To celebrate International Cat Day, how about a look at living with cats through history?

And don’t miss Lady Catherine’s Cat a short story here on this site.

Click on the titles to read the whole article.

The Medieval Cats of Exeter Cathedral

Medieval churches were often infiltrated by rats and mice, as well as by birds in the high-up places. All those infiltrators needed controlling, and a cat was a useful creature to have around for the job. And it was a job: for many years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, England’s Exeter Cathedral actually kept a cat on the payroll, and for a while the cathedral employed two cats.

How to Play with a Cat, 1658

How to make dainty sport with a Cat.

If you will have some sport with a Cat, then get a little Bel, such as the tame Hawkes have at their legs, and tye the Bell something hard at the end of the Cats tayle, and let her go…

A Victorian Wife’s Best Friend: The Role of Cats & Dogs in Cases of Spousal Abuse

The nineteenth century news is filled with reports of hero pets rescuing their masters and mistresses from various catastrophes. Dogs routed burglars and saved children from drowning, while cats meowed the alarm when the house was on fire or when a family member had stopped breathing in their bed. Both cats and dogs were also known to intervene in cases of spousal abuse. For a battered Victorian wife, this animal intervention could sometimes mean the difference between life and death. 

How to Keep Your Cat, c. 1470

If you have a good cat and you don’t want to lose it…

Feline Dress Improvers: The Victorian Fashion in Bustle Baskets for Cats

During the mid-1880s, the silhouette of women’s gowns was characterized by the size and shape of the bustle or “dress improver.” Unlike the more moderate-sized dress improvers of the 1870s, the bustle of the 1880s was—at its most extreme—large, protruding, and shelf-like. For fashionable ladies with cats, it provided a convenient ledge on which to strap a satin-lined cat basket. In 1887 edition of the Derby Daily Telegraph refers to these cat bustle basket contraptions as “living dress improvers.”

~~Can’t make this stuff up, folks. Seriously!

This 19th-Century Book Chronicles Victorians’ Strange Cat Fears And Fascinations

IN THE 1800S, PEOPLE WERE just as crazed about cats as we are today. But instead of memes, Instagram posts, and viral videos, the Victorians had satirical comics and chronicles.

English cartoonist, and evident cat fanatic, Charles Henry Ross wrote an epic encyclopedic book detailing the intricacies and culture of cats. In The Book of Cats. A Chit-Chat Chronicle of Feline Facts and Fancies, Legendary, Lyrical, Medical, Mirthful and Miscellaneous, Ross makes an argument in support of the animal. Published in 1868, Ross read over 300 books, browsed newspapers, drew 20 illustrations, and gathered a mass of anecdotes about the fondness and repulsion towards cats. 

 “Did Victorian Cats Eat Kibble?”

 I came across a GLORIOUS ARTICLE from September 8^th 1883 entitled “Cats: Their Humane and Rational Treatment”, published in Chambers’s Journalby William Gordon Stables. Stables was a medical man, a Royal Navy Surgeon and, in his spare time, liked to write articles about how much he loved cats, dogs, and bumbling about the English countryside in his caravan. He gives us some pretty good clues as to how the Victorians might have thought about (and fed) their household moggies: