Tag: Chaucer

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From Chariots to Chaucer: Mastiffs in Medieval England

As a medievalist and a mastiff owner, it seems fitting that I first found my beloved dogs in the pages of medieval literature, specifically in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite are pitted against one another in a tournament to determine which knight will win Emelye’s hand in marriage. The contestants are given a year to prepare, during which time they each assemble an entourage of men to accompany them into the melee. When the Knight introduces Lycurgus, “the grete king of Trace” [the great king of Thrace] (Chaucer 2129) who sides with Palamon, he describes the dogs circling his chariot as part of the tournament’s pageantry:

Aboute his chaar ther wenten white alauntz,
Twenty and mo, as grete as any steer,
To hunten at the leoun or the deer,
And folwed hym with mosel faste ybounde,
Colered of gold, and tourettes fyled rounde. (Chaucer 2148-2152)[1]

[About his chariot there went white alaunts,
More than twenty, each as great as any steer,
To hunt the lion or the deer,
And followed him with muzzles securely bound,
Wearing collars of gold and rings for leashes filed round.] (My translation)

The term alaunt, now archaic and historical, refers to a type of dog, though exactly what kind of dog remains at least somewhat ambiguous. Although Harvard’s interlinear text translates “alauntz” as “wolfhounds,” it is far more likely that these alaunts are mastiffs.

Mastiffs are one of the oldest recorded dog breeds. Revered for their size and strength, the breed was used for hunting, fighting, and guarding for thousands of years. The massive dogs are physically characterized by their imposing size, broad heads, and powerful necks, qualities that have defined them from their earliest appearances in art and literature.

Image of a warrior holding a mastiff-type dog on a leash from an expansive Assyrian relief depicting a lion hunt, dated 645-640 BCE and housed at the British Museum.

It is unclear where the mastiff originated, but the English Mastiff has ties to ancient Greece and Rome, where the narrator of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale sets his story. According to The Kennel Club, “[w]hen the Romans invaded Britain in 55 BC they found the inhabitants already had a mastiff-type dog, huge and courageous and which defeated the Romans’ own dogs in organised fights. The Romans took some of these mastiff types home with them and used them for fighting wild animals in the Colosseum.”[2]

The English Mastiff, as we know it today, descends from the Molossus, a formidable war dog from ancient Greece. The British Museum reports that the Molossus is depicted battling lions and gladiators in murals dating as far back as 2500 BC. The dogs also served in the Roman army, as guard dogs stationed within encampments or as soldiers, with the largest and most ferocious dogs strapped with armor and sent into battle. Both Aristotle and Ovid mention the Molussus in their work.[3]

The Dog of Alcibiades, marble statue depicting a Molussus, probably produced in Rome between 100 and 200 AD, British Museum.  

The term mastiff does not appear in English until the 14th century,[4] but this does not mean that mastiffs were not present in England during the Middle Ages. When the Normans introduced bull baiting to Britain in the 12th century, they used mastiffs to torment bulls for sport long before the appearance of the bulldog.[5] The bulldog was actually developed from the mastiff and looked quite different from the bulldog as we recognize it today.

Sketch of a bulldog by Thomas Brown, from Biographical Sketches and Authentic Anecdotes of Dogs, published in 1829.

Alaunt referred to any ‘large fierce dog or mastiff of a breed valued for its use in hunting and fighting,’ and indeed, the term’s first appearance in English is attributed to Chaucer.[6] The “alaunts” he describes as “great as any steer” would certainly suggest the stature of a mastiff with their massive bodies, heads, and necks and the power conveyed by the ratio of mass and muscle much similar to that of a bull. Their presence in a stadium setting within the Classical world recalls the Mollosus of the Colosseum, while their accompaniment of a Thracian warrior and their ability to hunt lions invokes the image of the Assyrian reliefs pictured above.

Admittedly, modern mastiffs are no match for deer with respect to their speed, and greyhounds would have been the preferred breed for deer hunting in medieval England, such as those described in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But it’s possible that earlier mastiffs may have been capable of the chase, as their speed and endurance would have also been needed in battle. It’s also possible that mastiffs provided a hunting party with protection from animals that could pose serious threats such as boars and wolves – and in fact, mastiffs were used to hunt both.

