The Edges of the Medieval World

What is Exotic?Sources of Animals and Animal Products from the Edges of the Medieval World

WHAT IS EXOTIC? SOURCES OF ANIMALS AND ANIMAL PRODUCTS FROM THE EDGES OF THE MEDIEVAL WORLD Aleksander Pluskowski INTRODUCTION The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is the most impressive predator of the Arctic wastes; modern Europeans have become familiarised with these animals after centuries of polar exploration, their most intimate and violent behaviour has been captured on film, whilst their iconic associations range from confectionary to the accelerating degradation of the circumpolar environment.1 Their distinctive appearance and exclusive distribution in an environment where human activity is severely restricted, has meant that polar bears are one of the few animals that remain virtually ‘exotic’ – foreign – at a global scale. This is despite the efforts of zoos to bring people and bears closer together; indeed the dramatically contrasting environment of enclosure in warmer, humid climates has also made the experience of polar bears representative of the misery of confinement.2 Polar bears were even more exotic for medieval European societies; in complete contrast to lions, they rarely feature in contemporary art and literature, and only a few living individuals appear to have been shipped in from Arctic Norway and Greenland. In these regions, local communities had developed methods of both hunting polar bears and capturing them alive; their bones have been found in at least fifteen medieval Norse faunal assemblages in Greenland, associated with a range of sites such as large farms with churches, smaller coastal farms and inland farms. Recovered skeletal elements suggest quick and rough field skinning – fine cut marks on many of the phalanges point to 1 ‘Peppy the polar bear’ has featured as the logo of Fox’s ‘glacier mints’ since 1922. 2 On the polar bear in general, see Ian Stirling, Polar Bears (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). For a detailed bibliography see the official website of the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (http://pbsg.npolar.no) ALEKSANDER PLUSKOWSKI 114 their removal during the final finishing of a hide.3 The comparatively limited remains of polar bears within archaeological contexts at their source region mirrors the few references to pelts shipped into medieval Europe. A rare example is from the customs records of the Norwegian king Haakon V dating to 1316, which refer to merchants from Bruges and Lübeck obtaining two polar bear pelts in Bergen.4 Capturing these animals alive (even as cubs) must have been an incredibly dangerous and infrequent event, one motivated by facilitating access to the most luxurious market – European rulers. Einars Þáttr Sokkasonar mentions a live polar bear brought to Norway as a royal bribe,5 whilst Auðunar þáttur vestfirska tells the story of an Icelander who spends all his money on a live bear from Greenland and makes his fortune by presenting it to King Svein of Denmark .6 Both Henry III of England and Philip IV of France had ‘white bears’, the former presented by the Norwegian king Haakon IV in 1252.7 But whilst the polar bear ranked as one of the most unusual and prestigious exotics in medieval Europe, its cousin the brown bear (Ursus arctos) was widely distributed in the northern hemisphere. Like polar bears, these were also difficult animals to hunt, even more difficult to capture alive and by the turn of the second millennium, they were not available everywhere. Populations survived in many parts of Continental and Scandinavian Europe into the twentieth century, and some areas such as the Central Apennine and eastern Carpathian mountain chains have had continuous bear presence into the present day.8 In England, where baiting is documented from the late-Saxon period, they were most probably imported for this purpose, since bears appear to have become extinct in the region by the Iron Age.9 One obvious ‘source’ for what became an ‘exotic’ from the latter centuries of the first millennium was Scandinavia. Here, brown bears were available in the wooded and mountainous interior of the peninsula, and their remains have been found in a number of Viking-age burials, as well as trading hubs and later medieval urban centres.10 Bear pelts were a comparatively unusual commodity, and 3 Thomas McGovern, “The Arctic frontier of Norse Greenland,” in The Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries , ed. Stanton W. Green and Stephen M. Perlman (London: Academic Press, 1985), 298-299 (hereafter: McGovern, “Arctic frontier”); Kirsten Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America , ca. A.D. 1000-1500 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) (hereafter: Seaver, Frozen Echo). 4 Robert...