Spernellus the Medieval Bearward

In May 1247, two royal officials for Yorkshire recorded the results of an inquiry into lands alienated in the county before Peter of Savoy was given the Honour of Richmond in 1241. The Honour was a large collection of lands with a significant concentration in Richmondshire, in the north-west corner of Yorkshire. It was originally compiled, in several episodes of land grants, to sustain the early lords of Richmond, the first of whom, Alan rufus (d.1093), is regarded as one of the wealthiest people in English history. In around 1235 the Honour, and indeed all the English estates of Peter I, Duke of Brittany, had been forfeited to the English Crown.

The citizens of Richmond reported that a certain Henry son of Galiena had an oven on a plot of land which had been set aside by the then Earl of Richmond, possibly Peter I, to sustain one of a number of serjeanties associated with his wider household. Serjeanties were a form of service given in return for holding properties; the service of carrying letters from the earl to addressees, for example, is a kind of serjeanty where an individual holds land of a landlord in return for this service.

A curiosity of Henry son of Galiena’s tenure is that the person who held it before him was a certain Spernellus, the earl’s ursarius, or bearward [1]. There is no other reference to Spernellus in the record [2].  

The precise location of Spernellus’ plot of land is not known for certain: the two entries preceding this one make reference to the ‘bailey’ of Richmond – perhaps the area of the planned settlement – as well as Richmond Castle. Given that it was the citizens of Richmond who provided the necessary information to the escheators, it is likely Spernellus’ plot was somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the castle and town.

 Although bearwards are somewhat rare outside of richer royal documentation, they do appear for households of the aristocracy in the high medieval period. The settlement of Bearwardcote in Derbyshire is attested (‘Bereuuardescote’; ‘Beruerdescote’) in Domesday (1086), suggesting that the practice of keeping bears was present in England before the Norman Conquest [3]. William fitz Robert Geffeson was a ‘belle-ward’ in Warrington in the reign of Edward III [4]. There is also a long tradition of animals kept for the English crown at the Tower of London, including a polar bear in the middle of the 13th century [5].

The passing reference to Spernellus hints at a tradition of bearwards outside of the relatively well-known royal and early modern traditions. More research will need to be done to assess how many bearwards are likely to have been present in England during this time, and what exactly their lives may have looked like.