Limer
hunting dog
A limer, or lymer , was a kind of dog, a scenthound, used on a leash in medieval times to find large game before it was hunted down by the pack. It was sometimes known as a lyam hound/dog or lime-hound, from the Middle English word lyam, meaning 'leash'. The French cognate limier has sometimes been used for the dogs in English as well. The type is not to be confused with the bandog, which was also a dog controlled by a leash, typically a chain, but was a watchdog or guard dog.
Use
In medieval hunting in France and England, certain kinds of game were not found and hunted with a full pack, as usual in modern hunting. Instead, they were first found by a limer.
The limer would be taken out at dawn by its handler, on foot, who would identify, perhaps from droppings, perhaps from footprints, where a large animal had passed during the night. He would set his hound on the trail, until it had found where the animal was browsing or at rest. This required keen scenting, the ability to ignore all other scents that might be a distraction, and silent trailing. This process became known as 'harbouring' the animal.
“Limer” enters the record as hunting dog. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Limer and hunting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Limer” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Limer and hunting provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39283. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Limer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.