Tag: Middle English

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Aries Across the Ages: Bighorn Sheep, Medieval Rams, and Springtime Symbolism

Since relocating from England and returning to my hometown in Colorado somewhat unexpectedly, I’ve been spending a lot of time soaking up the sunshine by the Arkansas river, and when a bighorn sheep approached the bank to drink the other day, it was not only a sure sign of spring but also a reminder of how medieval symbolism and modern day animals create connections across time and space, even entire continents.

Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, one of seven subspecies native to North America, occupy mountainous areas in the United States and Canada. They are named for the male’s large, curved horns, a pair of which can weigh up to 30 pounds – the equivalent of the weight of all the bones in the male’s body. They are powerful, steadfast creatures with males weighing upward of 500 pounds.

Male bighorn sheet. Photo courtesy of The National Wildlife Federation Blog.

During rutting season, which runs from October to January, rams battle for dominance and breeding rights with ewes. After descending from steep, treacherous terrain to lower territory, males can be observed rearing and smashing their horns together in a violent collision, producing sounds that can be heard up to 40 miles away.   

Rams butting heads. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13 [Taymouth Hours], folio 183r.

Indeed, we are in the season of the Ram, just as the Western medieval world would have been at this time of year. The sun entered the constellation Aries, the ram, on March 20th in line with the spring, or vernal, equinox in the northern hemisphere and will remain in this astrological sign until approximately the same date in April before transitioning into Taurus, the bull.

The spring equinox marks the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator, bringing nearly equal day and night lengths and signifying the start of spring. When the sun passes through Aries, it also marks the astrological new year. As the first sign of the zodiac, Aries season symbolizes a reset after a long winter and a sense of reemergence, both in modern and medieval times.

Ram depicted in Bibliothèque Municipale de Douai, MS 711 [De Natura animalium], folio 18r.

In the medieval world, the season was perfect for pilgrimage. The characters of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, of course, begin their journey to Canterbury in mid-April as described by the first several lines of the General Prologue:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, an the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne… (Chaucer 1-8).

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries… (Translation from Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website)

Sheep have maintained a strong presence in the English landscape since their domestication during the Neolithic era. Although they were not initially valued as highly as other livestock, they were integral in the early medieval period as providers of milk, wool, and manure. Their bodies were also harvested for meat, skin, fat, bones, and horns. They were hardy animals, able to thrive on rough grazing and survive during harsh winters.

A shepherd holding a lamb and tending a flock of sheep, including two rams in the foreground. Cambridge University Library, Kk.4.25 [Bestiary (Third Family)], folio 58v.

They were also used for ecclesiastical purposes. The best vellum was produced from either calf or lamb skin, and regular parchment was procured from the skin of sheep and goats. Additionally, rams were some of the first animals to be sacrificed on altars in the ancient world. Isidore of Seville, in his 7th-century Etymologies, writes, “The ram [aries] is either named after the word aris, that is, after ‘Mars’ whence we call the males in a flock ‘males’ [mas, maris] – or because this animal was the first to be sacrificed on altars [ara, aris] by pagans.”

Further to the etymological origins of the word, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a “ram” simply as an adult male sheep, and the word has remained relatively unchanged since it first appearance in English during the Anglo Saxon period, wherein rams appear as sacrifices in Biblical stories, notably that of Abraham, and other Christian contexts.

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac with ram behind. Morgan Library & Museum, Bible historiale MS M.322 I, fol. 032r.

The term ram, however, also appeared in the context of battle, describing both a weapon of war (later renamed the “battering ram”) and the action of ramming as with the weapon itself, just as two rams would collide in conflict. Circa 1470, Thomas Malory in Morte Darthur describes how knights “hurteled togydirs lyke too rammes,” emphasizing the brute strength and blunt impact of the men as their bodies meet in battle.

At this time of year, bighorn sheep are less interested in fighting and more focused on lambing. Females typically give birth between late April and June, during which time they find steep, secluded habitats to protect their newborn babies from predators like mountain lions, coyotes, and bears. Males, during this time, live apart from females, maintaining a hierarchy of dominance amongst themselves. The separation during the springtime season creates an apt juxtaposition of violence and renewal from an ecological perspective, as well as a personal one: the hardest part has passed, and rebirth is possible.

