All Things Medieval

Dogs were part of European civilization from the start, first as hunting dogs. Most knights kept hunting dogs at their manors. By the Middle Ages, there were many different breeds. Hunting required different sizes and skills in dogs: greyhounds and alaunts could catch up to running deer and pull them down, mid-sized running hounds tracked and chased the quarry, and bloodhounds tracked and killed downed animals. Mastiffs and similar dogs were used for guarding flocks. Hunting dogs were not exactly pets, since they lived in kennels, but some favorite hunting dogs were permitted to come into the castle hall and eat scraps. Dogs are described in bestiaries in terms similar to the modern phrase “man’s best friend”: dogs had been known to help solve crimes or to leap onto the funeral pyre of a dead master.

Venery was the art of using a variety of dogs as a team and employing strategy appropriate to the prey and the terrain. Hunting dogs went to the hunt on leashes, controlled by trainers who could follow the huntsman’s signals to leash or release their dogs at the proper time. Some dogs were leashed in pairs and released as packs, while others worked alone. Breeding the right kinds of dogs was its own full-time profession, as was training each type of dog to its task. Some particular dogs became internationally famous or were featured in poems about hunting, since they were the most outstanding of their type. They were sought after for breeding.

Small hunting dogs that ran in packs were known by many different names. They could have been different breeds or fairly similar. In medieval hunting treatises, they are known as brachets, crachets, harriers, coursers, or raches. They may have been similar to modern beagles, with large noses, droopy ears, and big eyes. They were strong and fast; their main job was to run fast and far. They were not expected to bring large prey down at the end of the run. Harriers were particularly trained to chase hares, but they also were used against other prey.

Greyhounds were large and thin. They were very fast, with narrow heads and large jaws. They hunted by sight and could catch up with a deer and bring it down with their jaws. Greyhounds came in different sizes and perhaps slightly different breeds; good greyhounds were bred in Scotland. They were supposed to have gentle dispositions outside of a hunt and were among the dogs permitted into the lord’s hall.

Alaunts were like greyhounds but were stronger and could hold a fiercer prey. They had larger, blunter heads and very strong jaws. They could be used for hunting deer but were the only kind of dog suitable for hunting wild boar. The heaviest kind of alaunt was also used for bearbaiting. They may have been similar to modern pitbulls or German shepherds, but, in the Middle Ages, the best ones came from Spain. Alaunts had more violent temperaments and were less intelligent than greyhounds. They had to be kept leashed and muzzled.

Lymers were specialized tracking dogs, very much like modern bloodhounds. They were kept leashed and were used to locate the scent of the quarry. They were trained to run long distances following a specific trail, to find it again if it were momentarily lost, and not to bark. Very few lymers were needed in a hunt, and they were trained to work alone. Lords who kept large packs of hunting dogs had at least 20 other dogs for every lymer.

Mastiffs were large, coarse dogs used as guard animals by shepherds and as hunting dogs for particularly difficult prey. Mastiffs were shaggy and large, and they were not purebreds. They had large teeth and often wore spiked collars, since they guarded flocks against wolves.

Spaniels and setters, and sometimes greyhounds, were trained to find and call attention to quarry, particularly kinds of birds such as quail or partridges. They went out with falconers, and at times the greyhounds needed to help a falcon kill a large bird such as a heron. Spaniels and setters only found and roused birds. Other small dogs had their roles, but not necessarily in an aristocratic hunt; terriers, for example, caught rats.

Royal kennels could be very large operations, with 30 full-time huntsmen and pages caring for up to 100 dogs. The chief huntsman and his clerk were at the top; at the bottom, some kennels allowed a few poor men to sleep with the dogs for no wages. The kennels were warm, safe places, better than the streets for the poorest.

