The Medieval Pig (Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages, 9) 1837651426, 9781837651429

Citation preview

The Medieval Pig

Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages ISSN: 2399-3804 (Print) ISSN: 2399-3812 (Online) Series Editor Michael D.J. Bintley Editorial Board Jennifer Neville Aleks Pluskowski Gillian Rudd Questions of nature, the environment and sustainability are increasingly important areas of scholarly enquiry in various fields. This exciting new series aims to provide a forum for new work throughout the medieval period broadly defined (c.400–1500), covering literature, history, archaeology and other allied disciplines in the humanities. Topics may range from studies of landscape to interaction with humans, from representations of “nature” in art to ecology, ecotheory, ecofeminism and ecocriticism; monographs and collections of essays are equally welcome. Proposals or enquiries may be sent directly to the series editor or to the publisher at the addresses given below.

Dr Michael D. J. Bintley, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Southampton, SO17 1BF Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF

Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the end of this book.

The Medieval Pig

Dolly Jørgensen

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Dolly Jørgensen 2024 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Dolly Jørgensen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2024 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 83765 142 9 (Hardback) ISBN 978 1 83765 168 9 (Paperback) ISBN 978 1 80543 245 6 (ePDF) The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Please note that some of the discussion in this book addresses sensitive and possibly distressing issues, including antisemitism Cover image: Calendar page for December from MS Douce 8 pp. xxvi–xxvii Images courtesy of The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

For my mother Mary, whose love of pigs inspired me to write this book

CONTENTS List of Illustrations

viii

Acknowledgements

x

List of Abbreviations

xi

1. Placing the Medieval Pig

1

2. In the Country

12

3. In the City

30

4. On the Plate

43

5. In the Mind

57

6. The Pig’s Place

76

Notes

79

Bibliography

98

Index

113

ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1

Calendar illustrations showing the fattening of domestic pigs on acorns and then slaughter

3

Fig. 2

A medieval domestic pig with bristly hair, tusks, long legs, and curly tail

4

Fig. 3

Archaeological pig remains dated to the medieval period from the urban area of Turku

8

Fig. 4

The sow with feeding piglets illustrated in a thirteenthcentury bestiary

13

Fig. 5

The Devonshire Hunting Tapestry: Boar and Bear Hunt (detail), 1425–1430

15

Fig. 6

Calendar image for the month of November showing pigs and their herders in an open woodland

19

Fig. 7

Late twelfth-century Norman lead font in Saint-Evroultde-Montfort in Orne, France

24

Fig. 8

Roundel on a twelfth-century portal of the Basilica of Saint-Denis, France

25

Fig. 9

A pig and swineherd entering the city from the countryside. Fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti

29

Fig. 10

Detail of a swineherd and pig coming into town. Yves de Saint-Denis, Vita et passio sancti Dionysii31

Fig. 11

Pigs inside and outside a sty, getting food in a trough. Spinola Hours, c. 1510

Fig. 12

A swineherd watching over his pigs in a marketplace. Thomas de Saluces, Le Chevalier errant34

Fig. 13

A pig with a nose ring. Guillaume de La Perrière, Le theatre des bons engins: auquel sont contenuz cent emblemes moraulx41

Fig. 14

Image of pig butchery. Spinola Hours, c. 1510

32

44

Illustrations Fig. 15

Image of pig butchery. Portable Benedictine psalter made in Ghent c. 1320

48

Fig. 16

Image of pig butchery. Book of Hours, c. 1318

49

Fig. 17

Pig butchery. Book of Hours, France, c. 1440–1450

51

Fig. 18

A butcher at work. Bonmont Psalter, c. 1260

52

Fig. 19

The Miracle of the Gadarene Swine. Magdeburg Ivories, mid-900s58

Fig. 20

The Prodigal Son watching over a herd of pigs and knocking down acorns for them. Chartres Cathedral, France59

Fig. 21

St Anthony’s pig wearing a bell. Mural from c. 1300, St Matthew’s church, Murau, Austria

Fig. 22

Venus, signifying lust, rides a swine. Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine65

Fig. 23

Casting flowers before swine. Late fifteenth-century misericord, Toledo Cathedral, Spain

67

Fig. 24

Judensau corbel relief, early fourteenth century. Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden

71

Fig. 25

The children hidden in the ovens emerge as pigs in the Miracle of Jesus and the Oven

72

61

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has been a long time in the making. I discovered medieval pigs while working on my master’s thesis under Professor Sally Vaughn at the University of Houston. I continued to bump into pigs in the medieval streets as I wrote my PhD with Professor Bernie Carlson at the University of Virginia. Even when my primary research interests had moved into the modern era, I could not let medieval pigs go. I have had the opportunity to publish a number of articles on medieval pig management over the course of my career – these are listed in the bibliography and notes. I thank the reviewers and editors who helped me to shape those pieces and my thinking over the years. I have drawn on that prior work for the kernel of this book. I also want to thank the libraries, archives, and special collections who make their holdings freely accessible online. I have relied extensively on the digital assets of the Internet Archive, the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Getty Museum, the Morgan Library & Museum, and many smaller collections of medieval manuscripts to do research for this book. The various projects that have made printed primary sources and translations available, including British History Online, Stephen Alsford’s Medieval English Towns website, MPublishing of the University of Michigan Library, and Digital Dante, have been incredibly valuable to me. Scholarship is greatly advanced through all of their efforts to make it more effortless to access historical material.

