The Domestication of Animals in the Middle Ages. 821 



A curious work; recently published under the direction of 

 the Master of the Bolls, furnishes us with some new and very 

 remarkable, illustrations of this practice. It is a treatise on 

 Natural History, written in Latin by Alexander Neckam, a 

 very distinguished English scholar of the latter half of the 

 twelfth century,* who has enlivened his science by filling it 

 with contemporary anecdotes and stories, many of them 

 relating to the habits and characters of domestic animals, and 

 especially to the custom of keeping them in the castles and 

 great mansions, for the amusement of the household. We 

 learn from these stories that the bear and the ape were common 

 inmates of the castle ; the former, of course, chained up, the 

 latter at large. "It happened," Neckam tells us, "in the 

 court of a certain wealthy man, which was stocked with a 

 great variety of extraordinary beasts and birds," that there 

 were a pair of apes aud a bear, the bear chained to an iron stake. 

 These animals afforded great entertainment to the inhabi- 

 tants of the castle by their tricks. One day the female ape 

 gave birth to a young one, and the mother was so vain of her 

 offspring that she could not restrain herself from carrying it 

 about, and protruding it upon everybody's attention. At length 

 she presented it to the bear, which instantly grasped at and 

 seized it, and tore it to pieces. The ape, overcome with grief, 

 hurried to complain to her mate; and, after what appeared 

 like a private consultation, the two apes gathered wood, and 

 piled it under the bear, which appears, therefore, to have 

 stood upon an elevated stand ; and, as soon as they considered 

 the quantity of the wood sufficient, they set fire to it and burnt 

 their enemy to death. Neckani considers that the great pecu- 

 liarity of the ape was its imitative power, which it sometimes 

 practised to its own destruction, as in the following story, which, 

 as he tells it, is further illustrative of the position of the ape in 

 the mediaeval castle. An ape resided among the battlements of 

 a castle, and amused itself with watching a shoemaker at work 

 in a cottage below, at a short distance from the walls. When 

 other business obliged the shoemaker to leave his workshop, 

 the ape would descend, enter the man's house by the window, 

 and, taking the shoemaker's knife in his hand, would, in trying 

 to imitate him, cut his leather to pieces, and cause him great 

 damage and loss. There was not much chance in those days of 

 a lowly artisan obtaining compensation in such a case from the 

 lord of a castle, so the shoemaker resolved to seek at least 

 revenge. One day, when the ape was in its usual place 



* Alexandri Neckaru de Naturis Serum libri duo ; with the Poem of the 

 same author, De Laadibus Divince Sapientice, edited by Thomas Wright, Esq. 

 Published by the authority of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's 

 Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls. Imperial 8vo. 1863. 



