own chapter, and this continues through the other subfamilies of II, some manuscripts of HI, and IV. A hint of how the confusion arose is perhaps given by Bern 318, in which the bird is called yppopws.

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