ABBREVIATIONS BL

British Library

BnF

Bibliothèque nationale de France

Bodl

Bodleian Library, Oxford

1 Placing the Medieval Pig

T

he pig was a commonplace animal in the Middle Ages and, like many commonplace animals, the medieval pig embodies paradoxes. The pig was a major food source in winter, yet pork was a food that carried the connotation of religious uncleanliness. The omnivorous pig was useful as a garbage recycler, but was also a dangerous eater who could steal food and even root up buried corpses. Some pigs were domesticated, while others ran freely through the woodlands. The pig larder was a blessing, but pigs were also believed to do the Devil’s bidding. As art historian Michael Camille observed, ‘pigs were both celebrated and reviled in medieval culture’.1 This book will explore these paradoxes of the pig in medieval culture and practice as we journey together to the places the pig inhabited. Human lives are, and have been, deeply entangled with animal lives. Humans have sought wild animals for meat, skins, and a myriad of other products – from beaver castoreum to whale ambergris – as long as humans have existed. Wild animals, from lions to kangaroos to bats, shape human culture through symbolism and social practices that incorporate them. Both livestock and pets are brought directly under human control, often living under the same roofs as people and dependent on them for food and care. Humans began domesticating livestock mammals such as goats, sheep, pigs, and cattle over 10,000 years ago; dogs were domesticated even earlier. In the domestication process, the genetic makeup of the animals was modified as humans bred them for economically advantageous traits (more milk production, better wool fibres, more strength, better stamina, etc.) and human cultural contexts were modified to accommodate the animals’ needs and wants.2 This closeness to animals is both physical and mental – as humans have interacted with animals, we have thought with and through them. In a book about animals, looking at animals involves looking at both them and ourselves.3 This book looks at human–animal relations through one animal (the pig) in a particular time (the Middle Ages) in a particular geography (western Europe). Writing about pigs is nothing new. Scholars have written about Fascist Pigs, Capitalist Pigs, The Symbolic Pig, The English Pig, and Legions of Pigs.4 Even just The Pig.5 Some of these studies emphasise the pig’s history of domestication; others focus on the pig as a standardised commodity; still others hone in on the pig as a carrier of meaning. Since pigs and humans have been living together for ten millennia, there is plenty of history to explore. This book focuses on the European Middle Ages, approximately

The Medieval Pig AD 500 to 1500, as a particularly useful time to delve into the paradoxes embodied and acted out by the pig. Unlike our modern age, in which the pig is often tucked away in industrial production facilities out of sight or fed in fields far from the eyes of urbanites, pigs in the Middle Ages were part and parcel of daily life. This means that they leave their imprints in many sources, from artworks to land grants to court records. This book makes use of this variety of sources to understand how pigs shaped human life and how humans shaped the pig’s. This will take us into various European places in which pigs appear in the medieval sources: in the countryside, in the city, on the plate, and in the mind. Humans placed pigs into each of these environments and, in each place, the pig’s paradoxical characteristics interacted in contentious ways. Picturing the pig When a reader today thinks of the pig, the image which probably pops into the mind is a very large, pink, smooth animal with a group of hungry piglets in a pen on a farm. This is not what should come to mind when we think of a European medieval pig. The body colouring and conformation of most modern pigs are a result of breeding in the early modern period. In the eighteenth century imported pig breeds from China with rounder bodies and faster weight gain were crossbred with local varieties to create larger and fatter pigs that fitted well into the industrialisation of meat production.6 For most of the 10,000-year history of pig–human interaction, pigs have not looked like the titular pig in Babe or Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web.7 Pigs, both wild and domesticated types, are known scientifically as Sus scrofa, with 25 subspecies described by scientists.8 Pigs were probably domesticated independently more than once in Eurasia.9 Archaeological investigations have traced the evolution of pigs under husbandry regimes globally.10 In this book I am writing primarily about the domesticated type of pig in medieval Europe, although the European wild boar also makes a few brief appearances. Pigs are pictured regularly in medieval calendars as part of the annual cycle of monthly activities (Figure 1). This sequence of 12 activities was almost always drawn from agricultural occupations, representing the annual cycle of necessary basic tasks that put food on the table: ‘pruning and ploughing, sowing and reaping; the fattening up of livestock, and the slaughter’.11 More than being simple tropes copied from one manuscript to another, these activity cycle images show great familiarity with agricultural practices.12 Pigs frequently represent the autumn and winter months, typically November and December, but sometimes September/October or October/November instead. Pigs are illustrated in 2

Figure 1 (a and b): Calendar illustrations for November and December showing fattening domestic pigs on acorns and then slaughter. BL, Royal 2 B VII fo. 81v (above) and 82v (below). Image in public domain courtesy of British Library.

