Alphyn

Somewhere in a herald’s book made in England around 1531, and kept now at the College of Arms, a beast walks across the page with its tail tied in a knot. The body is feline and heavy through the shoulder. A thick mane runs down its neck, coarse tufts break the line of its flanks, and a long thin tongue hangs from its jaw. Where the front paws should be there are the talons of an eagle. Nobody wrote down beside it what the thing was supposed to mean. Somebody thought it worth painting anyway, in flat opaque colour that has not faded much in five centuries.

The English called it an alphyn.

It belonged to the badge, which was a different instrument from a coat of arms and did a different job. Arms were the property of one man and his heirs, formal, blazoned, argued over by heralds. A badge was looser and more useful. It went on the sleeves of retainers, on the household’s livery cloth, on hangings, and above all on the long tapering standard that a lord’s men followed across a field. Anyone who could recognise the badge knew whose side a body of armed men was on, and that was the entire point. The alphyn served the Lords de la Warre in that capacity from about 1476.

Picture the practical version of it. A grey morning, a muster in a wet yard, forty men in coats of the family colours, and stitched to each shoulder a small clumsy beast with a knotted tail, worked in wool by somebody who had probably never seen the herald’s original. The stitching pulls. The knot comes out lopsided. It still reads at fifty paces, and reading at fifty paces is the only thing being asked of it.

The drawings do not agree with each other about the feet. Most give the alphyn eagle’s talons in front, some give it a dragon’s, some cloven feet like a goat’s, and occasionally all four limbs end in ordinary lion’s claws. What never varies is the tail. It loops back and ties itself, the way a griffin’s sometimes does, and that knot is the beast’s signature. Strip everything else away and heralds would still know it.

The creature underneath is not a tiger in any sense a naturalist would accept. The heraldic tyger was its own invention, a beast the heralds had inherited and redrawn so many times that its resemblance to the animal in Asia had worn away entirely. The alphyn takes that shape, thickens it, roughens the coat, and swaps the forelegs for something that grips.

Then there is the question of the name, which turns out to be the interesting part.

For a long time the answer looked settled. Middle English had a word alfin, meaning the chess piece we now call the bishop, and that word came through Arabic al-fil, “the elephant”, because the piece was once carved as one. Alfin, alphyn. Neat. The trouble is that the alphyn has no trunk, no tusks, and nothing elephantine about it at all, and heralds who wanted to draw an elephant drew an elephant and called it that. They were not short of the animal.

In 1989 N. J. A. Williams put a different case in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and it moves the beast out of the chessboard and into an Irish river. The Irish word onchu appears to be built from cu, “hound”, and on, “water”, and it sits beside doburchu, the otter, which is literally the same idea. An onchu was a water-dog, a large fierce thing at home in a lake. The same word also meant a battle-standard, which suggests the creature was painted on banners early and often enough for its name to transfer to the object. Williams follows the plural through the mangling that Irish words suffered in English mouths: onchainn to onfainn, then anchainn, anfainn, anfaill, anfild, enfild. Enfield. And from anfaill, on a different branch of the same wreck, alphyn.

If he is right, then the alphyn and the enfield are not cousins. They are the same word, split in two by pronunciation, each half of it eventually drawn as a separate animal by heralds who no longer knew they were repeating themselves. The enfield came out of it better. It kept a story, an Irish one about a beast that rose from the sea at Clontarf to stand over the body of Tadhg Mor Ua Ceallaigh until his people could recover him, which is why the O’Kelly crest carries it. That tale reaches us through nineteenth-century antiquarian collecting rather than from the medieval record, and it belongs to the enfield, not to this beast.

The alphyn has no story.

It has an object, though. At Montacute House in Somerset hangs the earliest tapestry in the care of the National Trust, woven in Tournai between about 1477 and 1481, wool and silk at five or six warps to the centimetre, three and a half metres tall. A knight in plate armour rides through a dense blue meadow of small flowers, his horse under a red and gold caparison hung with bells, the letters IE knotted together and repeated round the hem. He carries a standard, and on it is a red beast. Books about heraldic monsters routinely name that beast an alphyn. The National Trust’s own catalogue entry, describing the object it owns, calls it a red wolf or tiger and leaves it there. Both statements are in print and only one of them is a museum record.

The silence around the creature is easy to check. James Parker’s standard Victorian glossary of heraldic terms works patiently through alant, alce, allocamelus and antelope, and never reaches an alphyn. John Vinycomb’s book on fictitious creatures in British heraldry gives the enfield a section of its own and the alphyn none. The beast survived not because anyone told stories about it but because a Tudor clerk drew it, an antiquarian named Thomas Willement copied that drawing in the 1820s, and a peer published the copies in 1904.

What the alphyn can do is be recognised, and that is a real power in a century when most people could not read a name but could tell one beast from another at a distance. Its limits follow from the same fact. It works only for as long as somebody remembers whose badge it was, and it holds its identity only by the knot in its tail. Untie that and the alphyn goes back to being a stocky tyger with borrowed feet, which is very nearly what it always was.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an alphyn?

The alphyn is a rare beast of English heraldry, used as a badge rather than as a charge on a shield. It is drawn like a heraldic tyger but stockier, with a thick mane, tufted hair, a long thin tongue, eagle’s talons for forelegs and a tail tied in a knot. It appears in a Tudor manuscript of banners, standards and badges made in England around 1531 and now held at the College of Arms.

Whose badge was the alphyn?

The alphyn was borne as a badge by the Lords de la Warre from about 1476. A badge was worn by a lord’s servants and retainers and flown on his standard, so the alphyn functioned as a mark of allegiance that could be recognised at a distance rather than as a formal coat of arms.

Is the alphyn the same creature as the enfield?

Very probably. N. J. A. Williams argued in 1989 that both names descend from the Irish word onchu, meaning “water-hound”, through a chain of mispronunciations that produced enfild on one branch and alphyn on another. If that is correct, the two heraldic beasts are one word that split in half and then got drawn twice.

Does the alphyn have a myth attached to it?

No. The alphyn appears in heraldic art and in family badges, but no tale, legend or folk belief is recorded about it. The nearest thing belongs to the enfield, whose Irish legend has a sea-beast guarding the body of Tadhg Mor Ua Ceallaigh after the battle of Clontarf, and that story is not the alphyn’s.

Why does the alphyn have a knotted tail?

The knotted tail is the alphyn’s identifying feature, the one detail that stays constant when everything else about the drawing varies. Heralds differed over whether its forelegs ended in eagle’s talons, dragon’s talons, cloven feet or lion’s claws, but the looped and tied tail is what tells an alphyn from the heraldic tyger it is built on.

Related Entries

Enfield, Tyger, Yale, Opinicus, Keythong, Musimon, Allocamelus, Ypotryll, Griffin (or Gryphon), Bonnacon, Caladrius, Amphisbaena, Questing Beast, Alicorn, Dobhar-chu