Constructing Vermin in Seventeenth-Century England

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS CAUDS. Sold ly J . i t o i b a +At the Atlas in JJarxHck lane And at the three Sells -AtJiuStfOte jbreefr Figure 1. Setting the scene for carving. Wrapper, The Genteel House-Keeper's Pastime. Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England by Mary Fissell Vermin. To us the word connotes icky, dirty, nasty, disease-bearing animals who are out of place, invaders of human territory. Vermin are animals whom it is largely acceptable to kill. We can purchase an array of devices, from 'roach motels' to smoke bombs, in order to do the job. 'Vermin', of course, is not a timeless category. It has a history. In the seventeenth century, birds and animals whom we now consider rare or beautiful - kingfishers, herons, osprey and otters - were labelled vermin, and methods were developed to kill them. The ways in which these creatures were imagined and represented suggest that, as well as being a threat to material survival, they were problematic because they called into question some of the social relations which humans had built around themselves and animals. Three related characteristics were crucial to the category 'vermin' in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. First, vermin poached human food, often items which were ready for human consumption; vermin History Workshop Journal Issue 47 © History Workshop Journal 1999 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 CARVING 2 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 ate things in which humans had already invested considerable time and effort. The second characteristic of vermin was their cleverness, displayed in the many ways that they succeeded in devouring humans' food. These beasts were smart. While humans outweighed them by factors of tens to thousands, humans could not be assured that their superior strength was sufficient to eliminate these pests. Instead, humans built elaborate traps and constructed special poisons in order to lure them to their deaths. Finally, vermin possessed the ability to manipulate symbols, and even language itself. In fables, vermin were masters of discourse, while in household guides, vermin responded to symbols manipulated by humans. Because they could communicate, vermin were better able to plot together to raid human larders, and to avoid capture by humans. The communal actions they undertook at times made a disturbing mirror image of human society. As with all animals, vermin were composed of a mix of projections, fantasies, identifications, and real flesh and blood animals with their own agendas and goals.1 Vermin threatened the always tenuous balance between ease and hardship, satiety and starvation, enough and not-enough. At the same time, they were imagined as animals who sometimes displayed a mastery of certain human forms and customs, a mastery which made humans uneasy. I do not want to cast vermin as boundary-problems in the way that Mary Douglas characterizes the abominations of Leviticus or the pangolin.2 Instead, I want to historicize vermin, both as material beings and as a symbolic category rich in meanings specific to Restoration England. In other words, I take from Douglas and other structuralists the idea that animals are both natural and cultural objects. Categories of animals can function as a means through which a particular social group articulates its sense of itself. Robert Darnton's essay on the Great Cat Massacre takes structuralist insights a step further by attempting to historicize a particular incident, the killing of cats by a group of Parisian printers, journeymen and apprentices.3 Darnton combines an analysis of the specific economic structures of the print trade with a much more general interpretation of the significance of cats in early modern Europe. I wish to analyse a category of early modern animals at a higher level of resolution than Darnton does by exploring the production of meanings by particular types of texts. Specific reading practices, instantiated within texts as well as in social customs, helped to produce an array of meanings about vermin that was historically specific. The second historiographic intent of the paper is to question some of the inherently modernizing narratives now current about human and animal relations in the early modern period. Within discussions of English humans and animals, historians have tended to construct narratives around the rise of new sensibilities to animals, from animal-welfare movements to petkeeping. Both Harriet Ritvo and Keith Thomas rely upon this type of transition in their major works, as does John Berger in his germinal essay, 'Why Look at Animals?'.4 For Thomas, early modern views of animals might be Imagining Vermin 3 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 said to be the dark side of the world we have lost. Man and the Natural World, like his earlier Religion and the Decline of Magic, moves the reader from a customary, highly-symbolic, small-scale world to one characterized as rational, mechanistic, and recognizably modern. In each work, what is left behind can be described with a certain nostalgia - the varied names country folk used for the kinds of wildlife around them, for instance - but by the end of the book, the reader breathes a certain sigh of relief that burning witches or baiting bulls is a thing of the past. My exploration of vermin does not fit particularly well into such a modernizing narrative. Perhaps we do not become nicer, gentler, kinder people towards rats and moles. Any excursion to the mousetrap section of the local supermarket reminds us that we kill mice in ways as brutal as any in the seventeenth century. What is different, it seems to me, is the ways in which we imagine what vermin are and can do. The early modern texts I have analysed portray vermin as direct competitors with humans for resources. Dirt and disgust are not mentioned. Instead, these small animals are the enemy, poaching human food rather than decently eating animal food. Vermin were defined legally in Elizabethan and Henrician statutes which authorized parishes to provide payments for the killing of vermin injurious to grain. The statutes can be understood as a response to an economic crisis characterized by a growing population and rising grain prices. While the Henrician statute focused closely on birds that ate grain or spoiled fruit trees, the Elizabethan one also included foxes, stoats, weasels, hedghogs, and a host of other 'four-footed beasts' who damaged or ate human food.5 The willingness of a parish to pay bounties for certain animals' heads helped to define vermin in practice, although much more archival work is needed to analyse the function of these acts on a local level.6 Legal status and local procedures provide one framework for understanding vermin, but by the later seventeenth century, English men and women had access to a range of books which discussed animals, and vermin in particular. Specifically, I focus on books which were cheap and easy to read, which historians have called 'cheap print'. From the 1640s onwards, thousands and thousands of such books were produced, often by specialized publishers and printers.7 These works both constructed and responded to a growing audience of readers; conservative estimates suggest that half of all English men and a quarter of all English women could read by 1700. Most of the books I discuss in this paper cost a shilling and sixpence or less, and shorter pamphlets were often priced at a few pence each.8 In what follows, I explore both didactic and non-didactic works. The production of 'how-to' books boomed, on topics from cookery to navigation to beekeeping to venereal disease. Such topics had long been addressed in print, but what makes the later seventeenth century distinctive is the numbers of titles available, the sheer quantity of books produced, and the conscious rhetorical framing of many books as easy, popular, or open to all.9 The production of books we might consider 4 History Workshop Journal 'fiction', namely fables, chapbooks, and jokebooks, also increased in the later seventeenth century. The didactic andfictionalworks I address have important commonalities despite their generic differences. First, each adopts a form composed of very brief narratives which demonstrate a moral or a suggested behaviour. For example, Aesop's fables contain moral tales we still recognize, such as the wolf in sheep's clothing. Jokes are also little stories with multiple, even conflicting messages. Even 'how-to' books can be interpreted as series of narratives. For instance, The Experienc'd Fowler explains,10 Thus, both fictional and didactic works rely upon a series of very brief narratives. These tiny stories create texts full of contradictions and complexities, but they also invite readers to partake of a book in small pieces rather than presenting a unified or hierarchical model of knowledge. These books made up of tiny fragments rendered cheap print accessible even to beginning readers, making elements of a printed book similar to the more ephemeral ballads and chapbooks which bridged oral and print cultural forms. Second, I consider didactic and fictional works together because they were produced and advertised by the same publishers. For example, John Harris advertised fourteen 'useful' books in his 1688 vermin-killing manual. These include a children's catechism priced at eightpence, six works of practical divinity (ranging in cost from one to three shillings), two popular medical works at sixpence and three shillings, and two historical works, a fortune-teller, a jokebook, and a work of fiction at one shilling apiece.11 Some works might be didactic in one context and entertaining in another. Aesop's fables, for example, were read for pleasure, but they were also used as schoolbooks, instructing boys in rhetoric and Latin. On a humbler level, they appeared as copybooks, instructional works on handwriting.12 FOOD First and foremost, cheap-print vermin were defined in relation to human food. In 1688, A Necessary Family-Book emphasized the ways in which vermin ate human food.13 Foxes, this work advised, killed 1,000 lambs, 2,000 poultry, and 4,000 pairs of rabbits every year. These numbers are meant to convey the magnitude of the fox's offence: no one could have calculated such figures accurately.14 The section of the book on water birds reiterates the fact that vermin are those which eat human food: 'The Herne destroys much young Fish'; the coot or moor-hen 'are great destroyers of Fish'. Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 To drive away Weasles. Take a living Hedge Weasle, cut his Tail short, and it beeing a Hee, his Stones [ie., testicles] out, turn him loose, and the very sight of him will fright all that come near him, to seek habitations elsewhere. Imagining Vermin 5 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Worse yet, the cormorant 'is a great destroyer of Fish also, he useth fresh Waters, and will dive under the water and take Fish of three or four Years growth.'15 In other words, the cormorant takes fish that are of a size to be eaten by humans. In fiction, vermin eat human food constantly. In ose version of the fable 'The Country Mouse and the City Mouse', human foods are lovingly detailed. The country mouse serves up beans and pease, cheese parings and bacon rind, and a black pudding sprinkled with sugar. This may be rural fare, but it included sugar, an imported luxury commodity manufactured for humans. The city mouse promises her cousin more sophisticated foods, a venison pasty and sugar and sack. Venison was a socially-specific human food since deer-hunting was supposed to be restricted to the aristocracy. However, illicit venison could be found for sale in markets, and recipes in cookbooks explained how to make counterfeit venison.16 When the country mouse is scared by the dogs, she leaves, telling her cousin, Tie ne're to eat quelquechose, and high rogouts strive'.17 Both 'quelquechose' and 'rogouts' [modern ragout] are French words first introduced into English cookery books in the early seventeenth century. The first was often rendered 'kickshaw' in English, and quickly both came to be used pejoratively to describe over-fancy foreign food. Undoubtedly, many an English barn full of grain was ravaged by mice, but in these stories, mice eat food specifically prepared for human tables. Hunger and food, greed and satiety, want and plenty - all of these recur in different genres of cheap print. The last subsistence crises (as defined by demographers) in England occurred in the seventeenth century. Large-scale famine no longer threatened the land, but bad harvests recurred, and people went hungry while subsisting on whatever they could find. So too, memory of famine or hard times probably lasted long after actual famines had become a thing of the past.18 However, I do not want to reduce themes in cheap print wholly to a material base. Rather, my aim is to understand what connotations human food, and the eating of it by animals, might have carried in the later seventeenth century. Books on vermin-killing often noted that vermin died because they ate 'greedily'. Again and again, they describe how 'they will greedily eat it, and it quickly killeth them' or 'the Mice will greedily eat of it, and it is present death to them' or 'the Moulds [moles] will greedily eat of it, and it certainly kills them'.19 In vermin-killing manuals, 'greed' may be used to displace any anxieties about killing vermin. It is as though the vermin invite their own deaths, because of their greedy behaviour. Bugs are not described as 'greedy', nor are water birds. Only the four-footed beasts are greedy. Cheap-print books which discuss food, cookery, and manners suggest that various techniques were employed to discourage or manage manifestations of human greed. As James Serpell notes, anthropomorphism has a dark side in which some animals are are portrayed in highly negative human terms, thus justifying their extermination.20 When vermin were called 'greedy', in 6 History Workshop Journal other words, that description carried with it a set of associations which created distance between vermin and human society. That distance was produced, in part, by means of jokes about greed, and instructions for carving meat, while the depiction of vermin as non-food animals in the same texts simultaneously undermined some of that carefully built distance. In jokebooks, tensions between greed and politeness are frequently invoked. Sometimes, the joke is against a glutton,21 In another joke, desire for food serves as a way to shame a hostess. A large dish of broth, with a small mutton chop in the middle of it, is put on the table. The guest begins to unbutton his doublet; when asked why, he replies 'I mean to swim through this sea of Pottage, to that Island of Meat'.22 Here the issue is not greed as such. Instead, a critique of hospitality is performed through a gesture satirizing the desire for meat. Jokes and stories are not univocal about greed, although it is usually portrayed as a very human failing. For example,23 A sharping scholar of King's Colledg in Oxford, being in the Kitchin, and seeing the Cook take up a Plumb-pudding out of the Pot, watching his opportunity, while the Cook's back was turn'd; he whipt up the Pudding into his own Chamber: which the Cook presently missing, runs up into the Scholars Chamber, and searched all about for it, but could not find it; the Scholar swore it was not in his Chambers (though the Cook smelt it) for he had ingeniously hung it out of his Window, which when the Cook was gone, he pull'd in, and eat as ingeniously. This combination of greed and cunning is itself reminiscent of descriptions of vermin. Although the scholar succeeds in this joke, he is not presented as admirable - the word 'sharping' is pejorative. I suspect that this joke may derive from earlier ones about priests and monks, well-known stereotypes with a fondness for food and drink. Eating with a group of people involved a code of behaviour and manners which, among other things, mediated between naked hunger and its satisfaction.24 In particular, the elaborate art of carving meat was central to the display of good manners. The physical skill of cutting up parts of dead animals and the social one of allocating pieces of meat to guests appropriately revealed the host's finesse. The guests' careful recognition of social hierarchy, highlighted in who got what piece of the animal, enabled them to enact their own representation of that hierarchy. As such, an elaborate meal was a theatre-piece, a display of food and courtesy in which eating was embedded within cultural forms. Books of cheap print both popularized Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 One that was a great Eater, sitting down to Supper, complained that he had lost his Stomach. 'Well', says a merry Fellow that was there, 'If a Poor Man has found it, he will be utterly undone'. Imagining Vermin 7 If any Gentleman who attends the Table, be employed or commanded to cut up any Fowl or Pig, or anything else whatsoever, it is requisite that he have a clean napkin upon his Arm . . . [he should remove the meat to be carved from the main dining table] till he hath made it ready for his Superiors to eat, and neatly and handsomly to carve it . . . the neatest Carvers never touch any Meat but with the Knife and Fork; he must be very nimble, lest the Meat cool too much . . . Much more specific instructions on carving were the basis of The Genteel House-Keeper's Pastime, first issued in 1671 (see Fig. 1). Various kinds of meat are conspicuously displayed on the table. The format of instruction is unusual: a small pamphlet accompanies a deck of playing cards (see Figs 2-4). The deck of cards sold for a shilling, and the accompanying pamphlet for Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 these standards of behaviour, and made fun of them. Vermin, on the other hand, ate indiscriminately, without attention to hierarchy or manners. In fables, for example, vermin are not usually portrayed as sitting down to a meal together. The country mouse's dinner for her city cousin is quite unusual, and when the situation is reversed, the city mouse is often depicted eating her dainty food off the floor. A work such as Youth's Behaviour (seventh edition 1661) laid out the basics of courtesy: 'Take not thy repast like a glutton'. 'Eat not with cheeks full, and with full mouth.' 'Smell not to thy meat, and if thou holdest thy nose to it, set it not afterwards before another.' 25 These precepts were not original: they were taken from De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, by Erasmus, first translated and published in English in 1532, and one of the foundational European works on manners or civility. Youth's Behaviour also includes a discussion of the complicated social relations of serving and proffering meats. If you are entertaining a guest, it is proper for you to serve them, even to dishes that are close to them. 'But if one be invited by another, it is better to attend until that the master or other do carve him meat, than that he take it himself.'26 At this time, 'meat' could mean any sort of victual (as in 'meat and drink'). However, in this text, it is clear that meat means animal parts, and it is the focus of desire. 'Cast not thine eyes upon the trenchers of others, and fix them not wishly upon the meat on the table.' 'One ought sometimes look off the meat, yet without gazing to and fro . . . or on the meat which is before others.' 