This old breed of lapdog was described in the 16th century, when it was given the alternative name of Spaniel Gentle. It is the earliest form of the group of closely related breeds that are collectively known as the English Toy Spaniels.
The physician of Queen Elizabeth I, John Keys (also known as Dr Johannes Caius), whose book De Canibus Britannicis, published in 1570, was the first dog book ever written, includes a section on this breed, as the tiny dog that ladies keep close to their bodies for comfort. In the 1576 translation of this work, called Of Englishe Dogges, his description of the ‘delicate, neat, and pretty kind of dogs, called the Spaniel Gentle, or the Comforter’ reads as follows:
These dogs are little, pretty proper, and fine_ the smaller they be, the more pleasure they provoke, as more meet playfellows for mincing mistresses to bear in their bosoms, to keep company withal in their chambers, to succour with sleep in bed… to lay in their laps, and lick their lips as they ride in their wagons…
Later, he adds that ‘these little dogs are good to assuage the sickness of the stomach, being often times thereunto applied as a plaster preservative, or borne in the bosom of the diseased and weak person, which effect is performed by their moderate heat’. In other words they were used as living hot-water bottles, to comfort the poorly.
Two centuries later, Thomas Bewick, writing in 1790, gives us an illustration that makes it clear that the Comforter is, indeed, a dwarf spaniel, the forerunner of all the later forms of English Toy Spaniel. He has mixed feelings about it, describing it as ‘a most elegant little animal… generally kept by ladies as an attendant of the toilette or the drawing-room. It is very snappish, ill-natured, and noisy; and does not readily admit the familiarity of strangers:
As the years passed, the name of the Comforter was heard less and less. In its place came the Toy Spaniels, divided into separate types, colours and breeding lines. Some of these were mentioned as new imports from Spam. and elsewhere, but such comments must be taken with a pinch of salt, because, since the 16th century at the very least, the dwarf spaniel called the Comforter had been happily embedded in English society, ready and available to act as the ancestral form of any little toy dog that would become the height of fashion in later days.
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