787-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

No room to swing a cat Victoria Solt Dennis e-mailed: “Swinging real live cats was once commonplace in England, and it wasn’t
a ‘child’s cruel game’ but an adult sport. Brewer’s Phrase & Fable
of 1898 remarks: “Swinging cats as a mark for sportsmen was at one time a favourite amusement. There were several varieties of this diversion. Sometimes two cats were swung by their tails over a rope. Sometimes a cat was swung to the bough of a tree in a bag or sack. Sometimes it was enclosed in a leather bottle.” Shakespeare alluded to this last method in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1 Scene 1: “If I do, hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot at me”‘ but I wonder about the other supposed games. Was this an instance of Ebenezer Cobham being as unreliable a reporter as he so often was? I suspect so.

I’ve also now discovered that the expression occurs in exactly its modern form in Medela Pestilentiae (To Cure the Plague) by Richard Kephale, dated 1665: “One house I know more especially by Cursitors-Alley, where the Man, his Wife and Childe liv’d in a Room that look’d more like, for bigness, a big Chest than any thing else: They had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in; so hot by reason of the closeness, and so nastily kept besides, that it took away a mans breath to put his head but within the doors.”

I’ve updated the discussion online.