CHAPTER VI 
EarRLy SPANIELS AND SETTERS 
O give a complete history of the English Setter, without 
mixing with it a great deal of information regarding the 
various family connections of the breed, is so impossible 
that we have decided to give one comprehensive intro- 
ductory chapter regarding the spaniels, beginning with 
their earliest history and concluding with the splitting up of the family into 
the various sections of setters and spaniels. This will embrace a period of 
some four hundred years, during which the dog first known as the spaniel 
subsequently, in one branch, became the setting spaniel, then the setter, 
and finally became divided into the three breeds of setters as we know them 
to-day. 
The Duke of Northumberland, son of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite 
courtier, the celebrated Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and his second 
wife, Lady Douglas Howard, whom he is said to have married in 1578, is 
erroneously credited with having been the first person “that taught a dog to 
sit in order to catch partridges,” as we shall show very clearly. Even those 
who have in late years given this authoritatively, at the same time quoted 
from “Of Englishe Dogges,” written six years after the duke’s parents were 
married, in which the netting of partridges is fully described, showing but 
little investigation on the part of the editors, who permitted this and kindred 
errors to receive their endorsement. Caius, who wrote this old book, called 
them setters, but they could not have been so styled in common, and setting 
spaniel and setting dogge they continued to be called until the net went out 
of fashion about 1800. 
THe SPANIEL 
Our first knowledge of the spaniel is obtained from the work of the 
French count, Gaston de Foix, who in 1387 wrote his book called “Livre 
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