Breaded cats

I don’t know whether people know what belling the cat means now. In an allusive language like ours, some references sink out of sight. But the old tale is that a council of mice resolved to hang a bell round a cat’s neck, to warn them of its approach. Which of them would have the temerity to hang the bell on the cat?

The tale pre-dates Langland, who, in Piers Plowman in the 1370s, referred to the plan to get ‘a belle of brasse… And hangen it up-on the cattes hals’. (Hals is just an old word for ‘neck’, related to Latin collum, and our collar.) Langland doesn’t use the word bell as a verb, and nor, the OED says, did anyone until 1762, in James Man’s edition of an old history of Scotland.

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Simon Cook

Pensioners have never had it so good

There he tells how Scottish barons, wanting to be rid of James III’s ‘obnoxious favourites’, all hesitated to act until Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, declared ‘I will bell the cat.’