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A Better Mousetrap · Part 9 of 30

The wanted list, 1566

Act I: The problem ·

Listen · 2 min

Card for part 9 of A Better Mousetrap: the year 1566 in large red type, over the words: Twelve mice, one penny. Parliament put a price on vermin. Hampshire's accounts show no payment for a mouse.
Mascall Mill

Part 8 ended with England’s Parliament putting a price on rats and mice. Here is the price.

The list

In 1566, with food prices rising, Elizabeth I’s Parliament passed “An Act for the Preservation of Grain”. It named nineteen birds and thirteen animals as “noyfull fowles and vermyn”, and told each parish’s churchwardens to pay for every one killed, out of a rate raised for the purpose. The heads were brought to the churchwardens, to be “burned, consumed, or cut in sunder” in front of them.

The Act set the prices. In its own spelling:

For the Heades of everie Foxe or Gray [badger] twelve pence. For the Heades of everie Otter or Hedgehogges two pence. For the Heades of everie three Rattes or Twelve Myse one peny.

A mouse was worth a twelfth of a penny. A fox was worth a hundred and forty-four of them.

The prices in the 1566 Act. A fox or badger, twelve pence. An otter or hedgehog, two pence. Three rats or twelve mice, one penny. Then a grid of mice fills in, one row of twelve for each penny, until all twelve rows are full: one fox is worth 144 mice.

Bring your own engine

The Act left the catching open. Anyone who wanted the money, with the landowner’s leave, could use “suche Nettes, Engynnes and other reasonable Devyses as are meet and convenient”: anything but handguns and crossbows.

It was renewed twice in Elizabeth’s reign, and it stayed law until 1863.

No payment for a mouse

In 2005 Douglas Anderson went through the churchwardens’ accounts of 176 Hampshire parishes, looking for every payment made under the Act. He found payments for sparrows, foxes, polecats, hedgehogs, otters and moles.

He also found what was missing. Mice and rats, “the most harmful of all vermin”, as he puts it, almost never appear. In all of Hampshire, one parish paid for them: Romsey, where in 1783 “Knowles for killing Ratts” was paid two shillings and sixpence, and eight years later “old Knowles the ratcatcher” got three and six. Neither payment mentions a mouse.

Hampshire parishes that paid for each kind of animal from 1775 to 1799, of 94 parishes with vermin payments. The bars grow in turn: sparrows 75, foxes 37, polecats 36, hedgehogs 34, stoats 20, marten cats 13, otters 8, badgers 7, weasels 7, moles 1, rats 1 (Romsey, 1783), mice 0.

The law could say what a mouse was worth. For catching one, it allowed “Nettes, Engynnes and other reasonable Devyses”.

Twenty-four years later, someone wrote the engines down.

Next, part 10: The clerk of the kitchen.

Sources

  1. Douglas Anderson, "Noyfull Fowles and Vermyn: Parish Payments for Killing Wildlife in Hampshire 1533–1863", Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club & Archaeological Society 60 (2005), 209–228: hantsfieldclub.org.uk/publications/hampshirestudies/digital/2000s/vol60/Anderson.pdf . The Act's rates as quoted (p. 210), the nets and engines clause (p. 210), the 176 parishes studied (p. 212), parish counts by animal for 1775–99 (Tables 3 and 4, pp. 221–222), Romsey's rat payments and the absence of any mouse payment (p. 220; Tables 3 and 4 have no rats or mice column), and Mascall's 1590 book (p. 210, Fig. 1).
  2. "An Act for Preservation of Grain", House of Lords Journal, vol. 1, December 1566: british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol1/pp662-663 .
  3. West Sussex Record Office, "The Wonderful World of Churchwardens Accounts" (2024): westsussexrecordofficeblog.com/2024/04/18/the-wonderful-world-of-churchwardens-accounts/ . The Act's list of animals, and its repeal in 1863.