THE BORDER COLLIE MUSEUM

Permanent Collection

The Shepherd's Dog
from Chambers's Information for the People by William & Robert Chambers, 1875

PUSHING SHEEPDOG HISTORY BACK
BEFORE CAIUS

When I set out to research the history of the shepherd's dog and to write the articles on these pages, I did not anticipate how difficult it would be and how little information I would find.

Originally, I thought to write only about the history of the Border Collie, but it became clear early on that the Border Collie's history as a type (let alone as a breed) goes back perhaps to the 18th century, and then peters out. Yes, Johannes Caius (1510-1573) is much quoted by Border Collie enthusiasts as the "earliest portrayer of our breed"; but the truth is, the dog he describes could be any collie, perhaps any sheepdog. There is no description in his words of the traits that absolutely define the Border Collie: the silent use of "eye" to control the sheep, the crouching creep, the wide-circling outrun to gather the flock. That is not to say that this type of dog didn't exist prior to the 18th century, but there was no record of it; or I haven't found it yet.

Sheila Grew, in her small but significant work, Key Dogs from the Border Collie Family (1984 Payne Essex Ltd.), describes the Border Collie as a "type of herding dog developed by shepherds and sheep farmers during the last hundred years", that is, since the latter part of the 19th century. She goes on to say it is:

...characterized by its ability to move large or small numbers of sheep in a silent controlled manner in complete co-operation with its master...[and] a most useful asset possessed by many of these border working collies was the power of the 'eye', the ability to control the sheep by staring at them in a fixed and steady manner. Dogs with the right amount of 'eye' can keep their sheep bunched together well when driving them and thus avoid a great deal of flanking, running from one side to the other. This in turn keeps the sheep calmer and so they are less fatigued. . . .
It was generally known as the 'Working Collie' to distinguish it from the developing show (Lassie) type collie which started to flourish frim 1860 when the first dog show to include farm collies took place in Newcastle. . . .
The Working Collie was bred for one purpose only in those days--for work...

Left, Old Hemp, the progenitor of the Border Collie breed.

The history of the Border Collie as a breed is inexorably married to the first sheepdog trial at Bala in 1873, to the birth of Adam Telfer's Old Hemp (considered the progenitor of the Border Collie breed) in 1894, to the formation of the International Sheepdog Society in 1906, and to the coining of the name "Border Collie", attributed to the first secretary of the ISDS, James A. Reid, in 1921. Prior to that, there were just collies or sheepdogs or shepherds' dogs, and shepherds picked the type or working style that were most useful to their needs.

Given that, I had to re-evaluate the parameters by which I would do my research. I decided that it was important for me to go back before the Border Collie became a breed, and find those working collies, sheepdogs, and shepherds' dogs.

One is struck time and again by the fact that shepherds' dogs are barely alluded to in literature. Folksongs, poetry, novels and history abound with pastoral references. Shepherds falling in love or the lonely life of the shepherd are frequent themes. Histories of the sheep and wool industry in Britain fill volumes, but the shepherd's dog, so much a part of the shepherd's life, is hardly ever spoken of. In his landmark book, The Drove Roads of Scotland (Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd., London, 1952, 1953) A.R.B. Haldane says "Dogs were extensively used in droving,...although there is curiously little mention of them in contemporary records..." Why is that?

Right, the Shepherd's Dog from Chambers's English Readers Book, edited by J.M.D. Meiklejohn, W & R Chambers, London 1878

One explanation is that it was not ordinarily shepherds that wrote about pastoral life (a notable exception being James Hogg himself); and while to a shepherd his dog may be important, this fact might have been completely overlooked by contemprary writers. Could it be that shepherds' dogs were merely considered tools--indispensable but not worth singing about? "It is not surprising we know so little," says Shirley Toulson, "for no one bothers to record the ordinary" (The Drovers by Shirley Toulson, Shire Publications Ltd., Aylesbury, 1980).

