What do you think of this fact?
Picture this: your college bans pets, and you go looking for a loophole. That’s exactly what Lord Byron did, years before he became one of England’s most famous poets. Students at Trinity College, Cambridge, weren’t allowed to keep dogs. So he got himself a tame bear.
A loophole with fur
Byron studied at Trinity College from 1805 to 1807, and he resented the rule that kept him from having a dog there. According to the Wordsworth Trust, the rules said nothing about bears, so the college authorities had no legal basis to complain.
Where the animal came from isn’t completely certain. The University of Cambridge says Byron quite possibly bought it at Stourbridge Fair.
“He should sit for a fellowship”
On 26 October 1807, Byron wrote a letter to his friend Elizabeth Pigot that people still quote today: “I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear.” When people asked what he meant to do with it, his answer was that the bear “should sit for a fellowship”, meaning it should apply to become a member of the college’s academic staff.
In the same letter, Byron brags about “eternal parties” in his rooms, with jockeys, gamblers, boxers, authors, parsons and poets as guests. So the bear was in good company.
From college to country estate
After Cambridge, according to the Wordsworth Trust, Byron took the bear home to Newstead Abbey, his family’s ancestral seat. There it roamed the grounds together with a tame wolf.
Byron had a real soft spot for animals. Over the years, his household included a fox, a parrot, a crocodile, a honey badger, three geese, a heron and a goat with a broken leg, among others.
When Percy Shelley visited Byron in Ravenna in 1821, he counted ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon. All of them except the horses walked freely around the house.
Anyone can read the house rules. Byron read them looking for a gap big enough to fit a bear.