Breaded cats

I don’t know whether people know what belling the cat means now. In an allusive language like ours, some references sink out of sight. But the old tale is that a council of mice resolved to hang a bell round a cat’s neck, to warn them of its approach. Which of them would have the temerity to hang the bell on the cat?

The tale pre-dates Langland, who, in Piers Plowman in the 1370s, referred to the plan to get ‘a belle of brasse… And hangen it up-on the cattes hals’. (Hals is just an old word for ‘neck’, related to Latin collum, and our collar.) Langland doesn’t use the word bell as a verb, and nor, the OED says, did anyone until 1762, in James Man’s edition of an old history of Scotland.

There he tells how Scottish barons, wanting to be rid of James III’s ‘obnoxious favourites’, all hesitated to act until Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, declared ‘I will bell the cat.’ He thus gained the nickname ‘Archibald Bell-the-cat’ — or so it’s said. Yet according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography this nickname was thrust upon the Earl (who died in 1513) in a history by David Hume of Godscroft of 1644. So surely bell as a verb must date from then.

Anyway, the phrase bread the cat has waited until our own day for its birth. Of course breaded is familiar from supermarkets, in the context of haddock, and to bread, meaning ‘dress with breadcrumbs’, has an older history than supermarkets, going back 400 years.

Breaded cats are not covered with breadcrumbs. The website breadedcats.com explains that the idea is to take a slice of bread, cut out a circle the size of your cat’s head and photograph it in the remaining bread as a frame.