The imaginative category of “pet” as we conceive of it probably didn’t exist for people in medieval Europe, but they did draw a pretty clear distinction between animals which they kept for work or sport and the animals which they kept for companionship and play. The majority of writing on the care of dogs is in the former category, found in hunting manuals like Edward of York’s Master of Game. Companion animals, and writings about companion animals, were far less common. As a rule, companion animals in the High and Late Middle Ages were expensively kept trappings of luxury – the privilege of nobility, the clergy and the intellectual classes. Canine companions were smaller breeds, often serving principally as lapdogs for women. These are animals that serve not just as companionship but symbols of status and wealth.
We have a few accounts of what might loosely be termed dog-walking, but they differ pretty markedly from modern practises. Collars and leads have an obvious use in the training of working dogs, but outside the practicalities of the hunt might themselves be expensively produced symbols of ownership – one thinks of the twenty-plus white hounds in the pageant of Lycurgus in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, ‘with mosel [muzzle] faste ybounde / Colered [collared] of gold, and tourettes [leash-rings] fyled rounde’ (2151–2). Such accessories don’t seem to have been used in the walking of companion animals. The benefits of exercise were themselves not concretely understood; an overfed and under-exercised animal was, in its own way, an expression of luxury. All of which is to say that the walking of companion dogs in the regimented way that we now practise it would not have been the norm in medieval Europe.
But let’s cut to the chase. Who were the dog-walkers, and how did they go about it? The fullest account I know of is that of the Italian poet and humanist Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), who seems to have owned a few dogs over the course of his life. One of them (probably a larger hunting breed, but Petrarch did not use it for sport) was sent to him by his patron Cardinal Giovanni Colonna while Petrarch was living in Vaucluse, and in 1347 Petrarch wrote him a verse letter in which he describes how the animal was getting on. The letter can’t be treated as a strictly “historical” source – much is made of the idea that the dog has descended from a luxurious home with the Cardinal to a more moderate lifestyle, which Petrarch no doubt plays up for literary effect. But some of the details are relevant: the dog is healthier and content with its new lifestyle, it runs and swims freely in the countryside and subsists on a simple diet. Most interestingly of all, it freely accompanies him on his walks – and occasionally runs off to bark at the wild geese!
As depictions of more typical companion animals go, I quite enjoy the one in The Kingis Quair, a fifteenth-century poem attributed to James I of Scotland. The narrator, seemingly James during his lavish “imprisonment” in England, looks down from a tower into a beautiful little garden where he sees a noble woman walking amongst the flowers and falls instantly in love with her. She does not walk alone:
And eft myn eye full pitously adoun
I kest, behalding unto hir lytill hound
That with his bellis playit on the ground:
Than wold I say and sigh therwith a lyte,
”A, wele were him that now were in thy plyte!”
And afterward I cast my eye very sorrowfully down, looking toward her little dog that played on the ground with his bells. Then I said with a little sigh, “A, it would be well for he who were now in your situation!”
There’s a comparable noblewoman’s little dog with the freedom to roam a lavish garden in the thirteenth-century French romance Châtelaine de Vergi; when the Châtelaine sends her dog out to walk in the garden, her love knows that she is alone and that he can come to see her.
What these various depictions seem to tell us about dog-walking in medieval Europe is that the walking of the dog itself was almost incidental. Petrarch and the love of James I both go walking for their own pleasure – they bring their canine companion along for their own benefit, without any particular intent to exercise and with no need to recourse to a lead. It is worth mentioning at this point that the accepted theological, philosophical and scientific wisdom in the medieval West was that animals were irrational and soulless creations put in the world chiefly for the labour, pleasure and (like the symbolic animals of the Bestiary) edification of humans. I’m often inclined to be sceptical of how much the people who kept pets and worked with animals might have believed in this view (which was parroted by almost every major authority – with the sort-of exception of the curious Adelard of Bath). But I’m not especially surprised to find that the walking of companion dogs seems largely to have been an extension of the function that they served at home, namely to provide company and play at their owner’s whim.
I’d be interested to see “what happened next”, and hopefully someone else can fill that in. As I mentioned, the majority of writing on caring for dogs is in works on hunting, and the vast majority of “walked” dogs appear in the context of labour. Of course, there can be little doubt that at least some the people who owned and kept these animals saw them as more than servants. It is my conjecture (but an educated one!) that the more widespread practice of walking companion dogs after the Middle Ages will have owed some amount to the existing practices for the husbandry of working animals.
Sources:
Juliana Schiesari, ‘Portrait of the Poet as a Dog: Petrarch’s Epistola Metrica III, 5’, Italica 84.2/3 (2007), 162–72.
Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (2010).
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets (2014).