Most huntsmen began as pages when they were young boys. They lived with the dogs and learned all their names, and they cleaned the kennels and changed the dogs’ straw bedding. Some kennels had straw-covered posts for the dogs to urinate on, with channels in the floor to carry the urine away. Kennels had enclosures where the dogs could walk and run, and the pages took them out for walks on the grass. Pages brushed the dogs and made leashes and collars. They looked for lost dogs, clipped toenails, and soaked sore feet in vinegar. They were in charge of feeding the dogs their ration of bread. Sick dogs might be fed tripe and blood from sheep, but healthy dogs were not fed meat at home. Their trainers wanted them to associate meat with hunting and expect to find it only in the forest.

As they got older, pages moved up to varlets, who helped handle the dogs on a hunt. They learned how to track animals and interpret their marks and droppings. They learned how to blow horns and how the hunt was organized. Although they no longer lived in the kennels, some were expected to keep a lymer in their rooms. As they moved up to the status of full huntsmen as adults, they received higher wages, grander clothes, and horses to ride. They still remained in close contact with the dogs, training them and maintaining the dogs’ primary attachment. They had to oversee and give orders to the varlets who held the dogs on leashes, and they carried yard-long sticks to slap against their boots as signals. They carried hunting horns and swords and knives to help finish off game. Lesser huntsmen who remained on foot carried spears.

Huntsmen wore practical clothes without loose sleeves or long tunics to catch on branches. In summer, they wore green, and in winter, gray. They wore unusually high leather boots as protection against brambles. Not all hunters followed these rules, but the professional staff in many illustrations appears to work with rudimentary ideas of camouflage. At other times, especially in the late Middle Ages, they wore the household livery, which may have been gaudy and very far from camouflage.

Hunting horns were most often made of the horns of cattle. Some were made of brass and operated like modern bugles. Horns made of cattle horn were often bound in silver or gold, and the most expensive royal horns were carved from ivory. All the hunters, professionals and aristocratic amateurs, carried horns. They were all expected to use a communications code of horn calls. Certain calls signaled types of deer or danger from wolves. Other calls told the hunters when to assemble or what to do with their dogs, and the dogs were trained to come to some calls. Some calls asked for water or help. One such music was reserved for the death of the quarry, and the dogs joined in with barking.

Dogs were expensive investments and merited more care than most medieval animals. When a lord took his dogs a long distance to hunt in a certain forest, he often arranged to carry them in baskets or cages. The dogs had to be in their best shape when they arrived. Some dogs that were used for hunting dangerous prey were given quilted dog armor to help guard against claws and teeth. Dogs were frequently wounded while hunting bears and boars. Their kennel staff used needles and thread to stitch gaping wounds and sometimes used the ammonia of urine to sterilize a wound.

The day before a major deer hunt, or very early the same morning, one or more lymers and their handlers scouted the forest for suitable quarry. Some medieval illustrations show huntsmen studying the deers’ droppings on a table; they were able to estimate age, size, sex, and general health. They studied other signs, such as where the deer had rubbed its antlers on a tree, and they measured the size and depth of its tracks. They wanted to find the best hart for the chase, and sometimes they were able to sight one and count the points on its antlers. Deer tend to stay in one area of forest, called a covert; before leaving, the huntsmen used the lymers again to tell whether the harts they were studying had left the covert or not.

After the preliminary work was completed by the professionals, the aristocratic amateur hunters arrived. As the hunt opened, huntsmen took groups of dogs to relay points, depending on the terrain. They expected the first dogs to drive the hart past them so they could release fresh dogs to join the tired ones. A huntsman and his lymer went to pick up the scent of the selected hart. When the huntsman was sure the hart had noticed their presence and was running away, he tied the lymer up and blew his horn. The running dogs entered the chase.

Huntsmen followed the progress of the dogs and communicated with each other by signaling with horns. Each hunter and his set of dogs (brachets, harriers, greyhounds, and alaunts) worked to follow the same hart, not other deer, and make him run until he was tired. A tired stag turned to fight with his antlers; this was known as the stag being “at bay.” Now the hunters and dogs closed in, and, after a short time when the huntsmen and dogs enjoyed the excitement, the hart was finished off with a sword or spear. The hunters blew their horns, and sometimes they permitted the dogs to bite the dead animal’s throat to keep their primitive hunting instincts fresh.

