Bad Dogs by Caroline Lawrence

In nearly twenty years of trying to be a writer, I notice that authors tend to return to the same themes again and again. It’s as if certain incidents or impressions from childhood have branded our creative impulses. 

One of my recurring themes is scary dogs. I’m not sure where this obsession came from because I hardly think about dogs in my waking hours and have not had one as a pet since childhood, but there they are, popping up in all my books. 

My first Roman Mystery features running dogs on all three versions of the cover. I often say it has ‘good dogs, bad dogs and dead dogs’ because someone is killing the watchdogs of Rome’s ancient seaport. I thought canicide was more suitable for a children’s detective novel than homicide. 

I thought wrong. After outraged complaints from British readers, I vowed never to kill another dog. And in thirty subsequent books I’ve hardly ever broken that vow. 

So where does my primal obsession with dogs come from?

I vaguely remember being scared by a barking dog behind a fence when I was a little girl. And I remember having nightmares of being chased by dogs. When I was about eight or nine my family acquired a delightful black and white Boston Terrier named Duchess. She had an adorably ugly little face and loved to play with us. Her favourite game was Tug Towel. One of us kids would hold one end, she would clamp jaws on the other and then pull, with ecstatic growls and bulging eyes. 

But I also remember my distaste at finding red spots of her menstrual blood dotted around the house. One day she was seduced by Sandy, a big golden laborador who belonged to a neighbour. They got stuck together mid-coitus and the entire neighbourhood came out to witness them waddling about in the middle of the road like the proverbial two-backed beast. Duchess rolled her eyes with embarrassment, or so it seemed to me. The ultimate humiliation came when someone trained a hose on the ignominious pair, drenching them with water as well as mocking laughter. 

Duchess died of old age and after a suitable period of mourning we went to the animal shelter to find a replacement. There were no Boston terriers so we settled for a pretty Sheltie mix cowering in a corner. I was going through an African phase and insisted on naming her Simba – Swahili for ‘lion’ – on account of her white mane. Far from being lion-like she was neurotic and cringing, with a tendency to snap at men who made sudden moves to stroke her. When I went to college I was relieved to leave her at home, in the care of my long-suffering parents. 

I only spent a year studying at U.C. Santa Barbara before I transferred to another campus, but I still remember the packs of dogs that roamed the streets and beaches. Abandoned by their feckless student owners, these once-beloved pets had become feral. There was a story, no doubt apocryphal, that a band of them had once cornered an undergraduate in a vacant lot and forced him to throw a stick for hours. Readers of The Thieves of Ostia now know where I got the idea for the cover scene. 

In our affluent culture saturated by images of cute animals, it is hard to think of dogs as sinister, but as I read ancient texts I am often reminded of the deeply unpleasant aspects of canine behaviour. Throughout most of human history, dogs have been considered unclean scavengers and dangerous killers. 

Dogs appear in the very first line of Homer’s Iliad, where they vie with carrion birds to feed on the bodies of dead warriors. They’re in the Odyssey, too, where a savage pack of them strike terror into the heart of our hero: 

Suddenly the baying dogs caught sight of Odysseus and flew at him, barking loudly. He had the sense to sit down and drop his staff. Even so he would have suffered ignominious injuries there and then, at his own farm, had not the swineherd dashed through the gateway, shouted at the dogs and sent them scurrying off in all directions with a shower of stones. 
(Homer Odyssey 14.28)

In fifth century Greece, the poet Euripides died after being torn apart by a pack of his host’s watchdogs as he returned late from a banquet. ‘Such a great genius did not deserve this cruel fate,’ laments the Roman who tells this story. 
(Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings 9.12.4)

In the Jewish scriptures, dogs are presented as consistently negative. They lick human blood, devour corpses and return to their vomit. (e.g. 1 Kings 22.38, 2 Kings 9:10 & Proverbs 26:11) To be called a ‘dog’ was the most degrading epithet imaginable. 
(e.g. 1 Samuel 17:43 & 2 Samuel 16:9 )

In the New Testament even Jesus refers to dogs as unclean, showing how deeply engrained this attitude was in the ancient Middle East. (Matthew 7:6 & Matthew 15:26) 

We know from naturalists like Pliny the Elder and doctors like Galen that rabid dog bites were common enough to be genuine concerns. Today, this problem has been all but eradicated in the prosperous first world, where dogs have to get their shots, but in poorer parts of the third world dog bites account for a horrifying number of child deaths.  

