Gone Medieval - Extinct Beasts of Medieval Britain

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Why have wolves often been the villains of British history? What happened to them and some of the other remarkable creatures that once roamed medieval Britain?Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Lee Raye to explore Britain's lost wildlife and how extinct species survived long after their disappearance through medieval literature, folklore, religion and myth.MOREFantastic Beasts of the Middle AgesListen on AppleListen on SpotifyMonsters of the Medieval WorldListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcastHistory Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™Watch Eleanor's documentary Medieval Apocalypse when you sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. A thousand years ago in Britain, if you walked out into the night, you wouldn't necessarily have been at the top of the food chain. Somewhere in the dark, you might have heard a wolf pacing among the trees, a lynx scurrying into the scrub, and seen cranes soaring overhead in a ragged V. Their calls scraping at your nerves like an amateur violinist.

And then there were the great ox, the wild boar, the sturgeon, and the beavers, to name but a few more creatures that have today largely disappeared from our everyday experience. Wolves and lynx no longer breed in the wild in Britain. And the crane has only more recently been reintroduced in a handful of, of places. And yet these beasts refuse to die in our imagination. Just open a medieval poem, a saint's life, a hunting manual, and they are everywhere. Because before these animals disappeared from Britain's landscapes, they lived for centuries in its language. Shepherds complained about wolves in Latin school dialogues. Poets praised princes by likening them to

wolves and big cats feasting with ravens on the bodies of their enemies. Law codes argued over who was allowed to hunt cranes and what their eggs were worth in fines and blood price. Bestiary compilers calmly explained how lynxes produced gemstones from their own urine. Yes, you heard me say that correctly. And how cranes stayed awake on guard by grouping stones in their claws. According to my guest today, we can now read those texts differently. They draw on a different lens. Imagine ourselves as the animals, not their hunters.

To say, with a certain dark relish, Oh, yes indeed. I am fearsome. My guest is Dr. Lee Ray, whose interest is in the medieval and early modern history of Britain and Ireland's wildlife. Lee's new book, Creatures of Story and Song, Tracing Britain's Lost Species, looks at a wide range of creatures, what it meant, and what it still means, to draw a line between human and wild, and how we can quickly turn a neighboring species into a monster, a luxury food, a symbol, or a moral lesson,

and how long after the last creature has fallen silent, its shadow can go on wood, living in our language. But in the medieval imagination, perhaps in ours, they are still very much alive. Lee, welcome to God medieval. Thanks so much, I'm excited to be here. I am absolutely delighted that you are here because I'm a real animal head. You know, I think that this is a very uncontroversial thing to say, but I just really like a chatting about when there is a creature.

You know, I think that that is generally a good. thing. And I like to see older opinions on what little creatures may have been about, which is covered very, very well in this book. Thank you very much. In it, you're kind of tracing the lost species of Britain. And you make this really great decision, I think, to not start with the moment of extinction. You know, you're really interfacing with the fact that there are stories from before we lost these creatures on the island. And so what do we miss about these varying animals if we only focus on the very last time we saw them, you know, like the last official sighting of whatever? Yeah, it's so tempting, isn't it?

Lots of people want to focus on a moment, I call it the moment a trauma where we find the extinction of the animal and maybe we can try and learn it and focus on it. But if we don't look at what happened beforehand, then we don't. don't know how people actually did live with these species. And we're only focused on what might have gone wrong rather than what we're right, what it was like when the humans and these species did coexist in Britain. Yeah, I really like that. I mean, it's a really interesting framework that you've given because you're sort of pushing against this idea of your deep ecology, where humans are kind of just giving animals a voice, you know, and kind of scare quotes around that.

And what you end up doing is sort of saying that there should be a distinction between humans and nature, but that doesn't mean that we aren't taking animals seriously, right? So can you talk a little bit about how that tension shapes not only the way that we read bestiaries, for example, but, you know, saints' lives or hunting manuals, the different ways that we could look at sources to think about these creatures? Yeah, that's a very big question. that essentially lots of other scholars when they are looking at animals, they try to give them a voice and to find the places where they've made history. But the problem with that is if we're always looking for the exceptional animals, then the story we tell about animals is not quite accurate. it's not true. A truer way to look at it is looking at sort of all animals, if we could do that, and seeing not just where they've influenced history, but how history has influenced them. And that's how we look at humans, isn't it, as well? We don't just look at the great makers and shapers of history.

We don't just look at the great men of history. We also look at how the tides of history, if you like, have swept up individuals. human lives, and that's how I like to look at the animals as well. What do you mean about best theories? That's really interesting that you've called out those. How do they fit in? Well, I guess that, you know, in this same way that we sort of think about saints' lives, right? When we read a hagiography, again, we're kind of where we are, of course, looking at these extraordinary individuals, you know, individuals that have been elevated by society to a place because they are able to do even the miraculous. And indeed, when you, you, look at a bestiary, for example, we can see some pretty, you know, incredible animals,

you know, creatures that don't even exist necessarily. But even ordinary animals are given these saintly qualities or, and they're, and it's pretty expressed, right? They have these, these religious attributes to them as well. And so everything can be sort of read as an allegory. So on the one hand, we have the extraordinary. On the other hand, we do also have the somewhat mundane but that can also give us an idea about how we are seeing certain animals and how they could be elevated, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. I see what you mean now. Just like a saint's life will tell the story of exceptional humans. They also do include these exceptional animals. So lots of best theories, we have these wolves, and these wolves are monstrous. They are super intelligent and able to stalk around and find sheep and never be detected. And when you take them into hagiography, they take them in the opposite direction. So you get these very holy wolves, which would never hurt a fly.