These curious facts make understanding the role of sheepdogs difficult, and writing about them becomes a complex task. Instead of starting at the beginning, I needed to start at the end, and then push the history back. This page will reflect my attempt to do just that.

. . .

The term "English Literature" refers to works written in Modern English since the 15th century, when English acquired much of it's modern form. Prior to the 15th century, literature in England may be referred to as "Anglo-Saxon Literature" (ca. 650-1100, for example Beowulf), written in "Old English", and "Middle English Literature" (ca. 1100-1500, for example Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales). In addition, there is "Anglo-Norman Literature" (ca. 1100-1250) written in England in a dialect of French. (Information gleaned from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2004, Columbia University Press.)

Above, the "Chandos portrait" of William Shakespeare

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1564-1616

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer and playwright in the English Language; he certainly was one of the most prolific. There is much controversy over whether he or some other or others actually wrote his poems, sonnets, and plays, but we will not debate that here. When he was 18, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, and they had three children. Between 1585 and 1592 he moved to London and began a successful career as an actor and writer. In 1613 he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he died three yeas later. (Some material in this paragraph gleaned from Wikipedia.)

Shakespeare was, more or less, a contemporarty of Caius (he was actually his junior by a half century), and it is said that he based his eccentric Dr. Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor on Johannes Caius. Dogs are mentioned frequently in Shakespeare but usually in the context of a curse (for example, in Richard III, Act I Scene II, Gloucester calls a Gentleman an "unmanner'd dog!"). However, in King Lear (written between 1603 and 1606), a "bobtail tike" is mentioned. This is a term often used to describe the bobtail or Old English Sheepdog.

Above, center left, "The Annuciation to the Shepherds" from the Trivulizo Manuscript Book of Hours, late 15th century, by Simon Marmion (1425-1489), a French painter of illuminated manuscripts. Currently residing in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. Beside it is a detail showing the shepherd's dog. Above, center right, "The Annunciation to the Shepherds" from the Book of Hours for the Diocese of Avranches use, ca. 1480, and currently residing in the Avranches, Normandy, Museum. Beside it is a detail showing the shepherd's dog.

BOOKS OF HOURS
ca. 1300-1600

Right, "Annunciation" by "the Bedford Master", from a book of hours, ca. 1430-1445, meant for use in Rome and Paris; and the detail showing the dog.

A book of hours is the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. Each book of hours is unique in one way or another, but all contain a collection of texts, prayers and psalms, along with appropriate illustrations, to form a reference for Catholic Christian worship and devotion...Books of hours were usually written in Latin, although there are some examples entirely or partially written in vernacular European languages. Several hundred thousand books of hours have survived to the present day, scattered across libraries and private collections throughout the world.

Originally the prayers in a book of hours were private ones but by the 12th century they had become routine liturgical ones in the monasteries. After...1215, laymen also become interested in them...By the 15th century, various stationer's shops mass-produced books of hours in the Netherlands and France. In the late Middle Ages, books of hours often started with a timetable indicating religious holidays.

--from Wikipedia

Far left, "Annunciation to the Shepherds" by the "Master of the Geneva Latini Hours" ca. 1470, for use in Rouen, France. Like the previous one, above, this one is attributed to an unknown "Master". Left, the detail showing the dog

Like the Holkham Bible, below, books of hours were often made for or donated to various parishes as vehicles for teaching. The pages pictured here come from Rome, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and England. They all illustrate the Annunciation to the Shepherds and were chosen because they had shepherds' dogs in them. As you can see, the dogs do not look anything like the collies we are used to thinking of as shepherd's dogs. This could be for a number of reasons. Some of the illustrators were respected artists of the day, but others were monks or lay-persons without much skill at drawing or painting. They may not have seen shepherds' dogs, or their lack of skill just didn't allow for accurate representation. Or perhaps the dogs used then were whatever they had to hand. Some of the dogs look like hounds, others look almost like sheep, some look like small terriers. It was the style to portray the important characters in a story (like the shepherds and angels) large and everything else small in comparison. The sheep often fell into this latter category, and likely the dogs did too. However, the fact that so many of them do have dogs in them at all indicates that dogs were associated with shepherds, just as sheep were, and the presence of dogs was as necessary to identify these men and women as shepherds as the presence of sheep.

Above, four illustrations of the Annunciation to the Shepherds from books of hours residing in the Hague (the Netherlands), and below, the details showing the dogs from each of them. They are, left to right: Book of Hours for use of Paris, France, made for Fransoise Brinnon by her husband Jehan de Luc, Lord of Fontenay and Marilly, ca. 1524; Book of Hours and Prayer Book, made in Southern Netherlands ca. 1490-1500, with an added section and miniatures ca. 1500-1525; Book of Hours of Catherine de Medici, for use of Rome, made in France ca. 1560; and Book of Hours for use of Rome and Saurm/Rouen, made in Central France (possibly Le Mans) ca. 1485-1500.

We have others illustrations from books of hours which we may put up at another time if we have space. We wish to thank Aaron Garceau for his excellent website on Bagpipe Iconography and for his kind permission to reprint some of his images. It just so happened that, besides bagpipes (which you can see in the pictures of this section) they also had shepherds' dogs.

I wanted to put up one more picture, the one at left. It is from the De Damhouder Triptich by Pieter Pourbus (1510-1584), who was a Belgian painter from Bruges. It is the only one that we have come across that has a dog that actually looks like it could be a collie, and a black and white one at that. This is a step in the right direction.

Above, a photo of a detail of a brass monument
to Sir Anthony Fitzherbert and his wife
in the chancel floor of the church at Norbury, Derbyshire, England

SIR ANTHONY FITZHERBERT
1470-1538

Perhaps the first, and at least one of the earliest major treatises on husbandry was published in the reign of Henry VIII in 1534 by Sir Anthony Fitzherbert.

Born in Derbyshire, Fitzherbert was the sixth son of Ralph Fitzherbert and Elizabeth Marshall of Norbury. His brothers died young so he succeeded his father as lord of the estate granted to his family in 1125. He studied at Oxford, and was made "serjeant-at-law" for the king, eventually becoming a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He was knighted in 1516.

Fitzherbert was apparantly a real Rennaissance Man. He was, as the editor of the 1882 edition of his Book of Husbandry says, "a country gentleman, rich in horses and in timber, acquainted with the extravagant mode of life often adopted by the wealthy, and at the same time given to scholarly pursuits and to learned and devout reading." In 1514, Fitzherbert published a digest which was the first systematic attempt to provide a summary of English law. In 1519 he published an edition of the "Magna Carta with various other statutes". In 1523 he published three other works, including the Book of Husbandry and the Book of Surveying and Improvements (which is a treatise on the law and agriculture). And he continued to publish other law books throughout the rest of his life. He was a devout Catholic and opposed the king's suppression of the monasteries, but did not seem to be disadvantaged because of it.

The first part of the Boke of Husbandry is given over to preparing the fields and growing crops. A good deal is then devoted to raising livestock and treating livestock diseases. For example Fitzherbert explains that if a cow dies of a disease, the owner must bury the corpse deep in the ground so that no dogs may find it, "For," he says, "as many beastes as feleth the smelle of that caryen, are lykely to be enfecte" (as many beasts as feel the smell of that carrion, are likely to be infected). It is interesting to note that so much (and yet so little) was known about disease and infection, despite the fact that it would be almost another 300 years before there was a veterinary school in England.

There are a very large number of chapters devoted to horses, being a proper husband and landowner, and to religion, but the chapters we are interested in come earlier in the book, on sheep, for the shepherd's dog is mentioned there. In the chapter "To make an ewe to loue her lambe" (love her lamb) Fitzherbert says:

If thy ewe haue mylke, and wyll not loue her lambe, put her in a narrowe place made of bordes...a yarde wyde, and put the lambe to her, and socle it, and yf the ewe smyte the lamb with her heed, bynd her heed with a heye-rope , or a corde, to the syde of the penne: and if she wyl not stande syde long all the lambe, than gyue her a lyttel hey, and tye a dogge by her, that she may se hym: and this wyll make her to loue her lambe shortely...