In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass (a mid-second century fable sometimes called ‘the first Latin novel’) our hero meets many dogs, none of them pleasant. At one point a bandit recounts the death of his fellow robber, who was wearing the ill-judged disguise of a bearskin.

Guards called long-eared, bristling hunting dogs and commanded them to attack Thrasyleon. Hiding behind a door, I clearly saw my friend bravely fighting off the dogs… Finally he slipped out of the house and sought safety in flight. But as he ran along the streets of the town, all the dogs from neighbouring alleys poured out, just as fierce and numerous as the hunting dogs who were still in pursuit… I witnessed a pathetic and ghastly sight: that of my friend surrounded by the seething pack of dogs and ripped to pieces by their jaws. 
(Apuleius, Metamorphoses IV.19 ff)

Similarly, the myth of Actaeon has the eponymous hero torn apart by his own hunting dogs after Artemis has turned him into a deer. This adds a horrible new layer to our primal fear of being devoured by predators: that of being eaten by our own faithful pets. 

For Greeks and Romans did not keep dogs solely for hunting, herding and guarding. Some of them, especially women and children, had small lapdogs purely for companionship and play. 

From the Roman world we have Helena, a dog beloved enough to receive an expensive tombstone praising her as her ‘matchless’ and ‘well-deserving’. Even the poet Martial, who can be very rude about certain women and their lapdogs, penned a charming poem about a pet dog called Issa. Unlike my family’s childhood pet Duchess, she never soiled the bedcovers with a single drop but put an imploring paw on her master’s neck whenever nature called. 
(Martial Epigrams 1.109 )

Perhaps the most famous dog from ancient sources is Argos from Homer’s Odyssey. Tick-ridden and lying on a heap of manure, the old hound recognises his returning master after twenty years and, with a feeble wag of his tail, he dies of happiness. 
(Homer, Odyssey 17.290ff)

I suppose not all ancient dogs are bad. 

Caroline Lawrence’s latest book, Death in the Arena, has a good dog on the cover. Set in Roman Britain, it is suitable for kids 9+

Pets in the Middle Ages - by Ann Swinfen

If you had lived in the Middle Ages and wanted an animal companion, what would you have chosen? A good deal depended on your gender and occupation. For ladies of the gentry and nobility, one breed above all was the favourite, this one:

The Maltese is alleged to go back, as a breed, for a thousand years. Certainly the existence of small, white, long-haired dogs of the Maltese type, as the pampered pets of wealthy women, is attested in the iconography, not only paintings but even tapestries.

Clearly the ownership of such a dog was a status symbol, just as certain breeds today can become fashionable for a time, then be replaced by the latest fad, often these days by some new cross-breed (never to be called mongrels!).

These little white dogs were pampered pets, sleeping on embroidered cushions or the owner’s bed, and frequently shown wearing velvet collars adorned with bells.

Moralists raved against the keeping of such dogs, usually fed on expensive white bread and milk, food which should have been given to the poor. The dogs lived mostly indoors, only venturing outside on a lead or carried by a loving mistress, though they must surely have attended to the needs of nature, which might often have involved a long trek from the lady’s private chambers to the garden. Perhaps a servant took care of such problems. The dog would accompany its owner when travelling, either on horseback or by carriage:

When the dog died, it would be mourned as deeply as any modern pet, and many were given marble monuments. Poets and friends of the bereaved owner would write elegies or appropriate epitaphs for the tomb. For the owner it meant the loss of a beloved daily companion.

But was it only women who owned such dogs? For their male counterparts, who spent much of their life outdoors, there were also animal companions, but they tended to be different. Favourite dogs were hunting dogs, who might be trackers, retrievers, or killers. Their descendants are still with us today in the various retrieving breeds, including spaniels, tracking dogs like fox hounds, or the hunting breeds like wolf hounds and boar hounds. These male-owned dogs did not share their owners’ homes, but lived in kennels, and their collars were practical and serviceable, sometimes adorned with spikes to protect their throats in a fight.

Men of the nobility also owned favourite horses, who clearly could not be pets, but lived in stables, and various types of birds of prey, who were kept in mews, although they are sometimes pictured indoors, where a favourite hawk might be seen perched on a special stand.

