According to Monty Python1 King Arthur, when asked how he could have coconuts in a temperate climate like England’s, replied “The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.” (page 2) In my copy of the screenplay, which is a facsimile, lots of lines are scratched out, hand-written, or otherwise edited in production. Not this speech. It is unchanged from the first typewritten copy.

Eleanor Parker (the scholar, not Lenore from Scaramouche) on the approach of autumn, directs us to the Secreta Secretorum2:

In herust fallyth the contrary. In this tyme the eeyre wixeth colde and dry, the wynde of the Northe oftymes turnyth, Wellis wythdrawen ham, grene thynges fadyth, Frutes fallyth, the Eeyre lesyth his beute, the byrdys shechyn hote regions, the bestis desyryth hare receptis, Serpentes gone to hare dichis. (P. 245)

This is an odd book. Wikipedia refers to it as a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, which implies there are more things like it in the world. Let’s see how rusty my Middle English is: “In harvest the contrary happens. In this time the year grows cold and dry, the wind often comes from the north, water levels in the rivers drop, green things fade, fruits fall, the year loses its beauty, the birds seek hot regions, the beasts desire their burrows, serpents go to their holes.”

Monty Python’s line about birds “seeking hot lands in winter” clearly came from here.3 The more I learn about history, the more I wonder if Monty Python actually made up anything at all.

Notes

  1. Terry Jones (ed.). Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Book). New York, Methuen, 1977.
  2. Steele, Robert, ed. Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum.[Attributed to Aristotle]. Vol. 1. Early English Text Society, 1898.
  3. The other two versions in this book are: “birdes sechen hoot cuntrees,” and “Bryddes drawan toward hote kyngdomes”