In the autumn of 1235, three captives passed over the drawbridge into the Tower of London. Unlike later prisoners incarcerated in the tower, these were not traitors, discarded royal wives or even deposed kings, but lions. A gift from Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, to England’s King Henry III, the lions were the living embodiment of the fabulous beasts on the king’s crest and the first of many to take up residence in the royal menagerie at the tower. Seven centuries later, archaeologists digging in the tower’s old moat discovered the remains of two lions. Now, after spending 70 years in a box in a museum, those ancient bones are providing a rare glimpse of life in the medieval menagerie.
KINGS of England had a thing about lions almost from the first. Henry I kept some at his country estate near Oxford, along with leopards, lynxes, camels and a porcupine. Henry II adopted three as his motif, one above the other, each with its right forepaw raised. The three lions came to symbolise the power and might of the English throne. So what better way for foreign princes to curry favour with an English king than with a gift of lions?
Lions had been extinct in the British Isles since the last ice age, but in early medieval times they began to make a comeback courtesy of sundry sovereigns keen to keep in with the English. At first, the royal lions lived in the country. But at the turn of the 13th century King John moved part of his animal collection to the Tower of London. And in 1235, when Henry III received a gift of three lions from the Holy Roman Emperor, they were sent straight to the tower. The great stone fortress was hardly an ideal place to keep large, fierce animals, yet for the next 600 years the royal menagerie was a fixture there. It was only closed in 1835, after the remaining animals had been packed off to London Zoo.
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It’s odd, then, that when an archaeological dig in 1937 turned up the skulls of two lions in the old moat, the bones excited so little interest. Which king might they have belonged to? And why, given the pomp and circumstance that attended the arrival of any royal lion, did they end up in the moat? The skulls were packed into boxes and sent to London’s Natural History Museum, where they remained unstudied until, almost 70 years later, Hannah O’Regan of Liverpool John Moores University decided to investigate.
O’Regan, an expert on the bones of carnivores, became interested in the history of zoos because captivity sometimes leaves a distinctive signature on an animal’s bones. Poor diet, cramped conditions and abnormal behaviour patterns can all leave marks on the skeleton. When Richard Sabin, the museum’s curator of mammals, told O’Regan about the lions from the moat, she was curious: what might they reveal about life as a royal lion?
The later history of the tower menagerie is well documented, but little is known of the medieval years – even its whereabouts within the tower has always been uncertain. Radiocarbon dating of the skulls gave results even better than O’Regan had hoped for. “The best-preserved skull dates from between 1280 and 1385. That makes it the earliest known lion in England since the ice age.” The second skull dates from between 1420 and 1480. These dates don’t pinpoint which monarch owned the lions but they narrow down the possibilities.
The oldest lion could have belonged to Edward I, although between conquering the Welsh, fighting the French and hammering the Scots, he would have had little time to spend with his animals. It could have belonged to his son, the weak and dissolute Edward II, who was deposed and murdered in 1327. He clearly owned at least one lion because the City of London had to supply “the king’s lion” with a quarter of a sheep each day. Or it might have belonged to Edward III, a king whose 50 years on the throne were mostly spent fighting the French. We know he had more than one, because in 1360 another of the tower’s captives – King John II of France – made a note of the tip he gave to the guard who let him visit “des lions du Roy d’Angleterre”.
The second lion also lived in exciting times. The date range for this skull starts with the last days of Henry V, hero of Agincourt, encompasses the wars of the roses and ends with Edward IV, the eventual victor in the tussle for the throne. The only certainty is that the lion was not in the tower between 1436, when the Chronicle of London reports that all the lions had died, and 1445, when a new one arrived for Henry VI’s new bride, the 16-year-old Margaret of Anjou.
“They arrived with pomp but left with the household rubbish”
“These lions are interesting because they were present at important times in English history, and a time when the lion was a potent symbol of the monarchy,” says O’Regan. Despite this, the evidence from the skulls suggests that once a lion died, its royal status counted for nothing. “It looks as if they were just turfed into the moat.”
The dead lions were found near the base of what had been a huge half-moon-shaped bastion known as the Lion Tower, a part of the fortifications demolished in the mid-19th century. Although the tower was built in 1276, the first record of a menagerie there dates from the late 1500s. However, the condition of the skulls suggests the lions were dumped close to where they were found, which means the menagerie might have been in the Lion Tower almost from the time it was built. It also suggests they were thrown in intact. “Even the delicate bones that break easily when you handle modern skulls are undamaged, which suggests they were still covered with flesh. Nor are there any cut marks, which you’d expect if they had been skinned,” says O’Regan. A living lion may have been the ultimate status symbol, but a dead one wasn’t even turned into a rug. “They arrived with pomp and ceremony but they seem to have left the same way as the household rubbish.”
Even in life, these symbols of royalty were treated less than royally. Neither of the two lions reached old age, which is hardly surprising given the conditions in the menagerie and how little their keepers would have known about their needs. Excavations by the Oxford Archaeological Unit in 1999 uncovered the outline of a cage that is of unknown date but probably from the menagerie’s later years. It measured 2 metres by 3 metres, hardly big enough for a lion to lie down. “Conditions in the medieval zoo were probably no better,” says O’Regan.
The health of at least one of the two lions suffered as a result. In the later lion, the foramen magnum – the hole at the back of the skull where the spinal cord joins the brain – is partially blocked by excessive growth of bone. “This would have put pressure on the spinal cord and may have made movement difficult,” says O’Regan. This disorder was first recorded in the 1920s in a lioness at the National Zoo in Washington DC. A check of the zoo’s other lions found three with the same problem, and a later trawl through collections of old skulls turned up more cases – all among captive lions. “It seems to have been quite common in zoo lions in the early 20th century,” says O’Regan. “But it’s not been seen in the skulls of wild lions. The suspicion is that it has something to do with the way the animals were kept.”
No one knows what caused the condition, says O’Regan, but the fact that it showed up in animals five centuries apart suggests that it is a persistent problem in captive lions – or was. “With the better diets and greatly improved conditions in modern zoos, perhaps it won’t be seen again.”