Another group of men did keep indoor pet dogs: clergy and scholars (many of the latter also being in holy orders). Like the wealthy ladies, they tended to favour the small white dogs, quiet companions often shown curled up at the owner’s feet while he studies or writes. Sometimes there might also be another, bigger dog, more of a watch dog. Petrarch favoured large dogs and even wrote about them in surviving letters.

Dogs, of course, were not the only pets. Cats were not merely companions but served a useful purpose too, since they kept down mice and rats in the home, a laudable occupation as commemorated in the ninth century Irish poem Pangur Ban by an anonymous scholar. The moralists who condemned pet dogs seem to have been more tolerant of cats, who were probably less spoiled and less expensive to keep. They also seem to have been much more difficult for contemporary artists to depict!

The typical native British cat was grey with black stripes, probably still the commonest form of moggy to this day. Our own rescue kitten is of this type. However, from the fourteenth century a type of Syrian cat began to be imported into Britain. They were a tawny brown with black stripes, a tabby colouring, and these exotic animals were much coveted, selling for high prices. Merchants would buy them and import them, often via Greece, Cyprus, and Italy, and if they survived the journey they would become the latest fashion accessory for the wealthy.

Another small mammal which often occurred as a lady’s pet – and unfamiliar today – was the squirrel. These are generally depicted with a collar and lead, presumably because they were apt to run away. They were, of course, red squirrels, the invasive American greys not yet having reached Europe. One can be seen in the arms of the woman at the front of the carriage below, while the woman at the back is being handed a small white dog. The ladies were off on their travels, taking their pets with them.

The only other type of animal which was regularly kept as an indoor pet was the monkey. Some ladies loved the creatures, despite their destructive habits, dressing them in little coats and treating them like substitute children. However, they were most popular amongst the higher clergy, who sometimes kept more than one and lavished rich food and affection on them, a practice which was roundly condemned as improper and immoral.

These abbots and bishops, like their secular counterparts, also kept horses, hunting dogs, and hawks. Chaucer has much to say (and mock) on the subject, as indeed he mocks the Prioress with her dogs.

Birds were the last of the main types of pet. These were often singing birds, our common garden songsters. Sparrows were popular, and had been ever since Catullus wrote two poems lamenting the death of his mistress Lesbia’s pet bird back in Roman times. These birds frequently had elaborate cages, some even of gold and studded with jewels. There was no limit to the ostentatious bling for such pets.

What can surprise us is the number of parrots which were kept. A parrot sounds like a very exotic pet for the Middle Ages, yet they seem to have been fairly common. These were Indian parrots, the green rose-ringed parakeet, and they appear in the margins of manuscripts, form the subject of large illustrations, and occur in portraits of their owners. Moreover, being more talkative than cats and dogs, they spawned a whole literature of their own. They had a tendency to narrate satirical poems and stories, all the way from Scotland to Spain.

Pets in the wrong place could raise hackles. Nuns had a habit of taking their little dogs (and rabbits) into divine service with them. Repeated injunctions failed to eliminate the practice altogether, though keeping pets in nunneries was tolerated as long as they were not taken into church. So many animals were kept in monasteries that it aroused the wrath of the authorities, but once again it had little effect.

The other institutions which tried to clamp down on the keeping of pets were the universities. Again and again Oxford and Cambridge issued regulations banning the keeping of pets by students. These boys came up to university at a very young age, some as young as twelve, and one can have some sympathy for a homesick boy wanting the companionship of a favourite dog. However, as many students came from the landed gentry, they also liked to bring their horses, hawks, and hunting dogs. The university bans grew ever more desperate, excluding dogs, birds, monkeys, deer, ferrets, badgers, foxes, wolves, and bears. Bears??

As far as I know, these regulations are still in existence and more successfully enforced, though when I was at Oxford there was a student who kept a pet python. He used to come to parties with it draped round his neck . . .

Most of the literature and the portraits depicting animals relate to the upper classes, but we should not assume that it was only the wealthy who kept household pets. Certainly the less wealthy could not afford collars and cages of gold, or costly embroidered cushions for their pets to sleep on, but many families would have owned a cat, one of those simple grey and black striped moggies, to keep the rats out of the vital food stores. Most accusations of witchcraft against poor old women involved claims that her pet cat was a satanic familiar. And a family dog does not have to be a pampered overfed Maltese, carried everywhere like a toy. There were ordinary household dogs, even in humble homes, like this one:

So, if you had lived in the Middle Ages, which kind of pet would you have chosen?

