How the rat clawed its way to top
In 1284, the town on the banks of the Weser was overrun with rodents and the citizens despaired. Then, a colourful stranger arrived and offered to get rid of the pests, for a fee. The townsfolk agreed to his terms.
The visitor took out a pipe and began playing a strange refrain. The rats emerged from their hiding places and followed him down to the Weser, where they drowned. But “eaten bread is soon forgotten” and the people defaulted on their side of the bargain, with tragic consequences.
The angry piper returned when the adults were in church and began playing another tune. This time, it was the turn of the children to leave. All of them, apart from a blind boy and another who was deaf, followed the piper out of the town and were never seen again.
The story has extraordinary resonance. Even such luminaries as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Robert Browning produced versions of it. But what are the origins of the tale? Is it just a reworking of the Faust legend, the piper being a thinly-disguised Mephistopheles, or has it a basis in fact? Gottfried Leibniz thought the tale referred to the Children’s Crusade of 1212 when youngsters are supposed to have set out for the Holy Land to convert Muslims.
Historians now believe, however, that the unlikely crusaders weren’t children but bands of wandering vagabonds. Over-population was rife in the 13th century, so children might have been sent away in a desperate attempt to avoid starvation. Or were they expelled because plague had broken out in the town?
Plague would explain the connection with rats in the story; the rodents died first, their fleas moving onto people, carrying the fatal bacterium with them.
A rubbish dump on the outskirts of Hamelin is being blamed for today’s rat infestation. It is nonsense, however, to claim that the descendents of the Pied Piper’s rats have returned; the rodents in his day were of a different species.
Rats have a curious history in Europe. The first one to come here was the black rat, which originated in Asia and spread through India and the Middle East.
The date of its arrival in Europe isn’t known but bones have been found at Iron Age sites. The species had reached Britain by Roman times and Ireland by the early Christian period. The Chi-Rho page of the Book of Kells, of circa 800AD, shows rats being pursued by cats.
Then, in the 18th Century, the brown rat arrived, also from Asia. The great German naturalist-explorer, Pallas, watched hordes of them crossing the Volga in 1727. On arrival in Ireland, the brown rat ousted its black cousin. So successful was it in doing so that Oliver Goldsmith, about six years old when the browns arrived, declared that he had never seen a black one.
The brown became dominant throughout Europe although small numbers of black rats are still found, mainly at coastal locations. Just why the black rat lost out to the brown isn’t clear. The two species occupy somewhat different ecological niches and don’t compete directly with each other. The black, smaller and slimmer than the brown, dislikes open country and readily enters dwellings.
It lives close to people, which is one of the reasons why its fleas migrated so easily to humans. The brown species keeps its distance, seldom entering homes, but thrives in fields where cereals are grown.
These differences raise another question. Black rats tend to remain on the coast and in towns. If they were the carriers, how did plague spread to remote rural areas? In any case, the plague travelled extraordinarily quickly, faster than rats could move even if they were disposed to do so. This has led to suggestions that the dreaded Black Death was not what we call plague at all.
But rats must have been involved somehow, because epidemics became much less frequent after brown rats had arrived.
By wiping out its black cousin, the brown rat saved many of our ancestors from an untimely death. The animal is universally hated, but without its help, many of us might not be here!
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