How the dog of Bretten got its siege

Bretten’s own tourism page tells how a fattened dog saved the town from a siege.⁶ The same page ends with a correction from Peter Bahn, the former head of the town museum: not one of the sieges Bretten went through, he writes, was averted by a dog.⁷

A local weekly went further in 2024 and said that no record of a siege “at this time” survives.⁸ That is wrong. Duke Ulrich of Württemberg’s army arrived before the town on Tuesday 11 June 1504 and lay there for 23 days.⁹¹⁰ What none of the accounts we read has is a dog sent out of the town.¹¹¹²¹³

The siege without a dog

The siege is better documented than the dog.¹⁰ Georg Schwarzerdt, the younger brother of Philipp Melanchthon and later the town’s Schultheiss, wrote what Peter Bahn calls the most important surviving contemporary source for the siege.¹⁴ He was about four years old in 1504, so he wrote from what people who had been there told him, and no manuscript in his own hand is known.¹⁴¹⁵

His account has the town well provided for. Elector Philip had supplied it with guns, powder, lead and provisions, so that it lacked nothing, and had a common kitchen set up in the Steinhaus where anyone could fetch food.¹⁶ When the Landsknechte mutinied, their captain told them their pay was on the way and that they lacked neither food, drink, powder, lead nor water.¹⁷ That was a speech to angry men, and it shows what he said, not what every household had.

The want Schwarzerdt does record is water: the besiegers threw three fire-balls into the town, and the citizens were badly frightened because it was a hot season and there was little water.¹⁸

The siege did not end with a trick. Schwarzerdt writes that just when the war was at its hardest, it began to come to an end:

Duke Ludwig, the elector’s son, then came to Ulrich’s camp, and Ulrich left with his army.¹⁹ Peter Bahn dates the truce to 2 July 1504 and says it was signed at Knittlingen the same day.¹⁹

In the whole narrative the only dog we found is a simile. The citizens and soldiers grow bold and keen “wie ein jaghundt, der ob dem wilprecht gebaißt”, like a hunting hound that has bitten into game.¹¹ Gehres tells the same siege in a chapter of its own, later in the book that holds the dog, and there too there is no dog and no hunger: Ulrich comes with 20,000 foot and about 400 horse, the citizens make a night sortie, and the siege is lifted when Duke Ludwig arrives and brings about a settlement.¹²

A real dog does turn up in Schwarzerdt’s other account, of the Peasants’ War of 1525. Michael Klebon quotes it: the town tied the shepherd’s dog round the town every night.²⁰ He calls this a thoroughly unlegendary report of what the “Brettener Hundle” was worth.²⁰

The first siege story

The oldest siege story we could read is in a town chronicle printed in 1805.³ Siegmund Friedrich Gehres opens his chapter on the “so-called Wahrzeichen of the town of Bretten” with a little dog carved in stone outside the choir of the St. Laurentius church, without a tail.²¹ It had supplied the first material, he says, for a proverb about someone who lost his lawsuit or came off worst in a critical matter: “He turns up like the little dog of Bretten!”²¹

The first of those reports is the siege, and it is not the town’s telling of today.³⁶ Gehres’s dog is already fat and goes over the wall as a herald; nobody fattens it.³ The starvation is the enemy’s guess, not the town’s.³ The tail comes off as a threat that the besiegers will spare no one if they take the town, and the siege is lifted soon after, where the town now has the tail cut off in spite as the army leaves.³⁶ Gehres names no year, no duke and no enemy.³

Gehres prefers other explanations. Two follow: the man who commissioned the church had a dog in his coat of arms, or, which Gehres finds more credible, the Freiherren von Hundheim, who carried a dog in their arms and gave much to the building, were thanked with the carving.⁵ He ends by saying the reports contradict one another and that nobody has found a true trace of how the dog lost its tail.⁵

A butcher on a Friday

Eleven years later the Brothers Grimm printed the dog without a siege.⁴ Their no. 95 is marked “Mündlich”, told by word of mouth, and opens with a saying: in the Palatinate, especially the Kraichgau, people say “it will happen to you as it did to the little dog at Bretten” when they speak of loyalty badly repaid.²²

In the story a man’s trained little dog fetches meat and sausage from the butcher, with a basket in its mouth holding a note and the money.⁴ One Friday its master, a Protestant, sends it to a butcher who is a Catholic and keeps the fast strictly.⁴ Finding a sausage on the note, the butcher holds the dog, chops off its tail, puts the tail in the basket and says “There, have your meat!”⁴ The dog carries the basket home and dies, the whole town mourns, and a tailless dog is carved in stone and set above the town gate.⁴ Others tell it differently, Grimm adds: the dog stole meat for its poor master until a butcher caught it and took its tail.²³

In Grimm’s telling the dog is a victim, or a thief, not a rescuer.⁴²³ The saying sits oddly with a rescuer. Grimm glosses it as loyalty badly repaid, and Gehres as coming off worst.²²²¹ On our reading it is a saying about a loser, and a dog that saved a town is an odd loser.

Fischart’s dog

Grimm wrote that the legend “must be old already”, and that Fischart alludes to it in two different places.²² We found both in Scheible’s 1847 edition of Fischart, the first in the Geschichtklitterung and the second in the text printed after it.¹² The dog is no hero in either.

The sense of the line is not clear to us. In the second, a joke about “red peasant dogs”, they lately chased the little dog of Bretta so that it left its weak tool at the fence.² Neither says why the dog has no tail, and neither mentions a siege, a butcher or a monument.

Fischart’s book came out in 1575 and was reworked in 1582 and 1590. Alsleben’s edition prints the 1590 text with the earlier versions’ variants in its notes, and on the page with the first line his footnotes give variants from the earlier two for other lines but none for this one.¹ On our reading the dog of Bretta was a joke in print by 1590 and probably by 1575; we did not check the 1575 print itself.

One stone dog, several places

Gehres puts the stone dog outside the choir of the St. Laurentius church.²¹ Grimm has it above the town gate.⁴ A view of the town drawn after 1879 shows the Hundle on the south side of the Stiftskirche, below the bell tower.²⁴ We cannot say whether these are one carving seen three ways or more than one.

In 1786 Widder wrote that the town’s seal and arms show nothing but 21 blue and white Bavarian lozenges, and his chapter on Bretten does not mention a dog.²⁵¹³ A council decision of 1890, quoted by Wolfgang Martin, still speaks of the “Traubenbrunnen”, which he glosses as today’s Hundlesbrunnen.²⁶ We could not date the dog on the Hundlesbrunnen.

The story against the record

The town’s own chronology of 1967 lists the siege of “11.-22. Juni” under 1504, ending it earlier than Bahn’s truce, and, as a separate line, the “Sage vom Brettener Hundle”.²⁷¹⁹ Between Gehres in 1805 and that chronology we found no text that puts the dog before Duke Ulrich’s army, so we cannot say who first did.