page_title: Belling the Cat
section_title: Early versions and later interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Belling the Cat / Early versions and later interpretations
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail from Netherlandish Proverbs
context_page_description: "Belling the Cat" is a fable also known under the titles "The Bell and the Cat" and "The Mice in Council". Although often attributed to Aesop, it was not recorded before the Middle Ages and has been confused with the quite different fable of Classical origin titled The Cat and the Mice. In the classificatory system established for the fables by B. E. Perry, it is numbered 613, which is reserved for Mediaeval attributions outside the Aesopic canon.
context_section_description: One of the earliest versions of the story appears as a parable critical of the clergy in Odo of Cheriton's Parabolae. Written around 1200, it was afterwards translated into Welsh, French and Spanish. Some time later the story is found in the work now referred to as Ysopet-Avionnet, which is largely made up of Latin poems by the 12th century Walter of England, followed by a French version dating from as much as two centuries later. It also includes four poems not found in Walter's Esopus; among them is the tale of "The Council of the Mice" (De muribus consilium facientibus contra catum). The author concludes with the scornful comment that laws are of no effect without the means of adequately enforcing them and that such parliamentary assemblies as he describes are like the proverbial mountain in labour that gives birth to a mouse.
  The fable also appeared as a cautionary tale in Nicholas Bozon's Anglo-Norman Contes Moralisés (1320), referring to the difficulty of curbing the outrages of superior lords. It was in this context too that the story of a parliament of rats and mice was retold in William Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman. The episode is said to refer to the Parliament of 1376 which attempted unsuccessfully to remedy popular dissatisfaction over the exactions made by nobles acting in the royal name.
  Langland's French contemporary, the satirical Eustache Deschamps, also includes the story among his other moral ballades based on fables as "Les souris et les chats". It has been suggested that in this case too there is a political subtext. The poem was written as a response to the aborted invasion of England in 1386 and contrasts French dithering in the face of English aggression.  The refrain of Deschamps' ballade, Qui pendra la sonnette au chat (who will bell the cat) was to become proverbial in France if, indeed, it does not record one already existing.
  In the following century, the Italian author Laurentius Abstemius made of the fable a Latin cautionary tale titled De muribus tintinnabulum feli appendere volentibus (The mice who wanted to bell the cat) in 1499. A more popular version in Latin verse was written by Gabriele Faerno and printed posthumously in his Fabulae centum ex antiquis auctoribus delectae (100 delightful fables from ancient authors, Rome 1564), a work that was to be many times reprinted and translated up to start of the 19th century. Titled simply "The Council of the Mice", it comes to rest on the drily stated moral that 'a risky plan can have no good result'. The story was evidently known in Flanders too, since 'belling the cat' was included among the forty Netherlandish Proverbs in the composite painting of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559). In this case a man in armour is performing the task in the lower left foreground. A century later, La Fontaine's Fables made the tale even better known under the title Conseil tenu par les rats (II.2). 
  In mediaeval times the fable was applied to political situations and that British commentaries on it were sharply critical of the limited democratic processes of the day and their ability to resolve social conflict when class interests were at stake. This applies equally to the plot against the king's favourite in 15th century Scotland and the direct means that Archibald Douglas chose to resolve the issue. While none of the authors who used the fable actually incited revolution, the 1376 Parliament that Langland satirised was followed by Wat Tyler's revolt five years later, while Archibald Douglas went on to lead a rebellion against King James. During the Renaissance the fangs of the fable were being drawn by European authors, who restricted their criticism to pusillanimous conduct in the face of rashly proposed solutions. A later exception was the Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov, whose adaptation of the story satirises croneyism. In his account only those with perfect tails are to be allowed into the assembly; nevertheless, a tailless rat is admitted because of a family connection with one of the lawmakers.
  There still remains the perception of a fundame
caption: "Belling the cat" is one of the proverbs illustrated in Pieter Bruegel I's painting Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
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