The sighting of a bighorn sheep in early spring — powerfully yet gracefully poised on a rocky mountainside — poignantly connects my Colorado roots with my medieval interests and my previous home in England. It also reminds me that I am on the precipice of a new life after a difficult struggle, that this season symbolizes the beauty of living after a battle.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Alumni Contributor, Department of English

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From Chariots to Chaucer: Mastiffs in Medieval England

As a medievalist and a mastiff owner, it seems fitting that I first found my beloved dogs in the pages of medieval literature, specifically in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite are pitted against one another in a tournament to determine which knight will win Emelye’s hand in marriage. The contestants are given a year to prepare, during which time they each assemble an entourage of men to accompany them into the melee. When the Knight introduces Lycurgus, “the grete king of Trace” [the great king of Thrace] (Chaucer 2129) who sides with Palamon, he describes the dogs circling his chariot as part of the tournament’s pageantry:

Aboute his chaar ther wenten white alauntz,
Twenty and mo, as grete as any steer,
To hunten at the leoun or the deer,
And folwed hym with mosel faste ybounde,
Colered of gold, and tourettes fyled rounde. (Chaucer 2148-2152)[1]

[About his chariot there went white alaunts,
More than twenty, each as great as any steer,
To hunt the lion or the deer,
And followed him with muzzles securely bound,
Wearing collars of gold and rings for leashes filed round.] (My translation)

The term alaunt, now archaic and historical, refers to a type of dog, though exactly what kind of dog remains at least somewhat ambiguous. Although Harvard’s interlinear text translates “alauntz” as “wolfhounds,” it is far more likely that these alaunts are mastiffs.

Mastiffs are one of the oldest recorded dog breeds. Revered for their size and strength, the breed was used for hunting, fighting, and guarding for thousands of years. The massive dogs are physically characterized by their imposing size, broad heads, and powerful necks, qualities that have defined them from their earliest appearances in art and literature.

Image of a warrior holding a mastiff-type dog on a leash from an expansive Assyrian relief depicting a lion hunt, dated 645-640 BCE and housed at the British Museum.

It is unclear where the mastiff originated, but the English Mastiff has ties to ancient Greece and Rome, where the narrator of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale sets his story. According to The Kennel Club, “[w]hen the Romans invaded Britain in 55 BC they found the inhabitants already had a mastiff-type dog, huge and courageous and which defeated the Romans’ own dogs in organised fights. The Romans took some of these mastiff types home with them and used them for fighting wild animals in the Colosseum.”[2]

The English Mastiff, as we know it today, descends from the Molossus, a formidable war dog from ancient Greece. The British Museum reports that the Molossus is depicted battling lions and gladiators in murals dating as far back as 2500 BC. The dogs also served in the Roman army, as guard dogs stationed within encampments or as soldiers, with the largest and most ferocious dogs strapped with armor and sent into battle. Both Aristotle and Ovid mention the Molussus in their work.[3]

The Dog of Alcibiades, marble statue depicting a Molussus, probably produced in Rome between 100 and 200 AD, British Museum.  

The term mastiff does not appear in English until the 14th century,[4] but this does not mean that mastiffs were not present in England during the Middle Ages. When the Normans introduced bull baiting to Britain in the 12th century, they used mastiffs to torment bulls for sport long before the appearance of the bulldog.[5] The bulldog was actually developed from the mastiff and looked quite different from the bulldog as we recognize it today.

Sketch of a bulldog by Thomas Brown, from Biographical Sketches and Authentic Anecdotes of Dogs, published in 1829.

Alaunt referred to any ‘large fierce dog or mastiff of a breed valued for its use in hunting and fighting,’ and indeed, the term’s first appearance in English is attributed to Chaucer.[6] The “alaunts” he describes as “great as any steer” would certainly suggest the stature of a mastiff with their massive bodies, heads, and necks and the power conveyed by the ratio of mass and muscle much similar to that of a bull. Their presence in a stadium setting within the Classical world recalls the Mollosus of the Colosseum, while their accompaniment of a Thracian warrior and their ability to hunt lions invokes the image of the Assyrian reliefs pictured above.

Admittedly, modern mastiffs are no match for deer with respect to their speed, and greyhounds would have been the preferred breed for deer hunting in medieval England, such as those described in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But it’s possible that earlier mastiffs may have been capable of the chase, as their speed and endurance would have also been needed in battle. It’s also possible that mastiffs provided a hunting party with protection from animals that could pose serious threats such as boars and wolves – and in fact, mastiffs were used to hunt both.

Mastiffs today are no less powerful than their predecessors, even if their modern status as pets has mostly replaced their previous responsibilities in medieval England. The English Mastiff is still considered the largest dog breed and certainly the heaviest, if not always the tallest, with males easily reaching 240 pounds and standing upward of 30 inches at the shoulder. The world’s heaviest and longest dog ever recorded was a male English Mastiff from London named Aicama Zorba of La-Susa, who weighed 343 pounds, stood 37 inches at the shoulder, and measured 8 feet 3 inches from nose to tail in September 1987.[7]  

An English Mastiff named Aicama Zorba of La-Susa remains the largest dog ever recorded.

