What medieval bestiaries said about dogs

Part 1

Loyal dogs in the Aberdeen Bestiary

The Aberdeen Bestiary is a 12th-century English illuminated manuscript now held at the University of Aberdeen. You can imagine how vivid these stories must have seemed to a medieval reader listening to them read aloud. It tells several stories about dogs' devotion to their masters. In one, two hundred dogs are said to have fought through enemy lines to bring King Garamentes back from captivity. In another, a dog refused food and died after its master Jason was killed. A third story tells of the dog of King Lysimachus, which threw itself onto its master's funeral pyre and burned with him.

• A dog stayed with its condemned master and followed him to prison, then howled after he was executed.
• When people fed the dog out of pity, it carried the food to its dead master's mouth.
• When the master's body was thrown into the Tiber, the dog swam out and tried to keep it from sinking.

Part 2

A dog that helped identify a killer

You might find the idea of a dog identifying a killer unsettling, but the bestiary takes it seriously. The bestiary describes dogs giving evidence after a murder. At Antioch, a man was killed at dusk while his dog was with him on a lead. A soldier had killed him for robbery and fled into the darkness. The dog stayed by the body, howling, while a crowd gathered. The dog held that man alone, out of everyone present, and would not let him go, which the text says lent weight to the case against him. The man could not explain away the evidence, and he was punished for the crime.

Part 3

Healing tongues and other dog habits

Your own dog's habit of licking a paw might remind you of these old claims about healing tongues. The bestiary claims a dog's tongue heals wounds when it licks them. It also says a puppy's tongue could cure internal injuries. The text describes a dog's diet as temperate. It repeats the claim that a dog returns to its vomit and eats it again. Another story tells of a dog crossing a river with meat in its mouth that saw its own reflection, opened its mouth to grab the reflected meat, and lost the meat it was carrying.

Part 4

Working out a scent trail

Watching your dog work out a scent trail on a walk echoes this old description. The bestiary also describes how a dog tracks a hare or deer. When the trail splits, it goes to the start of each path and works out, in the text's words, which direction the animal took, using its sense of smell.

Part 5

Dogs as teaching tools

You may recognize this way of turning dog behavior into a lesson, since people still compare loyal dogs to loyal people today. Bestiaries often used dog behavior to teach moral or allegorical lessons, not just describe nature. The Aberdeen Bestiary compares preachers to dogs, saying that both drive off threats through vigilance. It says that just as a dog's tongue heals a wound by licking it, a priest's correction cleanses a sinner's confessed wrongs. The text also compares a dog's temperate diet to a leader's need to avoid gluttony and drunkenness. It warns that returning to wrongdoing after confession is like a dog returning to its vomit.

Part 6

The manuscript itself

If you have ever wondered how old books like this survive, this one owes its condition to careful keeping over centuries. The Aberdeen Bestiary was probably made around the year 1200, in England. It is heavily decorated with gold leaf and detailed illustrations of animals. The manuscript was once part of King Henry VIII's royal library and later passed to Marischal College in Aberdeen. It has been kept at the University of Aberdeen since 1542. The first full high-resolution digital version of the manuscript went online in 2016.

Part 7

How the Aberdeen Bestiary fits into the genre

You can browse the fuller index yourself if you want to see how dogs sit alongside all these other creatures. Bestiaries flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly in England, mixing descriptions of animals with moral and allegorical lessons. The genre included both animals such as dogs, and imaginary creatures such as unicorns and phoenixes. The Aberdeen Bestiary sits within a larger index of over 200 entries covering beasts, birds, snakes, fish, trees, stones, and the nature of man. The dog entries run across several folios, covering loyalty, healing, scent tracking, and the murder story.

Part 8

Dogs elsewhere in medieval manuscripts

If you have seen doodles like this, you'll recognize the same playful spirit that shows up in your dog's own antics. In some of these marginal drawings, rabbits are shown hunting and even boiling hunting dogs, a joke that reversed the usual roles of hunter and hunted. These pictures were drawn by religious men copying out other kinds of books, and usually had nothing to do with the content of the pages they were on.