Who Saw Bears in Medieval Europe?

Bear baiting proliferated in England during the early modern period, in both large cities and small towns, and touring bearwards who would show off their animals in fights all around the country. Across the Channel in mainland Europe, however, it is much more difficult to know if bears were baited. A lack of French, German, Italian, or other European documents concerning the treatment of bears and other animals in bloodsports leads us to explore other kinds of evidence.

In this series of blog posts on bears in visual cultures, Liam Lewis and Harvey Shepherd attempt to think through some of the problems of studying visual culture as a means of reconstructing baiting practices in Europe. Here, Liam considers examples from research on France in the Middle Ages. In an accompanying post, Harvey will explore his research on eighteenth-century French visual culture. In doing so, they look at ideas of public and private spaces and popular and elite culture.

For whom were depictions of bears made and what purposes did they serve?

Bears are a significant presence in visual cultures from Western Europe. Images of bears help us to understand who might have seen bears at different points in history. On the Box Office Bears project, we are interested in the presence of bears at bear baitings in early modern England (c. 1500-1700). But the use of animals in popular entertainment was not confined to the England in the early modern period. Manuscript marginalia and sketches suggest there is a lot more to visual depictions of bears  than first meets the eye…

We believe people subjugated bears for dancing or baiting in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, just as they were doing in the early modern period, but we have very little evidence of what really went on. We often refer to later images of bears fighting in arenas, or of bears at the stake, to help us think about what it might have been like to be present at one of these events. In the medieval period, the greatest presence of bears is probably found in the margins of medieval manuscripts, where artists were at some liberty to let their imaginations run wild.

Take, for example, the bear standing on its head in a manuscript of Robert de Boron’s Story of Merlin (Histoire de Merlin), dating from around 1270-1290. This manuscript, from the North of France, was a high-end product, lavishly decorated with images of animals and carnival in the margins around the text. It is likely that this manuscript was for an aristocratic audience, somewhat distanced from the topsy-turvy world of carnival, but perhaps they were familiar with animals such as bears from traveling menageries or bearwards. It leads us to question whether bears would have been a familiar sight for people living in England or France during the Middle Ages, as they were in England during the early modern period.

One of the interesting things about manuscript marginalia is that we often rely on such images to build a picture of the historical reality of bear baiting in England and France during the Middle Ages. But such images are very difficult to interpret. Bears clearly did not stand on their heads for audiences beating drums, but there could have been a culture of music and dance around traveling bears or menageries. Could there also have been playful, as well as violent, interactions with bears, at least as seen from a human perspective?

We can contrast fictional images like the one above with those that may have been drawn from life, or with real bears as ‘models’.

The profile of a brown bear shown here comes from the thirteenth-century sketchbook by an artist from Picardy in France, called Villard de Honnecourt. Villard was supposedly widely travelled. There are repeated claims in his sketchbook that some of the animal figures are drawn from life (‘contrefais al vif’).

The bear in this sketch may well have been drawn from life. Although not an entirely accurate representation of a bear, the figure features the characteristic hump, and non-retractable claws, of a brown bear (ursus arctos). This suggests that the artist may have seen a real bear and drawn from life, or at the very least drawn from an accurate copy as was standard practice in medieval depictions of animals in manuscripts and bestiaries. The rest of the sketchbook contains a variety of animal and architectural figures–including lions, porcupine, plans for cathedrals, and a trebuchet–all things that Villard may well have seen as he travelled through Europe.

We have scant evidence for bear baiting in France and Europe, but we do have visual evidence of the subjugation of bears in manuscript marginalia and sketchbooks. The evidence we have is tantalising for the Box Office Bears project because it helps us to build a bigger picture of the types of interactions humans had with bears in England and France during the Middle Ages. People may have interacted with bears as part of festivals and carnivals, as featured in manuscript marginalia, and bears were important enough in the medieval imagination for artists to spend time sketching details of bear anatomy into sketchbooks.

Whether or not these images represent the historical lived experiences of bears during this time is another question, and one that we are looking into in more detail…