Rats

 Modern cities have rats.  So did medieval cities.  The typical rats of European and now American cities are the black rat and the brown rat, the latter the so-called Norway rat (not to be confused with the Norway spruce). In spite of the evocation of Scandinavia, rats actually originated in eastern Asia, but they have spread around the world, now being found on every continent except Antarctica.

(The above photo is by Nikolett Emmert.)

Rats have adopted very well to humans.  In fact, although their ancestors lived in the wild, rats do not do well unless closely associated with humans.  They can survive in very cold climates by staying inside with the humans.  Their favorite food is whatever their local humans have left over and dump in the trash.  Italian rats, for example, favor spaghetti.

Cities are always trying to get rid of rats, but it's an uphill battle.  For one thing, rats are smart.  They can evade traps, hide so they won't be spotted, fight back against cats and terriers. They have large litters of pups at regular intervals, so even if sizeable numbers of rats are killed, they can quickly come back.

New York City thought they had kept rats out of residential neighborhoods more or less successfully until the Covid-19 pandemic. Then the restaurants closed down, and suddenly the rats found their favorite dumpsters empty.  Being resourceful, they headed out to the residential neighborhoods, which now had more food waste with more people eating at home. As restaurants reopened, the city was able to declare fewer rats in people's back yards.

One of the few places that I know that has successfully beaten back rat populations for good is in the Galapagos Islands, out in the Pacific on the equator.  There are a number of unique species there, not only the famous Galapagos tortoises, and those species had few natural enemies until the whaling ships showed up, complete with rats. In subsequent years, the rats were very harmful to the nests of ground-nesting birds and other creatures. However, recent vigorous trapping efforts have eradicated them from some of the islands where no humans live.

Because rats are intelligent and adaptable, they have been used in scientific research since the end of the nineteenth century (think of the expression, "like a rat in a maze").  They can be used for studying behavior and also digestion, since they eat the same range of foods that humans do.  Lab rats are generally white, descendants of an albino strain, and have become quite tame after generations of living directly with humans, rather than hidden in their walls.  Such rats are also sometimes kept as pets. Medieval people would be appalled.

The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a man who lures all the rats out of the city of Hamelin  with his magical pipe playing, has its origins in thirteenth-century Germany.  It has appeared in many guises over the centuries—I used a version of it myself in my novel Daughter of Magic. Most versions of the story take on a darker tone when the piper is not properly paid for ridding the city of rats. But for medieval people, the underlying premise was obvious:  their cities needed fewer rats (people in New York City today would understand).

Rats were considered to spread disease in the closely-packed late medieval cities. They were accused, accurately, for helping spread the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  They carried the fleas who transmitted the disease to humans.  People killed their cats and dogs to try to get rid of the fleas, but the fleas just jumped onto humans, and the rats, carrying fleas, eluded efforts to eliminate them.

Even when they weren't spreading disease, rats were a major problem for medieval people because they would eat the grain. Keeping the grain away from rats and mice is always important, especially as it represents both this year's food and next year's seed, and it was an especially critical concern for a society in which bread was the principal food. Cats were valued as rodent-hunters more than as pets.  There's a reason even now that farms have barn cats.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

A Bad Spell in Yurt

 How does one become a writer?  My first published novel, some 35 years ago now, was A Bad Spell in Yurt.  It was however far from the first book I'd written.  Like many authors, I'd been making up stories since before I even started school.  A lot of my early efforts were, shall we say, derivative.  But I loved writing stories and, in grade school, illustrating them.

I'm a pretty decent speller (in spite of how totally weird the English language is), and I think it's because when I was writing out my stories I'd keep asking Mom how a particular word was spelled, and I'd remember what she told me.

In junior high I moved from writing kids' books with pictures to writing novels.  In ninth grade I read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the first time (certainly not the last!), and it had a profound effect on me.  Fantasy rules!  From then on, the majority of what I wrote was more or less fantasy—although initially a lot of it was stories set in a pseudo-medieval world that had lots of action but no magic.

Starting when I was in college, I tried intermittently to get something published.  This was back when there was no self-publishing, so it was traditional publishing or nothing.  For years I didn't get anywhere, and it's probably just as well, because some of it I'd now be embarrassed to have attributed to me.  I was also busy being a graduate student and getting established as an academic in the field of medieval history (again, I think Tolkien is largely responsible).

But then I had an unusually vivid dream, which featured the opening of what became A Bad Spell in Yurt and much of the characters.  I started writing, and my husband encouraged me to finish and try to find a publisher.  And I did!  Some twenty-five years after I first packed up a manuscript and mailed it off to a publisher, my first novel was published (my first academic book preceded it by a dozen years). With a great cover by Tom Kidd, it became a national science-fiction/fantasy best seller.

 

(When I was about seven I'd decided both that I wanted to write fun books that people would read and that I wanted to write a "history of the world." Medieval history isn't the history of the whole world, but to a large extent I've achieved my childhood dream.)

 The publisher, Baen, brought out much of the rest of the Yurt series.  I hadn't planned on a series, but (again) my husband encouraged me to make it a series, and he was right.  But then the books went out of print, as books do, and once I got my rights back I turned to self-publishing.

Baen had published the Yurt books as mass-market (small) paperbacks.  I reissued them initially as ebooks, whch remains my best-selling format.  Here are the US link and the UK link.  The book is also available in other Amazon stores around the world.

As well as the ebook, I've brought Bad Spell out as a large-format ("trade") paperback and a hardcover. The rest of the series is available both as ebooks and as paperbacks (some in omnibus editions). I've also written and self-published a "Yurt, the Next Generation" series and some other books as well, having more time to write now that I've retired from that pesky day job.

Don't know if I'd recommend my path to anyone else, but that's how I became a writer. 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026