The pet indoors

MEDIEVAL pets had as their true milieu enclosed domestic space. They differed from other animals on which care was lavished, whether fine horses, hunting hounds and hawks, all of which required special attention from trained carers and resided in purpose-built accommodation – stables, kennels and mews. Pets, on the other hand, were free to accompany their owners in all aspects of their life, playing with them or with other pets.

Pets abounded in both public and private interior spaces, from courtyards and halls to private chambers, where their presence was taken for granted. In the early fifteenth-century Bedford Hours an illumination depicting the legend of the Fleur de Lys includes a small brown longhaired dog, wearing a collar, standing at the feet of court ladies, looking up at a king dressed in armour. In another illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript a round, long-haired dog with a curled tail follows the trains of the court ladies in a scene from Jean Wauquelin's L'Ystoire de Helayne (1448).

Pets appear in more intimate domestic spaces. In Lorenzo Lotto's early sixteenth-century painting ‘Husband and Wife’, a fashionably dressed couple sit in a luxurious room, in an opulent setting; an imported carpet is draped over the table. The man points to a tame squirrel on the table, as the lady holds in her left arm a white long-haired dog with a short snout and collar.