The Medieval Pig

Figure 2: A medieval domestic pig with bristly hair, tusks, long legs, and curly tail. BL, Sloane MS 4016 fo. 77. Image in public domain courtesy of British Library.

these particular months because of their meat production qualities: they could be fattened on autumn nuts and slaughtered before winter, since their meat is suitable for long-term preservation through salting, curing, and smoking. Images indicate the visual characteristics of medieval pigs. Predominant features of pigs in the period are long faces and hair along the back ridge (Figure 2). Because these features also appear in wild boar, but not in modern domesticated breeds, some researchers have interpreted the physical appearance to mean that pigs roamed freely through the woods breeding with wild boar,13 but, as this book will demonstrate, the evidence indicates that they were in fact well controlled and not necessarily as free as one might think. The visual depictions of domestic pigs do, however, provide evidence that domestic pig bodies had not radically diverged from wild boar bodies in the medieval period. The general similarity in the morphology of wild and domestic pigs can be explained by the fact that there had been no conscious breeding of pigs that removed their ‘wild’ features. 4

Placing the Medieval Pig This similarity does not, however, mean that medieval domestic pigs were indistinguishable from wild boar. One physical characteristic of domestication that appears clearly in medieval illustrations of pigs is a curly tail. Domestic pigs have curly tails, whereas wild pigs have straight ones.14 Even the Roman writer Pliny remarked that ‘the tail is curled’ in domesticated pigs.15 Pigs’ tails are used to indicate emotional state, demonstrating contentment, aggression, stress, and even happiness.16 Medieval drawings and sculptures of pigs, whether they are being herded, fed in woodlands, or slaughtered, invariably show curly tails. In addition to the curly tail, domestic pigs were generally slightly smaller than wild counterparts. Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Racio, attributed to Henri de Ferrières and probably written in the third quarter of the 1300s, describes the domestic pig as being shorter and having more even tusks and narrower feet than the boar, and that the bones are not as long, sharp, or wide as those of the boar.17 Boar were considered stronger and more dangerous than domestic pigs. Yet domestic pigs in the Middle Ages do not appear to have been systematically selectively bred for improvement, as would happen from the eighteenth century onward.18 Bones do not indicate significantly increasing body size in the Middle Ages, which is what tended to happen with intentional breeding, although there may have been selected breeding at isolated sites such as Dudley Castle, which shows increasing swine body size in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.19 Medieval pigs that were weak or small were certainly the first to be culled, which would inevitably lead to some level of genetic selection,20 and there was certainly regional variety in pig size.21 We see evidence of regional breeds and different colour pattern varieties in medieval images, so breeding did create some local differences in pig bodies. Yet overall in the Middle Ages, the European domestic pig looked much more like its wild cousin than it does today. This medieval pig, which we should picture as a lanky, bristly, longfaced, curly-tailed animal, was destined for the butcher’s table. The process by which it was raised, was cut up by a butcher, and then moved onward to the plate in medieval Europe was completely dependent on dealing with the pig’s paradoxical qualities. Pigs as part of medieval life Pigs are a domesticated animal different from others. They are raised by humans for their meat alone, unlike sheep or cows or chickens, which, while being raised for meat, also yield wool or milk or eggs while alive. They are not beasts of burden like horses or camels or oxen. The pig, however, has two particular qualities that make it highly suitable for meat production. 5

The Medieval Pig First, pigs eat almost everything. There is a reason that the phrases ‘being a pig’ or ‘hogging’ represent overindulgent consumption. Pigs are omnivores, meaning that they eat both vegetation and meat, making them highly versatile as a domesticated species. They can be fed in woodland and pastures or in sties and stalls; their diet can range from grasses and nuts to animal carcasses to the leftovers from human food. They convert vegetable matter that humans cannot regularly consume, such as beechmast, acorns, and bracken, into edible meat.22 Second, medieval pigs, like their current counterparts, were prolific breeders and could have more than one litter a year. Roman commentators, such as Varro in the first century BC and Pliny in the first century AD, had already remarked upon pigs farrowing twice a year.23 Walter of Henley, writing in the thirteenth century, also advocated farrowing two litters a year, and the anonymous Husbandry treatise of the same time recommends two litters of at least seven piglets each annually.24 This appears to have been borne out in practice. An inventory from Christmas 1315 for the manor of Bonnières, France, included a total of 65 pigs, of which 22 were piglets born at Easter and 22 more in August.25 An account of a demesne farm in Wellingborough, England, from 1283 to 1284 noted 24 piglets farrowed in the month of April and another set in early autumn (18 born in August plus 20 in September).26 The qualities of feeding flexibility and fecundity made pigs useful meat producers and incredibly common livestock across Europe. Archaeological evidence from the European transition from the late antique to the early medieval period indicates that farming diversified, with increasing woodland coverage and more mixed animal husbandry: that is, fewer cattle and more pigs, sheep, and goats.27 However, it should be noted that there was variety geographically: cattle are much more typical in archaeological deposits of animal bones – 40–60 per cent of the bones – in the British Isles, whereas Scandinavia in the ninth and tenth centuries shows an equal proportion of cattle and pig.28 And there was variety over time: the medieval period, stretching over 1,000 years, should not be understood as static in livestock husbandry – there were shifts in the way that pigs were raised over time and place. Written records across England indicate rising pig numbers from 1250 to 1325, yet zooarchaeological evidence from the Dudley Castle site in England, for example, reveals a shift in pig breeding and feeding from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century, with declining numbers of pigs, a higher proportion of young animals slaughtered, larger sizes, and more stall feeding.29 The number of pig bones also declined over time in Ghent and Leuven, Belgium.30 In Italian bone assemblages there is a shift from pigs to sheep and goats after the eleventh century.31 In Greenland and Iceland pigs were commonplace in the ninth and tenth centuries, but barely show up at all in the archaeological record after the mid-eleventh

