MEDIEVAL POLAR BEARS

…and the Tower of London

In 1252 Henry III took delivery of a white bear, sent to him as a gift from King Haakon IV of Norway. He decided to keep it in the Tower of London. The bear was either too big or too exciting to be taken to Oxfordshire, where there had been a royal menagerie at Woodstock since Henry I’s reign. What’s more, it needed to fish.

So the beast was sent to the Tower, and from what we can tell, it was well looked after. Although it had a muzzle and chain to wear while on land, the sheriffs of London were obliged to lay out more than a shilling a week for its upkeep - which added up over a year to roughly the expected income of a knight.

The bear came with a Norwegian keeper, and that keeper was allowed to lead fishing trips into the Thames, beside which the Tower sat. The man wore waterproof clothes (again, billed to the Crown). The bear had a long swimming leash.

There were salmon in the Thames in those days. So while being in London was probably not half so pleasing to the bear as sitting on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle, it sure beat working.

(Fwiw a few years ago I went to the Bioparco di Roma aka the zoo next door to the Villa Borghese, and the polar bear there was kept there in a pen about the size of my kitchen, sweltering in 35C heat. It seemed objectively worse off than this pet of Henry’s.)

Now, if you are anywhere above an entry level medieval nerd, or have simply taken a trip around the Tower of London in the last ten years, then everything I’ve just told you may sound like old hat.

Everyone knows the Tower had a polar bear. We know it swam in the river. We know that three years later Henry was also gifted an elephant, which drew big crowds to the Tower, including Matthew Paris, who drew a surprisingly good picture of the pachyderm in his chronicle.

But how much of the polar bear’s hinterland do we know? Beyond the factoid, what gives?

I was wondering about it this week. Here is what I found out.

The polar bear may not have been a polar bear (wtf)

The first thing to get straight may be the most alarming. It is not absolutely certain that Henry III’s bear was polar.