Mastiffs today are no less powerful than their predecessors, even if their modern status as pets has mostly replaced their previous responsibilities in medieval England. The English Mastiff is still considered the largest dog breed and certainly the heaviest, if not always the tallest, with males easily reaching 240 pounds and standing upward of 30 inches at the shoulder. The world’s heaviest and longest dog ever recorded was a male English Mastiff from London named Aicama Zorba of La-Susa, who weighed 343 pounds, stood 37 inches at the shoulder, and measured 8 feet 3 inches from nose to tail in September 1987.[7]  

An English Mastiff named Aicama Zorba of La-Susa remains the largest dog ever recorded.

The second mastiff associated with England is the Bullmastiff, developed as a guard dog during the 19th century to assist gamekeepers in their efforts to stop poachers. The Bullmastiff descends from the breeding of English Mastiffs and Bulldogs, at a ratio of 60 to 40 percent respectively, to produce a dog that exhibited size, courage, and athleticism. They were trained to pin and hold poachers, rather than maul them. As the American Kennel Club puts it, the Bullmastiff was “smart enough to work on command, tractable enough to hold but not maul a poacher, and big enough to scare the bejesus out of any intruder.”[8]

During the Victorian era, gamekeepers preferred Bullmastiffs with brindle coats, which worked to camouflage the dogs in the dark, but dogs with fawn colored coats and black masks are contemporarily more common.[9] Smaller than English Mastiffs, large Bullmastiff males can reach 140 pounds and stand 27 inches at the shoulder.

My first Bullmastiff, Beorn, lost unexpectedly and much too early to illness in November 2023.

Mastiffs, of course, are not limited to the British varieties. There is a plethora of types that extend to the Americas, across Europe, and into Asia. They also come in a variety of colors and coat lengths, hence the probability of white mastiffs loping alongside a chariot in the Classical world that Chaucer’s Knight creates.

My boys have been the very best dogs for me, but mastiffs of any kind are not for inexperienced or inattentive dog owners, nor are they good matches for the faint of heart. My Bullmastiffs are affectionate and intelligent, sweet and silly. They are big and slobbery and prefer to be with their people. They are extremely friendly because they have been properly trained and socialized since they were tiny babies. They are still incredibly strong and fiercely protective of me and anyone else they perceive as members of their pack.  

My second Bullmastiff, Sebastian, adopted in 2024.

As a medievalist, I love seeing my dogs’ legacy in the literature I study, but I chose my dogs because they are the perfect breed for my personality and my lifestyle, not because they appear in Chaucer’s poetry. It’s a happy coincidence that I initially crossed paths with my canine companions in a text that paved the way for my academic career — and since it’s Thanksgiving week, it’s fitting to say I’m grateful that I get to be their person.

Emily McLemore, Ph.D.
Alumni Contributor
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

[1] Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Knight’s Tale. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

[2] “Mastiff,” The Kennel Club.

[3] “Beware of the dog!,” British Museum.

[4] “Mastiff,” Oxford English Dictionary.

[5] “Bulldog,” The Kennel Club.

[6] “Alaunt,” Oxford English Dictionary.

[7] “Longest dog ever,” Guiness World Records.

[8] “Bullmastiff,” American Kennel Club.

[9] “Bullmastiff,” The Kennel Club.

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Medieval Rabbits: Ancient Symbolism, English Migration, and Manuscript Marginalia

From its earliest recordings in African, Indian, and Egyptian cultures, the hare, which later became interchangeable with the rabbit, has been recognized as a symbol of generative powers.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world, the hare symbolized fertility, as well as love and lust. The hare was the favored sacrifice to the gods of love, Aphrodite and Eros.[1] Consumption of the animal’s flesh was thought to enhance the beauty in the eater for several days. The animal’s body was also incorporated into medicines meant to cure conditions connected with sex.

Roman mosaic depicting a hare, dated to the 4th century and discovered in Cirencester, England. The mosaic was excavated in 1971 and is housed at the Corinium Museum. Photo credit: Isobel Wilkes, “Hares in Roman Art”.

Hares and rabbits were known as prolific breeders, but the classical world often exaggerated the creature’s capacity for reproduction. Aristotle, for example, believed the rabbit was capable of superfetation – that is, he thought a pregnant rabbit could become pregnant again, thereby gestating multiple litters at once. These ideas persisted into the Middle Ages, passed down by Aristotle and other philosophers such as Herodotus, as well as Pliny the Elder.

