St. Guinefort

Linocut on Awagami kitakata, edition of 50, 7 x 3.75 inches (17.78 x 9.53 cm)

According to medieval legend, a French knight went out to hunt one day, leaving his infant son in the care of his faithful greyhound, Guinefort, as one does. When he returned, he found the cradle overturned, the baby apparently missing, and his dog greeting him with a wagging tail and a blood-stained muzzle. The knight immediately assumed the dog had murdered and eaten his child and, in a fit of rage, killed Guinefort. Soon after, he heard a baby’s cry. Upon investigation, he found his son lying safe beneath the overturned cradle, beside the corpse of a viper pierced with bloody bite marks. Realizing that Guinefort had saved his child, the knight scooped up the body of that very good boy and dropped it down a well, as one does.

Poor parenting, anger management, and hygiene decisions aside, the family covered the well with stones and planted trees around it to create a memorial to Guinefort. As the story spread about how the martyred dog had saved the child, the people around Lyon began to visit the shrine and venerate Guinefort as a saint. The woods that grew up around the shrine became especially popular with mothers of sickly children. Miraculous cures were attributed to Guinefort’s intervention, and an unofficial feast day was celebrated annually on August 22nd. This folk practice was considered heretical by the Church, which tried to suppress the custom with fines. Despite official efforts, the dog saint remained locally popular and was remembered into the 20th century. The Vatican was still researching stories of miraculous healings in the Lyonnaise woods as late as the 1960s—only to rediscover that the alleged saint was, in fact, a dog. And a good dog, indeed.

One of earliest known versions of this legend was recorded by the Dominican friar and inquisitor, Stephen of Bourbon, in 1250. Stephen was a historian of superstition and heresy, so he was not in favor of Guinefort’s veneration. The tale is remarkably similar to the Welsh folktale of another faithful hound, Gelert. That dog was said to have saved Llywelyn the Great’s son from a wolf, but like Guinefort was mistaken for a murderer and slain for his troubles.