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Literary-historical dogs I have known, by Y S Lee

As the child of Southeast Asian immigrants, I grew up feeling somewhat appalled by the idea of sharing a house with a dog. Yes, our family had dogs when we lived in Singapore, but the dogs' place was in the garden, where they had plenty of shade and water and space to run around. They didn’t come inside the house, much less curl up on sofas or beds. As far as my parents were concerned, dogs were outdoor pets.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because several months ago my children, aged 7 and 4, mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign for a dog. And I’m about to concede defeat. I’ve accepted that our dog that will live in our house and shed on our furniture and need lots of training and exercise and brushing and bathing and veterinary visits and dear god, possibly also tooth-brushing and ear-cleaning and nail-clipping? (Maybe I’ll tackle the history of pet care in a different post.) My point is simply that all this domestic dog chat has me thinking about dogs in literary history.

The first literary–historical dogs I remember noticing was the litter of puppies in Wuthering Heights. They’re never named or numbered, of course; they’re mere props for the vivid illustration of Hareton Earnshaw’s character. As Hareton hangs the puppies (one by one? In a batch? It’s never clearly described) "from a chair-back in the doorway", we readers realize the extent to which Hareton’s own moral growth and intellectual development were strangled from birth.

Branwell Brontë's circa 1834 sibling portrait, with his own image painted out.

What’s most striking to me (as a contemporary reader) about this scene is that Hareton’s sadism towards animals does not expel him from the moral world of the novel. Emily Brontë herself disciplined her beloved dog, Keeper, with physical violence. In 1848, it was a fact of life that puppies (and kittens) were often too numerous and must sometimes be killed at birth. (This practice is relatively recent: my father-in-law had a childhood memory of his father dropping a sack of newborn puppies into a canal in 1950s Manchester.) And Hareton, with the help of Cathy Linton, eventually redeems himself. Together, the young lovers hold the promise of a happy ending for Wuthering Heights – with or without animal companions.

The next fictional dog to make a deep impression on me was Shock, Belinda's indulged pet in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, “The Rape of the Lock”. For me, the poem is a full-on olfactory assault. Let me break it down for you:

1. There’s a crush of people at Belinda’s house. Their combined body heat will heighten the ripeness of early eighteenth-century bodies.

2. This bodily funk will, in turn, be overlaid by the liberal use of perfumes.

3. The room will be lit by beeswax candles, which add their own sweet, thick scent to the air. (In a poorer household, the candles would be made of tallow and thus smell strongly of animals.)

4. As part of the ceremonial serving of coffee, Belinda’s family roasts coffee beans in the drawing room before grinding and brewing the expensive imported drink. Coffee-roasting novices expect the process to smell delectable but the toasting of green coffee beans actually produces a strong burnt aroma as the husks burn off; the roasted coffee smell emerges only at the end of the process. As a result, the smells of body musk and perfume would intermingle with the strong, acrid smell of burning.

Aubrey Beardsley's 1897 illustration of "The Rape of the Lock". At left, the Baron is about to snip off Belinda's curl.

5. The pampered, yipping, little dog Shock (whose name strikes me as a joke about the English pronunciation of “Jacques”), who fails to protect her from assault. I’m not sure how often pet dogs were bathed in 1717. However, in her biography of Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin describes the general domestic atmosphere of the 1650s: "Every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed." "The Rape of the Lock" takes place only 60 years or so later.

My third literary dog was a Newfoundland breed named "Boatswain". Having once read it, who could forget Byron’s "Epitaph to a Dog"? It's engraved on this monument at Newstead Abbey, Byron's family estate.

Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferosity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG,
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808.

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth:
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron’s anger and disgust with human hypocrisy here is all the more powerful because he practised it so well: “Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,/Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit” is a cri de coeur from a restless artist who spent much of his life at the centre of a bubble of scandal.

Byron originally posed for this portrait in 1813, about 5 years after railing against the "vain insect" that is Man. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license from the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s so much more I could say about dogs in literary history - and in social history, for that matter. But for the time being, I’ll return to my own practical dog research and continue to battle my residual squeamishness about dog odour and dog hair. Wish me luck!

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.

DOG TALES – Elizabeth Fremantle

It is no secret that I'm a dog lover and a recent research trip to look at Dutch art offered up a multitude of painted canines which brought to mind the dogs in my novels.  My work is teeming with  the creatures but they are not only included on authorial whim, the beloved pets of my protagonists can more often than not be found in the historical record.