The dogs received their share of the kill in a ceremony called the curée. After the stag or boar was dead, the hunters leashed the hounds, which waited while the deer was cut up. The dogs eagerly awaited the portions left for them, which were entrails and blood-soaked bread. A hunter, or the lord, held the animal’s head over the portion for the dogs, and the other hunters blew their horns. The dogs were released to devour their portion. The lymer often received the prize of being allowed to chew on the head before it was taken back as a trophy.

The fallow buck was not hunted with the same scouting process using lymers. Hunting a buck was less organized; the pack of running dogs was permitted to find the scent on its own. Roebucks were the smallest deer, the least useful for feast tables. They had great running stamina, so hunters used relays of dogs to chase them. Some hunters did not consider them worth eating and used them only to train dogs.

Another medieval hunting method was to drive the quarry toward a hidden group of archers. This method may have been the oldest, and it seems to have been the Anglo-Saxon method; it was also used for does and hinds during their hunting seasons. Ladies who participated in hunting were restricted to this method, which was safer and usually took place in an enclosed park. The royal party with its ladies went to an appointed place, the tryst, and hid with their bows. Hunters with a few dogs drove the deer toward them. Sometimes long lines of people helped corral the deer into the preferred path toward the archers; they were known as the “stable.” Deer parks could be designed with natural features to create a stable, or hunters could put up barriers or nets. When the group of hinds ran past the hidden archers, the ladies could try their shooting skill. One arrow was not always enough to kill a deer, but the hunters were nearby to finish them off with knives.

Poultry were the most common animal kept by the poor, even in cities. In Anglo-Saxon times, England had more chickens than geese, but geese and ducks became the primary poultry of the later Middle Ages. Many manors also kept doves as producers of manure.

The primary value of poultry was in egg production. Chickens and geese were only eaten for special occasions, since their eggs had more food value than their meat. A hen could lay on average one egg every two days, and some peasants paid rent in eggs.

Wild hares were native to Northern Europe, but the smaller, fatter domesticated rabbit was an medieval invader from the Mediterranean region and North Africa. Monasteries kept rabbits, since baby rabbits were declared fish by the church and could be eaten on fast days. That’s such a gross idea I wrestle with wanting to delete it from the paragraph, but fact it is.

As monasteries made progress in raising rabbits on their farms, aristocrats introduced them back into the wild in new areas so they would reproduce for sport hunting. The rabbit came as far north as England around 1176, and, at the same time, aristocrats introduced partridges, pheasants, peafowl, and fallow deer. Domestic and wild rabbits interbred, and rabbits easily went wild if they escaped. Although they were rare during most of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance rabbits were a common nuisance and had displaced the native hare.

Rabbits were not only wild or farm animals. Like people today, medieval people noticed that rabbits made good pets. They were easy to feed and did not take up much space. They made good pets for the middle class as they became more common, since they reproduced so fast.

Cattle were primarily draft animals and only shifted to dairy and meat animals as the horse became the main draft animal. One of the big stories in the early Middle Ages was the shift in agriculture that allowed average farmers to grow enough food to support horses. While horses eat grass like cattle, they need the extra protein of other grains like oats, and that added significant cost. All cattle could pull a cart or a plow, but a castrated male, called an ox, was the main plowing animal. Oxen typically plowed in teams of eight, where possible.

Cattle had another advantage over horses, in that when they grew old, they could be eaten. By the time an ox has spent some years plowing and pulling a cart, his meat is going to be very tough. Still, there was no religious prohibition against eating them, as there was with horses. Cattle’s other parts made glue, fat for soap or candles, and leather. Until the murrain outbreaks of the 14th century, cattle had fewer diseases than horses, and they did not need shoes.

Three major innovations cleared the way for using horses for draft purposes. Horses’ hooves needed protection in cold and wet climates, but the increasing use of iron allowed for shoeing the horses. Oxen have a shoulder structure that easily carried the plow’s yoke, but horses do not. Romans had harnessed horses across the chest, but this restricted the horse’s ability to breathe when loads grew heavy. So the key innovation was the padded horse collar, made of leather stuffed with straw, that shifted weight-bearing to the horse’s shoulders, too.

The third major innovation was in agriculture. In the 9th and 10th centuries, European farmers began to farm their strips in a three-way rotation. When a strip was planted in oats or legumes in the spring, it could be harvested at summer’s end. It was then replanted in wheat and rye and later left fallow for a third season. In the 13th century, farmers began planting additionally in the fall, to get an extra crop out of the same strip. On average, it may have added up to as much as 50 percent more food. The soil, refreshed by nitrates from the legumes, grew more grain. When rotation included oats, this high-protein grain allowed horses to be kept through the winter and worked harder.

When farmers could use a horse to plow and pull a cart, cattle were freed to put their energy into milk production. Males were still castrated as oxen if not needed as bulls, but barn and field resources shifted to maintaining as many females as possible for milk. Once cattle became more valuable for their milk, they were given more food and began to grow larger. Eventually, they could be used routinely for beef, as well, but that tended to be outside the medieval period.

Horses could plow faster, once they could be adequately fed and safely harnessed. They pulled carts faster, too, so that farmers could take more loads of produce to town in a day. Farmers began to travel more, either riding or with carts, and they could additionally go to towns that were a bit farther away than their previous reach. The increasing use of horses powered the growth of towns and cities, since a larger city needs its food to come in from a larger radius. Increasing use of horses led, of course, to increasing numbers of horses, and different kinds of them too. We’ll come back to horses later, since they lead into topics of war and sports.

Pigs, sheep and goats were the medium-sized domesticated animals of medieval Europe and Asia. Most meat that landed on the table was pork or mutton, most cheese came from sheep and goats, and most farmland was primarily fertilized by their droppings. In towns, their droppings were swept up and sold back to the countryfolk for gardens. Pigs, sheep and goats also had in common that they lived in herds and wandered to find food.

Pigs in the Middle Ages were smaller than modern domesticated pigs, and many of them were half-wild. They had longer legs and looked more like boars, with tusks and long snouts and wiry hair. There’s no species difference between wild hogs and domesticated pigs, and many interbred.

Interbreeding was particularly easy because pigs were not kept indoors or fenced very carefully. Swineherds walked with whole herds of pigs out to wander and find things to eat, and many pigs just fended for themselves much of the time. Wandering pigs walked through villages and towns, and sometimes they walked into houses whose doors were open for daylight. Since they were often half-wild, they were known to harm children. Babies were occasionally killed in their cradles when the mother had gone out for a few minutes and a pig came in.

What made pigs the ideal farm staple was that they would eat anything. In towns, they ate garbage, probably including offal from butchering or tanning. Early medieval Europe was heavily forested; pigs could eat roots and nuts. In fact, during the technological revolution in iron production, vast acres of established oak forests were cut down and turned into charcoal, and this hurt the pig population. Late medieval farmers had to think harder about what to feed their pigs, and eventually pigs were kept in pens. Brewing ale created a sloppy mess of grain that had to be strained out, which was an ideal pig food.

Sheep, too, were smaller than modern ones. In cold Northern Europe, their wool was their most valuable attribute, but they were also kept for milk. Sheep were more likely to be milked than cows, in many parts of medieval Europe; there were far more of them in most places. Sheep could find food at high altitudes where grain couldn’t grow.

Selective breeding of sheep went on all through the medieval years. They could be bred for wool, meat, or milk. Additionally, in the Middle East and Central Asia, sheep were bred for fat tails; their stored fat in the tail became a major source of cooking oil. In Northern Europe, Cistercian monasteries worked on sheep breeding, just as they made scientific progress in iron smelting and winemaking.

In Spain, breeders created fine Merino wool with sheep who could live on a sparse diet and walk long distances. The back country of Spain was criss-crossed with migration trails, as shepherds moved the Merino sheep from water source to water source. Partly due to their isolated herds, long walks, and necessary cooperation to maintain the trails, breeders in Spain could do more controlled experiments. After Merino wool came on the market, post-medieval sheep were interbred with Merinos, so the old multi-purpose sheep breeds are basically extinct. As wool improved, the wool trade increased and so did the herds of sheep. There were far more sheep by the end of the Middle Ages.

