Bloodhound History

VII   The St Hubert

St Hubert, 656-727 was a Frankish clergyman, Bishop of Maastricht & Liège, known only in contemporary records for his work among the heathens to the North.  A later pious legend sees him as a hunter, converted from his worldy ways by a vision of a stag with a crucifix between its antlers (a story first told of St Eustace).  Towards the end of the First Millennium there is evidence of a cult seeing him as the patron saint of hunters.

In Medieval times the name 'Chien de Saint Hubert' was given to a variety of large scent hound of which the monks of St Hubert's Abbey (formerly the Abbey of Andain, to which Hubert's remains were removed after his death) kept a notable kennel.  Perhaps the association of their 'founder' with hunting gave them licence to pursue the worldly activity of hunting themselves, which the church generally tried to discourage among its clergy.

From 1200 onwards the monks annually sent some of their black hounds to the King of France.

According to du Fouilloux (see Turbervile) by the 16th century these hounds were thoroughly mixed in their breeding, of many colours and dispersed in various areas of France.  He describes them as short of leg and massive of body.

They appear to have lost popularity, and after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, during which the aristocratic pursuit of hunting went into catastrophic decline, there were effectively no St Huberts left in France, and elsewhere they had been so much crossed in their breeding that they had altogether lost their character.

In the 19th century a French count, Le Couteulx de Canteleu, who was a great lover of the British Bloodhound, but who also mourned the extinction of the St Hubert in France, proposed the idea that the Bloodhound was none other than the St Hubert, brought over to Britain in the time of William the Conqueror, and somehow miraculously kept pure, while it had been mixed and allowed to die out on the Continent.  He was also, apparently the first to propose the idea that the word 'Bloodhound' originally meant 'hound of pure blood', an idea which leant support to his theory.

He bought a large stock of Bloodhounds, and with some fellow enthusiasts tried to resurrect the 'St Hubert' in France.  Some British exhibitors were also ready to take their hounds over and exhibit them in France as St Huberts.  However, this 'Mk II' St Hubert was not a great success with French huntsmen.

In the 1890's an influential book called Races des Chiens by H A Graf van Bylandt (Comte Henri de Bylandt) was published, in several editions and languages in Holland and Belgium.  This was a book of breed desriptions, and in it the Bloodhound was named as the Chien de St Hubert.  The illustrations, however, are all of English Bloodhounds kept in England, suggesting that the Continental stock had again dwindled.

Following two world wars, the continental stock has had to be re-established again with British and American imports of Bloodhounds.

When the FCI (Fédération Cynologique Internationale), of which Belgium was a founder member, but to which Britain did not belong, recognised the Bloodhound, it was named as the Chien de Saint Hubert, originating in Belgium!

Most writers on the History of the Bloodhound, while some are prepared to grant the possibility that the original St Hubert may have been involved in the development of the Bloodhound, or share a similar ancestry, do not accept the notion that the two breeds are identical.

The modern St Hubert ('Mk II') and the Bloodhound are of course the same breed, and that breed is the Bloodhound.