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What do Queen Victoria, the Pied Piper, and a children’s book have in common? Rats, of course – more specifically, the art of catching them. The history of rat-catching is a lot more fascinating than you might expect, but it's probably just as gross. From sewers to disease to lucrative rat-fighting businesses, rat-catching is definitely the kind of dirty and disgusting job that deserves more recognition.
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The origins of the rat catching profession
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are pretty simple. Europe had a massive rat problem. They hired people to try and solve it
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and that's pretty much it. But while its origins may be humble
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rat catching eventually became an important way to slow the spread of the Black Death
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during the Middle Ages and just generally protect population centers from contaminated food
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It's definitely a job that deserves a little more recognition. So today, we're going to take a look at how Europe used
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to be so filthy that rat hunter was a legitimate job. If there's one group of people who have experience living
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among rats, it's no doubt the poor. Well, there's rat cake, rat sorbet, rat pudding
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or strawberry tart. Strawberry tart? Well, it's got some rat in it
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And indeed, most rat catchers started out as simple, impoverished folks who figured
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they might as well use their lifetime of experience with rodents to make a living
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Many of them got paid per dead rat. But as always, there was also those with a more entrepreneurial spirit
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Rat catchers who were looking to take it to the next level would use dogs and ferrets to hunt the rats
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rather than crawling around on the floor themselves. Some even drummed up extra business by breeding their own rats
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releasing them, and then just sitting back and waiting for the customers to roll in
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It wasn't the most ethical way to make a living, but points for ingenuity
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Rat breeding not only resulted in a little extra cash for the rat catchers, but also in the unlikely popularity of what came to be called fancy rats. Fancy rats were rats that
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were, well, fancy, and rich Victorians would keep them in gilded cages as pets. One man named Jack
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Black, not the movie star, obviously, was actually famous for breeding unusually colored designer
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rats and selling them as pets to the likes of Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter and Queen
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Victoria. That's right, even Queen Victoria was into the whole fancy rat thing. According to one
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biographer, Black, who was also an accomplished fisherman, dog breeder, and taxidermist, would
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keep any interestingly colored rats he would catch and then breed them to establish new color
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varieties. He did such a good job establishing that fancy rats were acceptable pets, they continue
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to be both pets and exhibition animals to this very day. So rat catchers led to pet rats, and pet
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Rats led to fancy rats. And by 1901 the fancy rats were so incredibly popular that the National Mouse Club began accepting rats OK that sounds ridiculous but it was a huge deal to mouse lovers
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Oh, boy. By 1912, the trend was so prevalent that the club officially changed its name
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to the National Mouse and Rat Club. Again, it sounds a little ridiculous
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but this was huge stuff in what we will informally call the rodentologist community
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However, like all fads, the rat craze eventually petered out after a few years, and the club reverted back to its original name
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As for the people who still fancied fancy rats, they founded the National Fancy Rat Society
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Hmm, I didn't see that one coming. Although rat catchers could always make money by catching rats
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many of them found a much more unsettling way to profit off of the vermin they hunted
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Rat fights. See, in 1835, the United Kingdom passed the Cruelty to Animals Act
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which forbid the use of popular blood sport animals like bears and bulls in animal baiting
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However, the law said nothing about rats. Not being the types to feel guilty about exploiting a good loophole
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the baiters started working with rodents. And it wasn't long until rat baiting or rat fighting
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was a wildly popular blood sport. The captured rats would be placed in a pit
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and the spectators would place bets on how long it would take a dog to take them out
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Jack Black, a mole destroyer from Battersea, and the same man who sold Queen Victoria her fancy rats
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was said to be a big player in the rat fighting world. One of Black's partners, Jemmy Shaw, was the landlord of the Blue Anchor Tavern located in the London borough of Islington
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Shaw is said to have kept over 2,000 rats on the premises and used them to stage fights in the basement
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The health department would give your bar a D rating for that nowadays. Progress? I guess
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By the late 18th century, Great Britain had been invaded by a new species of rat
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These large brown specimens, properly called Rattus norvegicus, but more commonly known as
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Norway rats, were much bigger and a heck of a lot more terrifying than the average black rat
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They're also responsible for a big uptick in business for the rat catchers, as their appearance
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meant that there were now rats running around that could gnaw and nibble the hands and feet
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off children. In 1813, naturalist Charles Fothergill wrote that the new rats, which he
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called gray rats, had superior bodily powers, which kind of makes them sound like superheroes