27 The importance of manners to distinguish human eating of animals from animal eating of animals is made clear, again taken from Erasmus: 'Suck no bones at least in such wise that one may hear i t . . . Gnaw them not, nor tear the flesh with thy teeth, as dogs do, but make use of thy knife.'28 In books such as these, meat is the centre of the meal, and it provides the greatest test of politeness. Books on housewifery or cooking also emphasize the art of carving meat. The best-selling Hannah Woolley directs,29 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Imagining Vermin 9 And whatsoever goeth upon his paws, among all manner of beasts that go on all four, those are unclean unto you: whoso toucheth their carcase shall be unclean until the even. (Leviticus 11:27) Specific types of vermin were also mentioned by name. These shall also be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind, And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole. (Leviticus 11:29-30) However, these Biblical injunctions cannot be the sole reason that early modern texts do not represent vermin as edible. For within the same chapter Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 sixpence.30 The pamphlet explains how to carve, and provides suggestions for accompanying sauces. Some cuts of meat, such as the boar's head or the goose, are represented as clearly recognizable animal parts, while others, such as the venison pasty, are almost wholly transformed into works of art. In all cases, however, the elaborate carving methods transform the animal part into a food item. (Notice, for example, the delicacy with which the boar's head must be cut, with a tiny portion carved out at the lines marked 1-2.) Instructions on carving also appeared in the very cheapest books. A twenty-one-page Art of Courtship, for example, included amorous dialogues, model compliments for courtship, the significance of moles, and the interpretation of dreams.31 Its title page also promised 'rules for carving of Flesh, Fish, Fowl, and cutting up Pastry: Also to distinguish the best Pieces, and decently to serve a Table after the most Modish and Courtly manner'. And, in two small pages, the book provides those instructions, including the fact that pigs' ears are 'by ladies accounted best'.32 'Pastry' here meant meat pies, the proper carving of which formed a whole suit of the deck of playing cards mentioned above (see Fig 5). Carving and table manners delineated an elaborate and highly-articulated social hierarchy, and defined civility as a triumph of politeness over greed, or manners over mouth. Vermin* who ate greedily and went to their deaths, illustrated the potential consequences of the uninhibited pursuit of bodily pleasures. Cheap print's emphasis upon the rituals of carving meat functioned in relation to vermin in a second way. Not only were vermin uncouth eaters who devoured their meat without any ceremony. Vermin were also animals who were never transformed into meat. Like humans, they ate meat but were never eaten themselves, at least within the purview of cheap print. While many vermin lived with humans in their houses, there was no place at, on, or under the dinner table for them, as meat or as meat-eaters. There is a range of potential reasons for the inedibility of vermin, but none is fully convincing. Leviticus is quite specific on the matter. As the King James version had it, 10 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 of Leviticus, other animals were also forbidden, among them staples of English meat-eating such as pigs, coneys, and hares (Leviticus ll:5-7). 33 It might be argued that vermin were too small to make a meal, or that their flesh was too strong-tasting. However, cookbooks of the period include recipes for very small animals, such as infant rabbits, and there are recipes to conceal the strong taste of certain meats. In contrast, water vermin could be eaten without a twinge. Although Leviticus forbade the consumption of herons, cormorants, and swans (reserved for royalty in early modern England), cookbooks provide instructions for their cooking and carving. The same bird could be vermin in one context and dinner in another, and the methods for catching sporting and verminous birds were the same. Elaborate nets trapped birds on or near the water, whether they were to be killed for food or for the safety of fish. In other words, it is verminous animals, not verminous birds, that are represented as not transformable into human food; birds could shed their verminous identities and become meat without difficulty. The larger topic of food taboos or avoidances, such as religions which forbid the consumption of specific animals, has been analysed in a variety of disciplines. Anthropologists generalize that boundary animals, those animals who violate a particular culture's ordering of animal types by displaying characteristics of multiple categories, are rarely eaten. Others suggest that carnivorous animals are rarely eaten, perhaps because of an unspoken fear that they might have consumed human flesh. However, anthropologists also claim that every item that is food in one culture is the subject of an avoidance somewhere else, and vice-versa.34 Thus, the answer to the question, 'why not eat vermin?', seems complex and even contradictory. I suspect that in the hardscrabble world of rural England, such small beasts probably were eaten. But in cheap print, four-footed vermin are always the eaters, never the eaten. Rather than seeking a structural explanation for the inedibility of vermin, here I can only suggest that in early modern England inedibility was part and parcel of the definition of vermin. Finally, food and eating had important religious and moral connotations utterly unknown to vermin. Cheap-print books often stressed moderation in food and drink, for intertwined religious and health reasons. A Rich Treasure, the Knowledge whereof is Useful, Profitable, Pleasant and Delightful (1698) includes remedies for the diseases of sheep, frugal ways to cut out a shift from the least possible fabric, directions for raising coneys and pigeons, advice on the interpretation of dreams, and so on. A section on health counsels moderation in food and drink, which 'will furnish Religious Persons with such a way and manner of Living, that they may with more ease, Cheerfulness and Alacrity, apply themselves to the Service of the Great God'.35 This text instructs the reader to determine how much food is appropriate for him or her on a daily basis. Although every person's individual constitution would dictate the specifics, about thirteen or fourteen ounces of food per day was suggested for the elderly and sedentary.36 Imagining Vermin 11 CUNNING AND TRICKERY Greed was also often connected with cunning, the second characteristic of vermin. The classic medieval French tale of Reynard the Fox, as presented in chapbook form, illustrates the multiple connections between the two.38 Reynard, known throughout Europe for his cunning, here uses his wits and other animals' greed to trick his way out of trouble. Various animals complain to the lion king that Reynard has eaten their relatives. When the king summons Reynard to court, he first sends a bear. Reynard constructs a trap which lures the bear with honey and then closes around the bear's head. Next is sent a cat, who is trapped in a noose in a henhouse. The farmer had constructed the noose to catch Reynard, but the fox uses the cat's desire for mice to trap it instead. When Reynard finally appears, he pleads his case at the gallows by telling a complicated tale about treasure, conspiracy, and betrayal. The king saves Reynard from execution by hanging, and turns on those animals who betrayed him. Not coincidentally, they are some of the very same animals who had originally complained about Reynard. The farmer in Reynard's tale could have learned how to set his trap from any one of a number of vermin-killing manuals, which often specify a noose for foxes (see Fig. 6). In these books, no other animal is despatched by hanging, a uniquely human method of judicial killing. Other similar traps which catch an animal by the neck and kill it are referred to as snares, and are not visually represented as noose-like (see Fig. 7). Only foxes, whose cunning can outweigh even their desires for food, are killed as if they are human criminals. In the eighteenth century, gamekeepers in England began to construct so-called gamekeepers' gibbets, still employed in England to this day. The keeper will hang a number of animal pests, and leave their bodies hanging as a warning to other animals of that type. In other words, these are intended to be terrifying and edifying public spectacles, as were public executions in early modern England. The only difference is that their intended audience is composed of animals, not people.39 Foxes are unique in European literature, but they are also exemplars of the worst characteristics of vermin. The fox was represented as the most Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Vermin were in part defined by their consumption of human food. This transgression was materially and symbolically significant. The depredations of vermin left people hungry. Symbolically, vermin attacks on human food can be understood as representing a threat to human civility. The elaborate apparatuses of carving, dining, and godly moderation separated humans from animals, but vermin showed that a taste for human food need not be associated with human social norms. Finally, the irreducibility of vermin to meat made them an odd category. In the Scripturally-defined functionalist understanding of animals which predominated in early modern England, vermin were not useful to humans, but they lived with them, as did domestic animals, and stole their food.37 12 History Workshop Journal Figure 8. The Drag-hook to take the Fox, A Necessary Family-book. Figure 7. A snare for birds, The Compleat English and French Vermin-killer. Figure 9. The Dead-fall for Polecats, A Necessary Family-book. cunning animal (rather as we think of rats today), but cunning was also characteristic of all four-footed vermin. Therefore traps and tricks were recommended in vermin-killing manuals. ThefierceDrag-Hook was described as an 'engine' which could destroy many foxes (see Fig. 8). Polecats, buzzards, and kites might be trapped in dead-falls (see Fig. 9). The Compleat English and French Vermin-killer notes that traps for rats and mice are so well-known that it need only describe one type.40 To catch a fox, one manual recommended laying a false trail with a sheep's paunch after carefully rubbing one's shoes with it, so that the fox 'may not scent your swetty Feet'. After laying the trail, the human climbs a tree and waits for the fox with a Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Figure 6. A Whip or Spring-Trap for the Fox, A Necessary Family-book. Imagining Vermin 13 This hodgepodge array is not at all unusual; its origins lie in books of secrets.48 The link between vermin-killing and books of secrets is quite direct in some manuals. The Vermin-killer, from which the Necessary Family-book draws much of its advice on vermin, includes citations for the methods recommended, although these are not included in the derivative text. Such citations make a virtual roster of the (often suppositious) authors Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 gun.41 Humans, in other words, needed to employ both specific technologies and their wits to catch vermin. In fiction, vermin were sufficiently cunning to use tricks and traps themselves, as in the story of Reynard. A mouse battling a frog, for example, is described as 'The crafty Mouse, lurking under the Grass, sets upon the Frog by Ambuscado'.42 A rat bites an ox, but hides in a hole, and mocks the ox for failing to find him.43 In the same collection, a weasel grown too old to hunt hides in a pile of meal, and devours every mouse who comes there to eat (see Fig. 10). The moral is 'Where virtue fails, make use of Policy'.44 A fox lures an ape who has been elected as king of the beasts, telling him that there is buried treasure nearby, which (according to contemporaneous English law) belongs to the crown. The ape goes where directed, and falls into a trap constructed by the fox (see Fig. II). 