‘Draco the Dragon is the biggest of all serpents, in fact of all living things on earth…its strength is not in its teeth but in its tail and it inflicts injury by blows rather than stinging. Even the elephant is not protected from it by the size of its body; for the dragon, lying in wait near the paths along which elephants usually saunter, lassoes their legs in a knot with its tail.’

(Words from T.H. White’s translation of a Latin prose bestiary, copied in the twelfth century by Jacobus Thomas Herison at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire).