9781422279335

corruption of the French word espagnol, meaning Spanish). This the- ory is based on sources such as the oldest English book on hunting, Master of Game (1406-1413) written by Edward Plantagenet, Duke of York, who wrote of spaniels that “their nature cometh from Spain.” Although there is no real evidence to support this claim, it remains a popular theory today. It is known that these early spaniels were sporting dogs, used to hunt wild fowl and in falconry. Their job was to help to flush quarry into the hunting nets or toward trained birds of prey. Dr. John Caius, a famed Elizabethan physician and pioneer nat- uralist, describes these hunting spaniels in his treatise, Of Englishe Dogges (translated from Latin in 1576), which was the earliest known attempt at a complete classification of dogs. He noted that the land spaniels were used for “The Falcon, The Pheasant, The Partridge, and such like.

In those early days, spaniels were di- vided into two varieties—land and the water spaniels—depending on where they hunted. From those early dogs have sprung the many varieties of span- iels we have today, including the toys. Cocking Spaniels It was not until the 1800s that the Cocker or Cocking Spaniel emerged as a separate, distinct type of hunting dog. The name derives from the small

spaniels used in woodcock hunts, which had become popular in Great Britain at the time. These “cocking” spaniels could get into the thickest undergrowth and flush out the woodcock for the waiting hunters. One of the first mentions of Cocking Spaniels in literature can be found in The Sportsman’s Cabinet, written by William Taplin in 1803.

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