One winter afternoon I went up to my bedroom and found a rat there, sitting on the rug before the fire. It did not move when I came in, but looked at me appealingly. I understood, and it saw I understood; and we had as clear a conversation as if we had expressed ourselves in words. The rat said, “I must apologize for this unwarranted intrusion; but I am suffering from some distressing malady, and entertain a hope that it may be within your power to alleviate my sufferings.” I said, “I regret exceedingly that this should be entirely beyond my powers. I know too little of human maladies, and even less of the maladies of rodents; and were I to adopt the treatment usually prescribed for them, I fear your sufferings might be aggravated.” And the rat said, “You disappoint me grievously. But at least, I trust, you will not abuse the confidence I have reposed in you?” I said, “Nothing could be further from my thoughts,” and held the door politely open. The rat walked slowly out, stopped at the top of the stairs, and looked back at me with much more confidence, “But really isn’t there anything
VIEW ACROSS WREY VALLEY
at all that you can do for me?” I said, “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid there isn’t.” And the rat went slowly downstairs, out of doors, and away along the Pixey Garden.
The rat had come in through an open door; and this is the only way that a rat should be allowed to come into a house—the walls should be made rat-proof with cement. No doubt, rats climb up ivy and other creepers on the walls, and sometimes reach the thatch that way; but I have never known one come in at a window.
These rats, of course, are brown rats, the black rats being quite extinct now, although old men have told me they have seen some, years ago, both in London and down here. In his History of Devonshire, I. 129, ed. 1797, Polwhele quotes a man who was born in 1723 and said that, when he was a lad, there were only black rats until a ship called the Elizabeth was brought into Plymouth and broken up on the Devonshire side of the Plym; and this ship’s rats were brown.
We ought really to be grateful to the browns for killing off the blacks, as the blacks were much worse than the browns for carrying the Plague about. We have not heard much of the Plague in Western Europe since the brown rats arrived—the last great outbreak was in 1720 at Marseilles. The first outbreak in England began with the arrival of some ships at Weymouth in July or August 1348, and it very soon reached Devon and then spread over the whole country, killing more than half the population. So far as we know now, the Plague began in the Crimea. The black rats must have come down there in hordes, like the hordes of brown rats that were seen swimming across the Volga in 1727. It was brought by ships from the Crimea to Constantinople, and thence to Messina and Genoa; and a Genoese ship brought it to Marseilles about Christmas 1347. It spread all over France up to the Channel coast; but if it had come here that way, it would probably have reached Dover first, as Calais was then an English town with much traffic across the Straits: so I imagine that the ships at Weymouth had come up from the Mediterranean, and brought black rats with the pestiferous fleas.
That outbreak of the Plague reduced the population of these islands to half or perhaps a third of what it was before; and one may speculate about what might have happened, if the outbreak had been more severe and swept the population off without a remnant. In the absence of statistics one may estimate the death-rate from the number of new appointments to livings in the diocese of Exeter, as set down in bishop Grandisson’s register of Institutions. During February 1349 there were institutions to five parishes in the next valley to this: Chudleigh, Trusham, Ashton, Doddiscombsleigh, Dunsford. Those parishes are all on the left bank of the Teign; and there are no institutions to parishes on the right bank until June. If rats could swim the Volga, they could swim the Teign, but probably would not take the trouble if they were happy where they were; so I presume the river checked them, and they came up here another way. During March and April there were institutions to Lustleigh, Bovey, North Bovey, Manaton, Ilsington, Widdicombe: six parishes forming a solid block of sixty-four square miles. In the first six months of 1349 there were altogether 269 institutions, and 394 in the whole year. Even in 1348 there had been only 52, and the average number was 37 in the seven previous years, 1341 to 1347. There were not priests enough to fill up all the vacancies in 1349; and on 20 September bishop Grandisson obtained two Faculties from the Pope, one for ordaining a hundred young men who had not yet attained the age of twenty-three, and the other for ordaining fifty men who were born out of wedlock and therefore were ineligible without a Dispensation.