Fearsome mousers, canny characters

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Medieval Cats

By Kathleen Walker-Meikle

Kathleen Walker-Meikle has combed through numerous illuminated manuscripts to find cats and kittens in books of hours, Gospels, scientific treatises, and fiction. Cats sometimes seem to have led a rough life in the Middle Ages, and not just because people drawing their heads could never seem to get the ears right.

 Although cats were treated as valuable rodent controllers and pets, there were also times and places that saw them being abused with stupefying cruelty. The cats that play and prowl around the edges of these manuscript pages are recognizably the ancestors of our own house pets and were presumably similarly loved as members of the household, but at the same time stray cats were sometimes burned alive for entertainment or as part of some festival. The aloof, mysterious air of cats had its drawback. The cat was, and still is, the only domestic animal to retain a certain wild side, and so in mediaeval literature it often has magical powers or consorts with the devil. Cats were associated with magic, heresy and witchcraft by our superstitious ancestors.

 The typical household cat of the 13th century worked for a living. He might be called the generic pet-cat name Gyb, short for Gilbert. The cat would be prized, as now, as a mouser and as a furry companion to doze by the hearth. We learn that in early mediaeval Irish law a cat was valued at ‘three cows if it could purr and hunt mice’. (If it could only purr, it was worth a mere cow and a half.) As they were supposed to be self-sufficient with all those mice, little is recorded about cat food, but in the household accounts of 1293-94 at a manor of Cuxham in Oxfordshire, an item notes that cheese was specially bought for a cat. So that cats could come and go as they pleased (and century after century cats are always on the wrong side of the door), the mediaeval version of the catflap was invented and to this day there is a cat-hole in a door in Exeter Cathedral.

 These manuscript cats typically figure in the margins among the foliage on beautifully decorated pages. The cat is seen chasing, catching or eating a mouse, which is often black and often out of proportion, unless mice in those days were a lot bigger than they are now. (Could it be a rat instead?) The cats are occasionally washing themselves or curled up asleep or perhaps having a stand-off with a dog. Besides the depiction of ordinary cats, there are also some fanciful scenes of cats playing musical instruments or being hanged by mice getting their own back.

The pages they inhabit here vary in both their subject matter and artistic style. From the 7th- or 8th-century Lindisfarne Gospels to the Sforza Hours (c.1490), cats romp in the margins, lurk in ornate capitals, or are bit players in larger scenes. (To my mind, the artist of the Sforza Hours is the only one who had looked very closely at a real cat, but that’s the Italian Renaissance for you.)

The languages of these manuscripts are mostly Latin, English or French, but we get to hear about the delightful Irish cat, Pangur Bán, who was included in a 9th-century manuscript by his owner, a monk who took a break one day from copying the Gospels and immortalized his white cat. (The English translation is credited only to the anonymous monk who wrote the poem and not to the translator, who was Robin Flower.)

The charm of this book lies both in its hints of a recognizable affection for cats and typical cat behaviour of hundreds of years ago and in the evidence of distinctly pre-modern views of the feline. Medieval Cats is a lovely little book for more reasons than the cats, for in passing it also illustrates fine capitals and several varieties of manuscript hand. If the cats sometimes seem strangely proportioned or have parallel green stripes, if their ears seem all-purpose short animal ears (make them a bit longer for a rabbit, a bit shorter for a ferret), it’s all part of the charm and the evocation of centuries past.

Medieval Cats  by Kathleen Walker-Meikle is published by The British Library 2011. 89pp. 82 colour illus. ISBN 978-0-7123-5818-7