March 2025
Splitting Hares
It’s a cliché. In March everybody goes mad about hares. In Cirencester, we have huge, decorated effigies of them, startling visitors at key locations around town. Ironically, although they’ve become an adopted emblem of the place, the animals themselves are now rare locally due to loss of habitat resulting from changes in farming practices. Although they’re popularly supposed to have been introduced to Britain, together with rabbits, by the Romans, archaeological evidence shows that they were probably imported around two and a half to three millennia ago – before the Roman invasion.
When land use around Ciren included smaller fields with hedgerows, crop rotation featuring cycles of fallow hay-meadow growth, and before the advent of huge, combined harvesters, hares had been far more likely to give Arrowsmith’s lurcher, Jethro, a forty-five mile an hour run for his money than today. Jethro has never been a lurcher to go coursing, being a spoilt and pampered sighthound! Apart from a population scattered over the Marlborough Downs, to see significant numbers of hares it’s necessary to go to East Anglia where farming methods are more like those long forgotten in Gloucestershire.
The hare became a symbol of Ciren after the mosaic was discovered at The Beeches in 1971, and it’s now the emblem of The Corinium Museum. It could be argued the best image to symbolise the place would be sheep – or at least the fleece. As early as six thousand years back, in Neolithic times, sheep farming began in the Cotswolds, and the wealth developed through the wool trade built the Abbey, many other monasteries further afield, and the famous wool churches such as those in Northleach and St John’s in Ciren.
The town chose neither the hare nor the sheep as an emblem but instead opted for that superb example of self-roasting poultry: the phoenix.
Nobody knows for sure why it was first choice. Certainly, coins found nearby, dating to the Roman Emperor Constans, showed a phoenix on the ‘tail’ side, but even though he visited Britain towards the end of the Roman occupation, it’s no justification to remember him with affection. The inscription on his coins translates, loosely, as; “Happy days are here again!” but, like many such political promises, he brought no happy days.
Another suggestion is that the image of the phoenix could be connected to the sacking of Cirencester by the Saxons in 577CE. But it seems unlikely. There’s no suggestion of the town having been destroyed and subsequently rebuilt. Nor did the outcome of King Penda’s 628CE battle of Cirencester constitute destruction and reconstruction. It was more a declaration of ‘under new management’.
The Boleyn Cup, given by Elizabeth I to Dr Masters of Cirencester Abbey – who attended her during her near fatal illness with smallpox – and now in St John’s church, may well provide the true reason for the choice of the phoenix. The cup itself has a falcon as a finial, but, more significantly, Elizabeth adopted the phoenix as an emblem of her recovery from smallpox, and perhaps it was a good political gesture for the town to be seen to support her escape from death.
The relationship between the town and the state has had its moments. When the Civil War broke out, a descendant of Dr Masters supported parliament, but wisely signed up for the King when Royalist forces dropped by for a chat.
The Phoenix appears on the Arms of Cotswold District Council which also carries two woolsacks (Sheep from Northleach) and a pair of dolphins which reputedly saved the life of the Lord of the Manor of Tetbury after a shipwreck. If we now face a ‘Unitary Authority’, what symbol shall we keep?
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