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Pretty cool Either way it easy to see why people who could catch these monsters were in demand Capturing or catching and killing rats was literal dirty work and it could be incredibly dangerous
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Rats avoided being out in the open and tend to hide in holes in other dark locations
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It was easy to get bitten, and those bites could carry any number of infectious or even
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deadly diseases. This being the case, the business was mostly reserved for the poorest people
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The aforementioned Jack Black, who was the most famous rat catcher of his era, is only so well known because he was written up
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in Henry Mayhew's 1815 book, London Labor and the London Poor, a literary examination of London's economically least fortunate
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Society had drawn a very clear line between those who were meant to crawl through sewers
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catching rats, and those who were meant to keep fancy rats as pets in gold cages
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And there was a certain logic to it. People who spent their childhoods playing with rodents
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who lived in their walls and floorboards would certainly have an advantage at catching them
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Didn't come close to making up for the vast economic disparities of the era, but hey, hats off to the poor of London for finding a way to profit from growing up in squalor
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Jack Black was Great Britain's most famous rat catcher, both because he was featured in Henry Mayhew's well-known book
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and because he liked to go around telling people that he was the personal rat catcher of Queen Victoria
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This position wasn't official, but nonetheless it became well-circulated knowledge, And Black was always ready to do whatever he could to confirm that he was worthy of the title
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royal rat catcher. He also dressed garishly in what was an attempt to attract people to him in
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a way he thought would be good for business. And when we say he dressed garishly, we mean that he
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would go around in a green top coat, a scarlet waistcoat, breeches, and a leather sash inset
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with cast iron rats all over it. That's a pretty good definition of garish. Ultimately, he did
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relatively well for himself. He not only caught rats for the government, but he was also the first
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recorded Fancy Rat Breeder, and he's also known to have contributed to the unseemly but still very
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popular rat fighting business. He made such a name for himself that he's actually mentioned in Pixar's
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short film Your Friend the Rat, which features Patton Oswalt reprising his role as Remy the Rat
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from the hit film Ratatouille. Whenever there is a weirdly interesting topic, you can count on
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someone, like your friends at Weird History, to do a video about it. And rat catching was a popular
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a topic for Victorian writers that was written about not only for entertainment
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but also for educational purposes Examples abound In 1896 Henry C Barclay published Studies in the Art of Rat Catching Just a few years later Ike Matthews published Full Revelations of a Professional Rat Catcher
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After 25 Years' Experience. Beatrix Potter, the author of the Peter Rabbit books, reportedly bought
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a pet rat from royal rat catcher Jack Black and dedicated her story, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers
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or the roly-poly pudding to her beloved rodent. And Roald Dahl published a short story
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called The Rat Catcher in 1953. But the most famous example of rat catching in literature
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is definitely the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Pied Piper is a fictional character
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who uses his magic pipe to steal all of the children from a village after being denied payment
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for his rat catching services. This tale was recorded by the brothers Grimm
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as well as the poets Robert Browning and Johann Goethe, among others
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The earliest known versions of the tale, however, make no mention of rats or rat catchers
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The Pied Piper was originally just a man who used a magic flute to steal the children of Hamlin
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The detail of him being a rat catcher wasn't actually added until over 250 years later
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Nonetheless, it is thanks mostly to this story, the image of the medieval rat catcher
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continues to be recognized in the modern world. Take, for example, the DC Comics character Rat Catcher
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Created in 1988, this lesser-known enemy of Batman, clearly created in the image of the Pied Piper
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has repeatedly used his power to control rats to terrorize the citizens of Gotham City
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Don't worry, though. Batman, a mouse with wings, has stopped him every time
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While it's doubtful that the people who scampered around the sewers of Europe hunting rats for money
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ever thought that one day there would be an annual holiday dedicated to their profession, there is
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Sort of. OK, so actually, the holiday is more about the legend
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of the Pied Piper than the profession as a whole, but it's better than nothing. The holiday is celebrated every June 26th in Hamlin, Germany
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the town which serves as the setting for the story and where the story's origin can be traced back
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as far as the year 1300. Rat Catcher's Day is also celebrated on July 22nd
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in a few other places outside of Hamlin. Why the discrepancy? Well, according to the Brothers Grimm
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the date the Pied Pipers stole the children from Hamlin was June 26th of 1284
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but according to the poet Robert Browning, it was July 22nd of 1376
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Historians have been unable to settle the matter, which means we might as well celebrate the Rat Catchers twice
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#People & Society
#Rabbits & Rodents