Everybody tells you the name is a corruption of a Spanish princess’s title. It almost certainly is not. It is a cutler’s badge.
You have heard the story. Everybody has heard the story.
The Elephant and Castle, you will be told – usually by somebody quite confident – is a corruption of “Infanta de Castile,” the title of a Spanish princess, mangled by the English tongue over a few centuries into an elephant carrying a fort.
It is a wonderful story. It has been told for two hundred years. It is almost certainly nonsense.
What the badge actually is
The Worshipful Company of Cutlers – the medieval livery company of London’s knife-makers – has an elephant with a castle on its back in its arms.
The reason is not exotic. It is ivory. Cutlers made knife handles from it, the elephant was the source, and a beast with a howdah on its back was a standard image in European heraldry long before any Spanish princess was involved.
An elephant carrying a tower appears in medieval bestiaries, on church carvings, and in armorial bearings all over Europe. It is not a mishearing. It is a picture of a thing people believed elephants did.
The Infanta theory, as far as anybody can establish, is a piece of nineteenth-century folk etymology – a good story invented to explain a name that already had a perfectly ordinary explanation, by people who found the ordinary explanation dull.
Why the false story wins
We have been here before. In Covent Garden we established that Brydges Place is not fifteen inches wide – it is thirty-three – and that the false measurement is in every guidebook while the true one is in nobody’s mouth.
We established that the Churchill Arms was called the Churchill Arms in 1826, forty-eight years before Winston Churchill was born, and that the entire nation has agreed to believe otherwise.
The rule is now firm enough to state: the version that survives is not the true one, it is the tellable one. A princess whose title got mangled is a story. A knife-maker’s ivory supply is a fact. Facts do not travel. Stories do.
The Institute for Folk Etymology in Erith reports that roughly one in five London place names carries an explanation that was invented, after the fact, by somebody who could not bear the real one.
The pub
A 4.5 from eleven hundred people, which is a genuinely good score, and twenty to thirty pounds. Small, old, wood-panelled, tucked away, and considerably nicer than the average Kensington pub.
It has a fine sign. On the sign there is an elephant, with a castle on it, and it is not a princess, and it has never been a princess.
Verdict
Lovely little pub. Go, drink, and be the one person in the room who knows about the cutlers.
Do not tell anybody. They will not thank you, and they will not believe you, and the story will outlive us all.
The elephant nobody had seen
One more thing, because it explains the castle.
Medieval Europeans had, overwhelmingly, never seen an elephant. What they had were descriptions, brought back from the Crusades and from trade routes, of an animal used in war in India and Persia – carrying a fighting platform on its back, with archers in it.
That platform is the castle. It is a howdah, rendered by artists who had never seen one, in a country where the only reference point for a defensive structure was a keep.
So the sign over the door shows an Indian war elephant, misremembered by a European who was working from hearsay, hung above a pub in Kensington, and attributed by everybody to a Spanish princess who has nothing to do with any of it.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Peter Cook understood London’s character. This understands how London’s turned that character into bureaucratic policy.