St Cuthbert's Griffin Claw: An Ibex Horn From Durham's Shrine

In 1383 the monk in charge of St Cuthbert’s shrine at Durham sat down to write out what was kept there, shelf by shelf. Among crosses, bones, robes and books, he listed two claws of a griffin. More than six hundred years later, a long curved horn, capped with a silver band that calls it a griffin’s claw sacred to Cuthbert, is held in the British Museum. The horn belonged to a wild goat, not to any eagle-lion. The story of how a goat’s horn could stand among the relics of England’s most venerated northern saint, and then end up in a London collector’s cabinet, is partly documented and partly guesswork. This article separates the two.

A shelf of wonders in the feretory

The feretory was the enclosed area around Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham Cathedral, and its keeper was called the feretrar. In 1383 that office was held by Richard de Segbrok, who compiled a book of the relics in the shrine to record what they were and on which step or shelf each one stood.¹ The manuscript survives in the Durham Chapter Library and was printed in Latin by the canon and editor J. T. Fowler in 1899, who noted that an earlier printing in Smith’s 1722 edition of Bede had given it the wrong date of 1372.¹

The claws appear on the third shelf, in a group that tells us how highly they were rated. Next to them stood Cuthbert’s cope, said to have lain with him in the ground for eleven years, an ivory casket with a vestment of John the Baptist, the book of Cuthbert’s teacher Boisil, and the ivory sceptre of King Oswald. Then comes the entry “Item due ungues griffonis,” two griffin claws, followed by five cloths for carrying relics.¹ James Raine, who opened Cuthbert’s tomb in 1827, had already translated the list in his 1828 book on the saint, rendering the line “Item, two claws of a griffin.”^{2 3}

The claws were not the only marvels in the feretory. The same inventory names griffins’ eggs again and again: three on one shelf, two on another, one stored with a vestment of St John the Evangelist, and one “ornamented and cut in two,” which suggests it had been made into a vessel.² Raine was frank about the limits of what he could identify. In a footnote he wrote, “What the claws were I know not,” and guessed that the eggs were perhaps those of the ostrich.² Fowler later glossed the eggs as probably ostrich eggs “brought home by travellers, or else coco-nut shells,” and defined the claws, with some dryness, as “Something imagined to be griffins’ claws.”⁴

Gifts hung at the end of the shrine

Why would a monastery keep such things beside the body of a saint? The best answer comes from Durham itself. The Rites of Durham, an anonymous description of the monastic cathedral before the Suppression dated 1593, explains what happened when a person of rank asked to see the shrine. The cover was drawn up, prayers were said, and any offering was dealt with by type. Gold, silver or jewels were hung on the shrine itself. Anything else, such as a unicorn horn, an “Eliphant Tooth, or such like thinge,” was hung within the feretory at the end of the shrine.⁵

Fowler’s notes on that passage spell out the point. Such natural curiosities, he wrote, were rarer in England then and were “highly prized, and exhibited together with the relics.” The unicorn horn was probably a narwhal tusk; walrus tusks would also have found their way into collections of this kind.⁵ In other words, the griffin claws belong to a category of marvellous gifts that pilgrims and patrons gave to a great shrine. They were treasures of the saint without being relics of his body. Fowler’s introduction to the account rolls makes the same distinction, describing them as curiosities shown “with the relics.”⁴

A modern catalogue entry written for the Treasures of Heaven exhibition on medieval relics agrees, describing the claw as part of a collection of fantastic objects displayed at the shrine and most likely given as a donation.⁶ Readers who know the Egyptian fossil pits will recognize the pattern: striking animal remains, gathered into sacred places, given meanings their makers’ science could not check.

What the monks thought a griffin was

The legend behind the label was old and widely read. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, was already skeptical. In the Bostock and Riley translation he says, “I look upon the birds as fabulous which are called ‘pegasi,’” and includes in the same doubt “the griffons, with long ears and a hooked beak.”⁷ Medieval readers were not always so cautious.

The Book of Sir John Mandeville, a fourteenth-century travel compilation, places griffins in “Bacharia” and describes them as eagle above and lion below, far stronger than eight lions. Its account of their feet is the part that matters here. The griffin, the book says, “hath his talons so long and so large and great upon his feet, as though they were horns of great oxen or of bugles or of kine, so that men make cups of them to drink of.”⁸ For anyone who had read or heard this, a long, curved, hollow horn was exactly what a griffin’s talon ought to look like. The text even supplies the use: a drinking vessel.

Later writers collected other examples. The heraldry writer John Vinycomb, in 1906, reported that Brunswick Cathedral still kept a horn “of some kind of antelope” that Henry the Lion had brought from the Holy Land as a griffin’s claw, and that three griffin talons were once kept at Bayeux and fastened to the altar on high feast days.⁹ These are Vinycomb’s statements and were not checked against other sources for this article. He also mentions “some curious legend” about a griffin-claw cup dedicated to Cuthbert, without saying what the legend was or where it came from.⁹ No medieval story linking Cuthbert personally to a griffin was found in the Durham sources read here. The Treasures of Heaven entry summarizes a belief that griffin claws could be obtained only in return for healing given by a holy person, but cites no primary text for it, so it is reported here only as that catalogue’s summary.⁶

The honest position, then, is this. The 1383 list proves that Durham’s monks owned two objects they called griffin claws. It does not tell us who gave them, when, or what story, if any, was attached to them at the shrine.

