Is there historical documents of dragons not part of mythology?

by sross91

Are there ancient documents that talk about witnessing creatures like dragons while traveling or in battle that historians accept as reliable documents of that cultures history and not a mythological story?

Evan_Th

Absolutely; there're a number of brief mentions of dragons in chronicles. For instance, from 793 AD in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:

Here were dreadful forewarnings come over the land of Northumbria, and woefully terrified the people: these were amazing sheets of lightning and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine soon followed these signs, and shortly after in the same year, on the sixth day before the ides of January, the woeful inroads of heathen men [i.e. Vikings] destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne Island by fierce robbery and slaughter.

Dragons were noted on the land as well as in the air. For example, in 1405, the monk John de Trokelowe recorded in Suffolk:

Close to the town of Bures there has lately appeared... a dragon vast in body with crested head, teeth like a saw and tail extending to an enourmous lenth. Having slaughterd the shepeherd it devoured very many sheep. There came forth an order, to shoot at him with arrows... those arrows bounced off his back if it were been iron or hard rock... But when the dragon saw he was again to be assaulted he fled away into a marsh or mere and was no more seen.