In November 1254, the port of Sandwich in Kent took delivery of an unusual cargo: a gift to Henry III from Louis IX of France. On his last crusade to Palestine, Louis acquired an African elephant and aware of his brother-in-law's passion for collecting exotic animals, felt it would make a worthy addition to the royal menagerie at the Tower of London.
Alongside big cats and crocodiles, elephants were considered the most fearsome beasts in creation. The first recorded elephant in northern Europe was the creature brought to England by the Emperor Claudius in 43AD. According to the historian Suetonius, it so terrified the armies of Caractacus, King of the Britons, that those who surrendered requested to do so to the elephant itself. By the time Henry took delivery of his own elephant over 1000 years later, Western rulers revered the animal as a totem of power.
The winter of 1254 was particularly harsh, so to keep the elephant safe its journey to London was postponed until the following year. On the 7th January 1255, a mandate in the Court Rolls ordered John Gouch, the Sheriff of Kent, "to provide for bringing the King's elephant from Whitsand to Dover and if possible by water to London". Travelling on foot, the animal's passage through Kent proceeded without incident until (legend has it) a bull in a field to the roadside took exception to the creature and charged it. The elephant is said to have thrown the bull with one sweep of its mighty tusks, the challenger expiring almost immediately.
The elephant arrived in London tethered to a great barge that floated down the Thames; Henry's subjects lined the riverbank to see the mighty beast soon to take pride of place in the King's collection. Elaborate renovations had already taken place at the Tower to accommodate the creature. Before it left Kent, Henry wrote to the Sheriff of London, "We command that ye cause without delay to be built at our Tower of London one house of forty feet long and twenty feet deep for our elephant".
The royal menagerie was first established in 1235 when Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II sent Henry a wedding gift of three leopards after his marriage to Eleanor of Provence. The Mayor of Northampton presented him with a bear in 1246, and in 1252 he came into possession of a Norwegian polar bear; muzzled and bound to an iron chain, it could regularly be seen catching fish in the River Thames. None of these animals, however, required the extensive provision that was afforded Henry's elephant.
Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk of the Order of St. Alban, made two sketches of the creature for his now seminal document of life in 13th century England, Chronica Majora. In both illustrations, the elephant is being fed by its keeper, identified in the Latin text as Henricus de Flor. To the left of these images, Paris provides us with a number of observations about the animal, many of which would eventually be disproved. (At one point, we're informed that elephants don't have knees and are incapable of getting up again should they fall.) Among these many details, he not only informs us how, as Paris affectionately refers to it, the "Noble Beast" was received at court, but also what its diet consisted of.
As far as the medieval mind was concerned, a creature of such awesome stature could only be a carnivore - albeit an unusually passive one. To this end, the elephant was fed roast beef accompanied by the finest claret from the King's cellar. Two years later, having grown weak from the cold climate, the great beast died of alcohol poisoning. Henry was inconsolable and ordered the elephant's hide to be stripped and placed in the grand hall of his castle at Woodstock, near Oxford: "In memory of a Noble Beast's journey to the court of man".
