Bears of England Read online

  The family and friends attending the funeral were unaware of what was about to befall them. They had attended a short service where thanks had been given, then followed the body as it headed to its final resting-place. The first sign of trouble was a distant howl from up in the woods. Only a handful of mourners heard it, and did not pay it too much attention. Their thoughts were with the fellow whose coffin was about to go into the ground.

  The next thing they knew was a tremendous roar as the bear climbed the wall fifty yards away. Then it was among them. It came clattering through the graveyard, knocking over several stones and markers on its way. It roared again as it neared the graveside, but by that point people were running and screaming in every direction and the service had rather fizzled out.

  The bear didn’t seem to notice. It landed on the wooden box and within a matter of seconds had ripped it open. It grabbed the occupant and dragged him out. Some of the mourners, having run a little distance, couldn’t help but stop and turn, to see what happened next. They saw the bear’s huge head drop towards the dead man. They imagined that, having had its appetite whetted by bread and beer, it had returned for a more substantial meal.

  In fact, it was quite the contrary. In four great heaves the bear brought up the contents of its stomach. And almost immediately, even as it crouched there getting its breath back, the bear felt its condition improve. The visions ceased, the pain abated. Whatever sins it had taken on the previous evening had been ejected – and returned to their rightful owner.

  The bear stepped off the coffin and looked around it, which provoked another round of screaming and running. But the bear just took a moment to compose itself, then turned and headed back towards the woods. It felt a little queasy, but no worse than you or I might feel, having overindulged the previous night.

  In that minute the era of Bear Worship was terminated and Bear Fear and Hatred was restored. The halo had slipped; the healing paw was neutered. The bear had rejected its role of assuager of English guilt and obliged the country’s inhabitants to take responsibility for their own actions. And for that it would never be forgiven.

  3

  Bears in Chains

  There is no category of bear whose story makes for more depressing reading, and whose miserable existence heaps more shame on humanity than that which follows. Readers of a nervous disposition may be tempted to skip this chapter and that, of course, is their prerogative. But there are at least two good reasons why they should continue reading. First, by omitting one of the longer chapters such readers will be reducing an already short book to little more than a pamphlet – a withered runt of a thing. More significantly, when they turn out the light at close of day, being of a nervous disposition, their imagination will return inexorably to that missing chapter, and will slowly furnish it with all sorts of horrors and ursine-cruelty which their sick mind is uniquely capable of conjuring up, and much worse, probably, than anything included here.

  So, let us begin by laying down the bare bones of bear-baiting. Quite frankly, it is difficult to know where to start. Whether to start with the metal halter, the post buried in the middle of the arena and the length of heavy chain between them, or the bear’s entrance and the roars and cheers which greeted it. Certainly we must mention the crowd – the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of ordinary people, brought together in their shared love of bear-sport, but all of them high enough up and well enough out of the way that even if a bear were to break free, they would be in no mortal danger – in fact, would be perfectly placed to watch the fun.

  And then there are the dogs. And here they come. More cheers, gradually giving way to apprehensive silence. Dogs slowly circling and stalking, but all the while watching the bear. Then the first dog lunges and has a nip, before quickly retreating. Then two or three dogs attack at the same moment, at two or three different parts of the bear. And the crowd is on its feet now. And we are back to cheering. And the entertainment is well under way.

  The bear will sometimes fling a dog across the bear-pit, sometimes smash it with a paw, but it is not unheard of for a bear to grab a dog and bring it close, with the dog’s jaws still snapping, to try and squeeze the life right out of it. And by now the dogs will have gauged the length of the chain between post and halter – will know exactly how many yards’ clearance is required for them to be safe. And there is no lack of dogs. As the bear does its best to tackle one dog, the next comes at it. One or two may limp away, broken and bleeding, but now the rest are in a frenzy – they cannot help themselves. And all this ripping and tearing continues until every last dog has been put out of action, or the bear itself lies dead.

  A child’s first visit to a bear-pit must have been a bewildering business. Aside from the savagery taking place before them, there was the bloodlust of the crowd to endure. But one assumes that, with each consequent visit to the bear-garden these concerns and anxieties would gradually diminish. The atmosphere and the spectacle would grow familiar. Until, there would come a day when they too would suddenly get to their feet, baying and gesticulating, along with everyone else.

  As for the bears themselves, it is difficult now to establish whether they were direct descendants of the native English bear or had been imported from further afield. For our purposes, however, we should regard them as English. They were, after all, bred in English captivity and killed in England for the entertainment of Englishmen. And, once killed, their corpses went into England’s soil, where English worms slowly worked their way through them, as an English breeze erased their memory. So even if, at the time, the bears didn’t consider themselves English, they are most certainly a part of England now.