The first of these is Katherine Parr's dog Rig who is featured in Queen's Gambit. When I was first researching the book I visited Sudeley Castle where Queen Katherine died. There are a few personal items that belonged to her in the collection there: a love letter she wrote to Thomas Seymour before they married, as well as a lock of her hair and a tooth, both taken from her grave when it was rediscovered in the eighteenth century. It was the tooth, clearly an item of great sentimental significance to have been buried with her, that particularly resonated for me. It was not a human tooth and seemed to have once belonged to a small dog. Knowing about her dog Rig I thought it possible that this was a carefully kept relic from a beloved pet. From this I gained a glimpse of understanding across the years about my protagonist and her love for her canine companion.

Many women in the Tudor court had small dogs, as we can see from the portraiture of the period. An amusing anecdote which made it into Queen's Gambit is that of Katherine Parr's dear friend and fellow religious reformer, the Duchess of Suffolk, who named her dog Gardiner. Seemingly innocuous, the name was in fact an audacious dig at her enemy Bishop Gardiner a religious conservative who would eventually attempt, and nearly succeed, to topple Queen Katherine.

Another Katherine, Lady Katherine Grey, of my second novel Sisters of Treason, had a great love of animals and kept a number of dogs. We know this because it is recorded that her pets, canines amongst them, destroyed the furniture in her rooms when she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. I characterised her as a girl who loved to be loved and what more fitting a symbol of this than a pack of small, adoring dogs. We have no names for her pets so I had to invent them and one, Stan, has a story of his own. As I was writing the first scene of Katherine Grey surrounded by her pets my editor emailed to say that her much loved terrier had died, so I thought it fitting to name one of Katherine's puppies in memory of him.

Dogs feature again in Watch the Lady but my protagonist, Penelope Devereux's puppy Fides is pure invention. I have included however The Earl of Leicester's old russet and white hound, who wanders about lost at Wanstead after his owner's death. This dog was taken from a painting from the mid 1560s where such a hound can be found in the corner of the image gazing lovingly at his master.

Dogs were often included in portraits to signify fidelity and presumably the hound here is included as a demonstration of Leicester's loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, who favoured him and many believed might marry him. Interestingly though, he is said to have had a flirtation with one of the Queen's maids Lettice Knollys (later to become his wife) in 1565 and by 1568 he was conducting a liaison with the recently widowed Lady Sheffield, who maintained they had married in secret even on her deathbed. This was never proven and the son they produced was named a bastard. In the light of this it is amusing to speculate that the dog in the painting might well be there more as a way to cover Leicester's disloyalty, than to indicate his faithfulness.

There is a delightful picture of Arbella Stuart, the heroine of my next novel, with two parrots, a pair of finches, a monkey and a small white dog. I rather fancifully took this dog to be Geddon, Mary Queen of Scot's Skye terrier who it is said had to be prised from her decapitated corpse. I have imagined that the animal found its way back to  Arbella at Chatsworth with Mary's host/jailer, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was Arbella's step grandfather. Another portrait of Arbella in later life, shows her with a tan and white spaniel tucked in the crook of her arm. In the novel this little dog, which I named Ruff, becomes the device by which she encounters someone who is to change the course of her life.

It's hard to imagine creating the world of a novel without including the creatures that were so much part of the fabric of life in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, either as pets or working animals. For me they are a means to conjure the past and also a way to help draw my characters. The way an individual responds to the  animals, as well as the people, around them can reveal a great deal about their personality.


Find out more about Elizabeth Fremantle's books on her website elizabethfremantle.com

'Think More Dog' by Karen Maitland

St Christopher with a dog's head

You have to feel sorry for Étienne de Bourbon, a medieval Churches Inquisitor, who was sent to a remote part of Lyon in France to try to stamp out pagan customs there. He became so encouraged when women earnestly assured him that they were not praying to the old gods, but to a beloved local saint, St. Guinefort, who had wrought miraculous cures for their children. Étienne really thought he was making great progress until he started asking questions about this unknown saint and discovered the saint was a dog.

