IN THE PARISH register from St. Nicholas's Church in Durham's central Market Place, scribbled below a list of christenings for the year 1569, there is an intriguing and now locally infamous reference to a travelling “performer” in the city:

What the precise nature of the “great, strange and monstrous” serpent may have been is hard to say. Was it some sort of preserved python, crocodile, or the like? Or else something fabricated, such as a mechanical stage dragon—an increasingly common sight in late-medieval civic performances? Regardless of its actual property, it is clear that the parish register's scribe found the creature's “foreignness,” as well as that of its handler, something worthy of comment. The mention of the serpent's Ethiopian origin, from “within the Turke's dominions,” marks the beast's exoticism, connecting it with common conceptions of the wider Levant and probably nodding towards the legend of St. George.

Stage dragons were indeed very popular in entertainments throughout late-medieval Britain, particularly in St. George plays, and there is ample evidence from the region we now refer to as England's northeast and the Scottish borders. In the chamberlains’ accounts from Newcastle upon Tyne, for example, there are records, first from April 1510 and again in May 1511, listing payments to various individuals for contributing and attending to the city's “Dragon” for St. George's Day. Phillip Butterworth suggests that the Newcastle dragon may have been constructed along the lines of those detailed in numerous records surviving in the St. George's Guild accounts from Norwich. He further suggests that the “Rogger brown” who appears in the Newcastle account of 1511 receiving payment “ffor the attendans off the Dragon” may have served as some sort of barker or money collector.