6

Placing the Medieval Pig century, whereas on the Faroe Islands pigs continued to be farmed until at least the thirteenth century.32 Even in the same geographical area, practices could diverge depending on the landholder. For example, the bishopric of Winchester and the priory of Winchester in England seem to have taken different courses with their pig herds: while they held the same number of pigs at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the priory estate significantly increased their herd size over the century, whereas the neighbouring bishop’s estates shrank their pig herds and even stopped keeping them altogether on some manors.33 Such changes, however, did not lessen the ubiquity of the pig. In general, most places in Europe would have had at least some pigs during the Middle Ages. Large institutions such as monasteries could own many pigs. The monks of Clairvaux had a herd of 800 pigs in the thirteenth century; the Cistercians at Poblet, Spain, owned 172 pigs in 1316; and the monks of Mont Saint-Michel, France, owned 309 in 1324.34 In the early 1400s the priory of Winchester had 15 manors with over 50 pigs on each.35 Pigs were regularly included as part of payments to lords for land. The records of the abbey of Vale Royal in England, for example, demonstrate this practice: in 1334, several landholders paid their rent in money plus a pig or two (or even half a pig) at Michaelmas.36 Urban inhabitants would also have been familiar with pig cohabitants. In Aboa Vetus, which we now call Turku, Finland, the remains of at least five infant pigs were found in a cellar; more were found in a lavatory and others in an abandoned well (Figure 3).37 These were probably piglets that died shortly after birth and were disposed of in town, probably indicating large pig litters and high mortality.38 In Eperjes, Hungary, one quarter of the wills from 1448 to 1526 mentioned pigs as part of their bequests.39 This testifies to the widespread nature of pig keeping in urban settings. Place-names stress the ubiquity of pigs. On the Faroe Islands, for example, place-names with -svín (swine), -grís (pig), -súgv (sow), -galta (boar), and -purk (pig) appear 140 times, sometimes as indicators of a structure or pen where pigs were kept, such as Svínhús (swine house), and at other times associated with outfields, such as Svínadalur (swine valley), which may indicate that they were free ranging or were kept there.40 In Iceland, the book of medieval settlement Landnámabók records several places that were named after pigs that had been lost but were later found.41 For example, Ingimundr’s pigs had run away and were found after two years in a dirty and scruffy state. When he and his men tried to pin the loose pigs down against a lake, one boar tried to escape by swimming across the lake. This gave rise to the name Svínavatn (swine lake). In pre-Conquest England the term den (short for denbera) appears to relate specifically to swine pastures, and is abundant in the woodland landscape of the Weald.42 7

Figure 3: Archaeological pig remains dated to the medieval period from the urban area of Turku. Aboa Vetus, Finland. Photograph by author.

Placing the Medieval Pig Overall, pigs were, well, everywhere in medieval Europe. City and countryside both had their share of pigs. Unlike in our modern society, in which many would have to look at a children’s book or make a special trip to a farm to know what a real pig looked like and how it acted, people in the Middle Ages regularly had direct interaction with pigs.

Natural and moral histories of pigs Because pigs were familiar, they were as good to think with as they were to eat. Writers of natural histories in both ancient and medieval Europe include Sus scrufa in their presentations of animal life. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History of the first century AD, includes chapters on both domesticated pigs and wild boar. His chapter on domesticated swine focused on reproduction, noting that they could farrow twice a year and give birth to up to 20 piglets. He noted that they would generally live 15 years and that 20 was not unheard of. While recognising that pigs were ‘the most brutish of all the animals’, he also hailed their intelligence and wit.43 The chapter on wild boar notes some contrasts: wild boar give birth only once a year and are not fertile until they are a year old, contra domesticated pigs, which were fertile at eight months old.44 Despite Pliny discussing domestic pigs and wild boar in separate chapters, the two animals were often hard to distinguish for medieval writers. The thirteenth-century grammarian John of Garland, for example, sorted pigs into categories based on gender and age, rather than their domesticity status.45 As scholar Karl Steel has discussed, medieval stories and songs with pigs often sway back and forth between wild boar (sanglier) and domestic pig (porc).46 This lack of distinction was, as Hildegard of Bingen noted in her twelfth-century Physica, a matter of nature: ‘silvester porcus eamdem naturam habet’ (the wild pig has the same nature [as the domestic pig]).47 Much of this tendency to mix the two together can be attributed to the lack of physiological differentiation and the fact, as we will see in the next chapter, that the two animals often inhabited the same countryside spaces. Pliny was interested in describing the pig as a biological animal, but his works would take on moral meanings over the next 1,000 years. Pliny’s character attributes became the backbone of much of medieval European thought – at least on the philosophical level – on pigs. Isidore of Seville, in his highly influential (although almost always etymologically incorrect) Etymologies of the seventh century, discussed the pig as an animal that digs up the pasture as it searches for food and plunges itself into mud. According to Isidore, the words for filth (spurcitia) and spurious (spurius) are derived from pig (sus) because of the pig’s qualities.48 While the pig’s ability to find 9

