Hatto, archbishop of Mainz, of whom tradition alleges that he was assailed in his palace by an army of mice, to escape whose ravages he retired to a tower on the Rhine, whither the mice followed him and ate him up, a judgment due, as is alleged, to his having, during a great famine in 970, gathered the poor into a barn and burnt them to death, as "like mice, good only for devouring corn," he said.