6 Common Pets in Medieval Times

Life was understandably very different in the Middle Ages than it is today, but keeping dogs and cats as household pets is something many of us share with our medieval ancestors. 

While our pets tend to be little more than companions nowadays, in medieval times, pets were more often kept as working animals. Many well-to-do ladies had lapdogs and pampered cats, of course, but in many households, dogs were widely used for security and for hunting, while cats were useful household pest controllers who kept rats and mice to a minimum. 

Alongside the usual canines and felines, the kinds of animals widely kept as pets in medieval times often strayed into far more bizarre territory than we might expect. In particular, the kinds of animals that people back then really did keep purely for fun or companionship were rather different from the dogs and cats we tend to have around today. 

1. Squirrels
2. Badgers
3. Weasels
4. Parrots
5. Rabbits
6. Monkeys

Squirrels

A 15th-century English ring now housed at the British Museum depicts, in its interior, an engraving of a young woman holding a pet squirrel on a leash. Red squirrels were apparently something of a pet of choice for aristocratic ladies in medieval times, and were often treated and pampered just as much as lapdogs were. These creatures were ultimately kept more for amusement and divertissement rather than as working animals like cats and dogs. 

Badgers

In the UK, at least, it has been illegal to keep badgers as pets since the Protection of Badgers Act was passed in 1992. This was not so in the Middle Ages, however, when badgers were apparently sometimes kept as pets among the more prosperous English families and may have served as something of a status symbol—an ostentatious sign that the owner had sufficient money, food, and space to keep an otherwise wild animal in their home. 

Weasels

Although they were typically viewed as pests, weasels were often tolerated in the houses of ancient Greece and Rome thanks to their expert vermin-catching abilities. By the Middle Ages, however, weasels, ferrets, polecats and other mustelids had all seemingly become prized pets—with ferrets in particular finding a home for themselves in several royal households. Henry VIII is known to have kept pet ferrets along with his many hounds, while the French king Charles VIII so admired his pet ferret that he bought it a bright red robe to wear. 

Parrots

Perhaps a rarer but more conventional choice of avian pet in medieval times, from a modern perspective at least, was the parrot (better known back then as a “popinjay”). Imported chiefly from Asia, these colorful and talkative birds soon became the subject of a curious bit of medieval folklore: because parrots could be trained to say “Ave”—the word the angel Gabriel is said to have greeted the Virgin Mary with—they came to be considered symbols of religious purity, and were closely associated with the mother of Jesus. 

Rabbits

Oddly, rabbits were never native to England and instead are believed to have been introduced to Britain and Ireland by the Romans, who farmed them for their fur and meat. By the Middle Ages, however, some people had begun adopting rabbits as pets—a trend that curiously proved particularly popular among nuns. 

Monkeys

The German medieval scholar and cleric Albertus Magnus wrote a famed treatise on animals, De animalibus, in which he noted way back in the mid 13th century that some people were keeping monkeys as household pets. This was a practice that should apparently not be entered into lightly, however, as a monkey, he warned, is “a tricky animal with bad habits,” and that “however much it might be tamed, it is always wild and imitates the bad rather than the good in humans.” That being said, a monkey will be “playful with the small offspring of humans and dogs,” he added—albeit with the caveat that, “it sometimes strangles unguarded boys.”