  Each night, the dead bears were carted off to a secret location and their bloody bodies rolled into a pit. The whereabouts of these sites was not made public, so it says a good deal about the persistence of the myth of the ‘healing paw’, or simple morbid curiosity, that on occasion individuals tracked down the sites, scaled the necessary walls and fences and evaded the night watchman in order to have a closer look. But only one man is known to have got among the corpses. His name was Henry Jacks. Jacks had taken a length of rope, hoping to tie it off against something such as a tree or post, then let himself down on it, but in the event no such tree or post was to be found. But as he stood at the edge of the pit and saw three or four paws among the carnage he must have convinced himself that the sides of the grave were not so steep as to prevent him climbing in and out, with the help of a few hand- and footholds along the way.

  He got in easily enough and for the last few feet allowed gravity to take him. Then he began stepping among the bears. It was never clear whether he wanted the paw for himself or had arranged to sell it on to a third party. Wherever it was destined, he was found to have a saw’s blade in his pocket, wrapped up in a piece of linen and a handkerchief masking his nose. But such a precaution was far from sufficient. If he’d only asked around he’d have learnt that for every three or four bears that went into the pit, several shovelfuls of quicklime went in with them. And only as he crawled among the corpses and pulled a paw up here and there, did he feel his hands and knees begin to itch, then burn. And by the time he properly appreciated that something was amiss it was already too late.

  He clambered over to the side and tried to pick his way back up the steep bank of earth. Tried to find those holes he’d used on his way in. But his hands were now too blistered to be of any use to him. He looked down at them as they burned by the moonlight. They were all blackened and bloated. And in those last few moments, before the full fire of the lime engulfed him they looked to Henry Jacks like the paws of a bear.

  Nobody visited the pit the next day and when, the day after, four men came by, around about gloaming, they rolled the bears in right on top of poor old Jacks and added a generous dusting of quicklime, without noticing him. It took a while for Jacks’ wife to report him missing and an extra day or two before she suggested where he might be found, by which time the lime had done its worst and it was ge
nerally felt that too much effort would have had to be expended to extract what was left of him, so the decision was made to leave him where he was.

  It is a salutary lesson, although perhaps it’s best to let the reader decide the particulars of what that lesson might be. But the death of Henry Jacks is not our primary interest, so we too should leave him a-mouldering and turn our attention to a bear which beat off the dogs and escaped the burial pit – a bear whose actions had a tremendous bearing on the fate of all the rest. But in order to introduce this creature, we must first explain how a bear which consistently saw off its adversaries would gain a reputation and how an audience would begin to attend particular fixtures just to cheer it on, which is all the more peculiar when one considers that only a week or two earlier the same audience would have gone along in the hope of witnessing the same creature being ripped apart.

  All the same, for those few bears which managed to find their way into the public’s affections, there was no knowing where the appreciation might end. Spectators would sew coloured scarves to their sleeves to denote their affiliation and carry placards with drawings depicting their favoured bear. Only thirty or forty bears ever achieved such a lofty status and it would seem that only one ever gained such popularity that its life was actually spared.

  That bear was commonly known as ‘Samson’. The similarities with the biblical character are twofold. The first and most obvious is that the bear was said to have formidable strength. The second is the fact that this particular bear was blind.

  Another unpalatable custom of the period was that some of the fiercest bears had their eyes put out, in order to give the dogs a fighting chance. In the case of Samson, the men charged with the task had successfully blinded him in the left eye and done what they reckoned to be a reasonable job on the right, whereas, in fact, much of their work on the latter had been inflicted on the flesh around it, so that the bear managed to retain some sight. But from that point on in order to look about him Samson was obliged to turn his whole head, which made him appear a little dim-witted and may well have contributed to his appeal.

  The bear’s reputation went before it. He was a monster, smashing and rending apart every dog that came his way, despite the fact that his head and hindquarters were a mass of scars, half his fur was missing and one ear had been completely chewed away. Then, quite suddenly, it seemed that at every appearance the stands were packed, with hundreds more being refused entry. And in a matter of months the public’s adoration had grown so strong that it was decided to take him out of service, before some new dog got its teeth into an artery and killed him, whereupon, it was thought, there would have been some sort of insurrection and half the city razed to the ground.

  So in early April the bear was formally granted a pardon. And for the whole of that summer he toured the pits and gardens, where he was paraded and encouraged to raise a paw to give the crowd its blessing – a salute solemnly returned by every spectator. But despite the fact that Samson had retired from fighting, the crowds kept growing – if only to catch one last glimpse of the legendary bear. There seemed to be no bounds to its popularity so, in order to draw a line under the whole affair, it was suggested that the bear be officially honoured by being presented with the key to the city, then sent out of London for good.

  There was talk of releasing the bear out in Epping, or building some special Bear House upriver where people could pay to ogle at him from a boat. In truth, several men of significant standing privately felt that everyone’s lives would be made a lot less complicated if they could only despatch the blasted bear, without anyone knowing, and spread some story that it had been put out to pasture in Northumberland or some other part of the country where people rarely went.

