Do enough research in old dog books (or work on a lot of crossword puzzles), and one is bound to run into a couple of words that may be confusing.

A “rache” (also seen as racch, rach, and ratch) was a type of hunting scenthound used during the Middle Ages in Britain.  Typically used in packs to run down game or bring it to bay, the word is so old that it appeared before the Normal Conquest. Mention of the word also appeared in “Gentleman’s Recreation” written in the 17th century by Nathaniel Cox. He wrote that in England and Scotland, there were in but “two kinds of hunting dogs, and nowhere else in all the world,” and he identified them as the rache and the sleuth hound.

In the 14th century, “rache” showed up in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,  a chivalric romance in which Bloodhounds announce the presence of a great boar hiding in a thicket, which then “rushes out and plays havoc among the raches of the knight’s pack.”

Students of heraldry may already be familiar with the word because it also referred to dogs that appeared on coats of arms.

Finally (and proving that the word isn’t entirely dead), readers of modern historical fiction may also have seen the word and wondered. One example is the following paragraph that appeared in the By Light of Camelot (2018) written by Shannon Allen:

“I can run faster beneath the trees, but swift as I go, the dogs are gaining, the cry of one hound giving way to the next as the leader tires and another takes his place. I leap to the top of a fallen log and see them behind me, white ghost—shapes flitting among the leaves. I gather myself to run and suddenly the first dog is upon me, a sleek rache—hound with flapping ears. He yammers defiance, but I am no deer to be so easily pulled down.”

After the mid 16th century, the term ‘rache’ wasn’t used much in England, “hound” being the preferred word, but “rache” was still used for a while in Scotland where the Bloodhound was called the sleuth hound, and smaller hounds were “raches.”. Hector Boece (1536) described the rache in Scotland as a versatile scent-hound, able to find flesh, fowl, or even fish among the rocks, by smelling. His translator, Bellenden, confirms that raches weren’t as large as the sleuth-hound.

Some archaic writers indicated that “rache” was interchangeable with “brache,” one of them being John Caius who gave rache as the Scottish equivalent for the English brache. Others, however, while acknowledging the confusion, maintain that “brache” (also seen as ‘bratchet’) is a French-derived word for a female scent hound.

Oh, the difference that one letter and syntax can make!

Image: Raches upon a Boar by Barthélemy d’Eyck – R.M.N. / R.-G. Ojéda, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=108574