45 The trap in the illustration is one similar to those in vermin-killing guides (see Fig. 12). Many further stories could be told about the trickery and cunning of vermin, especially of foxes, but these examples have displayed the basic tropes, many of which date back to the middle ages and before.46 These stories are only the most obvious example of the ways in which trickery was utterly bound up with the category of vermin. Vermin-killing manuals also imply that tricking vermin was not so very different from tricking other human beings. While such a claim might seem farfetched, A Necessary Family-book, which opens with diagrams of vermin traps, concludes with a long section on magic tricks, entitled 'Natural and Artificial Conclusions, both Pleasant and Profitable'. This part of the book starts with a description of how to catch kites and ravens alive, typical of the preceding section on vermin-killing. However, the next trick is entitled, 'To make a Cat Piss out a Fire'. It starts with a 'merry fellow' who came into an alehouse in cold weather, and found a miserable fire. He proclaimed that he could make the hostess's cat piss out the flames, and 'watching his opportunity' he did just that, thereby making his opinion of the inadequacy of the fire quite apparent.47 Structurally, this trick resembles the joke about the man who faults his hostess's hospitality by threatening to swim through the pottage to get the chop. Other tricks follow, including such classics as figuring out what number a person is thinking of, or making a sixpence fall through a solid table, or conveying money secretly from one hand to the other. Other 'natural and artificial conclusions' are of a practical nature: how to preserve cherries, pears, and nuts; how to know the hour of the day by hand and fingers (a sort of do-it-yourself sundial); how to know if the wine has been watered, how to keep fleas off dogs. Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 15 Imagining Vermin Family-book. manipulation of the natural world through human cunning. Legerdemain involved fooling the audience; vermin-killing required fooling the animals; and preserving fruit involved fooling the natural process of decay. As a number of historians have pointed out, books of secrets were closely tied to the seventeenth-century passion for demonstrations of the wonders of the natural world fostered by virtuosi. 'Science' and 'secrets' were wholly intermingled.50 SYMBOLS AND LANGUAGES There is another element to the relationship between vermin and trickery. Tricks are often linked, not only to the manipulation of the natural world, but also to language itself. Language enables both humans and vermin to play tricks on others. For example, one book describes a trick that involves putting a piece of string on the floor, and getting someone to bet that he will be able to jump over that piece of string. In the imagined alehouse of the text, there is always a taker. Then the trickster moves the piece of string to the corner where the wall meets the floor, and the better cannot jump through the wall over the piece of string, and so loses his money. It is both the linguistic ambiguity involved in 'this piece of string' and the manipulation of the structures of the material world that make the joke work.51 In addition to trickery, language enables quick-witted humans and vermin to get themselves out of trouble. For example, in a joke set in Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Figure 12. A bird-trap, A Necessary 16 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Charles the Bald's French court, a short Scotsman behaves quite rudely. Two tall scholars had come to dine, and the king set a dish with two large and one small fish between the Scotsman and the scholars. The Scotsman promptly served the two scholars the small fish, and put the two big ones on his own plate. When reprimanded by the King, the Scotsman pointed to himself, and said, here's two great and one small fish; pointing across the table he said, and there's two great and one little.52 Just as in the case of the man who started unbuttoning his doublet to swim towards the chop, clever words might absolve one from the social sin of greed. However, language does not always suffice. In a fable, a young man steals a piece of meat from a cookshop and quietly hands it to his companion. When questioned by the cook, the first man insists that he does not have the meat, and the second that he had not stolen the meat. Each is truthful within the narrow meanings of his words. But the cook is not fooled. Although he cannot recover his property, he reminds the thieves that God knows what truly took place, implying a punishment far more consequential than any the cook might inflict.53 Vermin were also masters of language, able to talk their way out of trouble again and again. In a fable by the 'Young Aesop', a crafty fox wants to trouble a young coney. He is unsuccessful, and so appeals to the lion, king of the beasts, for a warrant. The hapless coney is brought to court; both the lawyers, for the prosecution and the defence, are foxes. 'And strait two Foxes plead the cause, and so he's judg'd to dye.' The moral to this unhappy tale is spelled out: 'Might generally overcomes Right'.54 Foxes' cunning made them perfect for the role of lawyers, whose task was to manipulate language. Another children's book included an old proverb that also underlined the ways in which foxes use language to trick, 'When the Fox preaches, beware the Geese'.55 Even the story of Reynard hinges upon linguistic ability. It is only by telling his long and complicated story about treasure and betrayal that Reynard transforms himself from villain to hero, and escapes execution. In Aesop's fables, foxes have linguistic abilities that dogs lack, even though dogs resemble foxes. In one tale, a sheepdog savages one of the farmer's sheep. When the farmer threatens to kill him, the dog tells the master that it was a wolf who had done the killing. But the farmer is not taken in by the dog's speech, and kills it forthwith.56 In a fable which closely resembles the one about two thieves in a cookshop (see above), a dog steals a piece of meat from a butcher. However, the dog cannot use language to escape. On the contrary, the dog is caught because all the dogs bark uncontrollably as they quarrel about the distribution of the meat.57 The 'language' of dogs, barking, betrays them rather than enabling them to get away with the crime. Vermin use language, a system of signs, to deceive and to trick. In many fables vermin are also expert readers of signs, interpreting the material world in order to avoid being tricked themselves. In one such, the lion king Imagining Vermin 17 is ill and invites all of the animals to visit him, just as visiting the sick was a cardinal virtue in early modern England. The fox, however, refuses to go. When summoned specifically by the lion, the fox offers to pray for the lion's health, but will not visit. This refusal is explained:58 she was terrified with the footsteps: which indeed sith they were all towards the lions den, none returning back, it was a sign that many beasts had entred in, but that none had come forth. Take the Head of a Rat or Mouse, pull the Skin from of it, and cary the Head where the Mice and Rats come, and they will be immediately gone from thence, Running altogether as if they were bewitched, and come no more. Here is the domestic version of the gamekeeper's gibbet. Mice and rats are presumed to be able to abstract from a skinned head to their own safety, or lack thereof. The display of the tiny head reminds one of contemporaneous human executions for treason, when Londoners routinely saw the heads of the executed stuck on pikes as dreadful warnings.61 A related method to rid one's house of flies reveals the differing capacities of insect versus four-footed vermin to read symbols. Here, the reader is directed to make an image of aflyon a plate of copper, brass or tin, and an image of Pisces on the obverse. As the plate is made, the reader is to chant, 'This is the image which doth clean rid all Flies forever'. When completed, the image is to be buried in the centre of the house.62 This practice relies upon sympathetic magic. There is no suggestion that the flies will actually see their image in the plate. Rather, the charm spoken and the power of extra-natural invocations of the zodiac will eliminate the flies without their understanding what has happened to them. Mice and rats flee 'as if bewitched'; the flies leave because they are in some sense bewitched. In another example, rats, mice, or moles respond to the cries of one of Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Sherlock Holmes could not ask for better readings of footprints. Of all the animals, only this fox noticed and correctly interpreted these marks. In contrast, the dog, one of the animals most similar to the fox, lacks the ability to read symbols. A fable explains how a biting dog is outfitted with a bell by its master, to warn people of its whereabouts. The dog, however, cannot read the sign correctly, and assumes that the bell is given to him as 'an ornament for his goodness', until another dog explains to him that the bell is actually a mark of disgrace.59 While vermin in fiction can use human language, those represented in vermin-killing manuals do not. However, there are hints that humans thought that the vermin whom they encountered in their daily lives were capable of interpreting symbols. One of the Vermin-killer's recommendations for getting rid of rats and mice is violent and symbolic:60 18 History Workshop Journal their own kind who has been immured in a clay pot stuck over the fire. The Vermin-killer explains what happens next, all the rats and Mice in the house, hearing the Cry of those in the Pot, will run immediately to the Place, where the Pot standeth on the Fire, as if they did intend by force to deliver the rats and Mice in the Pot. Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Once they are gathered together, the human can kill them all in one place. Here, the humans use animals' identification with one of their own kind as a trick to kill them.63 The trick only works, however, if these animals understand the distress encoded in the animal's cry, and recognize what kind of animal is in distress. A mole's cries, for example, will only gather moles together, not rats and mice as well. A variation of this technique was recommended in a later vermin-killing manual, instructing one to beat or cut a rat or a mouse, and then let him go. His cries will scare all the rest of his kind away.64 This last example suggests another aspect of vermin's ability to understand and manipulate symbols, or language. The ability to communicate enables these animals to act corporatively. Vermin can be described as assembling in human-like formations; as the Vermin-killer says, 'all the rats and Mice will make their Appearance, as if it were to be an Assembly of an Army'.65 Mice are described as 'in Council' or a 'Committee'.66 These animals adopt human social forms - the assembly of an army, the meeting of a committee. In contrast, a group of fleas drawn to a bowl of goat's blood is described in animal terms, 'all the Flies [fleas] will come into it, like a swarm of bees'.67 In The Fables of Young Aesop, mice are portrayed in 'The Friendship of Mice' as able to understand each other. A mouse loses his footing and falls into a water barrel in a deserted house. He is saved from drowning by his fellow mice who make a long chain with their bodies, upon which he climbs out of danger (see Fig. 13).68 In another fable, mice talk amongst themselves and succeed in evading a cat. Until the mice banded together, the cat caught many of them. Once together, however, they realize that if they stay up above floor level, the cat cannot reach them (see Fig. 14). The cat tries a countermove, pretending to be dead, but the mouse cooperative is not fooled. One mouse playfully addresses the cat while warning the rest of the mice, 'Ho Friend, if I knew for certain that thou wert the Cat, I would not come down'.69 Not only can mice employ human language, they can use it in sophisticated ways, teasing the cat while warning fellow mice. I have suggested that various kinds of four-footed vermin were imagined to have linguistic powers of some kind. Whether discoursing of dinners or reading the sign of a skinned head, these animals could use and manipulate words and signs. Aside from the potential unease generated by animals who appeared to have human skills of language, this feature of vermin may have had another disquieting aspect. Humans themselves used a grid of language Imagining Vermin 19 Figure 14. Of the Mice and the Cat, W.D., Aesop's Fables. to array the natural world, and particularly the animals with whom they dealt regularly.70 Here I focus on two such languages: those of hunting and carving. They are, of course, related - animals killed in a hunt would be served up as an ornament to a dinner. Participation in hunting was increasingly limited to Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Figure 13. The Friendship of Mice, The Fables of Young Aesop. 20 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 the upper classes, but the cheap-print literature of the later seventeenth century offers its readers access to that gentlemanly world. For example, The School of Recreation, published in 1696, discusses a full range of gentlemanly talents and skills. Hunting, riding, racing, hawking, tennis, bowling, fowling and angling are all demystified, as are cock-fighting, and military manoeuvres. The book opens with the topic of hunting, because, as the author explains, 'it challenges the sublim Epithets of Royal, Artificial, Manly and Warlike, for its Stateliness, Cunning, and Indurance.'71 It is difficult to imagine how a book could successfully instruct one to stay on a horse, or follow a hound, and like others of its type, this text does not take up those challenges. Instead, the author declares, 'I reckon it the most necessary part of the Hunter to understand the Names, Degrees, Ages and Seasons of the aforesaid different beasts of Forest or Venery, Chase, and Warren'. What follows is an elaboration of the naming practices of hunting. For example, in its first year, a hart is called a hind-calf, then a knobber, a brock, a staggard, a stag and finally a hart, year by year. Such names were tricky; badgers were also commonly referred to as brocks. A buck followed a similar succession of names: a fawn, a pricket, a sorrel, a sore, a buck of the first head, and finally a great buck.72 This emphasis upon naming is utterly typical of books on hunting. And so it is with cookery. Once the hunted animal or bird was brought to the kitchen, it underwent another linguistic framing. As discussed above, carving was one of the actions which transformed nature (a dead animal) into culture (meat which becomes a means of enacting social difference). To this day, carving retains a certain mystique, a kind of specialized social skill. However, we no longer use an elaborate vocabulary to distinguish each animal from another. Carving a turkey, a chicken, a capon, or even a goose, follows the same general pattern. Once you know how to do one, usually you can carve all the rest. In the seventeenth century, however, cheap print makes each individual animal separate and distinct, and offers both a specialized language and a set of techniques to demarcate one type of animal from the next. As discussed above, the playing-cards called The Genteel House-keepers Pastime provided animal-by-animal diagrams of carving as well as the terms used to distinguish them. Here, a capon, turkey, hen and pullet are all different, linguistically and practically. In many books which lack illustrations, it is only the language of carving which provides this level of distinction. Hannah Woolley and a host of other cookery writers enjoined their readers to say, 'allay a pheasant', 'break a deer', 'mince that plover', 'rear that goose', 'sauce a capon', 'spaul that hen', and so on.73 Not all forms of meat which needed to be carved had their own specific terms. The hierarchy of meats, and of the animals from whence they came, was articulated through these words. In the set of playing-cards, mackerel, carp, turbot and sole lack specific words to describe their carving, although otherfisheshad them. The only item of pastry which takes a specific term is the venison pasty, that most Imagining Vermin 21 SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTS I have argued that four-footed vermin were imagined in early modern England according to three characteristics: they ate human food; they were cunning; and they understood symbols. Each of these three, of course, was also characteristic of humans. The very same books which advise one on tricking vermin with traps instruct one on how to avoid being tricked into buying unsatisfactory meat by a poulterer. A full analysis of the relationships among cheap print and other types of sources, such as diaries, city ordinances, and the like, will require a much larger study. Here I can only draw some preliminary conclusions about cheap print and its constructions of relationships between humans and animals. First, various types of cheapprint sources used here each have their own generic peculiarities. Playing cards, for instance, adopt different rhetorical forms than do chapbooks, although playing cards depicting Aesop's fables mix those categories. Each genre has its own trajectory, which needs further explication. However, many of these genres share certain features, perhaps because of the ways in which these books were produced in large quantities. The publishers needed to make their books appealing and accessible to those readers who lacked the rhetorical and linguistic skills required by elaborate works. In particular, I have focused on the ways in which many of these texts are made up of small stories, tiny units whose themes might cohere, but which do not make up a hierarchically-structured text. Readers of the cheap editions of Aesop, or of vermin books, or texts on legerdemain, or jokebooks, could open the book at any point and jump in, without having to start at the beginning and work their way through.75 The advice-oriented books, from The Art of Courtship to the works of Hannah Woolley, function similarly. A reader might dip into a section on carving, or on interpreting the significance of moles on the face, without having to read any other part of Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 aristocratic of meats. Almost all of the face cards (that is, king, queen, knave) depict meats that take a specific carving word, while those which do not have such terms are usually found amongst the twos, threes, and fours of the suits. In books of hunting and cookery, using the correct name for an animal or meat was crucial to social success, and cheap-print books were careful to explain these specialized languages to their readers. We cannot know if readers of these texts enjoyed a kind of imagined emulation of their betters, or actually put these instructions into practice, but in either case, using the right word was essential. On a humbler level, rural people employed extensive naming practices. Keith Thomas reminds us that each type of bird had its own human-like name, such as Jenny Wren, Robin Redbreast, or Will Wagtail.74 Thus language itself serves to order the motley world of animals. Vermin, who appear to have access to the tools which make that order, seem potentially disruptive of the categories made by humans to contain animals. 