In his Naturalis historia, written during the first century, Pliny the Elder characterizes hares and rabbits as the only animals that superfetate, “rearing one leveret while at the same time carrying in the womb another clothed with hair and another bald and another still an embryo.” He also discusses how wild rabbits laid waste to Spain. Describing their fertility as “beyond counting,” he says that “they bring famine to the Balearic Islands by ravaging the crops.”[2]

England, however, did not share Spain’s poor experience with rabbits. Although hares are indigenous to the British Isles, rabbits are not. They were introduced to England by the Normans in the 13th century and were raised for their meat and fur.[3] They were also kept as pets and were a particular favorite of nuns.[4]

Woman flushes a rabbit from its warren using a ferret or a small dog in the Taymouth Hours, England, c. 1260, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 13, f. 70v.

Rabbits did not initially thrive in the British climate, and they required careful tending by their owners, who constructed warrens for them. As Mark Bailey explains, “In modern usage the rabbit-warren refers to a piece of waste ground on which wild rabbits burrow, but in the Middle Ages it specifically meant an area of land preserved for the domestic or commercial rearing of game.”[5] These artificial burrows called “pillow-mounds” protected domestic rabbits from the elements and provided a dry, earthen enclosure that supported both survival and breeding.  

Rabbit warren depicted in the Luttrell Psalter, c. 1320-40, Lincolnshire, England, British Library, Add MS 42130, f. 176v.

Despite their modern reputation as pests, rabbit populations were primarily confined to privately owned warrens in medieval England. They were not considered vermin but, rather, valuable commodities, and they were protected by law. Poachers were a problem, as were the rabbit’s natural predators, which included the fox, stoat, weasel, polecat, and wildcat.

Hunter approaches a rabbit warren with his dog in the Rutland Psalter, c. 1260, England, British Library, Add MS 62925, f. 57v.

Yet in medieval English literature, rabbits retain their symbolic association with reproduction, as exemplified by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, a Middle English poem dated to the mid-14th century. Set in a garden during springtime, the poem centers a congregation of birds that meets to select their mates and explores themes related to love and marriage, as well as breeding.

Rabbits, or “conyes,” are depicted at play amidst the gathering of birds:  

On every bough the briddes herde I singe,
With voys of aungel in hir armonye,
Som besyed hem hir briddes forth to bringe;
The litel conyes to hir pley gonne hye. (Chaucer 190-93)[6]

I heard the birds on every branch singing
Like the voice of an angel in their harmony,
Some had their young beside them;
The little rabbits were busy at their play. (my translation)

Now virtually obsolete, the term coney was used in medieval England to differentiate an adult rabbit from a younger one. Deriving from the pun made possible by the Latin word for rabbit, cuniculus, and the Latin word for the female genitalia, cunnus, the term was also used as sexual slang in the medieval period and well beyond.[7] Essentially, coney, or cunny, was a crass term that referred to the vulva or vagina, to a woman or women, or to sexual intercourse.[8]

Bestiary rabbit catalogued under the Latin name cuniculus in the Liber de natura rerum, c. 13th century, France, Bibliothèque Municipale de Valenciennes, MS 320, f. 58r.

Despite its long-standing sexual symbolism, the rabbit was simultaneously imparted with sacred symbolism in the Middle Ages. In England, the rabbit became a symbol of purity when portrayed alongside the Virgin Mary. The animal also functioned as a symbol of salvation. As David Stocker and Margarita Stocker explain, “their sacred meaning is not as divorced from their profane meaning (libidinousness) as may at first appear. One the one hand, their symbolism of lust and fertility refers to the carnal body; on the other, their symbolism of salvation and resurrection refers to the ‘body of this death’ from which the soul is saved.”[9]

Indeed, the theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine, writing between 397 and 400 CE, connects the rabbit with Christianity, further attesting to how the animal’s sexual and spiritual symbolism culturally coexisted. Discussing the rabbit in relation to salvation, Saint Augustine renders the creature a symbol of cowardice. He describes the rabbit as “a small and weak animal” that is “cowardly” and then draws a parallel between the rabbit and the fearful man: “In that which he fears, man is a rabbit.”[10] Later in the Middle Ages, the rabbit “denoted a soldier who burrowed underground or someone who fled from his pursuers.”[11]

Perhaps the rabbit’s connection with cowardice, then, provides some insight into the images depicting bunnies as antagonistic and often murderous beasts in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Immortalized on screen by Monty Python’s Rabbit of Caerbannog and more recently popularized on social media, the rabbit adopts many forms and runs rampant across the pages of manuscripts from England and Europe.