The Medieval Pig its own food and care for its body could have been interpreted as positive qualities, in Isidore’s etymology they become negative traits. These paradoxical qualities were reiterated in the medieval bestiary tradition. Bestiaries, which combined natural history and moral instruction, were produced from the twelfth century onwards. They were aimed at the upper classes and surviving copies are often nicely illustrated with one image per animal entry (Figure 4). These books present the physical and behavioural characteristics of animals – everything from dogs to dragons – alongside the etymology of words associated with the animals and moral lessons in the form of parable and simile. A typical bestiary from the thirteenth century includes this entry for the pig (sus): The Sow is so named because it roots up (subigat) the pastures, that is, it seeks its food by rooting up the ground. Boars (verres) are so named because they have great strength (vires). The pig (porcus), as if named from spurcus (filthy), wallows, for it buries itself in filth and mud, and covers itself with mire. Thus in Horace: ‘Mud is dear to the sow.’ Hence, also, we get the terms for filth and bastard persons (spurcitiam et spurios).49

In this text, the behaviour of the pig is linked to the behaviour of people through words used to describe both. A trait seen as negative for humans – filthiness – is linked to a completely normal pig action – wallowing in mud to cool off and control pests. The medieval natural and moral histories of the pig were thus mired in complex and contradictory readings of pig (and human) behaviours. We cannot divorce the pig’s physical attributes from medieval moral readings of those attributes, because how people responded to pigs depends necessarily on what they thought about them.

Pig as paradox The medieval pig embodied paradox. They provided a lot of meat because of their large size but their size meant that, if they became unruly, they were very difficult to get under control. They could eat almost anything, but that also means that they would eat almost anything, even things their owners and others would rather not have them eat. In short, most positive attributes of pigs could also be flipped over as a negative in a different situation. How pigs were interpreted – beneficial, troublemaking, slothful, rapacious – depended on when, where, and how humans interacted with them. Interpretation of pig behaviour varied, too, according to the place it was. As an example, we can think about the behaviour of rooting, in which 10

Placing the Medieval Pig pigs use their snouts to dig into the ground: in the countryside its propensity to root could be a positive because it could find its own food, whereas in the city such activities would be considered destructive. Whether a pig’s traits were positive or negative also varied by cultural context. Pigs are animals with significant amounts of muscle and fat, which may be seen as affording meat for the table or affording a moral example that the pig is gluttonous. To a farmer, pig fecundity is a boon: to the religious writer, a sign of loose morality. Thus the time, place, and cultural context of the pig determined how people thought about, interacted with, and tried to control it. The medieval pig lived, died, and was imagined as a paradoxical animal. Good–bad, fecund–fornicator, noble–filthy. Exploring these paradoxes through places – countryside, city, plate, and mind – gives us insights into medieval human–pig relations. We will delve into all the phases of pig production, from husbandry and distribution to preparation and consumption, as well as what medieval Europeans thought about the pig as creature and companion. First, let us move out into the landscape of woods and pastures.

11

2 In the Country

O

ur first place to look for medieval pigs is in the countryside. The landscape of medieval Europe, before industrialisation and mechanisation enabled large-scale forestry or sweeping agricultural clearances, was significantly more wooded than it is today. But that does not mean that woodlands were unused, or dark places where only big bad wolves lurked. In fact, everyone’s life in medieval Europe depended on wood: firewood was critical as an energy source for cooking and heating, and timber was the most common building material. Woodlands also provided areas for livestock grazing. While woodlands could be imagined as wilderness in medieval writing, they were very much cultivated as domestic landscapes.1 It made sense to keep some woodlands intact near settlements to provide for domestic needs. Over the course of the Middle Ages demographic pressures and demand from urban settlements led to more commodification of woodlands and shifts in tree management practices to maximise the production of desirable wood.2 This led to some changes in woodland cover, but it did not change the fact that woodlands were embedded in medieval agricultural and economic systems. In the Middle Ages pigs could be found in woodlands and wooded pastures across Europe. There is a simple reason for this: pigs are animals that need to stay cool – they quickly die of sun exposure if not shaded from the sun at temperatures above 35oC – and thus wild pigs are most common in woodlands, where they seek the shade of trees and bushes, or moist micro-environments where they can cool off in the mud.3 But before we look to the focus of this book, the domestic pig, we need to take a short detour to the wild boar that roamed the same forests. The wild boar and the domestic pig are genetically the same species and in the Middle Ages had similar body conformations, but that does not mean that people thought of them as the same animal. Instead, they were placed in separate intellectual categories. To medieval writers the boar was the epitome of wildness. Isidore of Seville and the later bestiaries from the twelfth century associated the boar with ferocity: ‘Of the boar. The boar gets its name, aper, from its wildness, a feritate, the letter f being replaced by a p; for the same reason, it is called by the Greeks suagros, meaning wild. For everything which is untamed and savage we call, loosely, agreste, wild.’4 Although this etymology is nonsense, the association of boar with the wild in the medieval mind was most certainly true. This is a very different attitude than that toward domestic pigs, which were not considered wild.

