‘Tyrannic Man’s Dominion’

The early Church Fathers took an anthropomorphic view of the cock (and all other animals) and equated him with God himself. The Celts encountered by Caesar on his arrival in Britain in 55AD bred the hare, the cock and the goose for amusement and pleasure and the notion of animals and animals living together in harmony and being treated with kindness can be found in primitive cultures. Early morality tales tell of animals having human characteristics, being punished or rewarded depending on the rightness or wrongness of their actions. Many tales of wonder can be found in the bestiaries, with animals endowed with mystical powers. ‘The Church saw in animals a series of lessons to point the way to God’. Exotic animals were cared for in royal menageries across Europe and the exchange of animals as presents between royal households continues to the present day. Even monasteries once had their wild animals. ‘At St Gall in Switzerland, the monks had badgers, marmots and bears in an elaborately devised Tiergarten’. However, in the fourteenth century church leaders decided that keeping a menagerie was incompatible with the rule of St Benedict and abolished the practice. This rule was extended to those monks and nuns who lavished affection on domestic pets, there was no room for such earthly vanities, and the archdeacon of Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, wrote to the abbess of nearby Chatteris in 1345 forbidding ‘dogs or birds, both great and small, being kept by an abbess or any nun within the walls of the nunnery or beneath the chair, especially during divine service’. The place of animals in the church had changed.