In 1425, 600 years ago this year, the town of Shrewsbury had a stamp made for the wax seals attached to official documents. On the stamp are three shield designs: the three leopards of the King of England, a cross of St George, and on the right the three leopard heads which have become the emblem of Shrewsbury and its county of Shropshire. But why leopard heads? And why are they called “loggerheads” in Shropshire?
You can’t easily see the designs but they were intended to look similar to these modern interpretations. The red shield is the Royal Arms of England as they were in use until 1340, when Edward III added the arms of France on his shield to represent his claim to the French throne. The cats were referred to as “leopards” in heraldry due to their pose of face on to the viewer, but really the concept of lion and leopard were mixed in the Middle Ages, as people believed leopards were lioness / panther hybrids. Shrewsbury had very strong royal connections, and was used as a military base for wars in Wales, located as it is only 9 miles from the border. So one natural explanation for the three big cat heads on its blue shield is as a symbol of allegiance to the king or favour from him.
The Latin inscription on the town’s seal is “SIGILLV COMMUNE LIBERTATIS VILLE SALOPBURIE FACTO ANO GRE M CCCC XXV” which means “The common seal of the liberty of the town of Shrewsbury, made in the year of grace 1425”. The “liberty” refers to the legally independent territory of the town, where people were answerable directly to the king rather than to a local lord. As the county town of Shropshire, much of the symbols and terminology of the county derive from the town. For example, the county used to be called “Salop” after the town’s Latin name. It’s not surprising that the coat of arms of Shropshire County Council, granted in 1896, was based on the town arms. The same design once converted to a rectangle became the county’s official flag in 2013.
For these symbols of Shrewsbury and Shropshire, and nowhere else, the cats’ heads are called “loggerheads”. There has been a lot of speculation about where this name comes from. It’s one of those situations where people often fiercely defend the first version they heard, but in reality we just don’t know.
There is a pub on Church Street in Shrewsbury called The Loggerheads which has been a pub since the 18th century. It changed its name from The Greyhound to The Shrewsbury Arms some time before 1828. It naturally acquired the nickname The Loggerheads from three big cats’ heads on its pub sign, and eventually adopted that name officially. In 2004, the former pub chain caused an outcry by sending them a new sign showing loggerhead turtles to put up! After it was taken down and a proper sign reinstated, it was put on display on a wall inside, as a trophy of locals overcoming corporate ignorance.
There’s another pub, also The Loggerheads, just over the border in Staffordshire, at a crossroads on the A53 which runs from Derbyshire to Shrewsbury. A village grew up around the crossroads and took the name of the pub. There is speculation about the origin of the pub name but to me it seems obvious it’s a reference to Shrewsbury’s coat of arms.
So however the heraldic leopard heads got the name loggerheads, why were they chosen?
Lions were present in Greece and parts of Eastern and Central Europe even in classical times, although the Romans eventually had to import them from North Africa for their public games. These were full on Panthera Leo lions, that you see on nature programmes about Africa on TV now. So educated Medieval people would have been familiar with the idea of a lion from classical literature and of course from the Bible. Lions were naturally seen as symbols of power and courage, and have been a popular choice for royal emblems since the earliest civilisations, but they were not something people were directly familiar with in the British and French countrysides which the Norman and Plantagenet kings and nobles hunted in – at most they might have seen one in a cage in a menagerie.
However, I do wonder if the presence of lynx in western Europe in the Middle Ages kept the idea of big cats in people’s minds. Lynx probably died out in England and Wales in Anglo-Saxon times, and maybe much later in Scotland. But they are still present in France and were far more common in the Middle Ages. So maybe the three heraldic leopards on the Royal Arms, and therefore the Shrewsbury loggerheads, were in a way lynx: the cats some people had actually seen in all their majesty in the forests of France, even if they meant them to represent lions on their shields.
In the last few decades, conservation efforts and restrictions on hunting have seen lynx return across the continent, even in countries like the Netherlands. They have also returned to Shropshire, but only in captivity at Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World near Telford! They are magnificent though.
To mark the 600th anniversary of the 1425 stamp, local historian Mark Stewart has published a book and created a website with the results of his research into the possible origins and the use of the loggerheads. Mark presents a lot more about the conflicting theories, illustrated with lots of local photos.