City Dog House Author Kate Casebeer Encoder Kate Casebeer Guest Editor Ian MacInnes Markup Editor Joey Takeda Proofreader Tye Landels Data Manager Tye Landels Junior Programmer Joey Takeda Programmer Martin Holmes Associate Project Director Kim McLean-Fiander Project Director Janelle Jenstad The Map of Early Modern Londonhttp://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/includes.xmlVictoria, BC, Canada
Department of English P.O.Box 3070 STNC CSC University of Victoria Victoria, BC Canada V8W 3W1
2016University of Victoria978-1-55058-519-3 Janelle Jenstad london@uvic.ca

Copyright held by The Map of Early Modern London on behalf of the contributors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Further details of licences are available from our Licences page. For more information, contact the project director, Janelle Jenstad, for specific information on the availability and licensing of content found in files on this site.

Born digital.

The City Dog House, located in northern London, was adjacent to Moorfields and was located outside of The Wall and the city wards. On the Agas map, it is labelled as Dogge hous. Built in 1512, the Lord Mayor’s dog house, as it was most frequently called, housed the Lord Mayor’s hunting dogs.

Most MoEML documents, or significant fragments with xml:id attributes, can be addressed using the mol: prefix and accessed through the web application with their id + .xml.

The molagas prefix points to the shape representation of a location on MoEML’s OpenLayers3-based rendering of the Agas Map.

Links to page-images in the Chadwyck-Healey Early English Books Online (EEBO) repository. Note that this is a subscription service, and may not be accessible to those accessing it from locations outside member institutions.

Links to page-images in the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA).

The mdt (MoEML Document Type) prefix used on catRef/target points to a central taxonomy in the includes file.

The mdtlist (MoEML Document Type listing) prefix used in linking attributes points to a listings page constructed from a category in the central MDT taxonomy in the includes file. There are two variants, one with the plain xml:id of the category, meaning all documents in the specified category, and one with the suffix _subcategories, meaning all subcategories of the category.

The molgls (MoEML gloss) prefix used on term/corresp points to a a glossary entry in the GLOSS1.xml file.

This molvariant prefix is used on ref/target attributes during automated generation of gazetteer index files. It points to an element in the generated variant spellings listing file which lists all documents which contain a particular spelling variant for a location.

This molajax prefix is used on ref/target attributes during the static build process, to specify links which point to MoEML resources which should not be loaded into the source page during standalone processing; instead, these should be turned into links to the XML source documents, and at HTML page load time, these should be turned into AJAX calls. This is to handle the scenario in which a page such as an A-Z index of the whole site would end up containing virtually the whole site inside itself.

The molstow prefix is used on facs attributes to link to the HCMC verison of the Stow facsimiles. Usually the first group is the year (1633) and then last is the image number (0001).

The molshows prefix is used on facs attributes to link to the copies of page-images from mayoral shows stored in the london account on the HCMC server. The first group is the year (1633), the second is the source repository, and then last is the image file name.

The sb prefix is used on ref/target attributes to link to Stow’s Books URLs at UToronto.

Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.

 Removed old geo coordinates now superceded by GeoJSON. Changed calendar value from "julian" to "julianSic" using XSLT. Added sourceDesc information for born-digital documents. Published. Completed proof reading. Imported article by Kate Casebeer (from Albion College). Standardized respStmts for JENS1, MCFI1, and HOLM3 and added TAKE1 as Junior Programmer. Assigned this page to Ian MacInnes, Professor of English, Albion College, imacinnes@albion.edu. In Summer 2015, his summer research and scholarship undergraduate students will research and write an article on this site. Added XInclude for listPrefixDef in the header. Fixed erroneous status attribute on revisionDesc, changing it from stub to empty. Added global publicationStmt through XInclude. Eliminated superfluous catRef elements from the header. Added catRef elements based on the place/type values in the document. Put change elements inside revisionDesc into the correct (latest first) order. Added profileDesc containing document type information expressed in catRef elements. Converted @rend to @style, through XSLT transformation. Added front element with docTitle as part of a normalization process. This will be used as the definitive page title on rendering. Various updates and fixes made through XSLT, to standardize and normalize encoding practices. City Dog House
City Dog House