Figure 4: The sow with feeding piglets illustrated in a thirteenth-century bestiary. Bodl, MS Bodl. 764, fo. 37v. Courtesy of the The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

The Medieval Pig The medieval world inherited the savage and ferocious associations of wild boar from ancient cultures. Wild boar hunting had been practised in ancient Rome as well as in the Germanic cultures. The wild boar was considered a great game animal, exhibiting ferocity and submitting only to hunters with valour and skill. Roman legions displayed the wild boar on their standards, mosaics depicted hunts, and coinage featured the aggressive and dangerous animal.5 One of the four hunting medallions on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, which was dedicated in 315, shows Constantine the Great hunting a wild boar. The boar hunt continued unabated into the Middle Ages. The Frankish ruling elite hunted wild boar from late summer through autumn, along with their most common quarry, European red deer. For example, the archbishopric of Salzberg in the tenth century claimed the right to hunt bear and wild boar ‘for three weeks before the autumnal equinox until Martinmas’, from early September until 11th November.6 These grand hunts allowed the nobility to put on banquets and feasts designed to impress. Wild animals, including boar and deer, were prevalent at these kinds of gatherings.7 Boar hunting was considered a heroic event. The English scholar Ælfric (c. 955–1020) wrote of the hunt in his Colloquy, a classroom primer for Anglo-Saxon children. The hunter describes the hunt: ‘I pursue game with fast dogs. … I catch harts, boars, roes, does, and sometimes hares … . The harts I caught in a net, the boar I killed. …The hounds drove it at me, and I stood in its way and rapidly speared it.’8 The sport of killing boar required putting oneself directly in danger, with close contact between the hunter and quarry. The two most renowned medieval hunting treatises – Les Livres du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio by Henri de Ferrières and Livre de chasse by Gaston Phoebus, count of Foix (which was based primarily on the former) – both have extended discussions of boar hunting technique. Wild boar hunting usually used hunting dogs to corner the animal, which might be driven into a net. In two Icelandic sagas dogs assist the hero in taking down monstrous boars.9 After the animal was cornered the hunter could charge the boar with a sword or a lance (Figure 5). It was considered more noble to be closer to the boar at the kill, so sword-in-hand was the preferred way to take down a boar. This technique was very dangerous because the boar could charge or swipe with tusks, and would thrash about once struck.10 The thirteenth-century Parisian scholar Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote that the boar uses his tusks like a sword.11 This is attested to by the death of the tenth-century Frankish king Carloman during a boar hunt when a boar wounded him with its tusk.12 The danger of the hunt was, of course, part of its appeal as a cultural practice. The wild boar was encountered as a dangerous woodland inhabitant the killing of which symbolised strength and valour. The poem Seven Sages of Rome, which was translated into Middle English from French in 14

Figure 5: The spearing of the wild boar while it is surrounded by hunting dogs on the right side of the image. A dead boar is being prepared for transport on the left. The Devonshire Hunting Tapestry: Boar and Bear Hunt (detail), 1425–1430, probably made in Arras, France. Museum no. T.204–1957. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Medieval Pig the fourteenth century, includes a tale of a wild boar in ‘a faire forest’ in summertime who would sit under an oak tree eating his fill.13 No man walked in that forest ‘for ferdness [fear] of that wilde beste’. When a herder, who is specified as a swineherd in some versions of the story, encountered this boar in the forest, he was forced to flee up into a tree. The boar rammed against the tree and was delighted to see a few acorns fall from the branches, which it began eating. The quick-thinking herdsman grabbed more handfuls of acorns and threw these down to the boar. The boar ate so much that he fell fast asleep. The herder then climbed down and despatched the sleeping animal with a knife. This story stresses the ferocity of the wild boar, and yet it was also gluttonous, a trait which led to its eventual death. In the story the herdsman was clever rather than courageous – he succeeded in outwitting the wild boar because he knew first-hand about the acorn-eating habits of another porcine woodland inhabitant: domesticated pigs.

Of pigs and pannage Domesticated free-range pigs were a standard feature of the medieval countryside. As domesticated livestock, these pigs were understood and treated differently from wild boar, which were hunted. Pigs were present in the woodlands, particularly in autumn, when they could easily take advantage of the high-calorie foods acorns and beechmast. The autumnal bounty of tree fruit products, which is called mast, lasted only a limited time and was inconsistent from year to year. Oak and beech trees are notorious for uneven fruit production, with some lean years and some bumper crops, but even with that variability, most trees produce some crop every year, making it a dependable source of pig fodder.14 When the acorns really failed over a large area it was a noteworthy tragedy, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1116 notes: ‘this year was so barren of mast that none was heard tell of in all this land nor also in Wales’.15 The value of trees as pig fodder and shelter providers was recognised by ancient custom and led to their protection.16 Large productive oak trees were especially valued and conserved. The Laws of Ine, issued in seventhcentury Wessex, set the fine for illegally cutting down a tree that could ‘shelter 30 swine’ at twice the amount of a regular tree.17 The most often cited medieval documentary evidence for feeding pigs in woodlands is the late eleventh-century Domesday Book. The Domesday survey was created to take stock of all the properties and payments due on landholdings throughout England, which had recently been acquired by William I. In Domesday the normal formula for woodland size is 16