Locals told him that a knight had ridden off one day leaving his faithful hound, Guinefort, to guard his infant son, and in common with similar legends from all over Europe from Saxon times, the knight had returned to find the cradle overturned, baby missing and blood on the teeth of his dog. In horror, believing the dog had devoured his son, the knight drew his sword slew the animal. Moments later, he heard the child crying and found him unharmed, with a dead viper lying close by, bearing the teeth-marks of the faithful hound. In grief, the knight buried the dog down a well and planted a grove of sacred trees around it.

Miracles began to be associated with the dog and locals declared the dog a saint, whose feast day was celebrated on 22nd August. Women brought ailing infants to St Guinefort’s resting place and made offerings of salt and items of their infants’ clothes. They then passed the child between two tree trunks 3x3 times - the magic number. Though, according to the disgruntled Étienne, the mothers didn’t gently ‘pass’ the child, but threw the baby to a woman on the other side of the trees who would then toss it back.

Ailing infants were often thought to be changelings, the healthy babies having been stolen by the devil, faery

Devil replacing a human baby with a changeling

folk or in this case forest fauns. So in Lyon, after the mothers had prayed for the return of their child, the changeling would be left alone in the sacred grove beneath burning candles, to await the exchange with the real baby. This, Étienne claimed, often resulted in infants being burned. But it was a widely held belief across Europe that if a mother whipped the changeling baby or threatened to toss it in the fire, the faery folk would hear its screams and rush to rescue it, returning the stolen child. So if the mothers really were doing this at St Guinefort’s well, perhaps it was because they were trying to make changeling babies cry or appear to be in danger in order to force the fauns to return the kidnapped child.

Whatever the truth, Étienne declared that a dog couldn’t be a saint, so it must be a heretic. He had the dog’s bones dug up and burned on a pyre made from the trees he felled from the sacred grove. But this only fuelled the flames of the local women’s devotion and many still remained faithful to St Guinefort right up until the early twentieth century.

With its sacred grove and holy well, the customs surrounding the dog-saint are probably a direct survival of ancient pre-Christian worship on this site, which later acquired a veneer of Christian elements. But it proved remarkably enduring in spite of the Church’s opposition.

Another doggy saint was the better-known St Christopher or the cynocephalus (dog-headed) saint.

St Christopher

According to the English martyrologies, St Christopher came from a race of people who were all half-hounds. He was described as having the head of a hound, long hair, bright eyes and teeth as sharp and strong as a boar’s tusks. They fail to mention a wet nose, but otherwise he sounds remarkably healthy in dog terms. Obviously his diet of ‘human flesh’ suited him. There are numerous different legends about his conversion, one saying that having discovering ‘the devils’ he served were afraid of Christ, he decided to serve the stronger master. On his conversion, his head was transformed and he was so handsome that two women tried to seduce him in prison. The bestial pagan man becoming fully human was a useful allegory for the Church.

Interestingly though, the Eastern Orthodox Church reverses the dog-head legend of St Christopher. In their version he was a remarkably good-looking youth and women were forever throwing themselves at him, so he prayed that he might be made less attractive to women and God answered his prayers by giving him a dog’s head.

Curiously, neither St Christopher nor St Guinefort is the patron saint of dogs, as you might expect. That

St Sithney Church, Cornwall. Photographer: Tony Atkin

honour goes to St Hubert, also the patron saints of hunters, who protects healthy dogs and St Sithney who cures mad dogs. Legend goes that it was revealed to St Sithney that he was to be made patron saint of girls. He begged to be excused on the grounds that he would never get any peace, because girls would be praying to him night and day for handsome lovers and pretty clothes. Sithney declared that ‘mad dogs’ would be less trouble. So from then on, sick and mad dogs were taken to drink from his well, known as the well of St Sezni.

But sadly neither St Sithney nor St Hubert was able to protect one poor dog that lived in Hanley Castle,

Worcestershire. At the time of the civil war, the castle was in the hands of an ardent royalist, Thomas Holroyd who own a one-eyed bulldog called Charlie, named after the king. In 1651, the Roundheads seized the castle and, discovering the dog’s royalist name, hanged the poor bulldog from an oak-tree. Holroyd, though arrested and charged with treason, managed to survive and afterwards regain much of his property, but it is said the ghost of the bulldog forever haunts the village searching for his master.

