In 1807, Lord Byron was told by Trinity College, Cambridge that he could not keep his dog. He read the statute carefully. Then he bought a bear.

His name was George Gordon Byron. He was nineteen years old. He had published his first poems the previous year. He arrived at Trinity College in 1805 to read history, leaving his celebrated Newfoundland Boatswain at home, because Trinity's sixteenth-century statutes forbade undergraduates from keeping dogs in college. He obeyed the rule for two years. In the autumn of 1807, he returned to Cambridge with a brown bear, possibly purchased at Stourbridge Fair. He kept it in his rooms at Trinity. He walked it on a chain through the college grounds. His tutors were furious. They were also outmanoeuvred. The statutes did not mention bears.

On the twenty-sixth of October, 1807, Byron sat down and wrote a letter to his childhood friend Elizabeth Pigot in Southwell. The relevant passage reads, in full: I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was, he should sit for a fellowship. Byron was joking. Mostly. The point was not that the bear would actually become a Fellow of Trinity College. The point was that, on a strict reading of the statutes, there was nothing the college could legally do to stop him from trying. The bear stayed for the rest of his Cambridge career. The fellowship, technically, remained open.

Byron took the bear with him when he left Cambridge in 1808. It became one of the founding members of his menagerie at Newstead Abbey, which over the next decade would also include a wolf-dog, a fox, a parrot, a crocodile, a honey badger, three geese, a heron, and a lame goat. In Italy he added five peacocks, two guinea hens, an Egyptian crane, and three monkeys. The greatest poet of his generation could not legally bring a dog to college. Every other animal he ever met, he kept.

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