324 The Domestication of Animals in the Middle Ages. 



bitions were so common and so popular, that among the regu- 

 lations of the duties exacted at one of the gates in entering 

 into Paris in the time of St. Louis, it was provided, that when 

 a jougleur passed with an ape (and no doubt a bear came under 

 the same regulation), he should be allowed to go duty free, on 

 condition of causing the animal to dance before the toll- 

 collector. 



Among other animals which were tamed at an early period 

 was the fox. In the life of St. Brigida, written at a rather 

 remote period, we are told of a king in the north of Ireland 

 who had a tame fox in his court, which frequently amused his 

 guests by its cleverness and by the various tricks it played. 

 At length, to the king's great vexation, some unlucky indi- 

 vidual, taking it for a wild fox, killed it. The dog, though it is 

 not a tamed animal, belongs in a manner to both classes of 

 domesticity mentioned at the beginning of this paper, for, 

 through all periods, no animal has been more petted. Some 

 notes of the history of the dog as a lady's pet during the 

 middle ages will be found in my History of Domestic Manners 

 and Sentiments. An Anglo-Norman satire in verse, of the 

 beginning of the fourteenth century, against the ladies who 

 fed their pet dogs too delicately, is printed in the Bellqukv 

 Antiques. 



The history of the domestic cat in the middle ages is a little 

 obscure. The modern name is Teutonic. In English we pre- 

 serve the word cat in its pure Anglo-Saxon form, and, as it 

 seems to have been adopted into all the Romance tongues, 

 instead of the Latin felis, as in French chat, in Italian gatto, in 

 Spanish goto, etc., as well as in Welsh gath, we are perhaps justi- 

 fied in supposing that the mediasval use of the domestic cat was 

 derived from the Teutonic peoples. It is curious, in connection 

 with this view, that the cat is found rated at a much higher 

 value in some places at a distance from the centre of Teutonic 

 influence than in more purely Teutonic countries, such as Eng- 

 land. The early Welsh laws fixed the price of a cat at three 

 pennies, then equal to a considerable sum of modern money, and 

 reckoned one cat for each village. By one of the laws of James 

 I., King of Aragon, made in 1247, it was enacted that whoever 

 stole a cat, and was convicted of the offence, should be con- 

 sidered as a robber (latro), and was therefore liable to capital 

 punishment. It was perhaps the traditionary consciousness of 

 the value of this animal in some countries which gave rise to 

 the story of Whittington and his cat. That the domestic cat 

 was common during the middle ages in England and France, 

 and in other countries of the west, is evident from the 

 numerous very early proverbs into which the name enters. 

 Among these is one which may be traced as far back in England 



