Beware the Vengeance of the Mice

I have just posted a detailed analysis of the extended collective licensing proposals in the Hargreaves Report on the Action on Authors' Rights blog.

I enjoyed the cartoon by Steve Bell in yesterday's Guardian. It reminded me of Bishop Hatto. So I spent a happy half hour investigating the legend. There is a good account in Sabine Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, a book of which I am deeply fond. Baring-Gould has an excellent version from the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury:

I have heard a person of the utmost veracity relate, that one of his adversaries, a weak and factious man, while reclining at a banquet, was on a sudden so completely surrounded by mice as to be unable to escape. So great was the number of these little animals, that there could scarcely be imagined more in a whole province. It was in vain, that they were attacked with clubs and fragments of the benches which were at hand: and though they were for a long time assailed by all, yet they wreaked their deputed curse on no one else; pursuing him only with their teeth, and with a kind of dreadful squeaking. And although he was carried out to sea about a javelin’s cast by the servants, yet he could not by these means escape their violence; for immediately so great a multitude of mice took to the water, that you would have sworn the sea was strewed with chaff. But when they began to gnaw the planks of the ship, and the water, rushing through the chinks, threatened inevitable shipwreck, the servants turned the vessel to the shore. The animals, then also swimming close to the ship, landed first. Thus the wretch, set on shore, and soon after entirely gnawed in pieces, satiated the dreadful hunger of the mice.

William of Malmesbury (born c.1090, died in or after 1142), Gesta regum Anglorum, translated by J. A. Giles in 1847

Beware the Vengeance of the Mice

I have just posted a detailed analysis of the extended collective licensing proposals in the Hargreaves Report on the Action on Authors' Rights blog.

I enjoyed the cartoon by Steve Bell in yesterday's Guardian. It reminded me of Bishop Hatto. So I spent a happy half hour investigating the legend. There is a good account in Sabine Baring-Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, a book of which I am deeply fond. Baring-Gould has an excellent version from the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury:

I have heard a person of the utmost veracity relate, that one of his adversaries, a weak and factious man, while reclining at a banquet, was on a sudden so completely surrounded by mice as to be unable to escape. So great was the number of these little animals, that there could scarcely be imagined more in a whole province. It was in vain, that they were attacked with clubs and fragments of the benches which were at hand: and though they were for a long time assailed by all, yet they wreaked their deputed curse on no one else; pursuing him only with their teeth, and with a kind of dreadful squeaking. And although he was carried out to sea about a javelin’s cast by the servants, yet he could not by these means escape their violence; for immediately so great a multitude of mice took to the water, that you would have sworn the sea was strewed with chaff. But when they began to gnaw the planks of the ship, and the water, rushing through the chinks, threatened inevitable shipwreck, the servants turned the vessel to the shore. The animals, then also swimming close to the ship, landed first. Thus the wretch, set on shore, and soon after entirely gnawed in pieces, satiated the dreadful hunger of the mice.

William of Malmesbury (born c.1090, died in or after 1142), Gesta regum Anglorum, translated by J. A. Giles in 1847