Elephant and castle seal acquired by Norwich Castle Museum

The rare medieval gold seal with an intaglio gemstone depicting an elephant with a castle on its back discovered in Norfolk, England, in 2020 has been acquired by the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery.

The seal was discovered by a metal detectorist near King’s Lynn and declared treasure in 2021. It dates to between 1250 and 1350. It is one of only three gold seals recorded on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, and the only one of the three with an elephant engraved on the gemstone. Interestingly, all three of the gold seals are anonymous; they have no name or indication of who the owner was on the gemstones or the inscriptions. Seals were impressed on wax and affixed to documents as official signatures, so the owners can usually be identified.

Instead of a recognizable name or motto pointing to the seal’s owner, the inscription around the gold oval setting confounded experts when it was first discovered. The inscription reads: PARMAT EST ‧ WEVEI ‧ DRA OBEST, which was initially thought to be medieval Latin. The best interpretations researchers could come up with was “armed with a shield, the outlaw dragon is harmful,” which reads like a riddle more than a saying.

The meaning of the inscription is not immediately obvious. A parma is a small round Roman shield, and so parmatus means ‘armed with a parma’. The word wevei is medieval Latin, and means something like ‘outlaw’, ‘abandoned’ or ‘masterless’ (as in today’s ‘waif or stray’; Latham 1965, 519 under ‘waiv’). Dra is short for draco meaning ‘dragon’, and obest is the third person singular of obsum meaning ‘to be a nuisance’, ‘to be harmful’, or ‘to be in the way’.

Medieval French expert Malcolm Jones has now cracked the code when he proposed that it wasn’t Latin at all, but rather a French rhyming couplet in which the W of ‘WEVEI’ should be read as a “VU,” meaning “you.” By this interpretation, the inscription reads: PAR MA TEST ‧ VU EVEI ‧ DRA O BEST, meaning “By my head, you have dragon or beast.” In the Middle Ages, “by my head” was an emphatic expression of surprise or sincerity like “upon my soul.”

The dragon reference is likely an allusion to dragons being described in medieval bestiaries as the elephant’s only enemy. Illustrations in bestiaries depicted a dragon coiled around an elephant trying to suffocate it or breathing fire on it. They also claimed elephants gave birth in lakes to protect their young because dragons are too hot to cross a body of water. The father elephant stood guard on the shore to trample it should it approach.

The castle on the back of the elephant was also frequently seen in bestiaries. They contended that war elephants in India and Persia bore what amount to fortresses on their backs, capable of supporting and protecting multiple fighters like the crenellated battlements of a castle. The image of the elephant with a castle on its back became a heraldic symbol and popular pub name.

The artists who illustrated these bestiaries had never seen an elephant in real life; they were going by written descriptions, many of them by people who had never seen an elephant with their own eyes, which is why they tend to look a little wonky like the one carved on the gemstone. There are rare exceptions. The first elephant seen in England was a gift to Henry III from Louis IX of France in 1255, and there is a remarkably realistic portrait of Henry’s elephant in a collection of research assembled by the chronicler Matthew Paris around 1250-1259.