Hircocervus

19th century engraving of The Trusty Servant, from the 1579 painting by John Hoskins

Inn sign copied from The Trusty Servant, at The Trusty Servant Inn, Minstead, Hampshire

The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag or horse-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag.

The creature is now best-known through The Trusty Servant painting in Winchester College, representing the ideal virtues of its alumni.

Origins

In his work De Interpretatione, Aristotle utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is knowable even though it does not really exist.^[1] In Plato's Republic, Socrates speaks of his own image-making as similar to that of painters who paint goat-stags, combining the features of different things together (488a).^[2]

The word hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398 (now at the Bodleian Library).^[1]

The Trusty Servant

A hircocervus is depicted in a wall-painting called The Trusty Servant, painted by John Hoskins in 1579.^[3] It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England.^[1] The author Arthur Cleveland Coxe described "the time-honoured Hircocervus, or picture of 'the Trusty-servant,' which hangs near the kitchen, and which emblematically sets forth those virtues in domestics, of which we Americans know nothing. It is a figure, part man, part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth, and various other symbols in his hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable character."^[4]

The painting of The Trusty Servant had a didactic function: it is accompanied by allegorical verses that associate the hircocervus servant's various animal parts with distinctive virtues that the students of Winchester College were meant to follow.^[5]

The Latin verses have been translated into English as:

A trusty servant's picture would you see,
This figure well survey, who'ever you be.
The porker's snout not nice in diet shows;
The padlock shut, no secret he'll disclose;
Patient, to angry lords the ass gives ear;
Swiftness on errand, the stag's feet declare;
Laden his left hand, apt to labour saith;
The coat his neatness; the open hand his faith;
Girt with his sword, his shield upon his arm,
Himself and master he'll protect from harm.^[1]

1. ^ Quoted in Howard Staunton, The Great Schools of England (Strahan. 1869), 61n.

In culture

Umberto Eco refers to a hircocervus in his novel The Island of the Day Before.^[1]

Martin Luther uses the term "Goat-stag" (tragelaphus in his Latin) in his Theses Against the Antinomians (1540, Sixth Set) to describe "a law that does not condemn". Luther is stating that one can imagine a law from God that only instructs or teaches without threatening and condemning human sin. However, Luther claims that such a law, often sought by theologians throughout Christian history, does not actually exist. ^[6]

References

1. Quinion, Michael (2009). "Hircocervus". World Wide Words. Retrieved February 8, 2009.
2. Plato Republic. 488a.
3. Pattern Histories: The Trusty Servant accessed 29 May 2007
4. Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Impressions of England. (Google Books)
5. Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing "monsters" in Shakespearean drama and early modern culture (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 139.
6. Luther, Martin. Weimar Ausgabe. 39I:358.26-27; Luther, Martin. Solus Decalogus Est Aeternus: Martin Luther’s Complete Antinomian Theses and Disputations. Ed. and trans. Holger Sonntag. Latin and English ed. (Minneapolis: Lutheran Press, 2008): 375.