19th century engraved reproduction of "The Trusty Servant".

The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag or horse-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag. Its name is derived from the Latin words hircus ("billy goat") and cervus ("stag").^[1] Plato
utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical
concept of something that is knowable even though it does not really
exist.^[1]

The word hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398 (now at the Bodleian Library).^[1]

A hircocervus is depicted in a wall-painting called The Trusty Servant, painted by John Hoskins in 1579. dating from the 1580s.^[2] It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England.^[1] The author Arthur Cleveland Coxe
described the painting as such: "I must not omit to mention the
time-honoured Hircocervus, or picture of the 'trusty servant,' which
hangs near the kitchen, and which emblematically sets forth those
virtues in domestics, of which we Americans
know nothing. It is a figure, part man, part porker, part deer, and
part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth, and various other symbols in
his hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable
character."^[1]

The painting had a didactic function: it is accompanied by allegorical
verses that associate the hircocervus servant's various animal parts
with distinctive virtues that the college's students were meant to
follow.^[3]

The Latin verses have been translated into English as: