Image

SEVENTEEN

Middlin’ Dog to Guard,
Hunt, Haul, Herd,
Fight, and Preen

Image

The Middle Ages’ midsize dog guards home and hearth,
and stands between dogs big and small. But big is about
the hunt and class and power. Small is companionship
and privilege, except when it is not. Dogs conquer
a New World. The masses strike back
.

As a rule, the world’s great religions veer from a form of benign ambivalence to absolute denunciation and condemnation of the dog, with a few exceptions for dogs that are deemed useful. Among those are herding dogs, guard dogs, hunting dogs, and, for Christians, little companion dogs—all useful and fine exemplars of loyalty and fidelity except when they are not. But there are also the dirty village dogs, the excrement-, corpse-, and garbage-eating, livestock-killing, chicken-thieving, disease-bearing, flea- and tick-spreading, low-born, downwardly mobile dogs. Islam recognizes only working dogs and hunting dogs, than which no creature is more noble, and Judaism dispensed with the hunting dog but came to employ police and military dogs after its reestablishment the latter half of the twentieth century.

Hinduism sees dogs as links between the quick and the dead, and so has times when sacrifices are made to them. Their chief value to the living is as protectors of wealth, the home, and women and children—a significant assignment.

Chao-chou Ts’ung-shen, the ninth-century Zen master, answered a series of questions about the dog that seem to capture its essence as a noncompliant rule breaker from the start. When asked by a fellow Chinese monk, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?” Chao-chou responded, “Wu,” which translates, “It does not.” In the exchange that follows, Chao-chou makes clear that the dog has “karmic consciousness,” and that means the dog has no Buddha-nature because it is Buddha-nature. Since it is already one with “karmic consciousness,” in order to exist physically in this world, it “knowingly commits a deliberate violation.”1

The dog “is.”

Christian attitudes toward dogs are the most contradictory and the most contingent on the status of the dogs and people. As a rule, through the Middle Ages, the dogs of the nobility were, like their masters, deemed special because of their station in life. Those secular hounds had their spiritual counterparts in the cynosure wearing Domini canes, “hounds of god,” who held special status derived from their Lord, Jesus, the “hound of heaven.” The Dominicans became the Grand Inquisitors of the thirteenth century, responsible for stamping out heresies, including the common practice among peasants of granting godhood, or at least great spiritual power, to animals, including dogs. When the dog in question was a greyhound more noble than the noble who owned him, the situation was judged beyond the pale.

That is the case with the tale of Guinefort, which dates from at least the thirteenth century, the south of France, where a young lord was living the fine, noble hunting life with his wife and newborn baby and his devoted greyhound, Guinefort. Following custom, he gave the hound the run of the house and trusted him to guard castle and child. Returning home one afternoon, the noble couple went to the nursery and were greeted by a blood-soaked Guinefort in a bloodstained room. The child’s bed was overturned, the child nowhere to be seen. Leaping simultaneously to conclusion and action, the lord drew his sword and slew his beloved dog. By then his lady had discovered the child unharmed under the bed, and together lord and lady noticed the bits and pieces of bloody flesh scattered about the room. They reassembled them into a giant serpent—surely the devil’s own agent. Guinefort had performed his task brilliantly. The guilt-ridden parents dumped the body of Guinefort down a well, sealed it, and planted an oak grove hoping both to conceal their perfidy and commemorate their dog.2

The peasants understood who the saint was and brought their children to the sacred oak grove in the hope that he would cure them. He worked well enough that the Church periodically complained but did nothing, until the Dominican inquisitor Stephen of Bourbon exhumed what he said were Guinefort’s bones and scattered them to the wind. Then he cut down the oak grove and declared it a crime and mortal sin to go there seeking help from the devil. But people brought their children there for seven hundred more years, until antibiotics proved a more effective remedy.

The dogs of medieval European nobles followed roughly the Roman classifications, real and imagined, with specific types, usually geographically defined, increasingly improved upon in terms of special coat-color combinations, ear length, overall size, vocalizations, working styles, and other identifying characteristics. These may have amounted to little more than variations on an established type of local hound, but that was less important than the status owning them provided. As land became increasingly devoted to agriculture, forests and game grew in short supply, so nobles who could, set aside forest preserves to provide wood for themselves, but more precisely a place to hunt. “Laws of the forest” were promulgated to protect them and their wildlife from poachers, who, if caught, could be castrated, blinded, or wrapped in a deer skin and turned loose for the hounds’ sport.

In England, the law of the forest, promulgated by Henry II early in the twelfth century, forbade peasants and laborers from keeping mastiffs or hunting hounds within or near royal forests. Freeholders and farmers could keep mastiffs—defined as being of the Molossian type and including “barking curs”—to protect their homes and farms. But if they were bigger than a certain size—measured by whether their front paw would pass through an iron stirrup—they had to be expeditated. The middle three nails on each forepaw were chopped off at the flesh with a blow from a mallet on a sharp chisel, reportedly so that the dog could not leap on a stag’s back and kill it with a single bite, or even get traction for such a move. A person caught with an unexpeditated dog was fined three shillings, unless he had a royal patent to keep mastiffs and hounds.3

The English law and others like it effectively forced peasants and laborers near such restricted areas to keep medium to small dogs who were not high born or fancy-looking but who were often well trained and wise in the poaching arts. In some cases these were the same peasants and freedmen who ran the kennels for the nobility—or their relatives.

Many noble families had one or more representatives in the clergy or a religious order as a way to hedge their bets and keep Church power in check, and it was not unusual for them to bring their preoccupations with them when entering an order.

In the ninth century, the Belgian Benedictine monastery of Saint Hubert developed an eponymous line of tracking dogs that soon became famous for their ability to track humans and hold them in their teeth until the authorities came. These were slow trailing dogs with long, droopy ears and pendulous lips said to be descended from the ubiquitous Molossus. This desire for connection to the Molossus of Rome, and, more profoundly, Greece, smells strongly of the desire to wrap uncertain parentage or authority in the mantle of tradition—the way Augustus commissioned Virgil to pen the Aeneid, the epic of Rome’s founding, to bestow on it an aura of historical inevitability and legitimacy. To track a dog’s heritage to the near-mythical Molossus was to grant it standing in the world, which the Church did not like. But the people who supported the Church liked hunting with dogs; therein rose a problem.

The Saint Hubert hound existed into the nineteenth century, often paired and compared with Britain’s entry in the field of slow trailers, the Talbot hound. They were legendary, and the legends represented a reality born of the person’s desire. Thus, to say that ninth-century Benedictines knew of the Molossus—that any number of putatively not well educated medieval lords knew of the Molossus—is to say that knowledge of the classics was not fully lost in the Middle Ages, at least when it came to matters of dogs, birds, and hunting or heraldry.

If such knowledge had been lost, some of it was regained in the repeated invasions of the Holy Land during the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the Crusaders brought back whatever booty they could loot or steal—from dogs to illuminated manuscripts, doubtless dealing with the hunt and military arts. The thirteenth-century Mongol invasion brought new dogs into Eastern Europe from across central Asia.

Hunting hounds and war dogs were for men; little spaniels were for women, especially the hunters among them, and so were often freakish little sleeve dogs, barely bigger than a rat. The little dogs were just amusements, adornments for ladies who enjoyed rank and privileges above the servants who nursed them and cared for them. Despite local, regional, and continental differences in appearance and treatment, the broad divisions largely held where ruling classes kept dogs, often maintaining them in their own kennels. They might not look very refined in part because the emphasis was on what they did: the sight hound/greyhound deployed in open country to deliver the coup de grâce; scent hounds of various sizes and shapes and vocalizations, from leggy chase hounds, Chien courants to saddlebagsize beagles, with squared-off harriers and slower-going Saint Hubert or Talbot bloodhounds in between; the silent “finder hound,” the lymer; and the brutish alaunt—the hunters’ version of the brachycephalic mastiff or bowlegged bulldog—a catch dog for boar, bear, and badger, a foul-tempered bully. Conflation aside, the important point is that a divide between the dogs of people with power and wealth and those laborers, peasants, and everyone else that had to have formed with the earliest civilizations had deepened. Being a thug, the alaunt was allowed to look like one. Not infrequently a small terrier turned the role of the alaunt into that of a “baying-up dog,” responsible for holding a much larger animal’s attention while the hunters quietly took its life.4

Despite such fine distinctions, the greatest number of animals in medieval villages and towns from Scotland to Russia were mediumsized dogs. Built in the ninth century, Veliky Novgorod, the Great Novgorod, was the first capital of Russia and through the fourteenth century a major trading hub between the Baltic Sea, central Asia, and Byzantium, and thus a mixing zone for all manner of people and goods. Its dogs followed the medieval trinity—a few large and small dogs and abundant medium dogs supplemented during the town’s first three centuries by husky-type dogs, according to Russian archaeologist Andrei Zinoviev, who cataloged a large collection of canid bones from the period of Novgorod’s ascendancy. Calling the medium-sized dogs “scavenging curs,” he speculated in 2010 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology that they were primarily barking alarms for town houses and farmsteads, the purpose being to alert the residents and frighten intruders, who would rather try another house than test the dog’s willingness to back up its bark with a bite. The few large dogs were the size of the Caucasus mountain dogs, while the small dogs, at twenty-three pounds, matched the size of the Finnish spitz, a famous barker in its own right. Both types seemed to belong to wealthy people in the community.5

In other cities, relative proportions and size of the groups might have varied, but the dominance of the midsize dog in terms of sheer numbers did not change. Many scholars make a mistake in thinking that this population of medium dogs was comprised only of free-ranging, scavenging curs who did little but bark warnings if someone approached a house they considered their own largely because a resident fed them scraps.

Packs—more precisely, groups—of free-ranging and feral dogs periodically rampaged in various parts of Europe in the aftermath of battles that decimated the countryside and following local outbreaks of the plague or cholera or some other epidemic. None of those approached the continent-wide disaster that was the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, which obliterated nearly one-third of the population, with some cities, like Paris, losing 50 percent, and others, like Venice, plummeting by 80 percent. That left dogs on their own to scavenge corpses or any other food they could find, and unquestionably they did.

The greatest public health risk for dogs came from rabies, which, because it was so thoroughly misunderstood, annually brought on the death of many fine dogs.

To dodge legal prohibitions against owning large dogs, farmers and shepherds developed their stock dogs from a size that allowed them the combination of agility and power they needed to work everything from ducks to cattle. What species of livestock the dog worked was determined by the dog, and more than a few of them were capable of working cattle or sheep and pigs by morning and hunting by night. Whereas “the hunt” by nobility might be the daily reenactment of the quest for the Holy Grail or a sport with the serious result of putting food on the table or preparing for the next war or crusade, since they were constants of medieval life, the “poach” was a subversion necessary for physical and psychological survival.

Dogs pulled carts for people too poor for livestock. They turned wheels that powered machinery or drew water from wells. They stole food and purses. They fished and set nets. They dug animals out of their burrows. If a task needed doing, someone somewhere at sometime probably succeeded in training a dog to do it. The dog so trained was more likely than not from the ranks of those medium-sized dogs so common in medieval towns and villages.

Work for the butcher’s dog was a blood sport, a violent spectacle repeated throughout the day. He grabbed the bull by its nose and held on while the butcher opened its veins and bled it to death.