The second mastiff associated with England is the Bullmastiff, developed as a guard dog during the 19th century to assist gamekeepers in their efforts to stop poachers. The Bullmastiff descends from the breeding of English Mastiffs and Bulldogs, at a ratio of 60 to 40 percent respectively, to produce a dog that exhibited size, courage, and athleticism. They were trained to pin and hold poachers, rather than maul them. As the American Kennel Club puts it, the Bullmastiff was “smart enough to work on command, tractable enough to hold but not maul a poacher, and big enough to scare the bejesus out of any intruder.”[8]

During the Victorian era, gamekeepers preferred Bullmastiffs with brindle coats, which worked to camouflage the dogs in the dark, but dogs with fawn colored coats and black masks are contemporarily more common.[9] Smaller than English Mastiffs, large Bullmastiff males can reach 140 pounds and stand 27 inches at the shoulder.

My first Bullmastiff, Beorn, lost unexpectedly and much too early to illness in November 2023.

Mastiffs, of course, are not limited to the British varieties. There is a plethora of types that extend to the Americas, across Europe, and into Asia. They also come in a variety of colors and coat lengths, hence the probability of white mastiffs loping alongside a chariot in the Classical world that Chaucer’s Knight creates.

My boys have been the very best dogs for me, but mastiffs of any kind are not for inexperienced or inattentive dog owners, nor are they good matches for the faint of heart. My Bullmastiffs are affectionate and intelligent, sweet and silly. They are big and slobbery and prefer to be with their people. They are extremely friendly because they have been properly trained and socialized since they were tiny babies. They are still incredibly strong and fiercely protective of me and anyone else they perceive as members of their pack.  

My second Bullmastiff, Sebastian, adopted in 2024.

As a medievalist, I love seeing my dogs’ legacy in the literature I study, but I chose my dogs because they are the perfect breed for my personality and my lifestyle, not because they appear in Chaucer’s poetry. It’s a happy coincidence that I initially crossed paths with my canine companions in a text that paved the way for my academic career — and since it’s Thanksgiving week, it’s fitting to say I’m grateful that I get to be their person.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Alumni Contributor, Department of English
Lecturer, Bishop Grosseteste University (U.K.)

[1] Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Knight’s Tale. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

[2] “Mastiff,” The Kennel Club.

[3] “Beware of the dog!,” British Museum.

[4] “Mastiff,” Oxford English Dictionary.

[5] “Bulldog,” The Kennel Club.

[6] “Alaunt,” Oxford English Dictionary.

[7] “Longest dog ever,” Guiness World Records.

[8] “Bullmastiff,” American Kennel Club.

[9] “Bullmastiff,” The Kennel Club.

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The Raven’s False Greeting: Animal Language and Medieval Fable

Talking animals are a ubiquitous element in fables. They do not evoke wonder from human characters within the narrative, nor seem to require any explanation; this contrasts with other sorts of stories (everything from Marie de France’s Guigemar to contemporary fantasy novels) where the appearance of a talking animal signals the beginning of some rare adventure for humans. Notably, there is, however, one fable I can think of that seems to portray an animal whose ability to talk is liminal. That is, he can utter words, yet he is not really treated as a speaker. His status seems closer to that of a “real” animal who can mimic human speech, and that is in fact key to the story.

The fable in question is ascribed to Phaedrus, the author of the first extant literary fable collection. While Phaedrus wrote in the first century, his five books of fables were the basis for much of the “Romulus” tradition in prose and verse, which flourished in the Middle Ages. The aforementioned fable is called “The Traveler and the Raven” (Viator et corvus). The tale is found in “Perotti’s Appendix,” named for the Italian humanist, Niccolò Perotti (1429–80), who transmitted it; I offer a translation of it below, with the text based on Ben Edwin Perry’s edition.[1]

Manuscript illustration, from the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, of two humans and a horse harrowing a field, with two ravens hovering above them, British Library, Additional MS 42130, fol. 171r .

Quidam per agros devium carpens iter
AVE exaudivit, et moratus paululum,
adesse ut vidit nullum, corripuit gradum.
iterum salutat idem ex occulto sonus.
voce hospitali confirmatus restitit,
ut, quisquis esset, par officium reciperet.
cum circumspectans errore haesisset diu
et perdidisset tempus aliquot milium,
ostendit sese corvus et supervolans
AVE usque ingessit. tum se lusum intelligens
“At male tibi sit” inquit, “ales pessime,
qui festinantis sic detinuisti pedes.”

