If you visit Yale University, you might view the portico of Davenport College, or even catch a glimpse of the official banner of the university’s president. If you do, you’ll see a yale. Not, mind you, a Yale — that would be a direct descendant of Elihu Yale, who was a governor of the British East India Company and who gave a large gift to the “Collegiate School” in Saybrook Colony. It was a big enough gift that the school renamed itself “Yale.”
The “Yale” that’s a family name is derived from the Welsh word “Ial,” which is the name of a place in northern Wales. It’s probably a good place to farm, because “Ial” comes from a Welsh word for fertile land. But the “yale” that you’d see on the university’s president’s banner is quite different. That yale is an animal.
The “yale” (originally “eale”) was an African creature described by the Roman Pliny the Elder, who explained in his Natural History, about 77 CE, that it was found in Ethiopia, and was a very curious animal:
“It is the size of the river-horse, has the tail of the elephant, and is of a black or tawny colour. It has also the jaws of the wild boar, and horns that are moveable, and more than a cubit in length, so that, in fighting, it can employ them alternately, and vary their position by presenting them directly or obliquely, according as necessity may dictate.”
A river-horse is what the Romans called a hippopotamus. Horns that are “more than a cubit long” would be over 18 inches. Wild boars have big tusks sticking out of their mouths. So this thing was pretty formidable-looking. Or would have been if anyone had ever actually seen one. There’s no such thing as a yale, and the description is so weird that nobody has any idea what Pliny might have been talking about. He probably combined different descriptions from a lot of different travelers’ accounts to come up with his imaginary animal. He almost certainly made up the name too; he called it a “eale,” which is a word that’s never been found in any other Roman text.
Notwithstanding its improbable description and imaginary existence, the yale was depicted in any number of illustrations. Each one looks different, of course, but they usually show some sort of thing with the head of an antelope, maybe some wild boar parts, and weird horns that can rotate or move.
By medieval times the yale was being used in heraldry, and in that context it was shown as having a silver coat with gold spots. It was used to symbolize proud defense, probably having something to do with those fancy horns. Anyway, Cambridge University in England is made up of a number of colleges, and two of those colleges were founded by Margaret of Beaufort (in modern style, simply “Margaret Beaufort”), who was well known for being incredibly rich and also for being King Henry VII’s mother. Her coat of arms included two yales. It became part of the two colleges she founded (Christ’s and St. John’s). St. John’s College has a gatehouse where Margaret of Beaufort’s coat of arms is still displayed over an archway.
The yales at Yale aren’t related to the yales at Cambridge, and they’re not from Elihu Yale’s coat of arms (if he even had one) — Yale University only started using them as a sort of play on words.
