Page "Richard Whittington" Paragraph 30

As the son of gentry Whittington was never very poor and there is no evidence that he kept a cat.

Whittington may have become associated with a thirteenth-century Persian folktale about an orphan who gained a fortune through his cat, but the tale was common throughout Europe at that time.

Folklorists have suggested that the most popular legends about Whittington — that his fortunes were founded on the sale of his cat, who was sent on a merchant vessel to a rat-beset Eastern emperor — originated in a popular 17th-century engraving by Renold Elstracke in which his hand rested on a cat, but the picture only reflects a story already in wide circulation.

Elstracke's oddly-shaped cat was in fact a later replacement by printseller Peter Stent for what had been a skull in the original, with the change being made to conform to the story already in existence, in order to increase sales.