Goats tended to be kept farther south, in the Mediterranean region, but also in higher elevations. Goats, like pigs, will eat almost anything, so they can sustain themselves on dry, scruffy plants. On the other hand, by eating everything, goats also contribute to turning land into desert. A small herd of goats can drastically change the landscape in a year or two; the only things that grow are the few plants they don’t eat. Goats, too, were bred for meat, milk, and wool. During the medieval period, breeders in the Anatolian Plateau (modern Turkiye) developed Angora goats that looked a lot like sheep, and whose wool rivaled even that of Merino sheep.

In the Middle Ages, the European bison, or wisent, was still wandering about in herds, but it was quickly becoming extinct like its relative, the aurochs. There seem to have been small herds still in the deepest forests in France in the 15th century. They were vanishing in Macedonia in the Late Classical period, but some survived until the late medieval in remote parts of Bulgaria. The Białowieża Forest on the border of Poland and Belorussia had the last surviving herd. In modern times, some of the handful of bison from zoos were released back to this forest, where there is again a viable herd. Polish bison conservationists have sent animals to many other countries since then, and recently some bison were even released in an English forest.

Hares were native to Northern Europe, while the smaller, fatter rabbits originated in the Atlas Mountains and Iberia. Hares are larger and thinner, with longer ears, but although they look like rabbits to us, genetically they are different: 48 chromosomes, where rabbits have 44. Hares are adapted to living in the wild without burrows: their young are born with eyes open, ready to fend for themselves very quickly.

There’s no record of hares ever being domesticated, but they have always been eaten. This detail is gross, but traditionally, hares were cooked with their blood. In fact, hares were “jugged,” which I used to think meant something like canned. No. It means that they are hung up dead so that the blood will collect inside, instead of draining out. Hares are not kosher for Jews and neither is blood, so that’s definitely one dish that medieval German Jews were not consuming.

Modernization has not been kind to wild cats, although domestic ones have been fat and happy. Smaller wild cats persisted throughout Europe, and there is still a subspecies native to Scotland. But in the medieval mountains, there were lynx, and even Asiatic lions still lived in remote parts of Syria, Turkey and Greece. In Islamic culture and in the Ottoman Empire, lions were much used as symbols of courage, though they were rarely seen. Medieval Europeans often had no idea what a lion looked like, although certainly they had heard of them. One report said that lions gave birth to dead kittens who then came to life, and it was generally believed.

All of the small animals that live in and near water were populous in medieval Europe: otters, beavers, muskrats. Also populous, as today, were the small field animals: foxes, hedgehogs, badgers, and all kinds of weasels, including the northern ones prized for fur. In the mountains, there were many wild goats such as ibex and chamois. Naturally, we can fill in the squirrels, mice, shrews, voles, moles and rats as well. These are found all over the world, then and now. Later to be famous for spreading disease, marmots (ground squirrels) were also all over Europe and Asia — and along the Silk Road.

Northern Europe does not seem to have been home to venomous snakes, in general; mostly they had rat snakes and whip snakes, both predators of little creatures but harmless to humans. The Mediterranean region of course is another matter: vipers and adders galore. Some vipers lived as far north as Austria. While snakes were part of the legends and lore of Greece and all over Africa and Asia, they didn’t tend to feature so much in Northern European stories.

The Eurasian brown bear, Ursus arctos, ranged over every part of Europe in the early Middle Ages. Its diet was mainly mean, since small animals were also plentiful. Two different bear populations met in Europe, one coming from the Pyrenees Mountains, and the other coming out of Siberia’s Ural Mountains.