A certain man, taking a byway through the fields on a journey, heard “Hello!” and lingered for a moment, but when he saw that no one was there, he hastened the pace. Again, the same sound greeted him from some hidden place. He stopped, encouraged by the hospitable voice, so that whoever it was might receive an equal courtesy. When he had remained for a long time, looking around uncertainly, and lost enough time for several miles, a raven showed himself, and flying above him, incessantly repeated “Hello!” Then, realizing he had been tricked, the man said, “Damn you, wretched bird, for delaying my feet like that when I was in a hurry.”

Why did the man perceive the raven’s “hello” as a trick? (The word lusum, in line 10, comes from ludo, to play, and can suggest mockery or deception; I translated it as “tricked.”) Why did he not take this as a genuine greeting?

It seems that the man was expecting a human speaker, and was disappointed and annoyed to find out that the salutation came from a bird instead. But species difference doesn’t, in and of itself, seem like an adequate explanation, at least in the usual fable context where all sorts of creatures talk. Nor does the explanation for the man’s reaction lie in some perceived status imbalance between the two; reciprocity is expected in greetings, after all, even between parties of unequal standing, and it isn’t mockery for an inferior to greet a superior, or vice versa.

Complicating this is the fact that real birds can imitate human speech—parrots, most famously, but also corvids, including ravens. This raven repeats the same simple word, over and over, as a trained animal might. But the man simultaneously seems to impute malice or mischief to this animal and deny him as a legitimate interlocutor. The raven is capable of toying with him (and ravens have a longstanding, cross-cultural reputation for cleverness and tricks), but he is not capable of (or worthy of?) a conversation.

Manuscript illustration of a raven, from an early 14th century manuscript of Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme, British Library, Additional MS 11390, fol. 33r.

A traditional narrative about animal language is that it doesn’t exist—that the sounds that animals make (and this leaves aside non-aural communication, through movement, scent, etc.) are fundamentally different than human speech. Nonetheless, medieval grammarians and philosophers acknowledged that, say, a dog’s bark is not meaningless, that it might convey something of his emotional state, and that humans could pick up on this.[2] Some thinkers, too, suggested that animals can communicate with their own species in their own “language.” For example, says, Roger Bacon, hens can cluck to let their young know that food is near, or to warn them of a predator.[3]

So much for “real-life” animal language. In medieval literature, though, there may also be special talking animals (or humans gifted with a special ability to understand animals, e.g., the man who can translate between species in Culhwch and Olwen, or Canacee, with her magic ring, in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”). In fables, animals’ capacity to speak is typically unremarkable, and conversations readily occur across species lines.

This fable, however, reflects none of the above scenarios. The raven doesn’t caw or croak—he says an intelligible word, in a human language, Latin. And what he says is “Ave,” a greeting. Ave is not far off from Latin avis, “bird,” although the words are etymologically unrelated; in modern Spanish and Portuguese ave means “bird”. Etymology aside, there is still the possibility of wordplay. Is the bird proclaiming what he is all along, without the man realizing it? Is that the “trick”? Was that what the bird really meant to do, or was it apt, but not necessarily done knowingly—is the raven a kind of natural sign who reiterates himself, both by appearing and by unwittingly speaking his own appearance?

In any case, the man doesn’t treat the raven’s “Ave” as a sincere speech-act from an animal who can, unsurprisingly, talk to him—he doesn’t treat it as a greeting, he treats it as a deception. (The opening moral, possibly added by Perotti, emphasizes this, declaring, “People are very often deceived by words,” Verbis saepenumero homines decipi solere).

What accounts for the man’s reaction to the raven? Fables often have talking animals, yes, but fundamentally, fables are didactic, using memorable narratives to get messages across. The raven’s real-life reputation for mischief, but above all his real-life ability to imitate speech, is what is being drawn on here. The raven in “The Traveler and the Raven” is not the genre-typical talking animal, because for him to be an actual, expected interlocutor goes against the point of the fable, which is about how words can deceive.[4] In conveying this point, “The Traveler and the Raven” both acknowledges certain animals as clever and strips a non-human character of his genre-typical linguistic capability.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] Ben Edwin Perry, ed. and trans., Babrius and Phaedrus, Loeb Classical Library 436 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 404–6.

[2] For an analysis of the shifting conceptions of the semiotics of dogs’ barking, from Aristotle to Roger Bacon, see Umberto Eco et al., “On Animal Language in the Medieval Classification of Signs,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989), pp. 3–41.

[3] Quoted in Eco et al., “On Animal Language,” p. 36, n. 39.

[4] Fables tend to teach the “mistrust of words,” argues Jill Mann, in From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 96.