[3][4] The provenance of the Northumberland Bestiary is known through a series of personal notes called pen trails found on folio 73v as well as from the flyleaf on f. 74v where the inscription "Grace Fitzjames feres God and loves his word.
"[1] The pen trails begin in about 1500 and they include a distich warning clergymen to stay away from women, a partial document naming justice of the peace, Robert Turges, and the Percy family seal stamped on folios 1, 20, and 21v.
[1] At the death of Elizabeth Seymour's father in 1766 her husband, Hugh Smithson, adopted the surname Percy and the title of Duke of Northumberland was created.
Aside from a couple of chapters which are common to the other groups version Y doesn't seem to influence the others and after the eleventh century appears to have fallen out of reproduction.
Finally, Version B had thirty-six or thirty-seven chapters and influenced the most widely distributed manuscripts in France and England during the Middle Ages.
[5] Bestiaries are grouped in to “families” determined by how closely they follow the format of the Physiologus and how many excerpts from other texts are included.
[5] The first family of manuscripts are chiefly influenced by Version B of the Physiologus as well as book XII, De animalibus, from The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.
The panther entry begins by combining moralizing text from Physiologus groups B and Y and from De bestiis et aliis rebus.
[1][2] The manuscript begins with a chapter entitled "Creation of the World" which references the first two books of Genesis and De imagine Mundi Libri tres by Honorius.
[1] They are meant to be moralizing and were functionally used as a teaching manual for religious clerics as evidenced by the added entries for sermons.
[2] Bestiaries generally work at establishing clearly defined categories and binaries, for example, male or female, physical or divine, living or dead.
Animals such as amphibians (living in both land and water), pigs (having hooves but being carnivorous) which did not fit easily into a category or binary were often considered unclean or even seen as bad omens.
[3] Hyenas were seen as both unclean and as morally reprehensible because it was believed that they possessed both male and female sex organs and that they fed off of human corpses.
[4] In the Northumberland Bestiary on folio 12v the miniateure shows the Hyena not only double sexed and circumsized but also eating a corpse out of a tomb.
[1] The accompanying entry states "In this way the prophet compared the synagogue to this unclean animal saying My inheritance has become for me like a cave of a hyena.
"[1] The entry also states that the hyena stalks the huts of shepherds, can imitate human voices and sobs in order to trick men at night, that it eats dogs (dogs often symbolize religious clerics within bestiaries[1]) and that it carries a stone in its eyes which can freeze any man or beast that it circles three times.
[1] The idea of the "trans-animal body" is a more recent topic of modern scholarship which looks at bestiaries as a resource for transgender history.