Strange Science: Could the ‘Essex Serpent’ Have Been a Crocodile?
Or was it a Plesiosaurus?
If you’ve been watching The Essex Serpent, you probably know the intrepid Cora Seaborne (Clare Danes) relocates to the English coast in search of the legendary beast. The villagers believe the serpent, which is rumored to have killed a local girl, has been sent by devil and they don’t take kindly to the wealthy Londoner’s arrival to investigate — to put it mildly. Cora, on the other hand, is a Victorian . She knows her science, knows her fossils, and she thinks the serpent just might be a modern-day
I read Sarah Perry’s debut novel The Essex Serpent last year and found it as fascinating as I find natural history. So when I read an interview in which she discussed a medieval account of a “real-life” Essex serpent, I decided to do a little investigating of my own.
According to , she first heard of the serpent from her husband, who was reading a 1938 book called Companion into Essex:
The book includes an excerpt from a pamphlet printed at Clerkenwell in 1669, which relates the appearance of “a Monstrous Serpent.” The pamphlet goes on to show “the length, proportion, the bigness of the Serpent, the places where it commonly lurks and what means hath been used to kill it.”
The idea of an actual serpent in Essex sparked her imagination like nothing had before. She soon tracked down the pamphlet, which has the fantastically mysterious title .
Perry needed to see the antique text in person at the British Library but you can read it for free. I admit I gave up after a few lines. Still, if you’re curious it’s there for your reading pleasure. Despite the pamphlet’s larger-than-life drawing, the serpent doesn’t look all that terrifying and the villagers seem weirdly happy about the situation. Perry found the creature rather endearing — “familiar as an old pet” — and made her own Essex Serpent far more malevolent.
Not surprisingly, the same is true of the beast in the Apple TV+ miniseries. I don’t want to include any spoilers so I’ll simply say that after the girl’s death fear takes hold. Despite the local vicar’s assurances that the beast isn’t real, they are convinced a monster has entered their lives. One episode in particular has an intense Salem witch trials vibe.
Cora and Will Ransome (Tom Hiddleston) are philosophically opposed — science vs. faith and all that — but their measured approach to the unknown puts them at odds with everyone else in Aldwinter. It’s a lovely triangulation that captures so much of the of the intellectual intensity of the oft-misrepresented Victorian era.
Pure fiction or partial fact?
Even so, the show and the novel didn’t answer my question. What was the actual serpent like, as described in the pamphlet? Was it the equivalent of a big, cuddly Gecko of or more akin to the kind of dragon that needs slaying? That is to say, was the pamphlet pure fiction, a wildly exaggerated true story, or based partly on fact?
Though I couldn’t bring myself to slog through the pamphlet’s typeset, I found a 1979 article by someone who did. In ,” Michael Behrend argues that the winged Essex serpent could very well have been a crocodile:
Although the London publishers entitled it “the Flying Serpent”, and supplied an extravagant picture, the text gives a straightforward account, signed by seven witnesses, of a large unknown animal.”
Behrend goes on to explain that the first witness encountered the creature while on horseback. Shortly afterward, two more witnesses came across it sunning itself on a hill. According to his article, the so-called serpent sounds suspiciously like a crocodile:
They described it as “8 or 9 foot long, the smallest part of him about the thickness of a man’s leg, or the middle as big as a man’s thigh, his eyes very large and piercing, about the bigness of a sheep’s eye, in his mouth he had two row of teeth which appeared to their sight very white and sharp.”
That sounds somewhat plausible, but what about the wings — which appear in the text as well as in the drawing? Behrend believes they weren’t wings at all, simply the crocodile’s forelegs with their webbed feet. He goes on to explain that the locals were about as happy about its arrival in Essex as the Aldwinter villagers are about their serpent in the miniseries. Like Perry, Behrend almost seems fond of the mysterious creature:
The local people tried several times to kill it, but it hid away in the undergrowth where guns were useless, and none dared go near it with clubs. However, this specimen did no harm that was known of.”
If the guns reference strikes you as odd, you’re not alone. But they have been around since the I, too, felt bad for this creature caught in the usual Frankenstein scenario.
The Essex serpent isn’t the only crocodile in medieval literature, at least according to Behrend. In his view, many medieval “dragon sightings” recorded in old texts might have been crocodile sightings. In support of his theory, he mentions numerous accounts of the mythical creature that appear in other texts and regions. As is true in the miniseries, some church pews bore dragon carvings in towns where such legends had been passed down from generation to generation. , which date back to 1500, are “clearly” crocodiles in Behrend’s view.
I realize that there is no positive proof that all the dragons I have mentioned were really crocodiles. Previous writers have suggested, for instance, that the serpents of Horsham and Henham were in fact large snakes, and the theory cannot be ruled out. Nor am I denying the importance of the dragon as a symbol of fertility, whose image was carried in procession in Spring festivals and during the blessing of the crops at Rogationtide. However, the possibility that some dragon legends owe their origin to an encounter with a real animal is one that future researchers might like to keep in mind.
There’s only one problem. Crocodiles haven’t been native to England for more than 120,000 years, when large tropical animals lived in the Thames valley during the Eemian interglacial period. Crocodiles have a very temperature-sensitive breeding cycle and would not have been able be to reproduce in the wild due to the cold.
An unfortunate escape
If the Essex serpent was indeed a crocodile, how could it possibly have gotten there? There are a few explanations, but the most convincing one involves the Crusades.
In Peter Ackroyd writes that Richard the Lionheart brought a crocodile back from the Crusades and housed it in the Tower menagerie, which included three leopards and a polar bear. According to Ackroyd’s account, which he does not cite, the reptile escaped into the river. Other accounts allude to this legend as well.
While crocodiles aren’t suited for Northern climates, there have been a few contemporary sightings of crocs roaming England. One such sighting happened in Yorkshire in 2021. While some dismissed it as a hoax, wildlife photographer Lee Collings swears he really did encounter a crocodile at a nature reserve near :
“I am 46 years old and have been a birdwatcher for over 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this, other than a crocodile or alligator. It walked like it was rigid. It moved slow, but too fast to photograph it by the time I realized what I thought it was.”
I’ve always been a fan of dragons but am in no rush to run into a crocodile. the world’s largest croc, is nearly 18 feet long and looks disturbingly like a dragon, if you ask me. If that’s what these medieval knights were facing, good luck to them. have the most powerful bite force on earth, a virtually impenetrable skin and a brutal way of attacking their prey:
After lying in wait in the water, modern crocodilians bite onto their target with some of the strongest bite forces in the animal kingdom, making it very hard for the target to get free. The crocodilians then perform a behaviour known as a , [where they twist around to remove muscle from bone].
So was the Essex serpent an oddity — but an oddity within the realm of possibility — or an impossibility? Did it escape from a king’s tower? Or did someone else bring a crocodile to the area? Or is it just a good dragon tale?
We can’t know for sure, at least not unless paleontologists discover crocodile bones in Essex. In the meantime, you can watch the and imagine what Mulder and Scully might be like if they time traveled to 1890.