22 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 the book. Illustrations in these works function in a related manner: they provide a summing up of a particular story. Look again, for example, at Fig. 6. Not only do we see how to make a trap that will catch a fox - we see the outcome of this particular narrative, namely, the successful capture of the fox. The brevity of the written narrative is caught in an iconographic freezeframe, reminiscent of a range of other contemporaneous images.76 There is another crucial feature to these texts, aside from their nonhierarchical aspect. All of them are highly didactic in nature. While we do not usually think of jokebooks as producing moral messages, these books can be read as a long series of tiny playlets, each producing laughter and an example of a social interaction, be that one to copy or one to avoid. Similarly, the sections of cheap-print books on legerdemain enact tiny dramas about how to be the centre of attention in the alehouse, or how to impress people with what appear to be highly-developed mathematical skills. However, these small narratives cannot be read in a wholly unitary way. Although I have drawn out certain themes, some of these are produced by means of their contestation rather than their straightforward articulation. For example, the joke about the two scholars and the two tiny fish works in multiple ways: it shows an example of discourtesy that one should not emulate, it points towards a general principle about meat at meals, it hints that the French do not know how to set a good table, it suggests that the Scots are a canny race, and it implies that a quick wit may absolve one of rudeness. At the same time, it makes fun of the social precepts which govern the gratification of a very basic desire, that of hunger. While I have tried to suggest that the modernizing narratives which structure most of the historical discussions of animals do not account for vermin particularly well, there is one striking discontinuity between the early modern and modern periods. Early modern cheap print of the type I analyse here does not link vermin with dirt or disgust. Dirt, in Mary Douglas's famous definition, is matter out of place. It is easy to see how small creeping animals - matter which moves into the wrong places on its own four feet - might be dirty.77 Perhaps it is only in the nineteenth century that English vermin acquire (or re-acquire?) these connotations of dirt and disgust. Christopher Herbert has analysed Henry Mayhew's use of the figure of the rat in Mayhew's best-selling London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62), showing how rats symbolizefilthand dirt. Mayhew's rats, like the early modern vermin discussed above, are preternaturally smart, and seem to be able to communicate with each other in frightening ways. However, Mayhew's rats had an 'evil glamour' according to Herbert, and functioned in the text as a taboo object, powerfully attractive and repulsive simultaneously. As such, they were emblems of filth, of out-of-control workingclass sexuality, of vice and disease. Mayhew writes about a celebrated rat-catcher as if he were possessed of the occult powers inherent in the dangerous taboo animal whom he alone can control. With a frisson of horror, Mayhew tells us that this rat-catcher, unbeknownst to his wife, has Imagining Vermin 23 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 eaten cooked rats with pleasure - he claims that they were moist as rabbits.78 The way in which Mayhew employs this detail to produce horror brings us back to a characteristic aspect of vermin recognizable in early modern texts, namely that they are not eaten. However, the early modern texts I have analysed here do not produce horror or disgust; they just ignore vermin as a category of meat. Nor are vermin characterized by links to filth, to sexuality, to the potentially polluting aspects of the working classes. Any such argument from silence remains open to potential revision, but the texts I examine here simply do not treat vermin as disgusting or dirty. In part, such a lack may be related to the material specificities of early modern English Me. Perhaps disgust is something of a luxury, only possible when adequate means are available to barricade oneself from the source of potential contamination.79 A parallel case might be found in Naomi Rogers's analysis of the American transformation of the household fly from innocent, even amusing, domestic animal to disgusting germ-laden menace in the later nineteenth century.80 While Rogers rightly points to the role of germ theory in reconstructing the meanings of thefly,it is also the case that the transformation took place at a moment when middle-class Americans were pursuing what Nancy Tomes has called 'the private side of public health'.81 Men and women made use of a wide range of commercial products to fortify their homes against dirt and disease, a project easily adapted to germ theory when it became widely known. Rather than dirt and disgust, early modern representations emphasize those aspects of vermin which are the most threatening to the human social fabric. Vermin's consumption of human food threatens social integrity in two ways. First, their greed implies that there might not be enough food for all, and that social mechanisms, such as the assize of bread (the fixing of bread prices), might not be sufficient to remedy the split between those who have enough to eat, and those who do not. Second, vermin's taste for fancy human food, gobbled without human manners, hints that the social bonds established around a dinner table by means of manners may not be sufficient to restrain appetites so that there will be food for all. Even at an ample table, humans do not consume equal portions. Instead, food is used to display social hierarchy. However, that very hierarchy is supposed to guarantee that no-one at the table goes hungry. Noble banquets routinely served much more food than could be consumed, and gave the leftovers to the poor, although this style of household and banqueting had fallen into decline by the later seventeenth century.82 Similarly, vermin's reliance on cunning and trickery questions the functioning of human society. The obverse of trickery is trust. Are people what they represent themselves to be? Jokebooks are full of deceptions, as are books on legerdemain. While cheap-print books were providing detailed instructions on cosmetics and beauty, moralists were inveighing against the seemingly-new custom of giving servants the cast-off clothes of their masters. They worried that a person's clothing no longer located him or her 24 History Workshop Journal NOTES AND REFERENCES Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 correctly in a hierarchy. Similarly, writers argued for the better regulation of charity, arguing that beneficent people were imposed upon by rogues who misrepresented their worthiness for aid. It was by the means of their linguistic skills - the skill of their narratives - that beggars were able to gain money not rightfully theirs. The issue was not only that such money went to the wrong people, but that the reciprocal relations of obligation and deference which were supposed to govern the interactions of rich and poor were thereby harmed. These suggestions are of a sort that cannot be concretely linked to vermin-killing manuals. However, as suggested above, animals are always composed of projections, fantasies, identifications - and of real material beings with their own ideas and practices. By highlighting some aspects of vermin that troubled early moderns, we begin to see what kinds of changes require historical explanation. Both 'fact' and 'fiction' written about vermin can help us to analyse how the realms of imagination have their own histories, enacted in material worlds as well as in fantasies. This paper was written while I was a fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University; I am grateful to the Center for generousfinancialsupport, and to its Director William Chester Jordan and my fellow fellows for intellectual comradeship. My thanks to those who read and commented on earlier versions of the paper: Laura Gowing, Mary Henninger-Voss, Kathleen Crowther-Heyck, Maryanne Kowalewski, Pamela Long, Gregg Mitman, John Murrin, James Serpell, and to Tamara Griggs for superb research assistance. 1 Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast. Animals, Identity, and Representation, Manchester University Press, 1993; Tim Ingold ed., What is an Animal?, London, Unwin Hyman, 1988; R.G. Willis ed., Signifying Animals. Human Meaning in the Natural World, London, Unwin Hyman, 1990. 2 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York, Frederick A. Prager, 1966, see esp. pp. 41-57; 159-179. See also Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, 'Institutional ecology, "translations", and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39', Social Studies of Science 19,1989, pp. 387-420, which focuses upon animals, geographic regions, and so on which functioned as objects that could be used or exploited by more than one professional group. 3 Robert Darnton, 'Workers revolt, The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin', in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), New York, Vintage Books, 1985, pp. 75-104. My fascination with the tensions between an account such as Darnton's and a post-structuralist analysis focusing on the ways in which texts produce meaning is, in part, shaped by Roger Chartier, 'Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness', Journal of Modern History 57, pp. 682-95, and Darnton's reply, 'The Symbolic Element in History', Journal of Modern History 58, pp. 218-34, as well as Dominick LaCapra, 'Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre, and James Fernandez, 'Historians tell tales: Of Cartesian Cats and Gallic Cockfights', both in Journal of Modem History 60, pp. 95-112, 113-127. See also, Harold Mah, 'Suppressing the text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre', History Workshop Journal 31,1991, pp. 1-20. 4 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate. The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1987; John Berger, 'Why Look at Animals?' in John Berger, About Looking, New York, Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 1-26; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World. Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800, London, Penguin Books, 1984. 5 For a transcript of the Elizabethan statute, see 'Destruction of Birds and Vermin', The East Anglian 3, 1869, pp. 275-279. Animals mentioned by name in the act include magpies, Imagining Vermin 25 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 rooks, crows, choughs, pine martens, fursketts [furze-cats, or hares], mouldkites [I assume a type of predatory bird], buzzards, shags [crested cormorants], ringtails, osprey, woodwalls [green woodpeckers], jays, kites, kingfishers, bulfinches, grays [badgers], fitchetts [a kind of polecat], polecats, weasels, stoats, fayrbodes [probably a type of wild cat], wildcats, otters, hedgehogs, rats, mice, moles. The Act protects herons, shovellers, and swans. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parishes paid bounties for thousands of sparrows and sparrow eggs. See also T.N. Brushfield, 'On the destruction of vermin in rural parishes', Report & Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art 29, 1887; J.S. Elliott, Bedfordshire Vermin Payments, Luton, The City Museum, 1936; J.W. Millard, 'Destruction of Parish Vermin in the Sixteenth Century at Bedingfield', The East Anglian new series vol. 2,1887-88 pp. 328-329; P.J. Dillon and E.L. Jones, 'Trevor Falla's vermin transcripts for Devon', The Devon Historian 33, Oct. 1986, pp. 15-19; many thanks to Maryanne Kowaleski for this last reference. I have not yet been able to consult Charles Oldham, 'Payments for 'vermin' by some Hertfordshire churchwardens', Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club 19, from p. 79. The phrase 'four-footed beasts' is very roughly equivalent to our category 'mammals'; it is used repeatedly in pre-Linnean discussions, as in Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts, 1607. 6 E.L. Jones argues that the period of the Restoration saw an increase in campaigns against raptors and corvids (kites, buzzards, ravens and the like), who preyed on small poultry or infant lambs or dead sheep, and bullfinches and jays, who harmed fruit trees. Jones, 'The Bird Pests of British Agriculture in Recent Centuries', Agricultural History Review 20, 1972, pp. 107-125; see esp. pp. 110-114. However, he bases his arguments largely upon the essays by N.F. Ticehurst, 'On the Former Abundance of Kites, Buzzard, and Raven in Kent', British Birds 14, 1920, pp. 34-37; and 'Rewards for Vermin Killing Paid by the Churchwardens of Tenterden, 1626 to 1712', Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist 5,1935, pp. 69-82. Much further work is needed on such accounts before generalizations can be made about the changing status of particular species. 7 On cheap print, see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, 1981; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, Cambridge University Press, 1991. For a brief introduction to the growing literature on reading and readership, see Andrew Bennett, Readers and Reading, London, Longman, 1995. 8 The cost of books is determined in one of three ways: some books include the price, printed on the title page. Other prices are listed in publishers' advertisements. Finally, some prices can be obtained from Robert Clavel, A Catalogue of All the Books printed in England since the dreadfulfireof London in 1666 to the end of Michaelmas term, 1672, London, printed by R. Simmons for Robert Clavel, in Cross-key Court in Little-britain, 1673. facsimile edn, Farnborough, Hants, Gregg Press, 1965. Unfortunately Clavel's later catalogues lack prices. 9 Didactic books have not usually been analysed as a category in and of themselves. Rather, historians have focused on specific topics, such as medicine or conduct. For a discussion of late medieval and early modern how-to books that moves beyond specific categories, see Richard Hoffman, Fishers' Craft and Lettered Art, University of Toronto Press, 1997, especially the last two chapters. 10 J.S., The Experienc'd Fowler: Or, the Gentleman, Citizen, and Country-man's Pleasant and Profitable Recreation, London, Printed for Jo. Sprint, at the Blue Bell, and G. Conyers, at the Ring in Little Britain, 1697, p. 146. An edition of this work was advertised by Conyers for sixpence in the early 1720s; see The Compleat English and French Vermin-killer, p. 67. 11 A Necessary Family-Book, Both for the City & Country, In Two Parts, London: printed for John Harris, at the Harrow against the Church in the Poultry, 1688. Price sixpence. 12 Aesop's Fables is not a stable entity - many different fables have been included in various collections linked with the name Aesop. In England, Aesop became a standard schoolbook; a contract survives from 1631 for producing 12,000 copies of a schoolbook Aesop over the course of three years. See David G. Hale, 'Aesop in Renaissance England', The Library, 5th series vol. 27,1972, pp. 116-125; more generally see Ben E. Perry, Studies in the text history of the life and fables of Aesop, Haverford PA, American Philological Association, Philological Monographs 7,1936. By the later seventeenth century, a number of different versions were in print, ranging from the 'W.D.' version which cost between one and two shillings (see advert, The Compleat English and French Vermin-killer at one shilling; Clavel, 1672, p. 47, two shillings; Clavel lists schoolbook editions of Aesop from one shilling to two shillings, p. 103), 26 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 to the more expensive engraved Barlow and Ogilby versions (Clavel lists Barlow at eight shillings in 1672, p. 30). See also the use of Aesop's fables in copybooks (handwriting manuals used in schools), such as John Bickham, Fables and other Short Poems; Collected from the most celebrated English Authors. The Whole curiously Engrav'd, for the practice & Amusement of Young Gentlemen & Ladies, in the Art of Writing, [London], Printed and sold by Thos. Cobb (who Married ye Widow of Mr. John Cluer) at ye Printing Office in Bow Church Yard, London, where may be had Copy-Books of Round-Hand, with Copys at ye Top to write after. George Bickham, this work's engraver, produced a number of other copy books as well as manuals on drawing. This book is 32 pp.; I have not yet been able to determine its cost. See Sir Ambrose Heal, The English Writing Masters and their Copy-books, 1570-1800, a biographical dictionary and bibliography, Cambridge University Press, 1931. Finally, a series of broadsides used Aesop as a means to political critique, see Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power. Aesopian Writing and Political History, Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1991 for a discussion of the political meanings ascribed to the fables and to the life of Aesop himself, often included with the fables. See also, Jane E. Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740, Cambridge University Press, 1996. On a more general level, J. Paul Hunter has argued that the structures and readership of didactic works were crucial to the development of that pre-eminent form of fiction, the novel: Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, New York, Norton, 1990. 13 Necessary Family-Book, p. 7. Vermin have been associated with food in a variety of ways in the past. See, for instance, Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, transl. Rosemary Morris, London, Polity Press, 1990, pp. 170-73 for a discussion of vermin (worms and other creeping things) as consumers of the human body. Thanks to Sue Lederer for this reference. 14 For comparison, it was estimated that in 1726,100,000 beeves, 100,000 calves, and 600,00 sheep were slaughtered for human consumption in London. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 26. 15 Necessary Family-Book, foxes, p. 7; herne [heron], p. 41; coot/moorhen, p. 44; cormorant, p. 45. 16 C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain, London, Constable, 1973, pp. 108-110. 17 Aesop Naturaliz 'd and Expos 'd to the Publick View, Cambridge, Printed by John Hayes, for Edward Hall Bookseller there, 1697, p. 46. 18 John Walter and Keith Wrightson, 'Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England', Past and Present 71,1976, pp. 22-42; Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1978; Appleby, 'Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590-1740', Journal of Economic History 39, 1979, pp. 865-887. Work on food riots in the eighteenth century suggests that absence of famine by no means implied a lack of anxiety about food and starvation. John Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790-1810, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983; E.P. Thompson, 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present 50 1971, pp. 76-136. 19 Necessary Family-Book, p. 17; p. 38. W.W. [probably William Wadham], The VerminKiller, being a very necessary family book, containing Exact Rules and Directions for the Artificiall killing and destroying of all manner of Vermin, &c, London, printed for Samuel Lee at the Feathers near the Post-Office in Lombard-Street, 1680, p. 10. The former is based upon the latter, but there are items in each which are not duplicated in the other. By the 1750s, another version of this text no longer describes vermin as eating greedily. See The Vermin-killer, Being a Compleat and Necessary Family-Book, London, Printed and sold by W. Owen, at Homer's Head, near Temple Bar [1755?], price sixpence. 20 James Serpell, In the Company of Animals, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 198. 21 H.C., England's Jests Refin'd and Improv'd, being a Choice Collection of the Merriest Jests, Smartest Repartees, Wittiest Sayings, and most notable Bulls, yet extant, London, printed for John Harris at the Harrow in the Poultry, 1693, price one shilling, p. 40. For an introduction to the history of jokes, see Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg eds, A Cultural History of Humour, Oxford, Polity Press, 1997. 22 England's Jests, p. 46. 23 England's Jests, p. 10. 24 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners (1939), Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982; Stephen Mennell, All Manner of Food, Oxford, Basil BlackweU, 1985. Imagining Vermin 27 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 For a different analysis of the ritual aspects of a meal, see Mary Douglas, 'Deciphering a meal', Daedalus 101, 1972, pp. 61-81 and on meat in particular, see Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol, London, Routledge, 1991. 25 Francis Hawkins, Youth's Behaviour, or Decencie in Conversation Amongst Men, 7th impression, London, Printed for W. Lee, and are to be sold at the Turks-head, in Fleet-street near Ram-Alley, 1661. 26 Youth's Behaviour, p. 31. 27 Youth's Behaviour, pp. 32-33. 28 Youth's Behaviour, p.34. 29 Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet: or Rich Cabinet, Stored with all manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying, and Cookery. Very Pleasant and Beneficial to all Ingenious Persons of the Female Sex, 5th edn, London, printed for R. Chiswel at the Rose and Crown in St. Paul's Church yard, and T. Sawbridge at the Three Flower-de-Luces in Little-Britain, 1684, p. 258. 