The liver bird is a mythical creature which is the symbol of the English city of Liverpool. It is normally represented as a cormorant, and appears as such on the city's arms, in which it bears a branch of laver seaweed in its beak as a further pun on the name "Liverpool". History King John founded the borough of Liverpool by royal charter in 1207. The borough's second charter, granted by Henry III in 1229, gave the townspeople the right to form a guild with the privileges this came with, including the right to use a common seal. Liverpool's ancient seal probably dated from this time, though the earliest surviving impression (kept in the British Museum) is from 1352. The seal depicted a generic bird with a plant sprig in its beak, together with a scroll inscribed (in shaky letters) "JOHIS" - an abbreviation for Johannis, Latin for "John's". The bird was almost certainly intended to be an eagle, the symbol of John the Evangelist, who was both the namesake and the patron saint of King John. The plant sprig is interpreted as broom (planta genista in Latin), a badge of the Plantagenet dynasty. Also visible on the seal is a star and crescent, one of King John's personal badges. The shoddy draughtsmanship of the seal has given rise to other theories. Richard Brooke, a 19th-century Liverpudlian antiquary, surmised that the bird was a dove with an olive branch, and that the scroll read "NOBIS" or "VOBIS". By the 17th century the bird's real identity had been forgotten: it began to be interpreted either as a cormorant, a common bird in the area, or as a "lever". In 1611 the municipal records describe the mayor receiving a plate "marked with the Cormorant, the Townes Armes", while in 1668 the Earl of Derby gifted the town a silver-gilt mace engraved with a "leaver". In his 1688 work The Academie of Armorie, Randle Holme records the arms of Liverpool as a blue "lever" upon a silver field. Holme takes this word to be an adaptation of the German loffler or Dutch lepler/lefler, both referring to the spoonbill. It is possible that these continental words were adopted for the bird in Liverpool's arms as they made a fitting allusion to the name "Liverpool". Around the same time the broom sprig in the bird's beak was reinterpreted as a branch of laver, also on