Read Online Rabid by Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik - Free Book Online

prince of the fourteenth century so loved his two alaunts, Bravor and Rebez, that they slept on either side of him in his bed. Devotion to the hunt extended to the clergy as well. One medievalarchbishop of Canterbury kept twenty hunting grounds of his own, while even Thomas à Becket, when serving as Henry II’s ambassador to France, insisted that hunting dogs accompany him in his retinue.
    Medieval love of the hound was not entirely a masculine province. Among the best-loved English treatises on hunting is the fifteenth-century
Boke of Saint Albans,
written by one Juliana Berners, prioress of the Sopwell nunnery. Penned entirely in verse, Berners’s book limns the look of the ideal greyhound: “A grehounde sholde be heeded lyke a snake: and neckyd lyke a drake: fotyd lyke a catte: tayllyd lyke a ratte,” * and so on. Indeed, the highborn woman’s devotion to hounds—and vice versa—is a common trope in accounts of medieval life, particularly regarding those women who, like Berners, resided in convents. Chaucer’s own Prioress, in
The Canterbury Tales,
travels with “small houndes” that she “fedde with rosted flesh, or milk and wastel-breed,” that is, white bread. (Such a fondness for dogs among nuns is amply documented in real life, too. In 1387, at roughly the same time that Chaucer was writing his “Prioress’s Tale,” the bishop William of Wykeham upbraided one particular abbey in stark terms, noting that “the alms that should be given to the poor are devoured,” and the church itself “foully defiled,” by the “hunting dogs and other hounds” in residence at the abbey. Therefore, he went on, “we strictly command and enjoin you, Lady Abbess, that you remove the dogs altogether and that you suffer them never henceforth, not any such hounds, to abide within the precincts of your nunnery.”) †
    For the poor, though, the dog took on a decidedly different cast of meaning. Medieval towns and cities were no less amenable to thescourge of semi-wild dogs than were their Roman, Greek, Egyptian, or even Mesopotamian precursors. Some of the poor did own dogs, and occasionally kept them in houses, but these likely were seen as working animals, the cost of whose nourishment (which mattered dearly in lives lived so close to bone) had to be offset through useful farm labor on their parts. A dog could be a terrible liability in a feudal society: peasants whose dogs romped in the wrong forest could incur fines, as seen in this list of English public records from the reign of Edward II: “From John de Maunchestre for one dog, 3s. From Wilto le Seriaunte for one dog, 3s…. From Wilto de Huntyngtone for one dog, because he was poor, 12d.” In other accounts, peasants who took game from the preserves of their betters found themselves blinded, castrated, or even killed. Such draconian enforcement of the hunt as a noble privilege extended so far as to include preemptive rules about dogs. It was standard practice for all commoners’ dogs living near the royal hunting forest to be “expeditated,” that is, rendered unable to run by having one or more claws hacked from a foot. Peasants could not even legally own greyhounds in England, a prohibition that dated to the eleventh century.
    Should anyone doubt the dark heart of the dog, as revealed to medieval minds, he can find particularly vivid testimony in accounts of the Black Death, which ravaged three continents between 1347 and 1350, culling (by some estimates) more than half the population of Europe and then returning intermittently for centuries. These devastating epidemics transformed half-tamed neighborhood dogs into demonic corpse eaters. Agnolo di Tura, a shoemaker in Siena, Italy, recounted seeing, during the 1347 outbreak there, “many dead throughout the city who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured their bodies.” About a 1429 resurgence in Cairo, one chronicle reports grave diggers carving out giant