One of London’s most famous and most puzzling names – is it a cutler’s crest, a Spanish infanta, or an actual elephant?
The Elephant and Castle is a Kensington pub with eleven hundred and seventy-five reviews and a 4.5 – a strong score on a large sample – and it carries one of the most famous, and most fiercely debated, names in all of London: a name whose origin nobody can entirely agree on.
The great naming mystery
“The Elephant and Castle” is a wonderfully strange name – an elephant, with a castle on its back – and it has generated centuries of speculation about where it comes from. We touched on it in the Covent Garden survey; here it deserves the full treatment, because it is the perfect illustration of this whole survey’s great theme: that pub names are almost never what they seem, and their true origins are lost in myth and argument.
There are three main theories, and they are all wonderful.
Theory one: the cutlers
The most widely accepted explanation connects the name to the Worshipful Company of Cutlers – the medieval London guild of knife and blade makers. The cutlers’ coat of arms features an elephant with a castle (a “howdah,” the seat carried on an elephant’s back) on top. Why? Because cutlers worked with ivory – from elephant tusks – for their knife handles, and so the elephant became their heraldic symbol. A pub displaying the elephant and castle may have been advertising a connection to the cutlers’ trade.
Theory two: the Spanish princess
A more romantic theory holds that the name is a corruption of “the Infanta of Castile” – a Spanish princess. The idea is that “Infanta de Castilla” was slurred, over time, by English tongues into “Elephant and Castle.” Various Spanish princesses have been proposed, including one betrothed to an English king. It is a charming theory, beloved of guidebooks – though most serious historians are sceptical, considering it a folk etymology, too neat to be true.
Theory three: just an elephant
The simplest theory is that the sign was, simply, an elephant carrying a castle – a genuinely popular and exotic image in medieval and early modern Europe. War elephants carrying towers full of soldiers were a real feature of ancient warfare (Hannibal’s elephants, the armies of India), and the image of the elephant-and-tower was a known and striking heraldic and decorative motif. A pub might have adopted it simply because it was a memorable, exotic, impressive image – no deeper explanation needed.
The lesson
The Prat’s naming desk loves the Elephant and Castle precisely because the truth cannot be pinned down. Is it cutlers and ivory? A mangled Spanish princess? Just an exotic image? The honest answer is that we do not fully know, and probably never will. The name has outlived its own explanation, which is the fate of so many pub names in this survey – a vivid image whose meaning has dissolved into competing legends.
The pub
A strong, well-liked Kensington pub doing a 4.5 across a large and real sample, carrying one of London’s most famous and most gloriously unexplained names.
Verdict
Strong, popular, and named after London’s greatest pub-name mystery – cutlers, a Spanish princess, or simply an elephant with a castle on its back.
Have a pint beneath the elephant, and pick your favourite theory. Nobody can prove you wrong, which is the whole charm of the thing.
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]