["If your ewe has milk, and will not love her lamb, put her in a narrow place made of bordes...a yard wide, and put the lamb to her, and suckle it, and if the ewe butts the lamb with her head, bind her head with a hay-rope, or a cord, to the side of the pen: and if she will not stand sideways to the lamb, then give her a little hay, and tie a dog by her, that she may see him: and this will make her love her lamb shortly..."]

Later, Fitzherbert says:

...And a shepeherde shoulde not go without his dogge, his shepe-hoke, a payre of sheres, and his terre-boxe, eyther with hym, or redye at his shepe-folde, and he muste teche his dogge to barke whan he wolde haue him, to ronne whan he wold haue hym, and to leue ronning whan he wolde haue hym; or els he is not a cunninge shepeherde. The dogge must lerne it, whan he is a whelpe, or els it wyl not be: for it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe.

[...And a shepherd should not go without his dog, his sheep-hook, a pair of shears, and his ????-box, either with him or ready at his sheepfold, and he must teach his dog to bark when he would have him (bark), to run when he would have him (run), and to leave off running when he would have him; or else he is not a cunning shepherd. The dog must learn it when he is a whelp, or else it will not happen: for it is hard to make an old dog to stop.]

Fitzherbert also has brief chapters on the "properties" of other animals, including the badger, the lion, and the fox, and, if you can believe it, the "properties of a woman"! The latter includes to be cheerful, have a broad forehead and buttox, and other traits that Fitzherbert found pleasing in horses as well! At first I thought he may have been writing tongue in cheek, but realized he was serious when I arrived (via pigs and property) at the chapter on wives.

Above, a portrait of Chaucer
from Cassell's History of England, 1902

GEOFFREY CHAUCER
1343-1400

One of the earliest mentions of what appears to be a shepherd's dog comes to us from the 14th century and Geoffrey Chaucer. Sometimes called the "father of English Literature", Chaucer actually wrote his Canterbury Tales in Middle English. In "The Nonnes Tale", the phrase "ran Colle our dogge" is uttered. Colle is often thought to be a sheepdog or collie and that the name is akin to "Blackie". It is not a proven fact.

Chaucer was born in London. There are few detail of his early life, but he seems to have written many things besides Canterbury Tales, for which he is best known. He was also a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant, working for kings Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV). Chaucer's life and death are a bit of a mystery, and the last mention of him is in 1400, though his exact date of death is not known. He was buried in Westminster Abbey and 150 years later his remains were moved to a more ornate tomb making him the first writer to be interred in the "Poets' Corner". (Most of the information in this paragraph was gleaned from Wikipedia.org.)

Above, the "Anunciation to the Shepherds" from the Holkham Bible [1].
Note the dog at the center of the picture.

THE HOLKHAM BIBLE
ca. 1320-1330

The Holkham Bible is a "picture-book" rendition of the Biblical stories, written in London in the 14th century. It highlights stories from the Bible in an almost comic-book fashion (similar to the Bayeaux Tapestry), starting with the Creation, through the life of Jesus, to the Last Judgment. There are illustrations of the "usual Biblical characters", but 14th century people and everyday life of 14th-century England are pictured there as well. The book was probably made around the time of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth or a few years before. It was made for a Dominican friar, by a "Cockney London artist"[2], a layman hired to do the job, to help the friar explain the stories to his flock.

The illustrations are accompanied by brief explanatory texts in Anglo-Norman French, the literary language most familiar to contemporary English nobles (rather than Old English (Anglo-Saxon), the language that was spoken by the common people in England at the time). It is called the "Holkham Bible" because it was housed for many years in the library of Holkham House in Norfolk (East Anglia).

The costumes, tools, weapons and buildings in the illustrations are not Biblical, but are those of 14th-century England. They give a near documentary representation of many early occupations such as dyer, smith, carpenter, shepherd and midwife. The original pages are 10 inches high. The pictures are drawn in ink and leadpoint pencil, and partly coloured in wash to give a three-dimensional impression. There are more than 200 scenes in 84 pages.

