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!

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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.