More unusual was the pack of mastiffs set loose each evening within the walls of Saint-Malo, a garrison town on the northern coast of France with valuable quantities of naval stores. The lineage of this practice dated to the thirteenth century, when the Dominican monk Albertus Magnus commented that the dogs “patrolled well and trustily.” In the early 1600s, a passing observer recorded, In the dusk of the evening a bell is rung to warn all that are without the walls to retire into the town: then ye gates are shut, and eight or ten couple of hungry mastiffs turn’d out to range about the town all
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