THE VALUE OF A CAT.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 295, 22 May 1875, Page 3

THE VALUE OF A CAT.

(Pall Mall Budget) From a case lately decided in the Axbridge County Court it would seem that the price of cats has not risen so much as that of most other things during the last nine hundred years. Thomas Fear, of Mark, claimed one pound of James Heal of the same place for the loss of a cat killed by the defendant's dog. From the evidence it would seem that, if the cat was one of unusual value, the dog was one of a specially savage turn. Mr Fisher, the judge, " remarked that it was a rather dear cat, " but Mrs Fear retorted she would not take two sovereigns for the cat if she had it at that moment. She said defendant's dog tore her fowls to pieces, killed her peacock, and was in the habit of tearing to pieces everything it came across." One might have thought that the sovereign might have been more reasonably asked for the loss of the peacock than for the loss of the cat. Mrs Fear had also refused the defendant's offer of another cat to be chosen from among three cats of his own. The judge "considered the claim preposterous, and said he could get a hundred cats for the money." The price of a cat, then, according to Mr Fisher's reckoning, must be somewhat less than twopence-halfpenny. Now it is singular that a|Welsh prince of the tenth century, the famous Howel Dda, exactly provided in his laws for this case. He not only fixed the price of cats, but he insisted that every judge should be specially learned on the subject. The price of kittens and cats varied according to their age and merits. A cat of the highest value, such as Mrs Fear's doubtless was, was rated at fourpence. But, more than this, King Howel and his wise men set a curse "upon the lord who should confer, and upon the person who should undertake, judicial authority, without knowing the worth of wild and tame animals." It was doubtless to shield both himself and the Lord Chancellor who appointed him from the perils of this curse that the judge in the end, somewhat inconsistently after his former reckoning, gave judgment for half acrown and costs. It is for professed numismatic scholars to say whether Mrs Fear's* sovereign or the judge's half-crown best represents the relative value of fourpence in the time of Howel Dda. Anyhow, according to the mere letter of his laws, the cats, a hundred of whom could be bought for twenty shillings, would not be such cats as Mrs Fear's, but mere kittens, who had not yet caught a mouse.