When the wolf finds the delicious head of King Edmund, Martyr, does it eat it? No, of course not. It guards it. So, yeah, you're right. We're getting this exceptionality of the animals. And it's in kind of the opposite direction to the best dearies. But it is equally not accurate, not true to their lives of ordinary animals. You know, I'm not trying to shade any wolf, but I do feel as though if they were presented with a delicious head, they probably would eat it. I'm not casting aspersions on the wolf in question.

I'm just saying I think that it's perhaps, perhaps an embellishment on that particular tale. But I want to talk about wolves in particular because, you know, your book is, it covers so much. You know, you've got 14 species that you get over. And then you've got these great heading. So, you know, there's like the sea and the forest and field and town. And obviously, you know, we've only got so much showtime. So we can't cover all 14 of the animals. But I really wanted to get into wolves in particular because they do embody this sort of, I suppose, a dual purpose.

You know, there's ambiguity in the true sense of the word where it pulls very strongly into directions. You know, like there's this ambivalence there. So when we're looking for wolves in medieval sources, How do you feel that they're most often represented? The most common depiction of wolves, especially early on, is as part of this beasts of battle motif. So what I mean by that is, especially in poetry, but sometimes in prose, whenever there's been a horrific battle in order to show how terrible it was, people in not just in English literature, but also in Welsh literature, in Old Norse, if you go back, that far, in Scots and in Gallic, literature, they will show the bodies of the slain being eaten by wolves and also ravens and eagles. So this is the most common depiction of the wolf as sort of the eater of the slain

and as showing the brutality and the horrors of war. So I suppose that's where our starting point is with the wolf. The wolf was really ever so hated in medieval European literature. and I get the sense that perhaps it might have been different in other countries outside of Europe, that the hatred for the wolf, to my eyes, seems to go far beyond what it was capable of. It was treated as this super villain in a way. I think that's really interesting too, because we also have this sort of attention, you know, within if we're going far back to, you know, Norse sources before Christianization as well, because we also see, for example, this association of the wolf with Odin.

I mean, all of these battlefield creatures really. you know, you've got Hewnin and Munin and you've got wolves and things, and they're very expressly tied to this battlefield thing. And I find this tension so interesting because it's almost just that we're blaming the wolves for this horrific scene on the battlefield when it's not exactly the wolves who prosecuted the war, is it? You know, it's like, yeah, we have a bunch of slain men. And rather than saying, well, isn't, you know, the horror of war and the futility of what the power sort of throw bodies at discussing, we're just like, wolves, you know, it seems to me there's also like, it's a scape wolf instead of a scapegoat, you know, for the terrible politics of men, actually.

Yeah, definitely. We blame the wolf, whereas, yeah, we've, a lot of bad things happened in the medieval period, and I don't think wolves were to blame for most of them. I mean, you've already touched on this lightly, though, because, but on the other side of this, We have the fact that in religious writings, wolves have a really different character. But then also it's the same thing with heroic poetry. Can you tell us a little bit about where we see wolves in these circumstances? All the ways that we see wolves aren't really true to life, but we do get completely different versions.

So we've got the horrible, brutal wolf of the beasts of battle poetry. and we've got the holy, very helpful wolf showing the power of God, if you like, to tame wolves in the hagiographies. But in some war poetry, we get a slightly different version of the wolf. And this is, people start to see the wolf as because it was so powerful and because it was a sign of these battles, we start to get an idea that the wolf is a companion to, the soldiers because just like great warriors bring death to their pathetic enemies who are nowhere near as strong as them or in some war poetry, they're very strong enemies that show how strong they themselves are as warriors. Just like that, sometimes we get warriors who are particularly

aligned with wolves and they are able to sort of walk with wolves and feed wolves. And this is a sign that they are ever such good warriors. We get that quite a lot in, especially the earliest Welsh sources. So Godovin, the earliest Welsh source, has a lot of people who chose to live with wolves as warriors, rather than going to the altar and getting married and living a traditional life. I think there's an element of propaganda there. Or would you like to, do you feel a bit uncertain about getting married and living a normal life maybe you'd prefer to run with the wolves. Oh, I really like that.

Yeah, this idea that, you know, it's either the wolves or traditional marriage. Yeah, that's, you know, the two options. That's great. I think it is quite interesting because I think we certainly see the wolf still occupying this space in terms of enemy of the domestic, even within, I don't know, fairy tales in the early months. modern period, you know, we see them kind of traditionally associated with, you know, listen. There's, for example, Red Riding Hood and you've got the big bad wolf, you know, there are always

these things like the boy who cried wolf. And this very specific idea that wolves are sort of haunting around and they're after your sheep, I think in particular, and they're after you. And I think we do see a lot of worry, especially in bestiaries, for example, talking very specifically about this threat to livestock. that wolves pose. And to me, I suppose that's almost the most understandable problem with them, because I suppose that if one is attempting to keep one's livestock alive, you know, and we know how important sheep are just from a monetary standpoint, one can understand why wolves are not the favorite animal to have around. But it's interesting because I do think that it's almost

outsized this idea that that is the threat, you know, capital T threat to anyone's life or livelihood and that continues on for so, so long. Yeah, absolutely. We're getting a sense of demonizing the wolf there. We're making the wolf responsible for all of the problems with particular farming practices, whereas in reality, livestock die of all sorts of things, not just wolves, but you're handy, I suppose to have a wolf as a scapegoat, just like we were talking about earlier. But then sometimes there's this real tension, right? Because we see, for example, in romantic poetry that sometimes we're really invited to empathize with the plight of the wolf, or at least the man wolf, right?

