Ypotryll

Also Known As: also Yppotryll, Ipotryll, Ypotryle; the first element apparently from Middle English ypotame, hippopotamus, ultimately Greek hippos, horse; the ending -tryll is unexplained
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A composite heraldic beast assembled from a boar, a camel, an ox and a serpent, carrying no recorded powers of its own.
Role in Mythos: It exists as a livery badge, a mark of identity worn by a lord’s servants rather than a creature with a story attached.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people met it stitched onto the coats of armed retainers, where it functioned as a warning of whose men were approaching. It never hunted anyone, though the man who wore it did.

Fenn’s Book of Badges was put together around 1470 and now sits in the British Library, a modest volume of small painted devices that English lords stitched onto the coats of their servants. Most of it is what you would expect. Roses, knots, chained antelopes, a bear, a swan. Then one leaf gives you a hog’s head with the tusks showing, set on the humped back of a camel, propped on the cloven feet of an ox, with a long scaled tail trailing off behind like a rope somebody dropped. The thing is called an ypotryll. It belonged to John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who was remembered afterwards as the Butcher of England.

Nothing about the animal makes sense, and that is the first honest thing to say about it. The name looks as though it should mean something. Heralds took it, or seem to have taken it, from the Middle English word ypotame, which meant a hippopotamus and sometimes a vaguer river monster, and that word runs back through Old French to a Latin garbling of the Greek for river horse. So the ypotryll ought by rights to be a horse, or a hippopotamus, or some confusion of the two. It is neither. There is no horse in it anywhere. There is no hippopotamus either. What the second half of the word is doing has never been established by anyone, and the plain answer is that a late medieval herald wanted a beast nobody else had and a word that sounded impressive, and got both.

The anatomy is a shopping list. From the boar it takes the head, low and heavy, the snout blunt, the tusks curving up out of the lower jaw with that yellowish shine that ivory has when it has been used. From the camel it takes the barrel of the body and the hump, which in most drawings sits high and awkward, as though the painter had never seen a camel and was working from a description, which he almost certainly was. The legs are an ox’s, short and thick, ending in split hooves that would clack on stone. The tail is a serpent’s, scaled and far too long, and it does not swish so much as drag. Put together, the creature has the proportions of something built by committee, and there is a reason for that. It was.

Heraldic beasts are made rather than born, and they are made for a purpose. A badge had to be legible at distance and in bad light, on wool, on a metal pendant, on the sleeve of a man walking towards you across a market square. It had to be unmistakable, because in the Wars of the Roses the difference between one lord’s retainers and another’s was frequently the difference between a normal afternoon and a very short one. A boar’s head and a camel’s hump in the same silhouette cannot be confused with anything. That is the whole design brief, and the ypotryll meets it.

Which brings back Tiptoft. He was born in 1427 and he was, by the standards of fifteenth century English nobility, a genuine scholar. He studied in Padua, read Latin well enough to impress Italians, collected books and gave a good many of them to Oxford. He was also Edward IV’s Lord High Constable, which meant he presided over the trials and deaths of the king’s Lancastrian enemies, and he did that work with a thoroughness that appalled even a country accustomed to it. Men were beheaded, quartered, and their bodies impaled. The nickname followed him within his lifetime and has never come off.

In October 1470 the wheel turned. Henry VI was restored, Edward fled, and Tiptoft was caught. The man who condemned him was John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford, whose own father Tiptoft had sent to the block eight years earlier, which is the sort of symmetry the period specialised in. He was executed on Tower Hill on the eighteenth of October, and the account that survives has him asking the headsman for three strokes rather than one, in honour of the Trinity. The badge outlived him by five and a half centuries and he has never quite been separated from it.

The ypotryll has no powers, and pretending otherwise would be an invention. It breathes no fire, guards no hoard, grants nothing, curses no one. Nothing in the record gives it a myth, a habitat, an appetite or a temperament. What it has instead is the peculiar force of heraldry itself, which is the power to stand for a man and to keep standing for him after he is dead. Worn on a hundred sleeves, the boar’s head and the camel’s hump were Tiptoft in the way that his own face was not, since most people who feared him never saw it.

Its limitation is the same thing viewed from the other side. A beast that exists only as a mark on cloth depends entirely on somebody choosing to wear it, and when the household disperses the creature simply stops. Tiptoft’s did. The ypotryll turns up in the badge books, gets a line in the heraldic dictionaries, and otherwise vanishes so completely that when the Norfolk Herald Extraordinary H. Stanford London wrote it up in 1956 he filed it under minor monsters and paired it with the alphyn, another rarity, on the grounds that there was not enough of either to fill an article alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ypotryll?

The ypotryll is a composite beast from late medieval English heraldry, not from folklore or myth. It combines the tusked head of a wild boar, the humped body of a camel, the legs and cloven hooves of an ox or goat, and the long scaled tail of a serpent. It was designed as a livery badge, a device to be worn and recognised, rather than as a creature with stories told about it.

Whose badge was the ypotryll?

The ypotryll was the badge of John Tiptoft, first Earl of Worcester, who died in 1470. It appears in Fenn’s Book of Badges, a manuscript compiled around 1470 and now held by the British Library. Tiptoft was Edward IV’s Lord High Constable and was known as the Butcher of England for the severity of his executions of Lancastrians.

Where does the name ypotryll come from?

The first part of the name appears to come from Middle English ypotame, meaning a hippopotamus, which reaches English through Old French from a Latin corruption of the Greek for river horse. The ending has never been explained. The joke, if it is one, is that the ypotryll contains neither a horse nor a hippopotamus.

Does the ypotryll have any powers or myths attached to it?

No. There is no surviving myth, tale, habitat or ability recorded for the ypotryll. Its entire documented existence is as a heraldic device, and heraldic writers from H. Stanford London in 1956 to Rodney Dennys in 1975 treat it as a rare curiosity of badge design rather than as a creature of legend.