In the Country ‘wood for x swine’ (silva ad x porcos) although Shropshire entries are more specific: ‘wood for fattening (incrassandis) x swine’. In 1950 the geographer H. C. Darby compiled the most extensive study of Domesday woodland geography to date and came to the conclusion that ‘wood formed an important item in the economy of the eleventh century because its acorns and beech-mast provided food for swine’.18 Care, however, must be taken not to equate the potential size of the swine herd as listed in the Domesday record with its size in reality. For example, the holdings of the bishop of London as recorded in Domesday for Essex numbered 12 places with woodland measured in pigs ranging from ten animals in Horndon to 500 in Cranham.19 The number of pigs actually in those woodlands, however, could be much smaller than the woods’ notional capacity: in Totham the bishop held woodland for 90 pigs, but there were only four pigs listed as the bishop’s assets there. The Kent Domesday states that the pig numbers given for the woodland size represented the number at a time when the trees were fruitful (fructuosae), which would not have been every year.20 Just because a woodland could feed 90 pigs in a good year does not mean that there were 90 pigs feeding in it every year. Domesday, however, was not the first documentation to specify the connection between pigs and trees. In the Carolingian world the ninth-century estate inventories known as polyptychs measured woodland’s size and value based on its capacity to pasture swine. The monks of Montier-en-Der, for example, had 12 estates in Champagne that could fatten an average of 800 pigs each.21 Pastures for pigs like this are sometimes identifiable through placenames, such as den for swine pastures in pre-Conquest England.22 Concessions for pasture rights for pigs in woodlands were regularly included in monastic land grants in southern France in the twelfth century.23 Documentary evidence in charters tend to specify that pigs could roam in woodlands to forage for acorns in the autumn from either 21 or 29 September (St Matthew’s Day or Michaelmas) up to 11th November (St Martin’s Day).24 This period may have shifted over the medieval period and become shorter over time. In 1940 Earl B. Shaw’s extensive analysis of mast feeding attributed the decreasing forest feeding times to both a decrease in forested area as it came under cultivation and the availability of alternate feed.25 While acorns are good as feed, pigs cannot be fed on them for too long or as too high a proportion of their diet without losing weight because of the tannins acorns contain.26 Paradoxically, what can be good for them can also be bad for them. Although historians have focused on acorns as the reason to fatten pigs in the woods, pigs fed on much more than just acorns when put out into medieval woodlands. First, other fruits could also be consumed by pigs. For example, the statutes of Sambuca near Tuscany permitted pigs in chestnut groves after the commune had declared the end of the 17

The Medieval Pig harvest (for humans) in order to glean whatever was left.27 Second, grass and roots were consumed by free-range pigs both during and outside the mast season.28 In a few Domesday records for Surrey and Sussex, pigs are called de herbagio or pro pastura, meaning that they were feeding out in grassland pastures.29 In pasture settings pigs eat roots and rhizomes such as bracken (Pteridium) and couch grass (Agropyrum repens) by rooting them up.30 Privileges granted to the bishop of Worcester in 855 for an estate in Worcestershire allowed ‘the pasturing of the king’s swine which we call ‘fern-pasture’ (a pascua porcorum re[g]is quod nominamus fearnleswe).31 Early modern records indicate that pigs in the outfields, which are those feeding areas located away from settlements exploited at low density in the summer months on the northern European islands such as Shetland and the Faroes, as well as in mainland Scotland, regularly consumed tormentilla (Potentilla erecta) roots and buttercups (Ranunculus sp.).32 Pigs also find fungi such as truffles. A mid-fourthcentury mosaic from Rome shows a wild boar alongside its favourite food of brown and black mushrooms.33 So putting pigs out to pasture was not just about acorns, but also about allowing the pigs to take advantage of all available vegetation. According to the fourteenth-century husbandry handbook Seneschaucy, landowners were encouraged to provide food directly to their herd only during severe frost; the rest of the time pigs should find their own food in forest, wood pasture, marsh, or untilled fields.34 In very bad weather the Seneschaucy recommended that the swineherd should drive sows with piglets to the manor to allow them to feed on food waste until the storm passed. If a particular manor did not have woods, marsh, or other open land suitable for pig grazing, the Seneschaucy recommended that the owner keep their pigs in a piggery, only have as many pigs as could be fed on stubble from the August grain harvest, and not employ a swineherd at all. In one eleventh-century grant to Lessay Abbey in Normandy, the monks could freely graze 100 pigs from Martinmas until Lent, which indicates that the pigs were grazing out in the fields in the spring as well as autumn.35 Although it is easy to imagine pigs roaming free through the deep, dark wood, these would never have been the best feeding grounds. Instead, the woodlands that the pigs fed in would have been highly managed spaces (Figure 6).36 Trees could be pollarded (the practice of cutting off the branches of a mature tree above the grazing height of animals and utilising the regrowth for a variety of purposes). Oaks growing in open wood pasture, rather than in dense forests, produce more acorns per tree, and the open areas also encourage grass growth, so it would have made sense to keep grazing areas open to allow pigs more food sources to forage.37 Oaks tend not to produce a significant number of acorns until about the age of 20 so, while it was not necessary to cultivate young trees, 18