Left, a detail from the "Anunciation to the Shepherds".

The scene of the "Annunciation to the Shepherds" shows a dog likely to be a shepherd's dog [3], since the only beings in the picture, besides the angel, are the shepherds, the sheep, and the dog. It took an Englishman who likely saw working dogs bringing sheep to market in London, to include one in a book about the Bible, something that one rarely sees in representations of Biblical stories. It shows that shepherds' dogs were common at the time of the artist and to him, a scene with sheep and shepherds would not have seemed complete without the dog.

MARCUS TERENTIUS VARRO
116BC-27BC

Varro was a Roman scholar and writer. He was born into a family thought to be of equestrian rank, and always remained close to his roots, owning a large farm in the Reatine plain. He studied under the Roman philologist, Lucius Aelius Stilo, and later at Athens under the academic philosopher, Antiocus of Ascalon.

Varro's literary output was very large but little of it survives but one complete work and many fragments. His work is most noteworthy for anticipating microbiology and epidemiology. He warned his contemporaries to avoid swamps and marshlands, since such areas, he said, "breed certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases."

He began his Res Rusticae in his eightieth years, and it was intended as a practical manual on husbandry, devoted to agriculture, domestic cattle, sheep, poultry, game birds, and bees. Each book is cast in the form of a dialogue, with its own setting and drama.

It is often quoted as mentioning the shepherd's dog, but unfortunately for us, the dog Varro describes is of the guardian breeds, not the herding breeds. Still, it is worth mentioning. It appears, however, that perhaps only guardian breeds were used for sheep in Rome, because large preditors existed that needed to be guarded against. Here is what Varro had to say about them:

There is left...of the discussion of quadrupeds only the topic of dogs; but it is of great interest to those of us who keep fleece-bearing flocks, the dog being the guardian of the flock, which needs such a champion to defend it. Under this head come especially sheep but also goats, as these are common prey of the wolf, and we use dogs to protect them...

In the first place, they should be procured of the proper age, as puppies and dogs over age are of no value for guarding either themselves or sheep...preferably white in colour, so that they may the more readily be distinguished in the dark...It is better, therefore, to buy from a shepherd a bitch which has been trained to follow sheep, or one that has had no training at all; for a dog forms a habit for anything very easily, and the attachment he forms for shepherds is more lasting than that he forms for sheep...

The food of dogs is more like that of man than that of sheep: they eat scraps of meat and bones, not grass and leaves. Great care must be taken for their supply of food; for hunger will drive them to hunt for food...and take them away from the flock...They are not allowed to feed on the flesh of a dead sheep, for fear that the taste will make them less inclined to spare the flock...

To protect them from being wounded by wild beasts, collars are placed on them...made of stout leather with nails having heads; under the nail heads there is sewed a piece of soft leather, to prevent the hard iron from injuring the neck.

The number of dogs is usually determined by the size of the flock; it is thought to be about right for one dog to follow each shepherd. But the number varies with the circumstances; thus in countries where wild beasts are plentiful, there should be more, as is usually the case with those who escort the flocks to summer and winter pastures through distant woodland trails. On the other hand, for a flock feeding near the steading two dogs to the farm are sufficient.

I believe the implication is that the dogs were habituated to follow the shepherd, and the sheep accustomed to following the dogs, thereby obviating the need for a herding dog. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Some material for this article was taken from the web pages of Bill Thayer
and he has explicity inferred it to be in the public domain; likewise from Wikipedia.]

THE BIBLE

Taken strictly as literature, the Bible is likely to have been written down after the period when Dumuzid's Dream (below) was supposed to have taken place. Many people have pointed out that the Bible does not mention a dog with the shepherds. In Biblical times, even though shepherds likely did have dogs, among Jews and Muslims dogs were considered unclean and it certainly seems unlikely, therefore, that they would be mentioned in the sacred text of the Bible.