Because, you know, I'm thinking here, of course, of Bisclave that we get from Marie-Defonse. Can you tell us a little bit about that story? What a fantastic story. So after the Norman Conquest, a woman writing probably in Britain, Marie de France, not writing in Anglo-Norman writing in sort of Francian French, writes the story, which she says is a Bretonle, the story of Bisclaveret being a man who, at the start, she's a bit cagy about that. Right in the introduction, she says, just to let you know, there are these creatures called werewolves and they're very terrible. But never mind about that. I want to tell you about a man, and halfway through the story we find to our amazement, which no one could possibly have guessed that the main character, Biesclaveret, is actually a werewolf.

But something that's really interesting is, in the introduction, she says that werewolves are these terrible, brutal creatures, and they go into a rage. But later on in the story, Rensh, she's describing Biskleveri, and when Bisklaveri himself is describing the way that he transforms, it's... does sound kind of romantic and it sounds like something maybe we could imagine ourselves doing. He goes into the deepest parts of the woods and he hunts there. And it's almost like a sort of fantasy wish fulfillment. So we get the sense again that maybe there's another side to the wolf that we don't have to demonize it. Some people might have found it quite a powerful symbol. And there's

other wolfish characters within the text as well. So in Latin, the term looper, especially in the Roman period, was used for sort of sex workers as well as female wolves. And the way that the main female character in the text is sexually empowered is something really interesting as well. So maybe in a way she's acting as a wolf as well. And she is maybe a wish-fulfillment figure for medieval audiences in the same way. Yeah, what a text. I find it so interesting because I think to an extent, you know, as you've pointed out, we're using the wolf to sort of stand in and subvert our ideas about how masculinity works.

Because, of course, Bisse Clafay, he's this wonderful husband. His wife loves him very much. And what he does as a result of sort of lets her in, you know, shows her at this, this vulnerability, says, you know, like, whatever happens, you know, like, I just have to have this time in the middle of the woods. You know, this thing where when he goes to the woods, how he folds his clothes. just so. So, you know, we're seeing these kind of delicacy of doing things and these vulnerabilities that come from not being wolfish, you know, not not being the sort of manly man who just

sort of pushes people around. And to an extent that's his undoing, right? And I find that so interesting because we're meant to understand that he is wonderful and ought to be celebrated, even though he's a werewolf because he's able to restrain his war-based urges, but it's almost this restraint which has led to the predicament he finds himself in when he becomes stuck as a wolf as well, right? So it's this really difficult text to entirely get your head around. It's incredibly complex. And thought of it like that, Eleanor, that's so clever. Yeah, you're right.

The way that he gets into trouble is maybe by not being forceful enough, by letting a woman get the upper hand. We've got a sort of traditional bad girl villain going on. Although you're right, it's more complicated than that because in some way she is given her own dreams come true moment until the end of the text where, of course, just like in all medieval and early modern literature, all of the pieces have to go back into the box

and we have to have a properly tied together ending where everything is put back into the patriarchal norm. as it should be. It's true. It's true. You could say all the time in medieval literature, oh, well, this is a really interesting subversion. And then right at the end, it will cease to be an interesting subversion.

So, yeah, you've got to put the game away, don't you know? So eventually, you know, here in Britain, we have this decline of the wolves, you know, and there's any number of reasons for that. Can you tell us a little bit about the decline of them and what happens as a result of with the myths that we see as a part of this decline? Yes. So different scholars have had different ideas about when this decline happened. And that wasn't really entirely the focus of the book.

From previous research, I put the decline into the 14th century. And the reason for that is because there were lots of licenses granted for hunting wolves by the royal court in various times. and the last of those that I can see are from the mid-14th century. And also during this period, there was an official wolf hunter hired for many years. I believe his name was Peter Corbett, who was allowed to sort of hunt the entire length and breadth of the border counties between England and Wales. And he seems to have been very successful at hunting wolves. And we get, I suppose, a change from wolves being a unstoppable.

terrible force of nature, isn't it awful? They've killed lots of people and eaten all the sheep. To his, a licence, go and hunt as many wolves as you want. And that sort of signals the beginning at the end of the wolf in England. But elsewhere in Britain, of course, in Scotland, the wolf carries on. And in Scotland, we get the continuation of literature about the wolf and continuation of people saying, oh, the wolf is terrible. It's quite nice to see that contrast. But what's really interesting is after the extinction of the wolf in England,

there seem to be a few people who think that it might still be here, and it's never forgotten. So when other species go extinct, we quite soon forget that they were ever here. So, for example, recently in Britain, we've lost a little bird called the Rineck, It's like a kind of woodpecker, which whenever it was threatened, twists its neck. Really amazing if you get to see a video of one disappeared about 100 years ago.