  But before any decision was made regarding Samson’s ‘retirement’ there was the matter of the key to the city, which was to be presented by the Lord Mayor himself. Out at Spitalfields a vast stage was constructed and people began bagging prime spots three clear days before the event. On the Friday night it is estimated ten thousand Londoners slept under the stars in the vicinity. By eight o’clock on the Saturday morning thirty-five thousand packed into the fields, carried along on a wave of bear-worship (and the fact that there was nothing much else happening that weekend).

  Samson finally arrived, down Hog Lane, around ten o’clock, its paws chained together before it, and a second chain fitted between its wrists and the halter round its neck. It had an escort of a dozen or so men, as much for its own protection as that of the public. In fact, Samson was becoming accustomed to a somewhat cosseted lifestyle. Over the last few months those people in charge of his welfare had detected what they felt was a distinct mellowing in the bear’s attitude. He was, after all, well-fed, had comfortable sleeping arrangements and was used to having his meals served at regular intervals.

  The first cheers came up from the hundred or so spectators who’d climbed up into the treetops as they caught sight of the bear and his escorts heading towards the back of the stage. And as soon as they started up everyone else began craning their necks and jostling one another and the pandemonium grew from there. When the bear stepped out onto the platform the whole crowd surged forward. A good proportion of them had been up all night, drinking and singing, and would have had some trouble identifying their own husbands and wives. But they knew that bear – the famous bear with the one ear and the one good eye. So they began chanting its name and clapping and stamping. And generally helped drum up an atmosphere which was so exceptional in its raucous good nature that, even if there was nothing better all day than this very moment, they thought, then it would have been worth it just the same.

  The uproar continued unabated for a good five minutes. Meanwhile the bear just stood and looked out from the stage. Finally, some official stepped forward and tried to get the crowd to quieten down, so that the Lord Mayor might be able to deliver his speech. But the crowd just kept on bawling and chanting, and waving at the bear, until the official eventually turned and strode over to the Lord Mayor and suggested, by cupping his hands over one ear and shouting into it, that as there didn’t appear to be much prospect of the crowd calming down in the immediate future, he might consider scrapping the speech and cutting straight to the handing-over-of-the-key.

  The Lord Mayor was a tad disappointed. He’d seen this as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the common man and woman (and from what he could see of them, the majority of the crowd spread out before him were very common indeed). All the same, he made his way to the front of the stage, as directed, and Samson’s minders encouraged the great bear to take up a position next to him.

  The Lord Mayor had already come to the conclusion that, considering the colossal audience, it was probably best to present the highlight of the ceremony with the broadest of strokes. So he took the key from his pocket, held it up and turned to east and west so that everyone could see it, like a magician setting up some sleight of hand. Then, in a highly exaggerated fashion, he turned and offered the key to the bear.

  Samson leant forward and peered at the key for a couple of moments. It was newly minted and glinted in the sun. The bear glanced up at the face of the fellow offering it, then picked the key cleanly out of the Lord Mayor’s palm, without hesitation, as if he was handed keys every day of the week. The Lord Mayor turned to the row of dignitaries standing behind him, who were all nodding and smiling. It had been a lot easier than they thought it was going to be.

  Samson transferred the key to his left paw, studied it with his one good eye, sniffed it, and deduced quite quickly that whatever it was, it was probably not edible. But at this point the Lord Mayor made his fatal error. He saw how the bear’s right paw was free. And, thinking that a handshake might be appropriate, as if to seal the deal, he reached out and took the bear’s chained paw.

  He hoped that this image of man and bear in brotherly union would stay in people’s minds. Indeed, it would. That moment and all the moments which followed would be imprinted on the memories of e
veryone who witnessed them right through their lives. Samson took the Lord Mayor’s right hand and locked its paw around it. With its other paw it took hold of his right arm. It was a grip of tremendous conviction. And when the Lord Mayor looked into the bear’s one good eye he saw terrible things there.

  ‘It’s going to rip my arm right out of its socket,’ he thought to himself. ‘It’s going to rip my arm out of its socket and toss it to the crowd.’

  He merely underestimated the bear’s ambitions. Samson turned, skipped to the left and brought the Lord Mayor around behind him, so that both the fellow’s feet left the ground. And once the Lord Mayor had reached optimum height and velocity, the bear let him go.

  The Mayor went sailing out over the heads of his fellow-Londoners. If they had felt for him even a fraction of the affection they had been expressing for the bear they might have tried to catch him, or made some effort to try and break his fall. Instead, at the very last moment, when it was evident whereabouts he was going to land, they parted, leaving a clearing just wide enough to accommodate him.

  As he hit the ground a collective ‘Ohhhh’ went up from the spectators. Some turned away; some covered their faces. Others went up onto tiptoe, to try to get a better view. But people were not yet running and screaming. They were biding their time and wondering what tricks the bear might get up to next.

  The moment the Lord Mayor went flying, all the other dignitaries scurried off into the wings, so that Samson soon had the stage to himself. He stood and surveyed the city – out past the spires and the smoking chimney pots. Then he dropped his head, like an actor preparing for a particularly demanding soliloquy.