Wild Haggis in the Medieval Bestiary

  Acesse a tradução “A ‘buchada’¹silvestre em bestiários medievais” de Luiz Guerra.

Rory MacLellan ^[1]

Haggis Studies, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Summer, 2026), pp. 94-96.

The Cotton Manuscripts, which include such treasures as Beowulf, Gawain and Green Knight, and Magna Carta, were almost lost to posterity in a disastrous fire three centuries ago. Collected by the antiquarian and MP Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), 1st baronet, the manuscripts were stored in Ashburnham House in Westminster. On 23 October 1731, a spark from a fireplace set alight the beam above it and the fire soon spread to the adjoining library. The librarian Dr Bentley fled the flames in his nightgown and wig, with Codex Alexandrinus, the oldest complete Bible, under his arm. As the fire worsened, books were thrown from the windows to safety. Only thirteen manuscripts were completely destroyed, but many were damaged, some reduced to fragments.

The remains of those manuscripts have since been gathered into bundles or boxes under the shelfmark Cotton MS Fragments. Along with the rest of the Cotton Collection, they were transferred to the British Museum upon its foundation in 1753. Sir Frederic Madden (1801-73), the Museum’s Keeper of Manuscripts from 1837 to 1866, spent many hours sorting and reconstructing the fragments, successfully identifying many lost texts.^[1] However, the five vellum leaves that comprise Cotton MS Fragments XXXIII managed to confound him, and generations of scholars ever since. Though they are among the largest fragments to survive, each almost the size of an entire leaf, they are so badly burnt as to be unreadable. Until now, only a few words could be made out here and there. Folio (i.e. page) 1 appears to be a 12th century copy of Ossian’s Fingal, while f. 2 has the first passages of an Arabic necromantic text attributed to an Abdul al-[here the fragment ends], but it is f. 4 that is most relevant to the growing field of taigeisology.^[2] Its contents, lost to scholars for almost three centuries, have now, at last, been uncovered.

The leaf measures 270mm long on its left side and 170mm wide, with a text area of 210mm by 140mm. The text is in a gothic cursive hand of the late thirteenth century, with similar gs and as to those used in the scriptorium of Holyrood Abbey, suggesting a possible origin. A decorated initial in blues with red pen-flourishes is the leaf’s only decoration. Any illumination depicting the animal has been lost. The text, however, is now decipherable through multi-spectral imaging (MSI).

Multi-spectral imaging (MSI) is often used when studying damaged manuscripts such as these. A non-invasive technique, it involves photographs taken using different wavelengths (such as infrared or ultraviolet) to reveal text that has been erased, overwritten, or, as in this case, obscured by fire damage. MSI was carried out in-house at the British Library on Cotton MS Fragments XXXIII, f. 4 in January 2025, using a MegaVision Cultural Heritage EV Imaging System. The infra-red images in particular showed almost all of the text of this leaf, revealing it to be part of a Scottish bestiary of the late 13th century, one that contains the sole surviving medieval account of the haggis scoticus, the Wild Haggis.

Bestiaries were a popular genre of medieval text, presenting accounts of various animals, real and imagined, describing their anatomy, behaviour, and lifecycle. They drew upon earlier authorities — Pliny’s Natural History, the third century Greek text Physiologus, and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, an early medieval encyclopedia — but filtered through a strongly Christian worldview.^[3]

The text describes the haggis’ nature, makes reference to Pliny, offers the traditional religious analogy, and describes the animal’s medicinal uses, giving us the first full account of how medieval Scots understood these fascinating creatures. An edition of the text is presented below, translated from the original Latin.

London, British Library, Cotton MS Fragments XXXII, f. 4r

The haggis gets its name from the haw, the berry of the hawthorn, which it is said to eat by climbing the bushes.^[4] As Pliny says in the Natural History: the haggis is a small beast, like a hedgehog without spines, and with long hair all over.^[5] Its enemy is the fox.^[6] Should a haggis encounter a fox, it will burrow into the ground to hide.