No one knows about it. Why would you? It's gone. It's not a part of your life. But the wolf, everyone knows about the wolf for centuries and centuries. And still today, it was never forgotten. It's like the wolf is so badly behaved that it refuses to go culturally extinct, even when biologically it's no longer here. It's so interesting. It just has this hugely outsized part of our literary lives. It's something that children are introduced to almost right away. And it is, you know, the werewolf maintains this incredible hold in literature even now, you know, this idea of this uncontrollable, brutal force when, you know, I don't know, I've got a brother who lives in Alaska where wolves still exist and, you know, they're just kind of out there, right?

They don't actually play very much a part of his life at all, even though they're around, you know. And it's quite funny because I do think there is a kind of cultural desire to keep this piece of lore alive that we're still indulging in in the 21st century, I mean, let alone, you know, the 15th or the 14th, you know. You have to wonder if they did bring wolves back, what would happen? I think maybe they'd be blamed for everything going wrong. maybe the wolves to blame for, you know, all of the problems of society. The wolves cause wildfires, who knows, maybe. Well, we've got a lot of different examples of authors talking about wolves at all points in time from your book. And one of them was Ailfric, of course. Can you tell me a little bit about Ailfric's relationship?

He's got a complex relationship I find with wolves. He never knows exactly what to do with them. Yeah, Alfred's a really interesting one I pronounced, Alphrik, but yeah, I've heard, though. Do you know, you probably are smarter than I am on that? I've got to say. I'm not necessarily an early medievalist, but I'm pretty sure I've heard both. But Alphric, really interesting because he's got this colloquy. So this is a text intended to teach students Lutton. So they're expected to talk about their jobs and their lives.

And he's got various jobs included. and he comes out with a shepherd. And when the shepherd's talking about his life, he says, well, I just protect my sheep from wolves. Maybe this is as close as we can come to a sort of genuine idea of what it might have been like to live with wolves. The wolves that the shepherd is watching out for are not super terrible werewolves, and they're not the bestiary wolves that with their eyes burning with fire

that will bite their paws if they may. make too much noise and tread on twigs or anything like that. That's my idea of Alphric. Were you thinking of some other texts as well? Well, yeah, I mean, Alphrek in particular, does sort of talk about this. But I find him an interesting source because he's earlier and we have these kind of mentions of where wolves dip in and out. But then we definitely also see, you know, I don't know, I suppose his discussions of like the passion of St. Edmund, you know, where the wolf doesn't eat the saint's head. And I found that very striking because, you know, as someone who works on the period

a bit later and, you know, more in a continental context, I'm really reminded of like the story of the St. Francis of Assisi and his taming of a wolf, right? You know, that this is one of his big miracles as he manages to get a wolf to, you know, stop stealing sheaf and come hang out with him. And then it's also sort of one of the big things that is promoted in the early modern period about St. Ignatius of Loyola. Right? There's this idea that there are wolves that perhaps are attacking flocks and rather than kill them, he puts out kettles of food for them in order to stop them from doing it. So there's this really ongoing interest in the person of the saint and these interventions with wolves. You know, you can turn a wolf vegetarian. You can get a wolf to respect

the, you know, the corpse of a saint in the way that a human would. Saints can turn wolves essentially into lap dogs. And it's just a really interesting way of looking at the wolf because we're acknowledging that there's this sort of power. But then it's like, oh, but with the right touch, then maybe they're actually just a nice little guy. And I don't know quite what to make of that entirely. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting. Now you say it like that because with the wolf, it's like it's a force of nature. Medi- culture has created out of this ordinary animal, a unstoppable killing machine or a force which represents death, especially in the early sources with things like the beasts of battle.

And so for a saint, what an irresistible target to show the power of the saint and the power of God and the holiness to take this irresistible natural force representing death and to turn it into something constructive to society. And it makes sense why no one ever shows off about taming a hedgehog because they don't have that cultural connotation. But yeah, it's always dragons and wolves. And maybe that shows how people thought about wolves in the period. I read, you also have this really great discussion about the wolves as also being not just

emblematic of the forces of nature, but nature itself, right? because wolves are kind of also these talismans of landscape and hostility. Can you tell us a little bit about where we see wolves used to specifically show us that a place is hostile or frightening? There's a famous example of this in Beowulf. So when Beowulf goes out away from the beautiful, cheery hall of Herod, when he goes into the wilderness of Grendel, How is the wilderness described? It's a more trodden wilderness. And that sort of shows that over this wilderness, the wild powers of nature are in charge. This is not a human-dominated landscape. Get something similar in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well. Yeah, this sense that there are places where humans are not necessarily the dominant force. It still resonates worse today of it, doesn't it? I think so. And I always find that I'm really interested in the forest as this emblem for medieval people as a place of magic and chaos. And it's always, you know, there might be a witch in there. There might be a dragon and there might be a wolf. Maybe there's a bore, you know, that that comes up all the time. And those are almost interchangeable. It's as though there is the natural force that constrains humans. But there's also the supernatural forces that could come. from magic and exactly where that begins and ends. I think with wolves in particular, it's so

interesting for us, right? Because, you know, wolves have died out here completely, but we still use them as symbols, you know? And I mean, do you think that because they are extinct here, we're able to continue to use them in this way about, like, kind of looking at them as almost magical, you know, and showing how if a human can triumph over them, then, you know, we can, overcome anything. Yeah, maybe there is something to that that because wolves aren't here and doing inconvenient things, we can make them into whatever we want. We can turn them into magic pots, which we can put anything into and take anything out of to, I suppose, paraphrase talking a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I just, I really, I'm also interested,