They Dog Our Footsteps, by Leslie Wilson

When I was in Florence recently - oh, the bliss! and doing the gallery-crawl, as you do! I bought a lovely little book called Dogs In Galleries. I think what sold it to me was the humour of the jacket  - but it did get me looking at representations of dogs in art. The day after I bought the book, I took my husband to Pisa, to see the Campo dei Miracoli, because as far as I am concerned, the Baptistery there is the most beautiful building in the world. But there, as well as a sublime simplicity and beauty of proportion that goes straight to my heart -

I found dogs. More than I expected, too, There was one in a stained-glass window in the Baptistery - here it is -

and even before we had entered the Baptistery, we had found dogs acting as gutter-spouts on the outside of the Cathedral. In the course of the day, we found rather a lot of dogs, and not just hunting dogs, either, as you might expect, but also dogs living indoors with sculpted families, and little lap-dogs too.

This dog - in the cloister - is beneath the table where Tobias, I think, from the Book of Tobit, is restoring his sight to his aged father. There was no label on the bas-relief, but I'm sure I'm right.  There's the Angel on the right. Beneath a table is just where the dog would be, hoping, no doubt, that someone would shortly put something out to eat, and then a bit of it might drop down. People will sometimes tell you that dogs always used to live in kennels outside, but in medieval times,  I was taught at school, they were there, waiting to get the bones people threw down after they'd finished gnawing them for themselves. In other words, they were waste disposal operatives, just as my own dog is, and very useful when there is spilled food to mop up, or when my twin grandsons are eating finger food in their high chairs.

But look at this dog, on one of the doors of Pisa Cathedral. 

It's a scene of the Adoration of the Magi and the dog is looking straight at Jesus, as if the artist, in contradiction to the official doctrine of the Church, had given him a soul. The dog knows that this baby is special, quite different from any other baby, and is gazing at him with joy. I'm not being sentimental here, just considering the import of that fixed canine gaze.

After all, dogs have evolved into a special relationship with us that is perhaps unparalleled in the natural world. They are descendants of wolves, and share, I think 98% of their genetic material with the wolf - but they aren't wolves. 

A wolf may be raised by humans, it may even  become very friendly with humans, but it won't have that instinctive desire to please humans that a puppy has. It remains a wild animal. I recently read a very interesting book by John Bradshaw called In Defence of Dogs. I discovered that studies have been done of feral dog populations that show that dog behaviour is essentially different from wolf behaviour, even if the dogs don't live with humans. The wolves who became dogs, even, Bradshaw says, were probably different from today's wolves, who bitter experience has taught to be extremely shy of human beings. But at some stage - no-one knows exactly when - somewhere - grey wolves approached human camp fires and became hangers-on of the human race.

I watched a television programme once that suggested the socialisation was initially done by children. Having raised one puppy with kids at home, and the second one, our current dog, without resident young of our own, I think this is extremely likely. It is much harder work to bring a puppy up if you don't have children around to help. Admittedly, my young, when the first dog came among us, were over ten, not tinies. However, our current dog, Matilda, adores our young grandsons, and is staggeringly tolerant of crawling babies doing things to her that she would object to, strongly, from adults. We have to keep a sharp eye out, not so that she doesn't hurt the babies (they are twins, a double hazard!) but so that the twins don't hurt her.

But leaving the personal anecdotes aside; dogs must have revolutionised human society, in their many helpful roles as herders, hunting dogs, and guard dogs. If the agricultural revolution led to population explosions, what was the contribution to our ability to feed ourselves of dogs who applied their lupine skills to helping the hunt, and guarded sheep, cows, and goats from their wild cousins? 

When I walk with my own dog, Matilda, I often have the feeling that I have been walking thus, with a dog companion, for thousands of years. There is an antiquity in the relationship that is no sentimentality. And those of us who feel more truly themselves with a dog friend, are surely inheritors of a symbiotic relationship that is part of our humanity. Even those who don't want to have dogs - like my mother-in-law - have china dog ornaments or pictures of dogs on their walls.

Dogs have been buried with their masters and mistresses, mummified - in the Museum in Cairo I saw a mummified Saluki dog, quite recognisable as the kind that run round in the streets of Cairo nowadays. A beloved and skilled hunting dog, maybe. It's amazing to see it.

I leave you with another image from Pisa, of a spaniel doing what spaniels do, wriggling into the undergrowth to come out, covered in grass-seeds, bits of twig and goose-grass no doubt, to flush the game for its master. The posture and activity are so accurately-observed, you can almost hear the dog panting and barking, maybe, and see the tail furiously wagging, because for this animal, business and pleasure are one and the same thing.

All photos by Leslie or David Wilson.