Calygreyhound

The chancel at Castle Hedingham is cold in the way only stone churches manage, and the tomb against the north wall is colder still: black touchstone, its top slab polished to a dull mirror, cut in 1539 for a man who would be dead inside a year. Crouch to it and the carving comes forward out of the dark. A shield of eight quarters. A garter ringing it. A helm and crest above. And holding the whole arrangement upright, one on either side, a pair of animals that nobody has ever seen and nobody ever will. One of them is a calygreyhound.

Get close and it stops making sense in an interesting way. The head is a wildcat’s, broad and blunt, the ears pricked. The body behind it belongs to a deer or an antelope, long in the flank, built for running. The forelegs finish not in paws but in an eagle’s talons. The hind legs come off an ox and end in cloven hooves. Horns grow from the skull, drawn sometimes as antlers, sometimes as saw blades, sometimes as fronds of bracken. The tail is long and tufted, a lion’s in some hands and a poodle’s in others. The result is not frightening, and that is the strangest thing about it. Most heraldic monsters at least gesture at plausibility, at a creature that might hold together if you squinted. The calygreyhound does not bother, and its makers do not seem to have wanted it to.

It has no myth. It never had one. There is no bestiary entry for it, no folk tale, no encounter in a wood at dusk, no charm against it and no way to kill it. Nobody ever believed in it. They only used it.

What they used it for was speed. The parts are an argument: an eagle’s grip, a deer’s flank, the long legs of a courser. Heraldic writers gloss the beast as a figure of swiftness, and swiftness is the whole of the message. It belonged to the de Veres, Earls of Oxford, and it appears to have belonged to nobody else, which makes it among the rarest things in English armory, a monster with a single owner.

The family it served left its marks all over its own parish. At St Nicholas in Castle Hedingham the brick clerestory is panelled with alternating boars and mullets, the five-pointed star of the Vere arms and the boar that puns on the family name, since a boar in Latin is verres. Read the carved label above the tower window and you are reading a man’s career in pictures: a whistle and chain for Lord High Admiral, a screw-jack encircled by the Garter, a mullet in a shield, a boar grubbing acorns under an oak, an ox crossing a ford for the earldom of Oxford, a chair of estate for Lord Great Chamberlain, and half a harpy, one of the Vere supporters, the rest of it broken away.

The calygreyhound is not in that row. It turns up somewhere more private. The herald H. Stanford London recorded it as a badge of the thirteenth earl, shown on his signet seal, and noted that the fifteenth earl promoted it to a supporter, which is how it came to be gripping a shield on the black slab in the chancel. Picture the seal in use. A clerk warms wax over a candle until the smell of it fills the room, drops it onto the fold, and brings the matrix down; the wax cools around a beast the size of a thumbnail, complete with talons and horns and tufted tail, and the letter goes out into the world with a monster on it.

Where it came from is disputed, and the dispute is mostly about its name. Heraldic reference works place the beast in the middle of the fifteenth century. Charles Bird, in a talk given to the de Vere Society and published in 2016, argued for a later and far more pointed birth, after Bosworth in 1485. On his reading the caley, or colly, is an old word for the white hind: badge of Joan of Kent and, through her son Richard II, of the Plantagenet kings down to the last Richard, who died in the field that day. The greyhound was the beast of Margaret Beaufort, mother of the man who beat him. Weld the hind to the greyhound and you get a Plantagenet front end on Tudor hindquarters, the union of the two houses running about on four legs, worn by the earl who had commanded Henry Tudor’s vanguard. It is a handsome theory. Bird concedes in his own closing note that other authorities describe the animal with the body of a cat, talons for feet and saw-like antlers, and that for such a creature the name is very hard to explain.

He went looking for a picture of it, and thought he had found one. In the tower of St Margaret’s at Tilbury-juxta-Clare, built in 1519 by Elizabeth, Countess of Oxford, a crude figure is modelled in mortar high on the inside of the north wall, buried under generations of whitewash. The official county inventory calls it simply a winged beast. A former rector decided it was an ass carrying a wooden cross-tree for wings. Bird looked at the long neck, the hind’s head, the curled tail, and read the wings instead as a great embossed letter V, for Vere. If he is right, that lump of plaster is the only surviving picture of what the beast was actually supposed to look like. If he is wrong, it is a donkey. The whitewash is not saying.

The calygreyhound has one modern afterlife, and it is a peculiar one. On the catalogue and dedication pages of the 1623 First Folio sit a pair of horned, curly-tailed animals, one of them with a leg cocked, doing something no dignified beast should be doing in the front matter of the most famous book in English. Oxfordians, who hold that Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays, identify those animals as calygreyhounds and read them as a signature hidden in plain sight. Mainstream scholarship does not accept the authorship claim, and the identification travels with it. There is still a certain justice in the career: a beast invented purely as family advertising, conscripted four centuries later into an argument about who wrote Hamlet.

Its powers are exactly what it was built to display. It is fast, and it is equipped to stay fast: talons to grip at the turn, hooves for hard ground, horns carried forward. It fights nobody in the record, eats nothing, speaks never, guards no hoard and answers no prayer.

Its weakness is that it cannot exist without a patron. A creature with no story and no worshippers survives only as long as somebody keeps paying masons to carve it, and when the de Veres finally failed there was nothing left for the calygreyhound to hold up. The tomb in the chancel was shifted at some point and set back the wrong way round, so the earl’s four sons and four daughters now kneel facing west instead of east. The beast came round with them. It is still there on the cold slab, gripping its shield, running nowhere at speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a calygreyhound?

The calygreyhound is a mythical beast from English heraldry, used in the 15th and 16th centuries as a badge and shield supporter by the de Vere family, the Earls of Oxford. It is a composite animal, usually shown with a wildcat’s head, a deer or antelope body, an eagle’s talons on the forelegs, an ox’s hooves behind, horns, and a long tufted tail. It appears to be unique to the de Veres.

What does the calygreyhound symbolize?

Speed. Every part of the calygreyhound is taken from a swift animal, and heraldic writers consistently read the beast as a figure of swiftness rather than of ferocity or menace. Unlike most heraldic monsters, it makes no real attempt to look like an animal that could actually exist.

Where can you see a calygreyhound?

The best-known image is on the black marble tomb of John de Vere, fifteenth Earl of Oxford, made around 1539 and standing in the chancel of St Nicholas’ Church at Castle Hedingham in Essex, where the beast supports the earl’s arms. The herald H. Stanford London also recorded the calygreyhound on the signet seal of the thirteenth earl.

Where does the name calygreyhound come from?

Nobody is certain. One explanation, argued by Charles Bird to the de Vere Society, splits the name into “caley” (an old term for the white hind, a Plantagenet badge) and “greyhound” (the badge of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII), making the beast a symbol of the union of the two houses after Bosworth in 1485. Bird himself notes that this reading sits awkwardly with the descriptions that give the animal a cat’s body and talons.

Does the calygreyhound appear in any myths or legends?

No. The calygreyhound has no stories attached to it, no bestiary tradition and no folklore. It was invented for heraldry, lived on seals, stonework and tombs, and was never a creature that anyone claimed to believe in.

Related Entries

Yale, Enfield, Alphyn, Opinicus, Musimon, Ypotryll, Allocamelus, Sea-lion, Harpy, Griffin (or Gryphon), Cockatrice, Wyvern, Panther, Questing Beast, Unicorn