While most animals during the Middle Ages were service animals, our ancestors also enjoyed the company of domesticated pets. The evidence can be found in many different art forms such as literature, paintings, tapestries, stained glass windows, and stuatuary. Lords and ladies and peasants alike all enjoyed the company of domesticated animals. In the stained glass window pictured here from 1520 Cologne, the couple’s pet dog is a sleepy symbol of wedded tranquillity.

In drawings of medieval pets, the British Library has a manuscript showing a woman with a pet squirrel, while the Luttrell Psalter shows a collared pet squirrel as a sign of status.

In many households, birds were kept in cages as pets.  Larks and nightingales were kept for their sweet songs. Jays and magpies, often simply called ’pies’, were taught to copy speech. Parrots, which were called popinjays, were available for a high price. They were exotic, colorful, and entertaining, but being imports from the Middle East were not easily obtained. Geoffrey Chaucer mentions the popinjay six times in his works.

Cats in the Middle Ages were kept mainly to hunt mice, and also, more grimly, for their fur and skins. Yet cats were also treasured. Exeter Cathedral lists in its accounts from 1305 to 1467 the sum of a penny a week to feed the cathedral cats if the animals did not catch many mice in the main church.

Dogs, however, remained a favourite. Geoffrey Chaucer referred to the Prioress in The Canterbury Tales as having ”small hounds that she fed with meat and milk”. Eileen Power, in her research into medieval nunneries, found that in spite of efforts by ecclesiastical authorities to banish such worldly customs, the nuns often kept dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, rabbits, and squirrels. 

Hunting dogs and hawks were not officially pets, being used to hunt and bring extra food for the table and to provide sport and entertainment to their lords and ladies. However, hawks were also status symbols, given as kingly gifts and well-known as signs of wealth and power. As such they were pampered and displayed–so much so that perches were even brought indoors to their owners could have their falcons with them. In 1368 the Abbot of Westminster, Nicholas de Litlington, bought a wax image of a falcon to offer at the altar to help a sick falcon recover. Lay men and women often brought their pets into church–the men with hawks on their wrists and women with lap-dogs.