"A crowbar, a candle, stale bread, dried beans, an iron spike, a drill, a stick with a cloth on the end of it, a bag of sand – and crucially, a tortoise."

The toolkit of a "secretive and highly organised group of medieval burglars" called The Banu Sasan.

"The tortoise is employed thus. The burglar has with him a flint-stone and a candle about as big as a little finger. He lights the candle and sticks it on the tortoise’s back. The tortoise is then introduced through the breach into the house, and it crawls slowly around, thereby illuminating the house and its contents."

Once the tortoise had been set up, the burglar employed his bag of sand to check for sleeping inhabitants elsewhere in the house. He would throw out handfuls of sand at intervals, and if no one stirred he entered the house.... [T]he burglar might chew noisily on some stale bread and beans to impersonate a cat eating a rat or mouse so as not alarm any sleeping people in the house.

That worked in the Middle Ages, apparently, when people practiced the art of sleeping through the maraudings of mice.