However, in his Encyclopaedia Biblica ("a Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political, and Religious History, the Archaeology, Geography and Natural History of the Bible", Adam & Charles, London, 1899), the Rev. T. K. Cheyne (Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford) tells us otherwise:

The shepherd's dog is mentioned in Job 30-1...but [the] passage [does not] vouchsafe the dog in any friendly words.

Under the heading "Pariah dog", the book mentions that

...in the country they are trained by the shepherds and farmers to act as sheep-dogs (cp Job 30-1). Not much good, however can be said of the latter: they are 'a mean, sinister, ill-conditioned generation,' whose use consists in barking at intruders and warning the shepherds of any possible danger. In appearance they resemble the Scotch collie, and are said to be intelligent, and sagacious when trained. Rabies is almost, or entirely, unknown among them...

[This entry is a bit of a stretch and has nothing to do with Britain, but we're grasping at straws here.]

DUMUZID'S DREAM
from Sumerian Literature
ca. pre-2900 BC
A sir-kalkal[1] for the dead Dumuzid

Dumuzid is a shepherd and a mythical, prehistoric, pre-dynastic Sumerian king (prior to ca. 2900 BC which is when the Early Dynastic period begins). According to some sources, he is considered a precursor to the Babylonian god Tammuz [2]. In these interpretations, Tammuz is either a nature god, who protects agriculture and flocks and personifies fertility, or he is a sun god. In any case, similar to such gods of other mythologies, he dies at midsummer, and is ressurected the following spring, and this appears to be the case for Dumuzid as well. According to others, this narrative focuses "on the goddess Inana's journey to the Underworld, her rescue and return, and her pact with the Underworld gods, whereby she is replaced in the Underworld by her lover, the god Dumuzid." [3]

In the story, Dumuzid lies down to sleep and dreams. When he awakens, he is terrified and relates his dream to his sister, who is a "wise woman who knows the meanings of dreams". Dumuzid says that in his dream, among other things, water was thrown on his coals, his holy drinking cup was torn down from its peg, his shepherd's stick disappeared, an owl took one of his lambs, he died, and the sheepfold was haunted.

His sister interprets the dream to mean that terrible things will befall him and that she will morn him. She sends a friend to look for the villains (demons of the Underworld [3]) that are coming for him, and the friend reports that they are on their way. She tells her brother, who says he will hide and begs her not to tell them where he went. She responds with:

If I reveal your whereabouts to them, may your dog devour me! The black dog, your shepherd dog, the noble dog, your lordly dog, may your dog devour me! [3]

The men come for Dumuzid, but his sister will reveal nothing, so they go to his friend, who accepts their bribes and tells them where the shepherd/king/god is hiding. They find him and prepare to kill him, but he prays to Utu, a god, who turns his hands and feet into the feet of a gazelle, and so he escapes. Unfortunately, this, as in all the stanzas in this "song for the dead Dumuzid", happens three times, and the third time he cannot escape and is killed and his sheepfold is destroyed.

In their book, The Literature of Ancient Sumer [3], the authors say of the pastural theme for a violent act:

The composition exploits the powerful image of the sheepfold as a centre of warmth, well-being, prosperity, and stability...When the comfortable, ordered world of the sheepfold is attacked and disordered, as first in Dumuzid's dream and second when the demons enter, nothing but misery and death can come of it.

Since Dumuzid's sister used "dog" in the singluar, presumably all these adjectives apply to one dog, Dumuzid's shepherd dog. He is black so it may be safe to say that he is a herding dog rather than a guardian breed (which are usually white or light colored). I know this is assuming a lot, since this story takes place almost 5,000 years ago, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions. But if he is a herding dog, then this has got to be the earliest literary mention of the shepherd's dog.

[3] The Literature of Ancient Sumer by Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gabor Zolyomi. Translated by Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gabor Zolyomi (2004, Oxford University Press).

More when we get it!

Copyright 2008 by Carole L. Presberg

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shepdog@gis.net.