Rabbit strikes a knight with a lance in the Breviary of Renaud, c. 1302-05, France, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 107, f. 141v.

Rabbits spar with knights, wield axes at kings, and lay siege to castles. They ride snails with human faces and carry hounds on their shoulders into battle. They beat, they behead, they hang, they flay. Ranging from delightfully strange to strangely sadistic, the images of rabbits enacting violence reveal a world turned topsy-turvy through their reversal of expectations.

Rabbit beheads a man with a sword—the final image in a series of five that features rabbits hunting, capturing, and killing a man—in the Smithfield Decretals, c. 1340s, London, England, British Library, MS 10 E IV, f. 61v.

But medieval bunnies are not all bad. In bestiaries, they pose timidly in their portraits or express fear as they flee from hunting dogs. They frequently adorn decorative borders sans weapons and sometimes appear surprisingly realistic, as in the stunning illumination from the Cocharelli Codex below.

Pair of hares in the Cocharelli Codex, c. 1330-40, Genoa, Italy, British Library, Add MS 28841, f. 6v.

Although the killer coney and the cowardly knight have become a familiar motif, it is not a reflection of the rabbit population ransacking the English countryside, as some might be inclined to suspect. After all, wild rabbits did not become abundant until centuries later. But whether turning the world upside down or nestled benignly within a manuscript border, rabbits in medieval marginalia showcase their multifacetednous as an enduring and aptly inexhaustible cultural symbol.

Emily McLemore
Ph.D. in English

[1] Claude K. Abraham, “Myth and Symbol: The Rabbit in Medieval France,” Studies in Philology, vol. 60, no. 4 (1963), pp. 589-597, at 589.

[2] Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Loeb Classical Library, at 153.

[3] Mark Bailey, “The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy,” The Agricultural History Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (1988), pp. 1-20, at 1.

[4] Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, Boydell Press (2012), pp. 14.

[5] Bailey, 2.

[6] Geoffrey Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, http://www.librarius.com/parliamentfs.htm.

[7] Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism, University of Tennessee Press (1973), pp. 135.

[8] cunny, n. Oxford English Dictionary.

[9] David Stocker and Margarita Stocker, “Sacred Profanity: The Theology of Rabbit Breeding and the Symbolic Landscape of the Warren,” World Archaeology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 265-72, at 270.

[10] Stocker and Stocker, 271.

[11] Rowland, 135.

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The Late Medieval Clerical Proletariat & the Vocational Crisis in Modern Academia

Educational training was the cornerstone of ecclesiastical and monastic life in the early medieval period, with the aim of producing knowledgeable clergy, who might then serve as spiritual and intellectual shepherds for their population. However, as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton explains in her recent monograph, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry, because universities in the late Middle Ages were turning out more clergy than the church could hire in beneficed positions, many found themselves experiencing a crisis of vocation. Kerby-Fulton argues that this crisis produces a “clerical proletariat” many of whom ultimately become civil servants, secretaries in great households, writing office clerks, or casual liturgical laborers, especially in London. She shows how this crisis of mass underemployment is further exacerbated by pluralism (the unethical practice of hogging multiple benefices).

Beneficed priests were in a privileged position: they received both income from parish holdings and wealth from the church. Although medieval universities were producing highly educated clergy, there were more qualified candidates than ever before, while at the same time, beneficed priests were sometimes acquiring multiple benefices and then outsourcing the work of delivering the mass and managing the church operations to poorer paid vicars, chaplains and lesser church officials, while pocketing most of the money themselves.

Kerby-Fulton argues that this sharp increase in qualified clergy and decrease in beneficed positions, resulted not only in a vocational crisis and the creations of a clerical proletariat, but ultimately in a resurgence in Middle English poetry, as this class of clerks saw more opportunities for writing English because they were working for the laity, though many still worked with Latin (or French) documents all day long. Figures like Thomas Hoccleve, a late medieval poet-clerk, comment regularly on the financial struggles and tenuous existences of the unbeneficed clerical proletariat, observable in his poem “The Complaint” which states:

Thomas Hoccleve’s Signature; Durham University Library MS Cosin V.III.9, f.95r.

