Sea Bishop
Whitby, Yorkshire 1961 (or Poland 1531!)
“Carried to the king of that country, it made certain signs that it had a great desire to return to the sea. Being taken thither it threw itself instantly into the water.” - Guillaume Rondelet 1554
Now, then. Northern Folklore Archive took a little trip to Whitby to trade at the wonderful Hand of Glory Whitby Folklore Festival, and in our down time we meandered over to Whitby Museum and I saw something that completely stole my heart. The Sea Bishop!
Just look at it’s little, tiny, adorable face. It looks so happy. Or angry. But what is it?
The Sea Bishop is supposedly a manmade souvenir, crafted by sneaky fishermen for gullible visitors to make a little money. Advertised as a mythical monster, fishermen would take skate jinnies and tie back the wings with twine making the head stick out. They would then be dried and sold! So nothing of interest, right? These things were certainly, absolutely, unequivocally not real?
Well… I wanted to write about these little fellas for the Archive, so I’ve done a bit of research and I couldn’t find a single thing about Sea Bishops in terms of Whitby and its fisherman other than the museum itself. But I did find a case of ‘Sea Bishops’, which look strikingly similar to the Whitby one, in Poland back in the 1500s…
You can see the resemblance, right? Gilbertus Germanus, a doctor, stated that a ‘Sea Bishop’ monster had been brought to the king of Poland, Sigismund I, in 1531. But once presented to the King, it was said that the little sea creature somehow indicated that it wished to return to the sea and, once there, threw itself back into the water never to be seen again.
The creature was described as a fish in a bishop’s habit (De pisce Episcopi habitu), and when writing about the account of the Sea Bishop, Germanus omitted a few things he had been told about the monster because he considered them to be false, giving us less to go on in terms of determining whether this creature was indeed real…
Many people have written about the Sea Bishop, such as Richard Carrington who suggested that the shape of the creature indicates it could have been a manipulated skate or ray to create a new hoax creature… Is this not also similar to our Whitby Sea Bishop?!
