554 The Dog Book 



Certainly if mastiffs had been the master dog, they would have been the 

 choice of the nobility. Hence the deductions to be made are that the mas- 

 tiffs were inferior in size to the alaunts, as well as in breeding, so that the now 

 accepted definition of the name as applying to a cross-bred or mongrel dog 

 is undoubtedly correct. 



We have already quoted Caius with regard to mastiffs of his day, and 

 shown in connection with the smooth sheep dog and the bulldog that they 

 were members of the family of common country dog, dogs of undoubted cour- 

 age, differing in size and adaptation for the many uses to which they were put. 

 The section of the family which we are now discussing was the largest, and 

 Caius places it second to the shepherd's dog in the family group. As Caius 

 tells us nothing of the alauntes and describes no dog that at all resembles 

 what we know it to have been, we may assume that they had died out, but 

 we must also assume that their blood had become incorporated in that of 

 the common dog, for men in want of a large fighting dog would naturally 

 turn to this dog to get what they wanted. 



At the period covered by Caius, 1550, the mastiff was undoubtedly the 

 largest of the English dogs, or at least some of them were, but in considering 

 his description we should not fail to note that he had a habit of piling up his 

 adjectives; and when he says that the "mastyne or Bandogge is vaste, 

 huge, stubborne, ougly, and eager, of a heuy and burthenous body" it is not 

 very different from what he writes with regard to English curiosity regarding 

 foreign dogs, "gasping and gaping, staring and standing to see them." In 

 another place he says of the mastiff that he is usually tied and is mighty, 

 gross and fat-fed. It is not necessary to imagine that they were anything 

 like the size of our mastiffs. Indeed, from illustrations which appeared 

 during the next hundred years, in representations of attacks on bears, they 

 were apparently not much larger than a setter. Of course much heavier and 

 stronger but no taller. Active, powerful dogs with square-shaped heads. 



Men who breed bull terriers for the pit pay no attention whatever to 

 colour or points, breeding only from dogs of proved courage, and it would 

 be ridiculous to imagine that Englishmen of four or five hundred years ago 

 adopted any other course in breeding for a dog that would bait the bear and 

 the bull. We can see the result of this system of breeding in the colour of the 

 mastiff of a hundred years ago, all of the illustrations of that period showing 

 more or less white about the head and body, and that was not bred out even 

 when dog-shows were started. 