Fine though these dogs were, in the eyes of the lords and ladies they were no better than people who were poorly bred. Medieval and Renaissance notions of noble breeding and blood purity reached their apotheosis of sorts in fifteenth-century Spain, where forces gathered to complete the expulsion of Jews and Moors and all their spawn, no matter how distant and no matter that they may have been Christian and Spanish for generations. Limpieza de sangre, “cleanliness of the blood” or “purity of the blood,” was demanded of all Spaniards, and if they did not have it—and a wise nobleman or priest could tell at a glance—they were gone.

The Spaniards attempted to maintain that purity in breeding livestock, horses, and dogs in their monasteries, castles, and haciendas. The dogs were close to those in the rest of Europe in classification: lebrel, a greyhound a fast chase hound mix; mastin, dark for home protection and light for the flock; sabueso, a slow scent hound of the bloodhound sort; alano, a foul-tempered wolfhound; perro de presa, a catch dog, or short, powerful bulldog type; and perro de ayudas, an aid or assistance dog. Spanish troops deployed these dogs to devastating effect in la Monteria Inferna, “the infernal chase,” which turned infidels and impure humans into prey to be hunted down and torn asunder. Developed in the Canary Islands, it was refined in the final campaign against what remained of the Moors at the time Columbus was making his first voyage to what proved to be the New World.

Starting with Columbus, Spanish conquistadors and adventurers deployed their dogs, especially the lebrels, mastins, alanos, and catch dogs, to such murderous effect that they destroyed millions of people. Millions more perished from combat and introduced disease, especially small pox. A Dominican priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, began to protest the slaughter with thirteen other priests around 1516, winning some attention and concessions from the crown, concessions that were rolled back almost as soon as they were promulgated. Serious reform was not undertaken until promulgation of the New Laws in 1542 by Charles V restored some native rights.

By then the Conquest was nearly complete. African slaves were replacing the rebellious and increasingly dead native people on the newly formed plantations. But Las Casas refused to let go, and in 1552 he published a detailed and graphic account of the brutality, Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de Las Indias (A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indians). The encyclopaedic Historia de Las Indias was published in 1570, twenty years after his death. If any good could be said to have come from such slaughter, it was that the magnitude of the atrocity was so great that British, French, and Dutch colonists subsequently eschewed the use of war dogs in the New World—not always happily—and lost no time pillorying the Spanish for their brutality.

That was a major concession since dogs were a common weapon of war—usually aimed at opposing horsemen. No one quite matched the Greek fire helmets, which were dogs with pots of burning oil tied on their heads sent to panic enemy horsemen, or the Celtic catch dogs, who would grab the nose of enemy horses—no one without a firearm, that is. A gun neutralizes even a large dog very quickly, as do well-placed arrows.

Perhaps the first European compendium devoted purely to the dogs of a place was Johannes Caius’s De Canibus Britannicis, published in 1570 in Latin, as befit a scholarly work prepared at the behest of the distinguished Swedish naturalist, Conrad Gessner. Abraham Fleming, a former student of Caius’s, translated the book into A Treatise of Englishe Dogges in 1576. Dividing British dogs by function, Caius produced a comprehensive work that showed how much humans in just one part of the world had altered the dog since the fall of Rome. Following custom, hunting dogs dominated the field: the bloodhound and harrier for “smelling”; the gasehound for quickly locating game; the greyhound for “swiftness” and “quick spying”; the leuimer, or lyemmer, a cross between a harrier and greyhound known for its enthusiastic pursuit of game; the “tumbler,” a “sly,” “crafty,” acrobatic dog who bunched game and then caught its prey by the nose, the way curs do, and ambushed rabbits; and the “theevish dog,” the silent running, nighttime hunting poacher’s cur, a sort of prick-eared downsized greyhound, whippetlike, renowned for its rabbit hunting. Caius also names as hunters the terrare, the fierce little terriers as willing to bay a bear as to dig a critter out of its den.6

Caius identified two groups of fowling dogs—upland bird-hunting spaniels, so named because of the belief that most of them originated in Spain, an otherwise unidentified blue merle French dog, recently arrived, and setters. He names water dogs, too, among them the “Fynder,” a water spaniel, not unlike the French barbet. Also a fishing dog that hunted among the rocks for stranded fish. And the Spaniel Gentle or Comforter was identified with the Maltese and Cavalier King Charles spaniel by proponents of those breeds.

