The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts. Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century, Made and Edited by T. H. White

First published 1954. The manuscript which is here translated is a Latin prose Bestiary which was copied in the twelfth century. On f. 73a somebody has written in a sixteenth-century handwriting: "Jacobus Thomas Herison Thys ys ye abbaye of Rev..." There was an abbey at Revesby in Lincolnshire, so perhaps the manuscript was copied there. It is now preserved at the Cambridge University Library, where it is listed as Ii.4.26. A Bestiary is a serious work of natural history, and is one of the bases upon which our own knowledge of biology is founded, however much we may have advanced since it was written. There is no particular author of a bestiary. It is a compilation, a kind of naturalist’s scrapbook, which has grown with the additions of several hands. Its sources go back to the most distant past, to the Fathers of the Church, to Rome, to Greece, to Egypt, to mythology, ultimately to oral tradition which must have been contemporary with the caves of Cromagnon. Its influence has extended throughout literature, and, as has been seen in the Notes, country people are still repeating some of its saws.