Pied Piping

Today is Rat Catcher's Day . Little known fact?

Rat Catcher's Day commemorates the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Two dates: June 26 and July 22 are involved. 26 June 1284 is thought to have been the actual day when, as legend tells, a mysterious piper arrived in the town of Hamelin in Germany, promising to lure away the rats then infesting the town, using his music - but for a price. The town's mayor didn't hold up his end of the bargain, the piper left but returned later to take revenge. He again played his music but this time lured away 130 of the town's children, most of whom were never seen again.

22 July 1376 is the date mentioned in a poem about the legend written by Robert Browning. It's said this date was used as poetic license, for reasons of rhyme:

...They made a decree that lawyers never
Should think their records dated duly
If, after the day of the month and year,
These words did not as well appear:
“And so long after what happened here
On the twenty-second of July,
Thirteen hundred and seventy-six;"
And the better in memory to fix
The place of the children’s last retreat,
They called it the Pied Piper’s Street......

Whether the legend has a basis in fact has been investigated over the centuries. We'll never know for sure if the piper was a metaphor, or a fact, but it seems from ancient records that a loss of many children from the town did occur at that time. An article at Ancient Origins outlines some theories, including suggestions that the children might have died from natural causes - some kind of epidemic, the piper being a metaphor/personification of Death. Or that the children were sent away by parents due to extreme poverty (sounds unlikely to me). Or

"Yet another theory speculates that the children were participants of a doomed ‘Children’s Crusade’, and might have ended up in modern day Romania, or that the departure of Hamelin's children is tied to the Ostsiedlung, in which a number of Germans left their homes to colonize Eastern Europe. One of the darker theories even proposes that the Pied Piper was actually a paedophile who crept into the town of Hamelin to abduct children during their sleep."

Robert Browning's poem - at least the first couple of verses - have lodged themselves into my memory. In High School some of us were tasked to learn and sing a choral version of the poem. We rehearsed it over and over...and over, so many times that it must have deeply engraved itself into my grey matter. It begins like this:

Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladle’s,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats...........................

Those last two lines probably also described the sound of we schoolgirls, as we sang the ditty!