By Scott Lucas
Published in Notes and Queries, January 2025.
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Abstract

In their 1988 critical edition of William Baldwin’s comic prose satire Beware the Cat (composed 1553; printed 1561), William Ringler and Michael Flachmann assert that Baldwin (1526/7–1563) derived two anecdotes included in the work directly from Topographia Hibernica, a twelfth-century survey of Ireland composed by the well-travelled churchman and historian Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis).1 The anecdotes are related during a fireside discussion that the work’s principal character, Gregory Streamer, recalls having with various men at the Aldersgate residence of the prominent London printer John Day (d. 1584).2 Streamer, who was lodging with Day, remarks to those around him on the great noise he heard cats making atop the London wall on the previous night. Streamer’s remark leads the company into a discussion of whether or not animals have rational understanding.3 One of those present recalls being told of a cat that spoke in English to a man in Staffordshire. Another member of the group, named Thomas, then relates a tale he had heard in Ireland of a mysterious cat that asked two men for food in Gaelic and proceeded thereafter to eat in their entirety a sheep and a cow.