Dogs in medieval paintings and manuscripts: hunting hounds, lapdogs and faithful friends

Medieval dog paintings survive in books written and painted by hand, on the brass plates of church tombs and in the Bayeux Tapestry. This guide looks at the dogs in each one, as the libraries and museums that hold them describe them. You will meet hunting hounds, lapdogs and faithful dogs, and see what the dogs meant to the people who drew them. For dogs painted after the Middle Ages, from Titian in 1533 to Balla in 1912, read our guide to famous paintings of dogs.

Dogs in the Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry is the oldest work in this guide. The Bayeux Museum dates it to the 11th century and says it tells the story of the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy, in 1066. It is an embroidery: wool thread sewn onto linen, nearly 70 metres long and 50 centimetres high.

The main story runs along the centre. Above and below it, two narrow borders show animals. The museum lists dogs among the real ones, with birds, lions and deer, and griffins and centaurs among the imaginary ones. While the Bayeux museum is renovated, the Tapestry is on loan to the British Museum in London, from September 2026 to July 2027.

What did medieval dogs look like?

A hunting book from the 1380s shows many kinds of dog, each kind in its own painting. Gaston III, Count of Foix (1331 to 1391), called Phoebus, wrote his Livre de la chasse (Book of the Hunt) between 1387 and 1389. The Morgan Library & Museum says the book has four parts, and two of them are about dogs: one on their nature and care, and one on hunting with them. The Morgan's copy was made in Paris in 1406 or 1407. The museum counts 46 surviving copies of the book and names two as the finest: its own, and one at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

The paintings show these kinds of hunting dog:

• Running hounds. Phoebus ranked these highest. They ran in packs and followed an animal by its scent, from far behind.
• Greyhounds. They hunted by sight. The Morgan explains that the French word for greyhound, lévrier, comes from lièvre, the French word for hare.
• Spaniels. Phoebus called them bird-dogs and said the breed came from Spain. They drove partridge and quail out of cover. He complained that they barked too much and lacked discipline.
• The lymer. A tracking dog, kept on a lead, that found the scent of a stag before the chase began.

The Aberdeen Bestiary, a book of animals held by the University of Aberdeen, opens its chapter on dogs with three attentive dogs in collars and leads.

How hunting dogs lived: kennels, care and food

Phoebus needed healthy hounds, and the Morgan says he wrote a long chapter on their illnesses and cures. One painting shows kennel men at work. At the top, a man looks in a dog's mouth while others trim a paw and check an eye. Below, dogs stand in a foot bath to harden the pads of their feet, have their ears checked and a leg set, are washed, and are checked for thorns and parasites.

The kennel had two doors, the Morgan explains. The front door was only for the hunt. The back door stayed open onto a small fenced meadow where the dogs could play. A boy called a page of hounds began this work at age seven. He cleaned the kennel every morning, gave fresh water twice a day, changed the straw every three days and slept with the dogs to stop them fighting.

The dogs were rewarded with meat. After a stag hunt, the tracking dog got the stag's head, and the other hounds were given pieces of meat soaked in its blood. Before a roe deer hunt, Phoebus said to feed the dogs first. The British Library adds that medieval household accounts list "bread for the dogs".

Faithful friends in the bestiary

A bestiary is a medieval book of real and imaginary animals, written to teach moral lessons. The Getty Museum says these books held from a few dozen to more than a hundred animals, each with a picture.

The dog chapter of the Aberdeen Bestiary praises dogs above other animals. In the University of Aberdeen's translation, "No creature is more intelligent than the dog", and dogs "alone recognise their names and love their masters".

Then come stories of loyalty. King Garamantes was captured by his enemies, and 200 dogs fought through the enemy lines to bring him home. In the city of Antioch, a dog stayed beside its murdered master, then picked the killer out of the crowd and held him. The British Library holds another manuscript, Harley MS 3244, with a picture of a dog attacking its master's killer.

The University of Aberdeen says King Henry III chose scenes from the dog's story for the Painted Chamber at Westminster Palace. The British Library says loyalty was the quality people praised most in a dog in the Middle Ages.

Lapdogs at court and in the convent

On the January page of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Jean, Duke of Berry, sits at a feast. The Utpictura18 database of Aix-Marseille University describes small dogs on the table and a greyhound on the floor, and dates the page between 1412 and 1416. The Château de Chantilly says the Limbourg brothers, Paul, Jean and Herman, painted this prayer book for the duke, a brother of King Charles V of France. It belongs to the Musée Condé at Chantilly.

The British Library's manuscripts show more lapdogs. One shows the writer Christine de Pizan with her dog, and another shows a nun holding her lapdog. Nuns and monks kept little dogs even when church rules tried to limit it. In the early 1300s, William Greenfield, Archbishop of York, complained that little dogs brought into the choir during services disturbed the nuns' prayers. The 13th-century scholar Albertus Magnus wrote that lapdogs often died of constipation because their food was too rich.

Dogs at the feet of knights and ladies

A brass is a flat plate of copper alloy, engraved with a figure of the dead person and set into a church floor or wall. The V&A says the figures often lie with their hands in prayer and their feet resting on a lion or a dog. One in the museum, made in England between 1420 and 1440, shows a knight in armour with his feet on a dog.

What did the dog mean? The V&A says specialists still disagree. Some read it as a sign of loyalty. Others read it as a sign of evil, because dogs had a low reputation in Christian tradition, and on this brass the knight seems to press down hard on the dog with his feet. Later in the 1400s, the V&A adds, dogs on brasses took a gentler role and often stood for named pets.

Some ladies' brasses show a small dog. A V&A rubbing (a copy made by rubbing wax over paper laid on the brass) records a lady's brass at St Albans Abbey, made between 1395 and 1404. Her small dog sits looking up at her, in a collar hung with bells. Another rubbing, from Upminster Church in Essex, shows Elizabeth Dencourt in 1455 with a small dog at her feet.

To see what the knights on these tombs wore, read what a medieval knight wore. Some of these brass dogs stood for real pets, and our guide on how to memorialize a pet has ideas for remembering yours today.

Purrealism's 15 royal portrait styles include a Medieval Knight style. All eight finished portraits in the gallery come from the Indian court styles, so to see your own dog as a knight, choose the Medieval Knight style in the portrait studio and add a photo of up to 5 MB.

Why do medieval dogs look so strange?

Many medieval dog pictures shared online look odd today, and two collections in this guide explain why.

The first reason is purpose. The Getty Museum says bestiary pictures were made to show the wonder, variety and hidden meaning of the natural world, and it lists visual accuracy as outside their aim.

The second reason is humour. Many odd dogs appear in the margins, the blank edges around the text. Eleanor Jackson, a curator at the British Library, describes a Book of Hours, a prayer book, made in southern England between 1320 and 1330. In its margins a dog plays a hurdy-gurdy in a band of cats, pigs and rabbits. A fox teaches a dog pupil who holds a book up to its face, and a rabbit archer aims at a spotty dog. Jackson places these scenes in a popular theme of the time, "the world turned upside down", where hunted animals become hunters and animals make music.