A Mill to Take Mice

The self-resetting mousetrap is older than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and three centuries older than the spring snap trap. It first appears in print in 1590.

The clerk of the kitchen

Leonard Mascall was clerk of the kitchen to Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. In the second half of the sixteenth century he put together a run of practical books for well-run English households, covering how to graft fruit trees, keep poultry, doctor cattle and take stains out of cloth.

He died in 1589 and was buried at Farnham Royal in Buckinghamshire. The next year his publisher brought out A Booke of Fishing with Hooke & Line, bound with a second work: Another of sundrie Engines and Trappes to take Polcats, Buzards, Rattes, Mice and all other kindes of Vermine & Beasts whatsoever.

It is a remarkable little catalogue: 34 traps and nine recipes for poison baits. Twelve of the traps were meant for mice. Like his other books, it was a compilation, gathered from older sources that are now lost. That makes Mascall’s book the earliest substantial record of how people trapped vermin.

The mill

Among the deadfalls, box traps and springy “dragin” traps is one Mascall calls a Mill to take mice. It’s a small wheel of vanes turning freely on a spindle. Each vane was baited on both sides with butter, oatmeal and sugar, and the whole thing was set so it overhung the edge of a table, with a pot of water on the floor beneath.

A mouse after the bait has to climb out onto a vane. The vane is on a free spindle, so it turns under the mouse’s weight, and the mouse falls. The mill doesn’t need resetting, because every vane is the same: after a turn, the next vane is already in place, still baited. It just waits for the next mouse.

In 1992 the researcher David C. Drummond worked through all twelve of Mascall’s mousetraps for the Vertebrate Pest Conference. For all but two, working models had been built by following Mascall’s descriptions to the letter. Of the mill, he wrote that it was

“apparently the earliest known example of an ever-set multi-catch mouse trap.”

He also noted that the design itself “did not persist.” The idea of tipping an off-balance mouse into a pail of water kept coming back in other forms, most famously the rolling log across a bucket. But the mill itself, where the bait sits out on the vanes and a mouse has to commit to reach it, mostly dropped out of sight.

Four hundred years later

Recently, trap collectors and 3D-printing hobbyists began rebuilding the mill from Mascall’s description, and it worked. That’s where we come in. We didn’t want a curiosity. We wanted a trap you could clamp to a bucket in the garage and forget about, so we changed four things:

• It turns on ball bearings. A pair of 608 bearings in the hub means the mill turns under a mouse’s weight every time, instead of sticking on a dry spindle.
• The bait is out of reach. The fixed walkway stops well short of the bait wells, so a mouse can’t lick the bait off from somewhere steady. The only way to the bait is onto the mill.
• It clamps to a bucket. Instead of a table and a pot, a tool-free bar clamp fits a standard 5-gallon bucket, with a ramp from the floor to the rim.
• It can catch alive. Leave the bucket dry, clip on the guard ring, and the mill becomes a live-catch trap.

The principle is exactly Mascall’s: bait on the vanes, a free spindle, a drop. It has been waiting four hundred years for a good bearing.

Sources

1. Drummond, D. C. (1992). “Unmasking Mascall’s Mouse Traps.” Proceedings of the Fifteenth Vertebrate Pest Conference, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. digitalcommons.unl.edu/vpc15/23
2. Mascall, L. (1590). A booke of fishing with hooke & line… Another of sundrie engines and trappes to take polcats, buzards, rattes, mice and all other kinds of vermine & beasts whatsoever. London. Library of Congress record
3. “Leonard Mascall.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Mascall