Dacre Beasts: Red Bull and Black Gryphon – Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London, England

From the Guardian newspaper, July 28, 2000:

The Dacre Beasts, four towering wooden heraldic animals which guarded Dacre Castle in Cumbria for almost 500 years until they found themselves in a London auction room, have been bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum for £420,000, the museum announced yesterday.

The extraordinary figures, each more than six feet tall, all carved from a single early 16th century oak tree, are said to have inspired Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. Despite their remote location, the beasts became famous in the 19th century through prints, appealing strongly to Victorian fantasies of medieval romance.

The figures – a Red Bull, a Black Gryphon, a White Ram and a Crowned Salmon, concealing a coded history of the Dacre family including an elopement – are regarded as unique survivors of a lost world of English medieval and Tudor heraldic carving. All their peers have gone through rot, fire or deliberate destruction in the Reformation and the Civil War. The Dacre beasts themselves survived a 19th century fire which destroyed most of the castle. Traces of the original paint surface were recently discovered under the Victorian century repainting.

The beasts were made for Thomas Dacre, a formidable soldier who fought with Henry Tudor against Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, and against the Scots at Flodden.