you know, you mentioned you've touched on this, this already, when we are looking and talking about wolves and the figure of the loupé, you know, the, and the idea that we kind of use female wolves in particular, and Romans use female wolves as a kind of stand in for talking about women who are sexually rapacious, which, you know, as medieval people needed another way to talk about women as sexually rapacious, everybody. But we do see also in Bastieri's, this is kind of picked up in particular where they'll talk about she wolves. in a really different way. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so it's very strange, actually, because one of the foundational myths of Rome is Romulus and Remus

and the dream that they were suckled by a she-wolf and brought to the city and wouldn't have been able to do that without the care of this she-wolf. And so for them to go around and turn the she-wolf into what for them was a villain is a very strange, strange choice. But yeah, In the best theory, in the medieval Latin best theories, we get this idea that some women are like wolves in that they are what we would think of as gold diggers and sexually rapacious. And this is, I suppose, is contrasted with the idea of a good Christian woman who would never be like that and would be like the Virgin Mary, ideally, but also give birth to the next generation of patriarchs. It's very confusing and very contradictory. Yeah, medieval people. I really like the section, though,

where you also discuss the fact that, you know, we've got this real image of the wolf that is still heavily predominant in, I suppose, the global north. But that's not necessarily true about other cultures as well, because, you know, for example, that within Japanese culture, you can see a really different relationship to the wolf.

Can you tell us? a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not an expert in Japanese history or Japanese literature, but from what I've been able to piece together from secondary sources, in Japanese traditional culture, the wolf was a positive creature to have around because it was great for pest control. So negative creatures were creatures like wild boar and deer that would the post threats to agriculture and would cause damage to rice fields by trampling or by eating it, whereas the wolf would control these creatures. So the wolf was seen as positive. And in the Tokugawa period, Sunayoshi Tokugawa, the dog shogun set out a series of edicts where essentially he was bringing in sort of Buddhist philosophy.

and he suggested that everyone should be vegetarian as much as possible. And there were exceptions to this made for pest control around crops for farmers. But the wolf was not among those. The wolf was a creature that should be left alone. And so this is a period when in Europe, everyone hates the wolf and everyone is suggesting the wolf be exterminated as soon as possible. But in Japan, it was possible to conceive of the wolf in a completely different way. And this to me suggests that there's something very very.

cultural going on with our idea of the wolf. And we could say perhaps part of it is that Japan had this very agricultural society, so they wanted to protect crops, whereas Britain, in some areas of Britain, at least they had more pastoral society, so they wanted to protect livestock. And maybe the wolf was more of a threat to livestock than it was to crops. But I think it goes further than that. I think this is a really interesting point, you know. And also it's, you sort of highlight that it also depends on what you want to portray within literature the way that you might relate to the wolf, because, for example, within the Welsh tradition, we sometimes see wolfishness as a positive, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So in the very earliest poetry of the Godavim, and also in Taliazian's poetry, is a poetry which is associated with the north of England, but has come down to us in a Welsh form and might actually have originated in Wales depending on what you believe about how these texts were created. In this very early Welsh poetry, we get this sense that lots of warriors are compared to wolves, so they are like wolves chasing sheep, and that's how powerful they are. And other warriors are warriors who have chosen, like we said earlier, to live with the wolf and feed the wolf rather than to go to the altar and to get married and live normative lives. So, yeah, there's something a bit enticing about that, but this might just be propaganda in a similar way to the hagiography, the saints' lives.

That's such an interesting point too, because, you know, at the same time as we're really worrying about wolves and we're saying, oh, they're very naughty, they're going to steal your sheep, worry about them within an English context. Wolf comes up an awful lot in heroic names, right? So we've got, you know, your Bay Wolf, of course. You've got Ethel Wolf. And is that just underlining this idea that they have this separate warrior path? I mean, is that what we're meant to understand? I mean, what wither a boy named Wolfrick, I suppose, you know? A really good question, because it hints that the demonization of the wolf,

which we see in literature, might not have been the end of the wolf. story. And maybe, just like today, there are many people and even children who very much love wolves, even though we've got the story of Lissolvet writing hood running around all around our modern literature and our modern films. Maybe in the medieval period, even though the mainstream literature demonizes wolves, maybe there was a sense of people actually liking wolves, maybe just like we found in Beast Claveray, some people sort of saw wolves as this wish fulfillment, and it hints at that. But of course, it's really difficult to say with names because sometimes names just become traditional. And just like we don't think of someone called Arnold as being like an eagle

today, it might be that they didn't think of people being called Wolfrick as being especially wolfie. I'd just like to bring up the name Wolfrick, because I think we should bring it back. Any listeners who are expecting a boy, please name it Wolfrick. and write in and tell me. That's my request. We see, of course, the extinction of wolves in Britain at the very least. Do we see this soften any of the narratives that we see about wolves at all? Or is it just sort of like we wish to keep a monster and now it's a safe monster we can have in our back pocket?

Funnily enough, there's really not much difference. The big difference is as it's going extinct, we get a movement from the wolf. is an unstoppable predator to, I give you license to kill as many wolves as you want. That's a change that we see. But after the extinction of the wolf, it still remains an unstoppable predator, still remains something which,

a creature which you wouldn't want to meet. And when people do reflect on the extinction of the wolf, which they do sometimes, they're always quite glad. They say, well, we got rid of the, there's no wolves in Britain, and that shows how much God loves us, because we got rid of the wolf.

