story appears as a parable critical of the clergy in Odo of Cheriton's Parabolae. Written around 1200, it was afterwards translated into Welsh, French and Spanish. Sometime later, the story is found in the work now referred to as Ysopet-Avionnet, which is largely made up of Latin poems by the 12th century Walter of England, followed by a French version dating from as much as two centuries later. It also includes four poems not found in Walter's Esopus; among them is the tale of "The Council of the Mice" (De muribus consilium facientibus contra catum). The author concludes with the scornful comment that laws are of no effect without the means of adequately enforcing them and that such parliamentary assemblies as he describes are like the proverbial mountain in labour that gives birth to a mouse. The fable also appeared as a cautionary tale in Nicholas Bozon's Anglo-Norman Contes Moralisés (1320), referring to the difficulty of curbing the outrages of superior lords. It was in this context too that the story of a parliament of rats and mice was retold in William Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman. The episode is said to refer to the Parliament of 1376 which attempted unsuccessfully to remedy popular dissatisfaction over the exactions made by nobles acting in the royal name. Langland's French contemporary, the satirical Eustache Deschamps, also includes the story among his other moral ballades based on fables as "Les souris et les chats". It has been suggested that in this case too there is a political subtext. The poem was written as a response to the aborted invasion of England in 1386 and contrasts French dithering in the face of English aggression. The refrain of Deschamps' ballade, Qui pendra la sonnette au chat (who will bell the cat) was to become proverbial in France if, indeed, it does not record one already existing. In the following century, the Italian author Laurentius Abstemius made of the fable a Latin cautionary tale titled De muribus tintinnabulum feli appendere volentibus (The mice who wanted to bell the cat) in 1499. A more popular version in Latin verse was written by Gabriele Faerno and printed posthumously in his Fabulae centum ex antiquis auctoribus delectae (100 delightful fables from ancient authors, Rome 1564), a work that was to be many times reprinted and translated up to start of the 19th century. Titled simply "The Council of the