Bishop Hatto

Another German legend which owes its existence to this belief is the story of Bishop Hatto, the miserly prelate, who, annoyed by the clamours of the poor during a time of famine, had them burned alive in a deserted barn, like the rats whom he declared they resembled, rather than give them some of the precious grain which he had laid up for himself.

“‘I’ faith, ’tis an excellent bonfire!’ quoth he,

‘And the country is greatly obliged to me

For ridding it in these times forlorn

Of rats that only consume the corn.’”

Robert Southey.

Soon after this terrible crime had been accomplished the bishop’s retainers reported the approach of a vast swarm of rats. These, it appears, were the souls of the murdered peasants, which had assumed the forms of the rats to which the bishop had likened them. His efforts to escape were vain, and the rats pursued him even into the middle of the Rhine, to a stone tower in which he took refuge from their fangs. They swam to the tower, gnawed their way through the stone walls, and, pouring in on all sides at once, they found the bishop and devoured him alive.

“And in at the windows, and in at the door,

And through the walls, helter-skelter they pour,

And down from the ceiling, and up through the floor,

From the right and the left, from behind and before,[30]

From within and without, from above and below,

And all at once to the Bishop they go.

They have whetted their teeth against the stones;

And now they pick the Bishop’s bones;

They gnaw’d the flesh from every limb,

For they were sent to do judgment on him!”

Robert Southey.

The red glow of the sunset above the Rat Tower near Bingen on the Rhine is supposed to be the reflection of the hell fire in which the wicked bishop is slowly roasting in punishment for his heinous crime.