Bloodhound History

II   The Beginnings

Earliest References

The first recorded use of the word 'Bloodhound' occurs in English in a poem called William of Palerne or William and the Werwolf.  This romance was written in English about 1350, at the command of Sir Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford.  It was a translation of a French romance Guillaume de Palerne, of about 1220. 

It is a story about a baby prince brought up by a werwolf.  When the prince grows up he elopes with the daughter of the Emperor of Rome.  The couple, who are wearing white bear skins as a disguise, are tracked by “blod-houndes bold”, but when the werwolf sees they are in danger, he runs in front of the hounds and draws them off.

This shows that Bloodhounds were familiar to the English reader before 1350, and fascinatingly at this early date, they are seen as careful hunters, and on the trail of two human beings, albeit ones disguised as white bears!

There are also two poems written later, Barbour's The Bruce 1375, and a poem by Henry (“Blind Harry”) the Minstrel on William Wallace, about 1470, in each of which the hero is tracked by a ‘Sleuth-hound’.  Both these incidents would have taken place by 1307, and whether true or not, show that the Sleuth-hound was known to the writers as an animal existing at that time, which could be used to track people.

Origins

So we know there were Bloodhounds in Britain in and before the 1300s.  Where they came from, and how long they had existed — perhaps 50 years, perhaps centuries — we do not know.

There have been speculations about the origin of the Bloodhound, but that's what they are - speculations, not supported by evidence.  There are and have been many dogs more or less large, keen scented, with ears that hang rather than stand erect.  They may very well share a common ancestor, and this may have existed in Mesopotamia or points east in the year dot.  That does not make them Bloodhounds.  I take it, too, that any stories about Bloodhounds existing in Britain in the time of the Romans, (or being brought here from the sack of Troy even!) are irrelevant.  Such traditions have too little support and are too unspecific.

William the Conqueror 

The most persistent notion is that the ancestors of the Bloodhound, or even the Bloodhound itself, were brought over from France by William the Conqueror in 1066. 

No evidence for this has ever been published in the accounts of Bloodhound History; nevertheless I have even seen the claim that there were Bloodhounds on the field at the Battle of Hastings!

What does this claim amount to? After the Norman Conquest the royalty and the nobility of England and the upper ranks of the church were Norman French, while the subject population was English.  And the Normans were fanatical lovers of hunting; hunting and hawking were the major peacetime pursuits of knighthood.  The Anglo-Saxons had also hunted with hounds but there could hardly have been enough to satisfy the appetite of the new aristocracy, so numbers of hounds must have been brought over from Northern France during the century after the battle of Hastings.  But how many, and whether the specific ancestors of the Bloodhound were among these, or whether hounds already in England gave rise to our breed, or whether it came from a mingling of French with native stock, is impossible to say.  The Medieval term for a scent-hound, 'rache', is from an Old English word.  It was thought of as a large dog ('molossus'), and indicates that an ancestor of the Bloodhound, perhaps the Bloodhound itself, could very well have existed in Anglo-Saxon England.

The highly specific idea that a particular, pure breed of hound, the St Hubert, was brought over by William, and continued to be kept virtually pure over here till modern times, certainly lacks any basis in any early source that I have been able to find.  Indeed, Gerard Sasias, writing, in French, in Encyclo-Chien on the St Hubert, says even the name of the St Hubert was unknown to the Normans. 

At any rate, by the Mid 14th century, the English had a large, keen-scented hound, sometimes used to track people, which they called the ‘Bloodhound’.  Both ‘blood’ and ‘hound‘ are English words from common Germanic roots, and do not occur in French.  They could have been put together to form a compound at any time there appeared an animal that needed to be named, including before the Norman Conquest.  The first recorded use in William of Palerne is in a translation of a French poem.  The fact that this is the first recorded instance means nothing more than that earlier texts in which it appeared have not survived, or have not been noticed, and that the word, like most words, was familiar in the spoken language well before it was written down.  The French word the writer translates as ‘Bloodhounds’ is simply ‘chiens’, not ‘chiens de St Hubert’.  The translator uses ‘Bloodhound’ because he knows what a bloodhound is, and does, and he thinks it is appropriate to the situation the poem describes.  He probably would not have known what a St Hubert hound was. 

Conclusion: dogs called Bloodhounds appeared in England at some time in the period from before the Norman Conquest up to about 1300.  We don't know when.  We don't know what dogs went into their making.  We don't know how like the modern Bloodhound they were, but as there is no evidence of discontinuity from then on in the history of the Bloodhound in England, we are safe in assuming that they, or some of them, developed into the modern breed.