Harts, Hounds, and Humans

In Middle English romance, hounds play a significant role in hunting scenes and function in the establishment of human identity for their masters. Dogs are of such importance to medieval hunting that in the oldest English book on hunting, the early fifteenth-century Master of Game, several chapters address the care and training of hounds. Yet in the Middle English Robin Hood rhymes of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, despite repeated references to the hunting of deer, no mention of dogs is made among Robin and his men. The sole reference to hounds occurs in Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, when Little John encounters the Sheriff hunting with hounds and then leads the Sheriff on a hunt Is this an oversight on the part of the anonymous authors—dogs are such an integral part of medieval hunting that they need no mention—or is this a commentary on the characters themselves? What does it mean that dogs are absent from the world of Robin Hood? This essay examines A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode to establish the practical roles that hounds played in the historical reality of the medieval hunt, to understand the extent to which hounds owned by the lower estates and in what capacities, and to recognize the relationship between animals—especially dogs and deer in the Geste—and humans.