We hunted them all to extinction. There's no more left. And that's especially the sort of perspective of the early modern naturalists to the wolf. So yeah, it doesn't really soften that much. I hate to drag us away from the wolves because they're cool. But I also wanted to talk about I've got a personal favorite creature, which appears in the books, which is the lynx. I've got a manx cat, so she's got no tail. And so I have a soft spot for all of the short, the short-tailed cats myself.

Can you tell us a little bit about the links and what we know about when? it. They existed in Britain. Yes. So the lynx are very shadowy beast, very difficult to piece together the timeline for it. What we do, though, is that the remains of a lynx which lived on the border between England and Scotland have been found. They are from the early medieval period. So lynxes appear to have survived through the Roman occupation of Britain into the earliest medieval period. After that, what have we got? We've got a lot of shadows on the wall. There are little references in literature which might refer to the links. There are references to lions. Now, of course, lions, just like today, were popular in medieval Britain,

and everyone loved lions and talked about lions. Some of the descriptions of lions and some of the references to lions appear to be references to creatures that lived in Britain. And we know lions didn't live in Britain. So those, maybe those are lynxes. There are also references to cats. And we know that wildcats were once found not just in Scotland, but all the way across Britain until relatively recently. So those could be wildcat references, but some of the cats in medieval and early modern sources are very powerful. Some of these cats are creatures that can take down lambs, and you think it would have to be a very big cat to take on a sheep or to take on a lamb. And so some of these references do suggest something else is going on.

So very shadowy sources, yes. Yeah, it's an interesting one, right? Because we don't, there's plenty of Eurasian lynxes around the shop. Well, actually, not as many Eurasian lynxes as we would like to see, I suppose, on the continent. But we're working on that one. And the lynx is such an interesting one because medieval people sort of, I don't know, almost struggle to categorize them. You know, because there's some of these things where it's like, is this a very large cat? Or is this kind of just another type of wolf?

Like, is this a small wolf or a big cat, you know, kind of a thing? Because we do see, you know, as you say, these references to them very particularly as kind of like taking lambs, taking fowls. You know, just kind of a common nuisance, the sort of thing that one might see skulking about the farmyard almost. Yeah, absolutely. It's quite fun, actually. Some of the early glossaries in Old English give a gloss on the Latin term links as between a dog and a wolf or between a cat and a wolf. And we get this idea that they won't show what it was. And then when that glossary was translated to Cornish, exactly the same.

They just translated the gloss directly. So we get the sense that people aren't exactly sure what lynxes are. And this happens with a lot of the big cats, actually. There are completely separate entries in the best series for the panther and the part and the leopard. But when you look at them and when you try and work out what they were, those three are probably all the same creature. They're all the leopard. And so we also get the idea from literature that the lynx might. might have been a very exotic species that was found far away. But there's also the idea that

the Lupus Cavarius, this sort of deer-chasing wolf, was common in Northern Europe. And that's another term for the links. So medieval people aren't necessarily entirely sure what to call this creature. And when they do come up with terms to describe the creature, they seem to use it. Sometimes they split the terms in ways that we wouldn't today. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like there's this sort of exoticism about an animal that is fundamentally about, you know, that this is an animal that's kind of around the shop. And instead we're kind of seeing these sort of like, ah, the lynx, it is over in Syria.

You know, everything's always over in Syria to that. It's sort of this like cat shall place with them. I find it so interesting given, you know, that of the big cats, like a lynx, it's kind of kind of a manageable one, isn't it? They're not that big. Dog size, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Not a threat to humans. It's a creature that maybe they should have been familiar with, and you would have thought they could distinguish from wildcats. But then, lynxes and wildcats, both very solitary, both hard to see. Unless you hunt one and kill one, you're unlikely to get a very good view of it compared to something like the wolf where it's very present,

And if you don't see it, you probably listen out one evening and you'll hear it. So maybe that's one of the reasons why it's such a shadowy, hard-to-pin-down creature in medieval literature. I am going to foresee it, though, now. We have to talk about the lynx stone, right? Because this is like the fun exoticism about lynxes because there is this thing and it's called a link stone. And it's a sort of gemstone that lynxes were thought to make. out of their urine? What is this about?

What is this doing as a story? It's a very strange story. Lots of, the bestiary in lots of manuscripts is tied to the lapidary. So this sort of list of beautiful and magical stones. And one of the stones in here is ligureum, the stone which is produced when lynx is urinate. And the stone is very, beautiful and it's so beautiful that the lynx doesn't want us to have it. So it will bury it.

