Yale

The horn swings forward, catches the light along its ridged length, and drops back again. That single motion is the whole reason this animal survived. Everything else about the yale has been argued over, but for fifteen hundred years every copyist who touched it kept the horns that move.

Pliny the Elder set it down in the eighth book of his Natural History, filed among the monstrosities he assigned to Aethiopia. His yale is the size of a hippopotamus, with an elephant’s tail, black or tawny in colour, the jaws of a boar, and horns more than a cubit long which in a fight are raised one at a time, presented to the attack or sloped backward as policy directs. Policy is a strange word to use of an animal. It suggests calculation. It makes the yale sound less like a beast defending itself than a swordsman choosing a guard.

Pliny had never seen Ethiopia. He was a compiler, sifting other men’s reports at a desk in Rome and preserving whatever seemed worth preserving, and the yale reached him already secondhand. That is the first thing to say about it and the thing most often left out.

Solinus, writing a couple of centuries later, added the detail that fixes the creature in a landscape: it rejoices in the water of streams. Picture it there, chest-deep in slow brown water at the hot end of the afternoon, the heavy tail switching at flies, one horn tipped forward and beaded with wet, the other laid flat along the neck like a folded blade.

The body underneath is a committee decision. Pliny gives it the bulk of a hippopotamus; Solinus and the bestiaries after him shrink it to the size of a horse. The colour holds steady at black, occasionally tawny. The tail is always the elephant’s, thick and hairless and heavy at the root. The jaws are where the copies fall out with each other. The Latin of the Rochester Bestiary reads *maxillis caprinis*, a goat’s jaws, while the line running through Pliny and the Aberdeen Bestiary gives it a boar’s, tusks and all. Somewhere in the transmission a scribe read one word for the other, and both beasts went on being drawn for centuries afterward.

By 1200 the yale was everywhere. The Aberdeen Bestiary has it on folio 16v, black, horse-sized, its horns adjustable to any movement the animal might make. Jacques de Vitry, writing around 1220, improved the mechanism: the beast fights with one horn and carries the second on its back, in reserve, bringing it out when the first goes dull. Thomas of Cantimpré copied Solinus into his Liber de natura rerum and handed the creature on to the encyclopedists who came after him. In the Low Countries, Jacob van Maerlant illustrated it in Der Naturen Bloeme around 1350. In France it picked up a second name, centicore, which is how Pierre de Beauvais’s bestiary knows it.

The word itself is unsettled. The Latin is *eale*, and the English yale is that word worn smooth. The most repeated guess traces it to the Hebrew *ya’el*, the ibex, though nobody has proved it, and a rival reading pulls it toward a Greek verb meaning to roll back, which would make the name a description of the horns rather than of the animal. Take your pick. The beast is its horns either way.

No one has ever produced a real animal that does this.

The fight is the yale’s only story, and every version tells it the same way. Two creatures close on open ground. The yale leads with one horn and folds the other flat against its neck. The leading point takes a blow and is spoiled, and without pausing the beast rolls that horn back and brings the spare round into line, and the fight continues on fresh edge. There is no hero who kills it, no god who made it, no moral hung on the end. It simply cannot be disarmed.

That was enough to get it a career. Somewhere in the fifteenth century English heralds lifted the yale off the manuscript page and stood it up beside a shield. John, Duke of Bedford, used it as a supporter. So did the house of Beaufort, and through Lady Margaret Beaufort, who died in 1509 and whose son took the crown as Henry VII, it walked into the royal menagerie of English heraldry and stayed there. The heraldic yale is silvery white and spotted with gold, built from an antelope’s body, a goat’s head, boar tusks and those long turning horns. Margaret Beaufort’s benefactions to Cambridge left her yales sitting over the gatehouses of Christ’s College and St John’s College, and a pair stand on the roof of St George’s Chapel at Windsor. It is exactly the right job for the animal. A supporter’s whole purpose is to stand at the flank of a shield and face outward, and here is a beast that can face two ways at once.

In 1953 the sculptor James Woodford carved ten heraldic beasts for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and the Yale of Beaufort was one of them, set behind a crowned portcullis. The plaster originals went to Canada. Portland stone copies stand on the Palm House terrace at Kew, weathering slowly in English rain, several thousand miles and nineteen centuries from the Ethiopian riverbank Pliny never visited. The beast also crossed the Atlantic on the strength of a shared spelling, and now turns up on the arms of Yale University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, on the banner carried before its president, on a ceremonial mace capped with a yale’s head, above the gateway of Davenport College and on the pediment of Timothy Dwight.

Its powers begin and end at the skull. The horns are not fixed but hinged, aimed independently, reversible mid-combat, and long enough to keep anything at a distance greater than its own reach. Behind them sit tusked jaws and the weight of a large grazing animal, and the sources agree it is at home in water as well as on land, which gives it a line of retreat most land beasts do not have.

The redundancy is also an admission. A creature that carries a spare point expects to lose the first one, and every account is frank that the horns are damaged in the ordinary course of a fight. Beyond them the yale has nothing: no venom, no fire, no cunning past the guard-change, and none of the moral machinery that let bestiary compilers turn the panther or the unicorn into a sermon. It fights well and it is not clever. Blunt both points and what remains is a large black animal with an odd tail, standing in a river, waiting.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the yale?

The yale, called *eale* in Latin and *centicore* in the French bestiary tradition, is a legendary beast described by Pliny the Elder in the first century and copied through medieval bestiaries for the next thousand years. It is a black or tawny animal the size of a horse or a hippopotamus, with an elephant’s tail, tusked jaws, and two very long horns it can move at will.

What is special about the yale’s horns?

The yale’s horns are not fixed in the skull but swivel, so the beast can point one forward to attack while folding the other flat along its neck. If the leading horn is blunted or broken in a fight, it swings that one back and brings the reserve horn into use. Jacques de Vitry described the spare horn as carried on the animal’s back until needed.

Where does the yale come from?

Pliny placed the yale in Aethiopia, among the marvels he attributed to sub-Saharan Africa, though he was compiling other people’s reports rather than describing anything he had seen. Solinus repeated the account in the third century and added that the animal favours river water. From there it passed into the Aberdeen Bestiary, Thomas of Cantimpré’s Liber de natura rerum and Jacob van Maerlant’s Der Naturen Bloeme.

Why is the yale used in heraldry?

English heralds adopted the yale as a shield supporter in the fifteenth century, most notably for John, Duke of Bedford, and for the house of Beaufort. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, carried it into Tudor royal heraldry, and her yales appear on the gatehouses of Christ’s College and St John’s College in Cambridge. A beast whose horns can point in any direction suits a role that consists of standing beside a coat of arms and facing outward.

What does a heraldic yale look like?

The heraldic yale is usually shown silvery white with gold spots, combining an antelope’s body, a goat’s head, boar tusks and the long swivelling horns of the bestiary descriptions. This differs from the black, hippopotamus-sized creature Pliny described. The Yale of Beaufort sculpted by James Woodford for the 1953 coronation is the best-known modern example, with stone copies on the Palm House terrace at Kew.

Related Entries

Bonnacon, Leucrota, Parandrus, Monocerus, Catoblepas, Manticore, Hircocervus, Panther, Barometz, Musimon, Alphyn, Opinicus, Enfield, Griffin (or Gryphon), Unicorn