Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [51]
Of course, we like to believe we’re nicer now than people used to be, more sensitive, imaginative, generous. And it’s true we’ve been through, or cats have been through, periods of hideous cruelty in the embarrassingly recent past. It’s comforting to tell ourselves we’re getting better all the time, in a straight line through history, and if people three hundred years ago tortured cats without regard for their pain, then people a thousand years ago must have been inconceivably crueler. Unless favored by superstition, as in Egypt, cats must have been suffered to live at all only under mouse-catching covenants.
And again, we look backward through the glass of Victorian scholarship, when everyone believed that Creation was placed here for us to eat and wear, and all we had to do was find out how God intended us to use its lower elements. But were they really so businesslike, these ancestors of ours? Surely well-treated cats were no less affectionate, kittens no less endearing, and there were children a thousand years ago, and monks, nuns, widows, prisoners, sailors, and people in isolated hamlets and fortresses who may have needed affection as much as rodent control.
We can’t know. After Egypt the cat begins to slip underneath history, at knee level. In feudal times the master’s favorite hawks, hounds, and horses all had their quarters, and the Great Hall was heaped with snoozing dogs; where was the cat? Was an individual cat a farm tool rather than a friend, out in the stable treading a nest for kittens in the hay? Or was it asleep on the mistress’s bed? Or in the kitchen watching the meat turn on the spit?
Probably it was better off in England than in northern Europe. In 1205, the English Nuns’ Rule stated, “Ye shall not possess any beast, my dear sisters, except only a cat.” In the fourteenth century, Chaucer wrote, “Or take a cat, nourish it well with milk / And tender meat, make it a couch of silk …” English etiquette books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries forbade the feeding of cats under the table. Certainly some cats were appreciated as much for themselves as for their granary work.
There’s a great psychological gulf between corn crib and lap, between farmhand and friend, and very few of our useful creatures have taken the leap, or wanted to. Probably many cats didn’t. Certainly some did. Came inside, small and with cleanly habits, perhaps looking for a safer place to kitten, and looked into people’s eyes and purred when touched, and stayed. Or were brought in, because of being lame or sickly or orphaned, and cosseted by the kitchen fire, and stayed. Whoever made the first move, cat or human, probably people far from Egypt became attached to their cats then as they do now, mice or no mice.
The surviving written word concerns itself with practical matters. For instance, the Welsh king Hywel Dda in 936 organized the tribal laws that had been established by long custom. A newborn kitten’s value, or the compensation payable to its owner if you killed it, was one cent. When its eyes had opened it was worth two cents, and after it had killed its first mouse it was worth four cents, which would also buy you a sheep or a goat. To clarify the matter for barter, a calf, an ordinary filly, and a cat were of equal worth, unless the cat was one of the many that watched the king’s own granaries and so worth a lot more. If you stole one of the king’s cats, the fine was a pile of grain equal to the length of the cat, including its tail. The cat was held up by the tail and grain heaped around to its full length, which can’t have done either the cat or the tail holder any good.
In order to enjoy legal status as a hamlet, a Welsh settlement had to include nine buildings, a plow, a kiln, a churn, a bull, a cock, a herdsman, and a cat.
If