Rats were a big problem for people in the early modern people, since they carried disease, spoiled food supplies, and destroyed books.
This interest in human food was a huge problem for early modern Europeans (just as it’s a problem for many city dwellers today!). Not only could rats and mice decimate food stores, they could also make people sick. Most famously, as we know today, rats spread the plague by transferring fleas that carried the disease to humans. Early modern Europeans didn’t know that, but they did know that rodents could make people sick in other ways. According to Topsell, “The eating of bread or other meate which is bitten by Mice doth encrease in men and children a certaine disease in their face . . . And in their flesh, at the rootes of the nails of their fingers certaine hard bunches” (508).
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Rats were also a problem for gardens. According to The Compleat English and French vermin-killer, an 18th-century extermination manual, rats and mice “are great Lovers of Artichokes, and will come to them in troops” (12). To prevent this, the author suggests wrapping wool around the plant’s roots. If that doesn’t work, hog’s dung or ashes from a burned fig tree should do the trick
