In a category of its own – and bringing one of the highest prices at the Leyburn autumn sale – was this brass, tooth-edge dog collar, below, engraved Rt. Honble Lord Byron.
There are few more romantic names in English literature than Byron and his fondness for his Newfoundland, Boatswain, to whom he erected a monument at Newstead Abbey and wrote his Epitaph To A Dog, is well known.
The provenance for this collar included a 1903 auction catalogue (when it was bought by the Earl of Shrewsbury) and the transcript of a note by the widow of Byron’s gamekeeper at Newstead. She wrote that the collar was engraved by ‘old Mr Carr of Nottingham’ and that damage was done ‘by a Bear which Lord Byron kept for his own amusement and with which Boatswain had many severe encounters’. Famously, having noted that students were forbidden to bring their dogs to Cambridge, Byron took a bear instead.