What is that large, long-legged, ostrich-like bird in the painting? Was there a now-extinct bird like that in Anglo-Saxon England, or did people keep ostriches or emus or something like them?
I'd say a crane is a pretty good guess though, given it's a falconry picture; Wikipedia says
> The common crane (Grus grus) is generally believed to have been a breeding bird in Britain in the Middle Ages. English people prized cranes as the "noblest quarry" for a falconer, and gladly ate them. In December 1212 King John flew his gyrfalcons at cranes at Ashwell, in Cambridgeshire, and killed seven, and on another occasion in Lincolnshire in February 1213 he brought down nine.
I want to know what happened to the cranes - you'd think a few would escape and survive in the wild. Were they all hunted, or did the environment of Britain become somehow completely unsuitable for them between the middle ages and now? Relevant reading lists welcome :)
Historic crane populations crashed due to hunting and then loss of habitat as wetlands were drained and agriculture and housing expanded etc. Today you can find cranes in the wild in Norfolk, Suffolk and the Fens district which are all regions with sizeable wetland habitats due to active protection and reintroduction programs. There are small groups of other breeding pairs elsewhere in the UK as well. See following for a quick backgrounder:
The ostrich seems plausible to me. It is mentioned briefly twice in the Old Testament (Job 39:13 and Lamentations 4:3), and considering that publishing was almost exclusively done by the Church at this time, I presume that the illustrators would have been familiar with it. The Bible doesn't given any description however, so there must have been another source if it is indeed an ostrich.
I went down a related rabbit hole recently after realizing based on a passage in don quixote that all of the characters (and the reader!) were assumed to be familiar with the size and general appearance of an ostrich.
DQ was written in like 1600 but based on chivalric romances from 200-400 years earlier, where it turns out ostriches also come up from time to time, even in heraldry of some characters.
Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures including asia minor and northern africa where ostriches were present. And these seafaring cultural and trade spheres also extended into nothern europe and the british isles.
So ultimately I don't think they were going off the bible for it. It's no more unusual than someone from that area being aware of lions or crocodiles and their general appearance. It would probably be very unusual to have seen one, but they would appear in puppet shows and travelers tales for sure. Literate people may have seen them in manuscript illuminations as well.
> Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures
There were people in England in Anglo-Saxon times. who had been as far away as Alexandria, or Constantinople.
Icelandic sagas in the late 1000s, wrote about William the Conqueror in England, and noted that many of the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Byzantium. So, even in Iceland they knew about Constantinople, and probably ostriches too, and that these were real things and places, which you might travel and see, even if they were basically at the other end of the known world. At the other end of the world, Byzantine records mention Anglo-Saxon warriors being recruited at that time.
The Bronze Age Collapse may have been precipitated in part by disruption to trade from North Europe and the British Isles to the Levant, Greece, and Egypt. They had the tin necessary to make bronze.
The Egyptians domesticated the ostrich and it has been familiar to Mediterranean civilization since. England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question. At that time at least, there were lions in London's zoos and gladiatorial games. I don't know of records to this effect, but there might even have been been ostriches - a favourite animal to import for the games elsewhere in the empire.
It's much less likely there were live ostriches in Anglo-Saxon times but the rich have always enjoyed mangeries and exotic animals. I wouldn't be surprised. And there would be traveller accounts and stories, increasingly mythical to be fair, as large population movements from places where people had actually seen them declined in the post-Roman era.
> England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question.
England was never part of the roman world. It was the collapse of the roman world that allowed the anglo-saxons to settle and create england. England was a post-roman world creation. Heck it was part of the destruction crew of the roman world.
It's not just US people who do this, it's many others in Europe and around the world. The common name of the UK in many languages is some variant of England, even to the point of what you'd learn in a geography class.
Also, people very commonly use the name of modern day countries to refer to their territory, such as "most of Germany was frozen over in the last Ice Age". I suspect this is what is happening here.
While I'm far from a professional, I'd rule out emu being known to Anglo-Saxons. As for ostrich, seems far more plausible of the two. Not that ostriches were indigenous to any part of Europe, but they were at least known to them through trade. Emu would just be far-fetched, I think.
Possibly peafowl? They were kept in medieval England. There is some bright decoration on the head. The head and legs are too long, but other things in the picture are not to scale either.
I'd say a crane is a pretty good guess though, given it's a falconry picture; Wikipedia says
> The common crane (Grus grus) is generally believed to have been a breeding bird in Britain in the Middle Ages. English people prized cranes as the "noblest quarry" for a falconer, and gladly ate them. In December 1212 King John flew his gyrfalcons at cranes at Ashwell, in Cambridgeshire, and killed seven, and on another occasion in Lincolnshire in February 1213 he brought down nine.