It will bury this stone as soon as it's produced it. And you have to think, what on earth was happening with this? How did they come up with this idea? Of course, there's no truth to this. You do see cats will bury their urine. So maybe it was based on the story, a cat. But, yeah, what a strange story. I'm going to parse it back to you, Eleanor. What do you think was happening there? I don't know. It's an interesting one. Because it's sort of like, well, are we just saying that it's like a large cat and by virtue of its larger statue, it's behaving in the way that cats do, but it's got this magical quality, right? Which, I mean, perhaps it does sort of feel like a sort of magic if you do see a lynx. You know, I personally would be the most excited I've ever been in my life if I saw, you know, a lynx in the wild or, you know, or, let alone a wildcat, you know? And I think that it's just quite interesting because when you have these sort of little magical hints about an animal that is, you know, fundamentally a kind of medium-sized

predator, you know, like not that incredible, I find it really interesting because I think it shows us at the very least that whilst they are about, there's a kind of rarity to them, I mean, that that's all I can really come up with. But I'm sorry, if you're going to make a U.S. in gemstone, I'm going to talk about it. I'm a simple creature myself, you know. Absolutely. I like that. Maybe there was a sense of wonder in the lynx, either because of its rarity or because of its size compared to wild cats. Yeah, wonderful creatures creating wonderful stones. What an optimistic viewpoint I like it. Listen, we try to be somewhat positive over here. And they come up a little more often, though,

don't they? In Welsh verse, the lynxes, you know, they seem to be a little bit more like by the Welshnal a little bit more of an interest over on that side of things, don't they? Yes, so there's a few more references in early Welsh literature, which are conceivably based on or referring directly to lynxes. The most famous of these is Pais de Nogad Smok, which is a verse from the Godovin, which we talked about earlier. And some people think that it ended up in the Godfim by accident. And other people think that maybe actually it was supposed to be in there. And you can see my arguments about that. It gets a bit technical.

And I do accuse some of the other authors of sexism for arguing. But the thing about the links in Paisnogad is essentially a list of creatures that a man has gone to hunt with his dogs. And within that list, there is a reference to the share with. Now, Lhleu is the Welsh term for a lion, and we think that Hlewin might have been a Welsh term for the links. An alternative is it might also have been a term for the Fox, if we amend it slightly. I'm not convinced by that because Fox is already mentioned on the same line. But if we take this Chlewin and we look for possible other terms for it in other bits of Welsh literature, we do come up with a few.

So there's a famous Welsh verse called What Man is the Porter from the Black Book of Kamarvan. And it starts off as being a sort of someone trying to get entry to Arthur's court and it going through this. But then all of a sudden, halfway through, it breaks off and it talks about Fair Kai or Sir Kai of later English literature, one of Arthur's knights, as we might think of it, going off and fighting a monster. And the monster that he fights is called Kaft Paluk. And this, so this is obviously a cat, because calf means cat in Welsh. So a kind of monster, which is a cat, very large. And in the text, it's described as a Helewan, which it seems very similar to the

Chlewin, which we see in Darnagat Smok. So there are these very strange, very old, pieces of literature which seem to describe cats or cat monsters using the same sorts of terms and it might be that they refer to lynx is originally but kaff palleg is a terrible dangerous monster almost like the wolf after it's gone through all of its transformations and it has the gleaming eyes and it's mightier than any human and can steal people's voices so we're not seeing an ordinary straightforward links there and this is what i mean about the links being difficult to pin down You mentioned, you know, in comparison to the wolf, does the links kind of get the same sort of symbolic treatment in religious texts?

I mean, like, do we see the links carrying the same, I guess, a weight of spiritual condemnation that we see from wolves? There's a little hint of this. A really common metaphor in medieval period is the idea that, I suppose, just like today, that priests are like, like, shepherds. And this, of course, is the Latin for a shepherd is pastor, someone who looks after the pastures and looks after the animals on the pasture. So within one of the lives of St. Cuthbert, it's called the mythical life because it's all in poetry by the venerable bead, there is a sort of admonition that just like shepherds look after their sheep and protect them from the sort of lions and big cats.

At least, should look after their flocks. And this is a bit strange because the people making this metaphor are living in the north of England. And so we get this sense, we're shepherds in the north of England looking after their flocks and protecting them from dangerous big cats. That sounds like a reference to a lynx. So, yeah, we get this comparison. The comparison there is between.

a lynx and a threat to ordinary spiritual virtue. And that's very similar to what we get from the wolf. Yeah. I guess the difference here is that, as you say, it's difficult to find links. So if we can't have the same sort of like, oh, here's a hunter with a bounty on wolves. Do you have anything similar where we see a hunters tasked very particularly with going after links? Or are they just too shadowy to even get that from them? very shadowy. So in the master game, this text from right at the end of the medieval period,

the Duke of York is describing all of the animals that he likes to hunt. And he does have a section in there on the links, very definitely on the links, and very clearly on the links. But this text is a translation of a French original. Now, you might say he wouldn't have included this in his translation if he didn't think that lynxes could be hunted in Britain, perhaps that's true, but it is a translation, and he could have just been including it for completeness. There's a very strange reference to a lynx much later on from the 18th century, and it seems to be this idea that people might have been hunting very large cats, three times larger than ordinary cats, in the old county of Kirkcubbrichtshire, which is in the south-west of Scotland, sort of within what we were. would now think of as Donfries and Galloway. It's very late and very confusing because we don't have very much in between. So the lynx is always shadowy puzzling us. Listen, I realized that I've

taken up all our time talking about the animals that I find very interesting, which is Wilson Lynx's, but I hasten to add that there's all sorts of great other animals in this book. But I wanted to just talk a little bit about the excellent discussion in your book, about this process of extinction more generally, you know. And one of the things that you have is you have a kind of table of the best available extinction dates. And, you know, you acknowledge that it's kind of like it's controversial, right? You know, this is kind of like a provisional way of looking at these things. How did you decide what dates you could include and what evidence suggested things in the