The haggis comes in two kinds. The first has shorter legs on its left side than on its right, and so goes around the mountains sunwise. The second, shorter legs on its right side than its left, and goes around the mountains against the sun.^[7] Because of these differences, should one kind of haggis attempt to breed with one of the other kind, the male, unbalanced, will fall off.

A haggis produces offspring each Autumn. When a haggis wishes to copulate, it goes up into the mountains, where it makes its home amongst the thistles, and the male gives his wife a sprig of heather. She eats this and is instantly seduced and falls pregnant. Hagglets^[8] are born hairless and with small claws. Though Pliny says that animals with claws rarely have babies more than once, because of the damage they do when they move about in the womb, this is not the case for the haggis.

Its spine is solid, and so the haggis is unable to walk backwards.

To treat an injured foot, take the claw of a haggis, speak the names of the Trinity over it, and bind it to the injured foot overnight.

In his youth, Saint Kentigern preached to the haggis. Our lord Jesus Christ is like a haggis, for his flesh sustains us also, and the beast’s short stature shows its humility, for, as he said: ‘learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart’.^[9]

[1] Rory MacLellan is a historian specialising in late medieval Britain, the crusades, and the military orders. This is his first foray into the growing field of Haggis Studies.

^[1] Andrew Prescott, ‘‘Their Present Miserable State of Cremation’: the Restoration of the Cotton Library’, in C. J. Wright (ed.), Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and His Legacy, (London, The British Library, 1997), pp. 391-454.

^[2] Sir Robert Cotton acquired several manuscripts and items from the collection of Dr John Dee (1527-1608), court wizard to Queen Elizabeth I of England, including his scrying mirror, now British Museum, 1966,1001.1. Cotton MS Fragments XXXII, f. 2 may have been another occult inheritance from Dee’s library.

^[3] Often, entries present a Christian allegorical story, such as the pelican, who is supposedly attacked by its own young and kills them in self-defence. After three days, the pelican spills its own blood, dripping it over its chicks and resurrecting them, a sacrifice likened by medieval authors to that of Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of sinful Mankind.

^[4] Here the author offers a reverse etymology using the Old English word ‘haga’, meaning haw or hawthorn. However, the modern haggis scoticus, at least, is known to strongly dislike the smell of hawthorn berries, which are used to ward off wandering haggis from allotments across Scotland. ‘Haga’ can also mean a fence, such as those that are still needed to protect crops against the predations of the Wild Haggis, and it is this etymological explanation around which an academic consensus has formed: A. M. McLeod, Haggis: A History (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 2. That its name is derived from an Old English term suggests the haggis was first hunted by the Anglo-Saxons of the Lothians and Borders before these lands became part of the Kingdom of Scotland in the eleventh century.

^[5] I have been unable to find any reference to the haggis in the extant manuscripts of Pliny’s works. It is possible that the medieval writer was confusing the haggis with another animal, though the account given here does not match that of any other creature in the Natural History. More likely, they were inventing an earlier authority to add weight to their account.

^[6] This tradition of animosity was known to other medieval writers. One of the lesser known stories of Reynard the Fox, the satirical anthropomorphic medieval character, features Haron the Haggis, who works for Reynard’s nemesis Isengrim the wolf and spies on the fox by disguising himself as a rabbit: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Adv.MS.16.1.11, ff. 29v-32v.

^[7] That all Haggis are so-called Deasil Haggis (Scots for ‘sunwise’) or their counterpart, the Petril Haggis, remains a widespread misconception today. As decades of taigeisologists have shown, out of all the varieties of haggis, only one breed has this curious adaptation: the Highland Haggis (haggis scoticus wonkycus).

^[8] In Latin, ‘haggiculi’.

^[9] Matthew 11:29. This quotation is also used in the standard bestiary entry for the unicorn, again to show the creature’s supposed Christ-like humility.