Try to imagine medieval England. You might picture knights, castles and battles. But what about bears?
The Bayeux tapestry, which tells the story of the Norman conquest of England, contains a curious image of a man raising a sword towards a bear. New research involving archaeological analysis of bear bones and archival records from my colleague and I suggests that this was not an unusual sight in medieval England.
Bears became significantly more common in English towns after the Norman conquest in 1066. Bears were once native to Britain, but by the time of the Norman conquest they had been extinct for centuries.
This raises some intriguing questions. How did bears become part of medieval English life? And did this help lay the foundations for the bear-baiting spectacles that became popular centuries later?
By the early modern period, from about 1500 onwards, many English towns had their own celebrity bear, brought out to fight dogs in a spectacle known as baiting. Some of these animals even had evocative names, such as George Stone and Little Bess of Bromley. Bear baiting could draw large crowds. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth I was entertained by bear and bull baiting at Kenilworth Castle.
Bearwards, who looked after the animals, kept their bears fit enough to fight for much of their lives. Shakespeare referred to them as “Russian bears”, reflecting the fact that bears were imported from eastern Europe as young animals and raised for baiting. They would have travelled as young cubs across the seas to be raised for the sport of baiting in town squares and church yards from London to Yorkshire.
In 1562, admission to a bear-baiting event in London cost one or two pence. During the Great Fire of Nantwich, in Cheshire, in the winter of 1583, several bears were released from their stables to save them from the flames.
These bears led extraordinary lives. But where did the custom come from?
Wild bears are believed to have become extinct in Britain by the bronze age. Although they may have been imported again by the Romans, it is not until the early modern period that bears appear substantially in the archaeological and historical records.
For a long time, historians have suspected that the tradition of bear baiting had medieval roots. Bears appear frequently in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, sometimes playing musical instruments or standing on their heads as part of a medieval tradition of bear dancing.
But these images alone cannot tell us how widespread bears actually were, or when their presence in England began to increase.
What changed after the Norman conquest?
The Bayeux tapestry provides an intriguing clue. This embroidered document narrates the story of the conquest of England by William the Conqueror.
In scene 11, in a lower margin of the embroidery, a man holds a sword above a bear. The main scene shows messages being exchanged between Duke William and Guy Turold, leading to Harold’s release to William.
The meaning of the animals and other scenes in the tapestry’s margins is still debated. They may comment on, or satirise, the events shown in the main narrative. But the bear is particularly interesting in light of our research, which combined different types of analysis to discover the part bears played in medieval England.
There is at least one pre-conquest reference to a bear in England. The Domesday Book records that Norwich had provided a bear and six dogs to the king, Edward the Confessor. After the conquest, however, references to bears and bear baiting become more frequent.
We analysed how documents from the 11th century onwards describe bear baiting, beginning with an account from Ardres in northern France, which had strong links with Norman England. Bears then appear repeatedly in stories and romances written for aristocratic audiences in England and France. These describe bears, bulls and boars being baited alongside music, dancing and other entertainment at feasts and weddings.
We found that bear baiting was an established activity in England by the 12th century.
Archaeological evidence provides another piece of the puzzle. Bear bones have been found at sites including the palace of Les Hallettes at Compiègne in France and Richmond Castle in north Yorkshire. A bearward named Spenellus lived at Richmond in the early 13th century. A new radiocarbon dating on a bear shoulder blade from Richmond demonstrated that there were bears in northern England immediately after the Norman conquest.
Together, these sources suggest that bears were becoming an increasingly familiar presence in medieval life. London’s Southbank became the centre for baiting, which rivalled theatre in popularity.
Read more:
Shakespeare’s competition: the grisly world of British bear-baiting
Trying to imagine the middle ages is always tricky. We absorb our ideas about the past from novels, television, films and visual art. The Bayeux tapestry itself has helped shape how we picture the Norman conquest. But the tapestry also contains a bear.
Our past research suggests that this small image may offer more than a glimpse of medieval artistic imagination. It sits within a much larger story about the growing presence of bears in English towns after 1066.
That’s important because small details in historical artefacts can change the way we understand the past. The evidence for medieval bears helps connect the strange animals in manuscript margins and tapestry scenes with the later world of organised bear baiting.
So when visitors see the Bayeux tapestry in London over the next year, they might look at that little bear differently. Instead of seeing it simply as one of the tapestry’s many curious marginal figures, they might imagine something much stranger: medieval England as a place where, increasingly, you could encounter a bear.
Liam Lewis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.