The City Dog House, located in northern London, was adjacent to MoorfieldsOn some maps, such as the 1572 Braun and Hogenberg map of London (Londinum Feracissimi), the boundaries differ so that the Dog House also abuts Mallow Field. and was located outside of The Wall and the city wards.For a list of wards in early modern London, see Wards in the placeography. It was also referred to by the Lord Maiors dog-house, The Lord Mayors dogge-house, the Lord Mayors Dog-house, the Dog-house in Finsbury Field, and the Lord Mayor’s Dog-kennel. On the Agas map, it is labelled as Dogge hous. Built in 1512, the Lord Mayor’s dog house, as it was most frequently called, housed the Lord Mayor’s hunting dogs (Hope 42). This area was popular for recreational pursuits, such as archery, as depicted on the Agas map.See the archers on the Agas map here. Before 1527, when Moorfields and Finsbury Field were drained, the place was also popular for ice skating (Thornbury 196). Besides having a history as a place for recreation, the Dog House was located near Finsbury Manor, which was owned by the Lord Mayor and located in the outskirts of London, where the frequently mentioned odour and noise of the Dog House would be less bothersome (Poore 336).

The hounds were looked after by an officer called the Common Hunt, who resided in or near the Dog House itself. The Common Hunt was a high-ranking position, second only to the Master Sword-bearer (Pennant 347). The Common Hunt, also called Master Common Hunt, attended to the Lord Mayor on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays (Pennant 348).

From The Noble Art of Venerie by George Gascoigne, 1611. Image courtesy of LUNA at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

By the early 1600s, the Dog House seems to have fallen into disrepair, being referred to as verie old and reuinous and not fit for habitation as well as having stinking smelles (Waller 34). The Common Hunt writes next year that it doth rayne into the rooms of the Dogge hous’e throughout, and that the same will, in short time,- fall downe (Waller 34). The house, however, remained standing, though we do not hear about it for some time so perhaps some repairs were finally made. After some debate on the importance of the Common Hunt’s position in preserving the history of London, the office was abolished in 1807.

The Lord Mayor allowed well-off citizens to use his hounds to hunt. These hounds were used for an event called the citizen’s common hunt (not to be confused with the officer mentioned above). Strype describes one of these common hunts on 18 September 1562: There was a great cry for a mile, then the hounds killed him [the fox] at St. Giles, Cripplegate; a great hallooing at his death and blowing of horns; and the Lord Mayor and all his company rode through London to his place in Lombard Street (Strype 25).

The hounds were treated well. After a stag hunt, they were given choice pieces of meat from the dead stag, and on their return to the Dog House the hounds had their feet bathed and greased (Velten 89). The popularity of the common hunt fell until in the late eighteenth century, when the Lord Mayor’s hounds were only used once a year for the Epping Forest hunt. Previously a respectable and serious affair, the Epping hunt had become a laughingstock by 1807 when the City of London abolished the office of the Common Hunt. Without the Lord Mayor’s hounds, fewer hounds, that were of poorer breeding, were used, along with horses of lower quality. Riders were frequently drunk and the affair extremely chaotic. The Epping hunts ended in 1847 (Velten 94).

The Dog House was certainly well known in its day, as evidenced by references to it in period literature. In Thomas Dekker’s Belman of London, for example, a character refers to hounds from the City Dog House, saying, nay my Lord Maiors Hounds at the dog-house being bidden to the funerall banquet of a dead horse, could not pick the bones cleaner (Dekker, Belman 23). It was also one of the few places where ordinary Londoners could witness hunting techniques like the practice of coupling younger and older dogs for training. Dekker describes a pair of people who went away like a cupple of hounds from the dogge-house (Dekker, A Strange Horse-Race 24). Other literary references allow us to guess at conditions in the Dog House. For example, one Londoner claimed a prison stinkes more then the Lord Mayors dogge-house (G.M. 13). Others mention the Lord Mayor’s Dog House as a fanciful place to commit suicide by dogs or as a place to throw someone you are not fond of. The noise and smell thus made it a proverbially frightful place for early modern Londoners (Jessey 130; Rowley 64). We can guess at the hounds’ diets from a mention in Natura Exenterata of the Dog House in Finsbury Field as being a place to acquire horse marrow, and also from Dekker’s above comment regarding the dead horse (Philiatros 216).