Hounds generally got top billing, but the “dogs of the coarser sort” were the stars, starting with the shepherd’s dog, who responded to voice and whistle and would sometimes condition its flock to gather on hearing the whistle and begin moving toward the fold on its own, rather than face the dog. Caius also names the less refined mastiffs—large, short-faced, fighting, guarding, and hunting dogs; the “mooner,” whose purpose in life was apparently to bark at the moon; the “water drawer”; the “messenger dog”; the “tinker’s cur,” erstwhile companion to the itinerant tinker who fixed pots and other metal goods; and the “defending dog,” who never deserted his master. The big shepherd dog is absent, Caius said, because there were no wolves in the British Isles and so they were unneeded.

The tinker’s cur carried all of the tinker’s tools and also provided him protection on his travels, something the socialized wolf began for traders who always had to look out for thieves. They love their masters and despise strangers, Caius said,

whereupon it followeth that they are to their masters, in traveiling a singuler safgard, defending them forceably from the invasion of villons and theefes, preserving their lyfes from losse, and their health from hassard, theyr fleshe from hacking and hewing with such like desperate daungers. For which consideration they are meritoriously tearmed.7

The most infamous of the mastiffs were the Bandogges, who guarded the Tower of London and were used in the “sports” of bull and bear baiting, and the butcher’s dog. A Molossus was also present, but Caius has little to say on that score.

Those dogs bred to type, meaning they were identifiable as whatever they were supposed to be and thus were a higher class than the “rascals,” the randomly bred and breeding mutts who were employed as “turnspits” for churning butter or turning spits of meat; “wappe,” who barked outside a house it called home to announce to everyone, inside and out, that visitors were on the grounds; and the “dancers,” who performed various tricks and acrobatics on the street to earn money for their masters. Dogs are as capable of being clowns as people are, without question, and that is one reason we get on so well with them.

On the eve of the eighteenth century, Richard Blome revised Caius’s list in The Gentleman’s Recreation, adding the lurcher, a medium–sized crossbred hound beloved of poachers; a shrunken harrier called a beagle; and a new terrier born of the crossing of a beagle and a mastiff that sounds like the forerunner of the Jack Russell terrier.

The French had multiples of hounds, pointers, mastiffs, mountain dogs, and herding dogs, including several types found around Paris alone. Indeed, most places had their own distinctive dog or dogs that may have changed over the years with changing fashion or war or disease. Not long before he became president, George Washington sought some French hounds—perhaps grand bleu de gascogne, considered the most regal of French hounds—to incorporate into his pack of foxhounds. His ally in war, virtually his adopted son, the Marquis de Lafayette, who obtained them for him, explained that the hounds were difficult to find because the king favored the faster, smaller English hounds, and the nobility went along with him. Nonetheless, he had secured three males and four females and dispatched them for America in the care of young John Quincy Adams, bound for Harvard University by way of New York after a summer in Europe.8

Washington also sought from Ireland one of the big, legendary wolfhounds, only to learn that they could no longer be found since extirpation of wolves from the island. He was offered a well-bred mastiff instead but turned it down for lack of mobility. Free-ranging dogs operating like predators were a problem then, like they are now, and although records are scarce, custom dictates that they were treated accordingly. As the dog and human populations increased, the battle against wolves intensified for they, more than marauding dogs, embodied wild, unpredictable nature.9

The domestication of Nature motivated this war on wolves and wild predators, on Indians, on wetlands and rivers that could be drained, channelized, or dammed. The goal was to “civilize” Nature and improve on it scientifically.