From Durham to the Cotton library

At the Dissolution, Henry VIII’s commissioners stripped Cuthbert’s shrine of everything valuable.³ What became of the curiosities hung at its end is not recorded in any source found for this article. The next trace of a griffin claw is in London, in the library of the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton (1571 to 1631), whose collection passed to his son and grandson, was given to the nation by Act of Parliament in 1701, and became part of the founding collection of the British Museum in 1753.⁶

Two pieces of evidence place a griffin claw in the Cotton library, and one of them ties it to Durham. The first is a set of manuscript notes added to John Davies’s 1672 edition of the Rites, which Fowler printed in 1903; a note by the transcriber, signed R. Gale, says they were first written in 1691. One brief note reads “Unguis Griffonica in Bibliotheca Cotton,” followed by words identifying it as having once been the property of the church of Durham.⁵ The second is an undated description of the Cotton library quoted by the British Museum’s C. H. Read in 1883, by way of Notes and Queries, from a manuscript on London libraries believed to be by John Bagford and William Oldys. It cites Thomas Smith’s 1696 catalogue of the Cotton manuscripts, so it was written after that date. Among “many old reliques which belonged to the monasteries here in England before the Dissolution,” it describes “the claw of a griffin with a silver hoop, on the great end of it a Saxon inscription; but I take it rather to be the horn of some animal.”¹⁰ The writer’s eye for the horn was sharper than his reading of the lettering. Read suggested that “Saxon” might reflect a confused association with Cuthbert.¹⁰

The horn in the British Museum

On February 22, 1883, Read showed the Society of Antiquaries a drawing of a “Griffin’s claw” in the British Museum. He wrote: “This claw appears to be the horn of some animal, considerably curved like that of an ibex, but with a smooth surface.”¹⁰ Its silver mount carried the inscription that it still bears: GRYPHI VNGVIS DIVO CVTHBERTO DVNELMENSI SACER, translated in the Treasures of Heaven catalogue as “The claw of a griffin sacred to the blessed Cuthbert of Durham.”^{4 6} Read noted that the Museum had no record of how the object arrived, linked it to the 1383 entry through Raine’s translation, and suggested that “the present band was substituted” for an original mount in the sixteenth century.¹⁰

Fowler repeated these findings in 1901 and 1903, giving the horn as 3 feet 11 inches long and about 8.5 inches round at the wide end, and calling it plainly “the horn of an ibex.”^{4 5} The modern catalogue entry also identifies it as the horn of an Alpine ibex, dates the silver mount to between about 1575 and 1625, and gives a length of 71.1 centimeters.⁶ The difference between those two measurements is large and is not explained in either source; it may reflect measuring along the curve versus straight across, but that is a guess.

The date of the mount matters. If it was made in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, it was made after the shrine was dismantled. On that dating, someone in the post-Reformation decades either replaced an older fitting or added an inscription to record what the horn was believed to be, and the inscription is evidence of what a later owner thought, not a medieval label. Read and Fowler said only “sixteenth century,” which on its own would not rule out a date before the shrine was despoiled at the Dissolution, so the point rests on the more precise modern dating.

What can be said, and what cannot

The documented facts are few and solid. Durham’s shrine keeper listed two griffin claws, on a shelf with some of the shrine’s most prized relics, in 1383.¹ The Rites of Durham shows that exotic animal objects were hung inside the feretory as offerings to the saint.⁵ By the late seventeenth century a griffin claw in the Cotton library was described as formerly Durham’s, and an undated description of the library, attributed to Bagford and Oldys, records one there with a silver band.^{5 10} A horn with that band and a Cuthbert inscription is in the British Museum. Read in 1883 called it the horn of some animal curved like an ibex’s; Fowler by 1901 and the modern catalogue identify it as an ibex horn.^{10 4 6}

The link between the British Museum horn and one of the two claws of 1383 is probable but not proven. No document records its removal from Durham or its acquisition by Cotton, and the Treasures of Heaven entry puts it directly: “There is no firm documentary evidence that this is one of the claws described at the shrine of St. Cuthbert in 1383.”⁶ The second claw has no known history after the list. Whatever stories once explained how Cuthbert’s shrine came to own a griffin’s foot are lost, if they existed at all.

What survives instead is a clear picture of how a medieval shrine worked as a place of wonder. A goat’s horn, perhaps brought from the Alps by a traveller, matched what a widely read travel book said a griffin’s talon looked like. Given to a saint, it became his. Taken from his shrine, it became a collector’s marvel, and then a museum object with a corrected label. The horn did not change. The questions people asked of it did.

Footnotes

1. Fowler (ed.), Account Rolls II (1899), “Liber de Reliquiis, 1383,” pp. 425-426. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Raine, Saint Cuthbert (1828), pp. 121-130 and footnote on p. 122. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Durham Cathedral, “The treasures of Saint Cuthbert.” ↩ ↩²

4. Fowler (ed.), Account Rolls III (1901), Introduction p. xx and Glossary s.v. “Griffina ova,” “Griffonis ungues.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Fowler (ed.), Rites of Durham (1903), pp. 94-95, 167, 276, 301. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Speakman, Treasures of Heaven, “Griffin’s Claw of St. Cuthbert.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

7. Pliny, Natural History 10.70. ↩

8. Mandeville, Travels, ch. XXIX. ↩

9. Vinycomb 1906, chapter on the griffin. ↩ ↩²

10. Read, Proc. Soc. Antiq. 2nd ser. 9 (1883), pp. 250-251. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