A Better Mousetrap · Part 11 of 30

A mill to take mice, 1590

Act II: The mill · November 7, 2026

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Card for part 11 of A Better Mousetrap: the year 1590 in large red type, over the words: A mill to take mice. Two boards, a wire, some butter. Nothing to set again. — Mascall Mill

Part 10 ended with twelve mousetraps in a book printed the year after its author died, and one of them that didn’t need anyone. Here it is.

The chapter

It takes up less than a page. The heading is “A Mill to take Mice”, and it begins:

This engine or Mill, is made of ij. thin bords, and thicker in the midst, then at the ends.

Two thin boards, slotted into each other to make a cross: four vanes. A hole is bored through the middle, and through it goes “a great wyar, or a smal pinne of wood”. The pin is set into a thick board on a table, half a yard off the ground, so the vanes hang out over the edge. Under the mill goes a pan or pot of water.

Then the bait:

baite your mill on both sides of each leafe with some butter, mixt with otmele and sugar

And a little more oatmeal on the board, an inch from the mill, “to tice them to the mill”.

How it works

A mouse comes for the oatmeal on the board, reaches for the butter and sugar on the nearest vane, and steps out onto it. The vane turns under the mouse, and the mouse goes into the water.

The mill has turned a quarter of the way round. The next vane is now where the last one was, still baited on both sides. Nothing has to be set again. It just waits.

Mascall says he had seen it take “threescore or more perhaps in a night”, sixty mice, “if there be store”.

The line to remember

One sentence in the chapter matters more than the rest:

Ye shall make your mill to turne very easely, that the least weight thereon shall turne it.

If the pin is stiff, a mouse can stand on the vane, eat, and walk back to the board. The trap only works if the lightest mouse in the house can turn it.

Two mills side by side over pans of water. On the left, a stiff pin: a mouse walks out on a vane, the vane dips a little and holds, and the mouse eats and walks back. On the right, a mill that turns very easily: the same mouse steps out, the vane turns under it, the mouse drops toward the pan, and the next baited vane comes round level. Caption: that the least weight thereon shall turne it.

David Drummond, the researcher from part 10, built one from this chapter, and it’s now in the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. Remember the line about turning easily. It’s the hard part, and it will come back.

Next, part 12: The Mousetrap, c.1600.

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Sources

Leonard Mascall, A Booke of Fishing with Hooke & Line … Another of sundrie Engines and Trappes to take Polcats, Buzards, Rattes, Mice and all other kindes of Vermine & Beasts whatsoever (London: John Wolfe, 1590), the chapter "A Mill to take Mice". Early English Books Online text, Text Creation Partnership A07166 (CC0): github.com/textcreationpartnership/A07166 . Quoted with the long s written as s, and accents and the drop capital dropped.
Museum of English Rural Life, object 2008/1, "Mill to take mice", a replica, maker David Drummond, David Drummond Collection of Mouse Traps: reading.ac.uk/adlib/Details/collect/7290 .