Black Cats - musings from Sally Morningstar
Cats were highly venerated in the past, most probably because of their ability to catch the rats and mice that posed a very real threat to the grain harvests. Archaeological finds have unearthed several little cat mummy cases carved of wood or made of copper and jewels wrapped in fine linens.
However, the fate of the cat, specifically the black cat, turned one night in Lincolnshire in the 1560’s. A father and his son were frightened one moonless night when a small creature darted across their path into a hollow. Hurling stones into the opening, they saw an injured black cat scurry out and limp into the adjacent home of a woman suspected by the town of being a witch. The next day, the father and son encountered the woman on the street. Her face was bruised; her arm bandaged and she now walked with a limp. From that day on, in Lincolnshire, all black cats were suspected of being witches in night disguise.
This notion of witches transforming themselves into black cats in order to prowl the streets unobserved became a central belief. Thus, an animal once looked upon with approval became a creature dreaded and despised, so much so that during the middle-ages, the domestic cat was nearly driven into extinction!
Perhaps the regular finds of cats’ bodies within buildings, a mystery to archaeologists and historians to this day, can be explained by this suspicion, because anyone with a cat during the middle-ages was courting a very real danger to themselves. The solution would have been to get rid of the cat, to ‘hide’ it - thus possibly explaining why cat bodies are found all over old housing structures - in roofs, under floors, within walls and in their various nooks and crannies! Poor things.
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