I oones fro Westminstir cam,
Vexid ful grevously with thoughtful hete,
Thus thoughte I: ‘A greet fool I am
This pavyment a-daies thus to bete
And in and oute laboure faste and swete,
Wondringe and hevinesse to purchace,
Sithen I stonde out of al favour and grace.

“When once I came from Westminster, very bitterly troubled with burning anxiety, I thought like this: ‘I am a great fool to beat these streets like this every day and to work doggedly and sweat indoors and outdoors, in order to earn nothing but restlessness and misery, since I am fallen out of all good fortune and grace.’” (Jenni Nuttall, 183-189).
In this passage, we learn how Hoccleve is very upset with his vocational prospects (184), and he deems himself a greet fool “great fool” (185) for working endless and performing in and oute laboure faste and swete “firm and sweaty labor, indoors and outdoors” (187) with nothing to show for it but wondringe and hevinesse “wandering and hardship” (188).

Thomas Hoccleve presents ‘The Regiment of Princes’ to King Henry V; British Library, MS Royal 17, D.vi f.40r.

Similarly, in his poem, The Regiment of Princes, Hoccleve laments how he initially pursued the priesthood but ultimately forgoes these dreams and instead marries. Hoccleve describes his vocational rollercoaster, emphasizing that at first he sought Aftir sum benefice “after some benefice” but states that whan noon cam, / By procees I me weddid atte laste, “when none came, in time, I did wed at last” (1452-53). Moreover, Hoccleve stresses that his initial reluctance to marry is specifically because he long held hopes of a career as a beneficed priest, explaining that I whilom thoghte / Han been a preest “for a while I thought I would have been a priest” (1447-48). In both poems, Hoccleve expresses his frustration with the vocational crisis of underemployment which produces the clerical proletariat that Kerby-Fulton examines in her book.

Members of the clerical proletariat loom large in Middle English literary culture, and various characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, including the Clerk of Oxenford, the hapless lover and parish clerk, Absolon (in the “Miller’s Tale“), and the noble Parson, who is perhaps the most virtuous figure on the pilgrimage. Similarly, William Langland (the author of Piers Plowman) was such a clerk, and likely so were the authors of the Owl and Nightingale and Laȝamon’s Brut. The University of Pennsylvania Press notes that “Taking in proletarian themes, including class, meritocracy, the abuse of children (“Choristers’ Lament”), the gig economy, precarity, and the breaking of intellectual elites (Book of Margery Kempe), The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry speaks to both past and present employment urgencies.”

Author portrait of Laȝamon in British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.ix., f.3.

Indeed, many modern untenured scholars (including myself), who work three or more academic jobs to pay the bills, will surely identify with the position Hoccleve voices in his complaint. As Kerby-Fulton insightfully observes in her book, the circumstances outlined in this late Middle English poem closely resemble the current crisis of vocation within modern academia, where well-paying tenured faculty positions are disappearing as the universities seek to outsource more and more of the work of education to adjunct professors, the modern equivalent of the late medieval clerical proletariat. Meanwhile, universities continue to produce an endless stream of highly skilled and qualified professionals, many of whom will sadly face chronic underemployment and even possible unemployment as a result of over-qualification and unethical practices now embedded in our private university system that is seemingly more concerned with profits than with the future of the academy.

Richard Fahey
PhD in English
University of Notre Dame


Further Reading & Selected Bibliography

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Harvard University: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2021.

Hoccleve, Thomas. The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth. University of Rochester: TEAMS Middle English Text Series, 1999.

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Laȝamon. Laȝamon’s Brut. Western Michigan University: Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, 2019.

Langland, William. Piers Plowman, ed. Robert Adams, Patricia R. Bart, et. al. Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, 1994.

Nuttall, Jenni, trans. “Hoccleve’s ‘Complaint’: An Open-Access Prose Translation.” International Hoccleve Society, 2015.

Varnam, Laura, trans. “The Complaint Paramount [The Superlative Complaint] by Thomas Hoccleve.” Dr Laura Varnam, 2019.