A proclamation was made in 1387 “that dogs shall not wander in the City at large”; yet in the same order a distinction was made between wild or wandering dogs and household dogs. So the concept of the “pet” existed in medieval London. The most prized of London dogs was the mastiff. Many were sent as gifts to prominent persons abroad, and a German traveller of the sixteenth century noted that some of those dogs “are so large and heavy that if they have to be transported long distances, they are provided with shoes so that they do not wear out their feet.” They were also used as guard dogs and in the records of London Bridge there are payments made in compensation to those who had been bitten or hurt by the mastiff hounds. The major problem in the city, however, has always been that of strays. A notice at the newly built St. Katherine Docks, by the Tower of London, dated 23 September 1831, warned that “the Gate Keepers will prevent the admission of DOGS, unless the Owners shall have them fastened by a Cord or Handkerchief.” The principal complaint against the animals was that they wreaked “Considerable Injury” upon goods, but the age of commerce was also the age of philanthropy. In the mid-nineteenth century a Home for Lost and Starving Dogs was established in London; this is the first instance of canine welfare in the city. “When it first opened there was a disposition to laugh,” “Aleph” wrote in 1863, “but subscribers were found, and the asylum flourishes”; removed to Battersea in 1871 after complaints in the neighbourhood about the noise, it flourishes still, as the Battersea Dogs Home.
The flea is as ancient as the dog, but its part in the natural history of London is shrouded in obscurity. The bed bug was first noticed publicly in 1583, while the cockroach was reported by 1634. We may infer, however, that lice and fleas of every kind have infested London from the beginning of its recorded history, to such an extent that its condition has often been taken to resemble them. London, according to Verlaine, was “a flat, black bug.”
If animals in London were not used for labour or for food, they were characteristically employed for the purposes of entertainment. Ever since the first lions were placed in the Tower of London in the thirteenth century (to be joined later by a polar bear and an elephant), animals have provided a spectacle for the restless and voracious crowd. The first performing elephant in the London streets was recorded by Robert Hooke in 1679. Londoners could “see the animals” at Exeter Change. A building of three floors at the corner of Wellington Street and the Strand, it was known in the 1780s as “Pidcock’s Exhibition of Wild Beasts.” The animals were kept on the upper floors “in a small den and cages in rooms of various size, the walls painted with exotic scenery, in order to favour the illusion.” The menagerie went through the hands of three separate owners, and an engraving of 1826 shows the old house jutting above the Strand with pictures of elephants, tigers and monkeys daubed upon its front between two grand pillars of Corinthian design. Its popularity was very great, largely because, apart from the Tower zoo, it was the only menagerie of exotic species in London. The less dangerous animals were, on occasions, led through the streets as a living advertisement. Wordsworth mentions a dromedary and monkeys; and J.T. Smith in his