Wild bears probably became extinct in the British Isles first, well before the medieval period. Archeologists have found a limited bear population in Yorkshire that died out around 500 AD, but these bears may themselves have been imported by Romans for games. By contrast, in Scandinavia, they withdrew to mountains as the human population grew, but wild bears are still found in Sweden and Norway. Of course, it would be the same story everywhere in Europe: pulling back with the forest, retreating into the mountains. They still live in mountainous areas of Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Ukraine, and even Greece.

Bears have mythological significance to Northern Europe. The fact that we descendants of German tribes don’t call them either Ursus or Arctos (“bear” in Latin and Greek) seems to come from a taboo against speaking their name. “Bear” and “bruin” seem to be versions of “brown,” so that the bear was the Brown One. The bear might also be called the Honey-Eater, as in the Slavic languages it is Medved. “Beowulf” might have indicated a bear, the Bee-Wolf, that is, the hunter of honey. “Arctos,” the Greek name for the bear, came into modern use to mean the North, the land of the bear.

Unlike wolves, bears can be tamed. A really tame bear can learn to walk and dance, and a semi-tame bear can be handled for animal fights. Rome’s favorite public sport involved animals and men dying in combat, and the bear was a favorite competitor. Those bears in Yorkshire may have arrived in cages on Roman ships for use in amphitheaters. Following Rome’s example, medieval Europe continued to make sport not of all animals, but specifically of the bear. Bear-baiting was a gambling sport in which dogs attacked a chained bear; they placed bets on how many dogs would be killed before the bear died. (picture) The bear-baiting took place in a large pit, so that the spectators were safe. That’s where we get the name for pitbulls.

The “medieval” period stretches from the rise of Islam, about 650 AD, to the full establishment of the Ottoman Empire in about 1500. In the Late Classical Period of 400-500 AD, just before the Early Medieval, Europe was heavily forested and generally wild and dangerous. The Gauls, Britons, and recently-arriving Germans (Saxons, Goths, Franks) created small settlements along the rivers and generally avoided the deep, vast forests. The European climate had been relatively warm during the Roman period, but during the Late Classical/Early Medieval, it was relatively cooler (until about 950). It was a great time to be a wolf in Europe.

Medieval man would have been astonished at Yellowstone Park’s choice to reintroduce wolves. In people’s minds at that time, wolves were entirely wicked. Wolves came out of the forest to take domesticated — and expensive — animals like cattle and sheep. They were so large that ordinary farm dogs couldn’t mount a real defense, and a pack of them could do real damage to an armed human, too. Needless to say, deep in the forest, a pack of wolves could annihilate unarmed humans. Not only that, but wolves carried rabies, so medieval people believed that a wolf’s bite was venomous. There are mammals with venom, but wolves are not among them. Still, nobody was going to get close enough to find out.

Wolves had thick fur, but they also had a distinctive smell. Very few people would wear wolf’s skin as a coat or have it anywhere near their houses. A man who wore a wolf’s fur collar was sending a message; if you meet such a man in a book of fantasy or historical fiction, rest assured that he is a Bad Guy. He probably lives in a remote castle and robs travelers.

Nobody hunted wolves for sport. They were only killed to get rid of their predation, so poison was favored. Two flowering plants in Europe were called wolf’s bane: Aconitum, which was also called “wolf’s bane” in Greek, and Arnica montana, which also acted as a painkiller in small amounts and used topically.

Because wolves were considered evil and uncanny, their bones or fur could also be used for magic. This would apply especially in cases of healing wolf-bite, where the thing that caused harm was presumed to have power to cure it. Similarly, if a leaf or flower looked like a wolf’s head, it would be tried for curing an infected wolf bite.

Their magical power may be why, hated as wolves were, “wolf” was a very common name element. We see it in Germanic names, some of which have lasted into modern times, like Rudolf, Rolf (Ralph), and Adolf, and many more that stayed in the medieval period: Fridolf, Ethelwulf, Eadwulf, and Wulfgar. But we don’t realize that we’re seeing “wolf” also in Irish names that have “con,” for wolf or dog, like Connor, Conan, and Connery, and maybe also as “chan” in Channing. (List of wolf-related names, not very carefully curated, here.)