30 The Genteel House-keepers Pastime, or, The mode of carving at the table represented in a pack of playing cards by which together with the instructions in this book any ordinary capacity may easily learn how to cut up or carve in mode all the most usual dishes of flesh, fish, fowl, and baked meats. . . I set forth by the best masters in the faculty of carving and published for publick use, London, Printed for J. Moxon, 1693. Notice how carving is elevated by the claim that the work is based on the 'best masters in the faculty', as if carving were analogous to law or medicine. A number of sets of educational playing cards were manufactured in late seventeenth-century England, and this deck appears to have been aimed at the cheaper end of the market. Other decks were also available in coloured or coloured-and-gilt versions for three shillings or five shillings, but the Pastime was not advertised in such different versions, although it was reprinted in 1693 and 1717. 31 The Art of courtship, or, The School of delight containing amorous dialogues, complemental expressions, poems, letters and discourses upon sundry occasions relating to love and business... and rules for carving flesh, fish, fowl... [London], Printed by I.M. for I. Back, 1686. 32 The Art of Courtship, Bl v. 33 Coneys are rabbits; well into the eighteenth century, 'rabbit' meant an infant rabbit. They were commonly bred and raised for eating. 34 Douglas, Purity and Danger, for example. For a discussion of a number of such food avoidances in a wide geographical range, see Frederick J. Simoons, Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present, 2nd revised edn, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. A recent study is suggestive of more historicized ways to understand animals who are not eaten in particular cultures: Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast. Jews, Christians, and the Pig, transl. Carol Volk, New York, Columbia University Press, 1997. 35 A Rich Treasure, the Knowledge whereof is Useful, Profitable, Pleasant and Delightful, [London], Printed for Geo. Conyers, at the Ring in Little Britain. Price one shilling, pp. 108-109. A manuscript date of publication (1698) has been added to the Huntington Library's copy of the work. I suspect that the section on diet derives from the works of Thomas Tryon, also published by Conyers. On Tryon, and the links between vegetarianism and specific religious groups, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 289-297. 36 A Rich Treasure, p. 114. 37 See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 17^tl; 51-64. 38 The most pleasant history of Reynard the fox, Entered according to order [London], Printed for J. Conyers, and are to be sold by J. Blare at the Looking-glass on London-Bridge, [1700?]. According to Wing, this twenty-three-page version is a free adaptation and translation of: 'Le roman de Renart', in prose, attributed to John Shirley (flourished 1680-1702), who published a version in heroic verse in 1681 with a slightly different title. 39 Serpell, In the Company of Animals, p. 200. Such displays of animals are perhaps also linked to the medieval and early modern trials of animals accused of crimes. See E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), Union NJ, Lawbook Exchange, 1998; Esther Cohen, 'Law, Folklore and Animal Lore', Past and Present 110,1986, pp. 6-37. Thanks to Sue Woodson for this last reference. 40 The Compleat English and French Vermin-killer, London, Printed for G. Conyers, at the Ring in Little Brittain [1721?], price one shilling, p. 1. This incorporates some of the earlier vermin-killing manuals I discuss, but adds a considerable proportion of new material. The diary of an early eighteenth-century gentry farmer refers to at least four types of mouse or rat trap, and he consults with neighbours and the blacksmith about new designs for traps. He is even 28 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 solicited by a woman selling a new type of trap, which he rejects as a fraud. Nicholas Blundell, The Great Diurnall of Nicholas Blundell, ed. J.J. Bagley, The Record Society of Lancaster and Cheshire 110, 1968; 112, 1970; 114,1972; vol. 2, pp. 29, 38, 46, 222, 274, 277; vol. 3, pp. 8, 89, 225, 235. 41 Compleat English and French Vermin-killer, p. 60. 42 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 4. Ultimately, both are eaten by a kite. This is one of the fables rewritten specifically in language meant to evoke the English Civil War; its moral is, 'In like manner it happneth to factious Citizens, who being inflamed with a desire of rule, whilst they contend among themselves to be made Magistrates, do put their Estates, and also their Lives very often in danger'. 43 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p.160. 44 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 102. 45 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 231. 46 Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within. Animals in the Middle Ages, London and New York, Routledge, 1994, see esp. pp. 122-24, on the medieval Reynard the Fox. 47 Necessary Family-Book, p. 61. 48 William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, Princeton University Press, 1994, is the most recent comprehensive treatment of such works. 49 Most of the tricks in the Necessary Family-book are taken from John White's book of secrets, A Rich Cabinet, with a variety of inventions. See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, pp. 307-8. 50 The term 'science' is anachronistic here. On these links, see Eamon, Secrets of Nature; Pamela O. Long, 'Power, patronage, and the authorship of "Ars": From mechanical know-how to mechanical knowledge in the last scribal age', Isis 88,1997, pp. 1-41. 51 The same joke appears in A Rich Treasure, p. 51, except that a long tobacco pipe was used instead of a piece of string. 52 England's Jests, pp. 14-15. 53 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 72. 54 Young Aesop, p. 66. 55 T.H., A Guide for the Child and Youth, London, printed by J. Roberts, for the Company of Stationers, 1732, 9r. 56 Aesop Explain'd, p. 41. 57 Young Aesop, p. 74. 58 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p.67. 59 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 135. So too (p.279) a dog drowning in a well misreads a farmer's gestures. The farmer wants to rescue the dog, but the dog thinks that the man will push him in further, so bites him. The man then abandons the dog to drowning. 60 Vermin-killer, pp. 4—5. 61 There is some evidence that similar practices were employed to ensure that parishes did not pay bounties for the same animals twice; bounty heads were sometimes displayed publicly in the churchyard. For evidence of this practice, see Elliott, Bedfordshire Vermin Payments, p. 10; the law stipulated that the heads be 'burned consumed or cut in sunder'. Moles, too, responded to symbolic acts of destruction. One book recommended putting a dead mole 'into a common Haunt' and all the other moles will 'absolutely forsake it'. Compleat English and French Vermin-killer, p. 10. 62 A thousand more notable things: or, modern curiosities. Viz. Divers physical receipts. Monthly observations in gardening, . .. To prevent diseases in children. Directions for all midwives, . . . By G. Johnson. Part II [London], Sold [by George Conyers] at the Ring in Little-Britain [1706?], p. 11. The only extant copy of this work I have found is British Library (148O.a.lO). 63 Vermin-killer, pp. 6-7; pp. 8-9. 64 Compleat English and French Vermin-Killer, p. 4. This same entry continues, 'Some takes them and fleas the Skin off their Heads, and that does the same', linking these two methods of symbolic action. 65 Vermin-killer, p. 6. 66 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 288. 67 Vermin-Killer, p. 28. 68 Young Aesop, p. 54. 69 W.D., Aesop's Fables, p. 230. 70 Edmund Leach, 'Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animals Categories and Verbal Imagining Vermin 29 Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013 Abuse', in New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. E.M. Leeneberg, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1964. 71 R.H. [Robert Howlett], The School of Recreation: or a Guide to the Most Ingenious Exercises of Hunting. Riding. Racing. Fireworks. Military Discipline. The Science of Defence . . . , London, printed for H. Rhodes, at the Star, the Corner of Bride-Lane, Fleet-street, 1696, p.l. 72 School of Recreation, p. 2. 73 [Hannah Woolley], The Accomplish'd Ladies Delight in preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery, 5th edn, London: printed for Benjamin Harris, at the Stationers Arms and Anchor, in the Piazza, at the Royal-Exchange in Cornhil, 1685. 74 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 82. 75 On the non-linear quality of much early modern prose, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven F. Rendall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, pp. 165-76; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, '"Studied for Actions": How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy', Past and Present 129,1990, pp. 30-78; and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, transl. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 76 The most obvious example is the emblem book, usually aimed at a smaller, wealthier, and better-educated market than the works I study here. 77 See above for mention of Leviticus, in which such animals are specifically labelled 'unclean'. 78 Christopher Herbert, 'Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew's London', Representations 23,1988, pp. 1-24 79 For a wide-ranging discussion, see William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997. 80 Naomi Rogers, 'Germs with Legs: Flies, Disease, and the New Public Health', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63,1989, pp. 599-617. Mayhew specifically notes that "These winged tormentors are not, like most of our apterous enemies, calculated to excite disgust and nausea when we see or speak of them'. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work, London , Griffin, Bohn, and Company, 1861-62, vol. 3, p. 24. 81 Nancy J. Tomes, "The Private Side of Public Health', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64,1990, pp. 509-539. 82 Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990. Downloaded from http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Cambridge on March 10, 2013