best way? You know, was there a process by which you decided to hold a date back or some way that you decided you wanted to really put things forward? That's an interesting question. I haven't really thought of it like that. I suppose I've been studying extinct animals for a long time. That was the topic of my PhD thesis over a decade ago now. So I've been thinking about these extinct animals for a long time. And so I suppose there lots of the dates are. just almost the ones that I prefer, the ones that I find the most convincing. But other scholars might look at that table and say, actually, I don't think that's correct. But I thought that it was important to have it in the book for the sake of completion and also to sort of give a, here's the

best I can possibly do. And for some of the creatures, I've given multiple dates, so lots of them go extinct earlier in the south of Britain than they do in Scotland. So I've listed both of those. Some of them I've said, look, it might have gone extinct really early, like the last. links, it might have got extinct way later, you know, as later as the 18th century. So I've tried to do that. But yeah, it is a difficult thing because people focus and fixate so much on that moment of extinction. And that's what they've been, what is what most scholars have been interested in when they look at these creatures. So everyone sort of pushed the date back and forth, and we've been doing that for 150 years. I hope that my book is not just about that. And so the table at the

end, I suppose, if you disagree with it, I hope you can still take something out of the book, which is useful from the main part of the book, not just the table conclusion. But yeah, I did my best. Yeah, I think one of the things that I also think is really interesting about this is that, you know, you have this distinction that I think is incredibly useful that is between purposeful extinction, you know, sort of what we see with wolves, right, where it's sort of like, we need to get rid of these guys. This isn't good. And accidental or incidental, at the very least, extinction. But, you know, it's also quite a blunt distinction, right?

Do you think that there's animals that kind of come up that are very difficult to keep on one side or the other? I'm thinking here, I guess, very particularly of our friends, the beavers who are back, right? And on the one hand, you know, we hunt them because we really like their fur. But then on the other hand, they're kind of a bit of a pest, right? Is there anything like this that really helps you to question this binary way of looking at extinction? That's an interesting challenge. I think with the beaver in Britain, by the time we get the sources on it in the medieval period, it was very much very high status fur, you know, suitable for princes and kings.

And even after it had gone extinct in Britain, people were still importing its fur from Europe. That's how important this fur was. and we get a few hints that the castorium was important as well, so that's sort of the chemical extracted from the glands of the beaver. So in the sources that we have, the beaver is very important. But part of that might be because the beaver was rare, and rare creatures usually have a higher sort of status within society. So what happened in the years before our sources started?

Was the beaver sometimes just hunted because it was causing floods in an area? Probably, that sounds very, very plausible. How did it get to be this rare? Was it because everyone really wanted it? Or was it just because it was there? And sometimes because it was subject to pest control, that does seem plausible. There are some creatures which, I suppose, do definitely question the bounds between them. So the red kite might be. be another one where it was simultaneously hated and subject to hunting, but also very much treasured when it was in the right place, doing the right thing. So it was helpful within London City in the sort of early modern Renaissance period for garbage disposal and for getting rid of odours which might turn into health risks. So that's a creature, I suppose, which is halfway between, which is sometimes loved, sometimes hated, depending on where it was. It becomes a weed in the wrong place.

The last thing I wanted to talk about, because I really love this comparison that you make within the book, is you talk about looking at the way that medieval Bustarias relate to some animals and the way that modern tabloids look at, for example, the menace of foxes or adders, you kind of invite us to find some humor in this. Ken, you tell us a little bit about the line between using humor to sort of deflate the power of a moral panic, whilst at the same time taking the anxieties of people who live alongside large animals today. Yeah, it is a difficult line to walk, isn't it? I'm reminded of an episode of Pepper Pig, where it was aired and the aim of it was to make children less frightened. I can't remember now, actually, whether it was less frightened of snakes or less frightened of spiders. But in any case, it was aired in Britain very successfully. What a beautiful idea. Yes, children shouldn't be frightened of them. But in Australia, it was banned.

Because maybe children should be frightened in places where the animals are more of a threat. Now, there are moral panics going on at the moment. For example, the adder is not really as dangerous, a predator as tabloid authors might want us to think during the summertime. And I think, to some degree, the predators on my list also fit into this camp. So the lynx which is probably incapable of ever doing any damage to a human because it's too small, and even the wolf which generally avoids humans and which in other countries people just weren't scared of as we were in Europe. But there is a sense of arrogance there, isn't there? Because I'm looking at it from a place where nature has just become a garden.

I don't think twice when I leave the house about animals that I might meet. whereas in places where these animals are still around, there are ways that they've adapted to live alongside them. Bears, as an example, in places where they've still got, bears get relocated when they start to go through people's garbage, and people wear bear bells when they go out so they don't shock bells, don't come by surprise upon bears in the middle of the wilderness. They wear bear bells.

So there's a difficulty with looking into the past in that I'm trying to do away with the cultural fears that people have but in dismissing them maybe I'm being too dismissive in some places and if we do reintroduce some of these animals we might have a little bit of a learning curve to learn to live with them in harmony again I hope we can do it

elite thank you so much for such an excellent book and such a wonderful conversation I'm sorry for dragging you into my special interests of Wolves and Linkses Oh, it's a shared special interest, Eleanor. Thanks so much for having me. My thanks again to Dr. Lee Ray. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

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