Animals were everywhere in Medieval life. They were used to pull carts and plough fields, they were milked, sheared, skinned and eaten. But were they ever kept just for the sake of companionship, as we keep them today? We often think of pets as animals that live indoors with us. The word ‘pet’ as describing a sort of companion animal wasn’t even used, in the English language until the 16th century. And then only in the North of England and Scotland. The Oxford English Dictionary definition states that a pet is ‘an animal, a bird, etc. that you have at home for pleasure, rather than one that is kept for work or food’, for the Medievals this wasn’t always the case, as many families who lived in the countryside would have had a byre attached to their living area which they shared with, goats and cattle. Dogs used for hunting often lived indoors as did cats, whose job was to catch mice. Really an animal only becomes a pet because a human decides it is to be given a name and then kept as one rather than eaten. So for the early Medievals real pets as we think of them today were a rarity. Welcome to Medieval Madness.