Sackerson was a famous
brown bear
The brown bear (''Ursus arctos'') is a large bear species found across Eurasia and North America. In North America, the populations of brown bears are called grizzly bears, while the subspecies that inhabits the Kodiak Islands of Alaska is kno ...
which was
baited in the
Beargarden
The Beargarden was a facility for bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and other " animal sports" in the London area during the 16th and 17th centuries, from the Elizabethan era to the English Restoration period. Baiting is a blood sport where an animal ...
in the late 16th century.
The bear appears in Shakespeare's ''
The Merry Wives of Windsor
''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' or ''Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor'' is a comedy by William Shakespeare first published in 1602, though believed to have been written in or before 1597. The Windsor of the play's title is a ref ...
'' in which Slender boasts to Anne Page that, "That’s meate and drinke to me now: I have seene Sackerson loose, twenty times, and
have taken him by the Chaine: but (I warrant you) the women have so cride and shrekt at it, that it past:"
Such bears were named after their owners. John Sackerson (1541–95) was the landlord of the
Bear Inn in
Nantwich
Nantwich ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East in Cheshire, England. It has among the highest concentrations of listed buildings in England, with notably good examples of Tudor and Georgian architecture. ...
and kept a stable of bears and so may have supplied this one.
See also
*
List of individual bears
The following is a list of individual bears which garnered national or worldwide attention:
Actors
* Bart the Bear, a male Alaskan Kodiak bear, played the leading role in the 1988 wilderness drama, ''The Bear (1988 film), The Bear''. Between 1980 ...
References
Individual bears
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