Wyvern

Also Known As: also wivern, wyver; from Middle English *wivere*, “viper”, via Anglo-French *wivre* and Old French *guivre* from Latin *vipera*
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Flight, venom and fire carried in a serpent’s body on a single pair of legs.
Role in Mythos: The heraldic dragon of England, and the shape that West Country dragon legends were given once the word existed to give them.
Relation to Humans: On a shield it is a boast about ferocity and vigilance made by the family that bears it. In the folk tales it works through the livestock first and the farmers afterwards, and killing one tends to cost the killer his life.

On the west wall of a small church in Herefordshire there used to be a green dragon. Two legs, two wings, a long tail, a red forked tongue. Parishioners had been looking at it since at least 1670, when four lines of verse were set beneath the painting insisting it was a true effigy of a prodigious monster which our woods did range. In 1811 the church was restored and the dragon went under the whitewash. The story attached to it has now outlived the paint by two centuries, which is the whole career of the wyvern in miniature: a picture first, and a creature assembled afterwards to account for the picture.

The word reached English long before the shape did. Middle English had *wivere* and *wyver*, borrowed from Anglo-French *wivre* and Old French *guivre*, and behind all of them sits Latin *vipera*. It meant a viper. That is all it meant. When Chaucer wanted an image for jealousy working its way into a lover, he called it that wicked wyvere, creeping in for no cause at all. A romance of the following century lists dragons, wyvers and serpents as three separate items on an inventory of terrors. A wyver in 1400 was a poisonous snake in wet grass, with no wings, no legs and no coat of arms.

What turned the snake into a beast with a blazon was English heraldry, and it happened astonishingly late. In 1610 the herald John Guillim published *A Display of Heraldrie* and wrote of creatures that partake of a fowl in the wings and legs and resemble a serpent in the tail. That is the earliest instance of the modern word the Oxford English Dictionary can find. By 1682 another herald was stating flatly that a wyvern has but two legs, and after that the rule held. Almost everything the wyvern is, it became in an English drawing office in the seventeenth century.

Arthur Fox-Davies, compiling the standard guide to English heraldry in 1909, drew the line as sharply as anyone has managed. There is no difference whatever between a wyvern’s head and a dragon’s, he wrote, but there is considerable difference between the animals, at any rate in English heraldry, since elsewhere the two-legged form is simply called a dragon and nobody minds. The English wyvern has two legs and no more. Its body does not stand clear of the ground on four limbs; it curls away behind the shoulders into the tail, so the animal rests on legs and coils together, a tripod of talon, talon and spine. The tail ends in a barb. The wings are ribbed and membranous, usually raised. The variants are wonderfully strange: the Lancashire family of Ffarington bore a wyvern with no wings at all and its tail tied in a knot, the supporters of the Duke of Marlborough sit bolt upright on their tails with their claws in the air, and the crest of Maule is a green wyvern with two heads vomiting fire at both ends. It is a creature defined by a rule about legs.

The shape is older than the name, which is where the flags come in. Henry of Huntingdon records that Cuthred of Wessex carried a golden dragon at the battle of Burford in 752, and that the dragon standard went out again with Edmund Ironside’s men at Ashingdon in 1016. On the Bayeux Tapestry a dragon standard, apparently carved in wood or metal rather than sewn in cloth, goes down near Harold at Hastings. Later antiquaries looked at those beasts, counted the legs they believed they could see, and pronounced the golden dragon of Wessex a wyvern. That reading is retrospective. The early sources are not precise enough to settle the question, and the men who fought under the standard had no word for the distinction. The wyvern of Wessex, which now flies on the region’s flag and squats in a good many West Country coats of arms, is a seventeenth-century term fastened onto an eighth-century banner.

Which returns the matter to Herefordshire, where the wyvern was given the one full life story it has. Below the village of Mordiford the Lugg runs into the Wye, and the local telling says something lived at the confluence. In the version the village prefers, a girl named Maud found a small bright thing among the flowers of Haugh Wood, snouted, with little translucent wings, and hid it and fed it milk. It grew. It went from chickens to sheep to cattle and then, the farms being exhausted, to the farmers. It never touched Maud.

Every day it came down through the trees to drink, loud all the way and then silent at the water. The shallows at the meeting of the two rivers clouded where it put its head in, and the wet gravel held the print of two feet with a long dragging weight behind them.

The other version of the tale is grimmer and probably older. A condemned man was offered a pardon if he would rid the parish of the beast. He took a bow and a large cider barrel down to the Lugg, bored a hole through the staves, climbed inside among the apple smell and waited for the animal’s usual hour. The arrow went through the hole and into its heart. Then the dying creature’s poison ran down the bank and into the barrel, and the man died in it.

What a wyvern can do follows from what it is. It flies, on wings driving a body built like a snake, and speed is the real advantage: it arrives and it leaves. Fire is standard issue and heraldically optional. The venom is the part that matters, because the venom is the oldest thing about it, the inheritance of the *vipera* buried in its name, and in the Herefordshire story it is the poison rather than the flame that finally does the killing. On a shield its powers are of another order. It stands for war, pestilence and watchfulness, and a family that bears one is making a claim about its own temper.

The limits are just as legible. The Mordiford wyvern dies because it is a creature of habit, returning to the same water at the same hour until somebody works out the timetable, and it dies at a distance, shot rather than fought, because nothing about it invites a fair fight. Two legs make it clumsy on the ground and it must prop itself on its own tail to stay upright. In the heraldic register it is bound absolutely by the blazon: erect, displayed, wingless, knotted, whatever an officer of arms will accept, but a wyvern drawn with four legs is not a wyvern at all. It is an error.

The villagers did not stop worrying when the dragon died. As late as 1875 two old women were seen lifting newts out of the Lugg and killing them, on the grounds that the newts were the seed of the dragon and that if the work were neglected the thing would come back. The painting on the church wall was long gone by then. The habit outlasted it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a wyvern?

A wyvern is a winged serpent with a dragon’s head, a single pair of legs and a long barbed tail, best known from English heraldry. It appears on coats of arms, on the flag of Wessex and in a handful of West Country dragon legends, most famously the one attached to the village of Mordiford in Herefordshire.

What is the difference between a wyvern and a dragon?

The difference is the number of legs. An English heraldic dragon has four legs; a wyvern has two, with its body curling away behind it into the tail so that it rests on its legs and coils together. The herald Arthur Fox-Davies noted that a wyvern’s head and a dragon’s head are identical, and that outside English heraldry the two-legged form is usually just called a dragon.

Where does the word wyvern come from?

It comes from Middle English *wivere* or *wyver*, taken from Anglo-French *wivre* and Old French *guivre*, and ultimately from the Latin *vipera*, meaning viper. In the fourteenth century the word simply meant a poisonous snake, and Chaucer used it that way. The modern sense of a two-legged winged dragon is first recorded in 1610, in John Guillim’s *A Display of Heraldrie*.

Is the wyvern the emblem of Wessex?

The golden dragon standard of Wessex is recorded by Henry of Huntingdon at the battle of Burford in 752 and again with Edmund Ironside’s army in 1016, and a dragon standard falls near Harold on the Bayeux Tapestry. Calling that beast a wyvern is a much later identification made by antiquaries who already had the word. The early sources do not specify how many legs it had.

How was the Mordiford wyvern killed?

In the best-known version a condemned man was promised a pardon if he destroyed it. He hid in a cider barrel beside the River Lugg where the creature came to drink, shot an arrow through a hole in the staves and pierced its heart. The dying wyvern’s poison then ran into the barrel and killed him too.