Figure 6: Calendar image for the month of November showing pigs and their herders in an open woodland. Hours of Henry VIII, Morgan Library, MS H.8, fol. 6r. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

The Medieval Pig care would have been taken to keep old trees alive if a medieval herder wanted food for his pigs.38 There was always a balance between the needs of the pigs and other users of the same woodland. Woodland resources were vital to medieval communities: collecting firewood, cutting timber, pasturing livestock, foraging for wild honey and berries, and hunting game all took place in the same physical space. Even though the woodland was measured in pig numbers, the right to have pigs there was always in tension with others, with these usage rights specified in charters to lay lords, churches, and monastic communities. The intensification of commercial wood production in Champagne from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, for example, meant that while pigs could graze in both woods and pastures of the abbey of Vauluisant in 1193, at the beginning of the 1200s they were excluded from all pastures.39 Conflicts could arise between various users of the land. Although the foundation charter of 1037 for the monastery of Bakonybél in Hungary gave the monks the right to pasture their pigs in Bakony Forest, in 1432 their 40 pigs were driven out of the woodland by a neighbouring lord who wanted to use it.40 In April 1375 Edward III ordered the parson of Estwode to keep cows instead of pigs in the king’s park of Reylegh because in the past, when the parson had kept eight cows and 12 pigs in the park year round, the swine had damaged the pasture by their trampling.41 Domestic pig production also had to be balanced with the desire to hunt game in the woodland. While it was desirable to have pigs feed in the woodlands, it was undesirable to have long-lasting vegetative damage due to their feeding. Feeding pigs in woodlands came at a cost, literally. The fee for grazing pigs was known as pannage (in medieval Latin pasnagio) or glandage, which conferred the right to feed pigs in an area in exchange for a number of fattened pigs or an equivalent amount of cash. Use of a woodland for pannage or driving pigs through it is one of the most frequently recorded rights in woodland, including the administrative areas called forest in medieval documents.42 Pigs may have been driven considerable distances to seasonal pastures.43 The rate of payment for pannage was highly variable, depending on the place and the status of the pig owner and the landholder. For example, some tenants paid one pig for every three fed in the woodlands, whereas others had to pay only one for every five or one for every ten.44 The quality of the pig might matter as much as the quantity, with some grants specifying delivery of the ‘best pig’ as payment.45 If the pannage was paid in kind, the number of pigs that the wood owner could claim depended on the size of the pigs.46 Alternatively, payment could be translated into coinage so that the landholder, who might be receiving payments from many different 20

In the Country pig owners, did not end up with an abundance of livestock that needed to be sold. As an example, the receipts for Chester, England, to the royal treasury in 1279–1280 included ‘From the pannage, in money 21s., which remains to be paid, and for pigs sold 32s., which the justiciar received’ and, similarly, in the following year, ‘from the pannage of the term of St Martin in the ninth year, in money 30s. 8d., and for pigs sold, 33s.’.47 Pannage like this was essentially tax revenue. In 1202–1203 the king of France collected 50 pounds for pannage in the forest of Yveline, another 50 for Montargis, and 100 for Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which equates to payment for about 16,000 pigs in total.48 Not every pig in the woodland had to be paid for, however. Wealthy landowners sometimes gave religious houses the right to have pigs in their woodlands at no cost as a way to save their souls. For example, in the eleventh century, Robert, count of Mortain, exempted the canons, priests of the prebends, and the rent-paying farmers of the church of Saint-Evroult from pannage payments.49 He also allowed the abbey of Marmoutier to send their pigs into the same woods that his own pigs fed in without paying pannage.50 Nigel vicomte of the Cotentin similarly gifted the church of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte ‘pasture for animals in open country, woods, the enclosure, and the marshes, the right for pigs to graze in the forest and enclosure of Salsoif, without payment of pannage, and for them to wander wherever Nigel’s pigs go. Similarly he gives the tithes of rents and pannage and the right to graze pigs without paying pannage in the thicket of Henneville and in the forest of La Colombe.’51 In the fourteenth century the abbot of Begeham had permission to have 20 pigs in the forest of Asshedoune without paying pannage.52 Lest we think that all these piggy transactions took place among men, it is worth noting that the English noblewoman Agnes de Bella Fago gave half of the pannage of her town’s woods to Holy Trinity Abbey in Norwich in the twelfth century.53 The size of these pig herds feeding in woodlands could reach into the thousands. The Saxon Ealdorman Alfred, who died c. 880, left his wife land with 2,000 swine, and gave 400 more swine to other family members.54 There were apparently some rather large herds of swine, if we look at the number of pigs paid as rent. In the Midland region of England 264 swineherds rendered rents of 1,343 and a half swine, which, since rent was typically paid as one animal to every ten animals at pasture, means that the pig numbers are in the tens of thousands.55 But the number of pigs belonging to one person was quite variable. Birrell’s study of Staffordshire gives some examples of the range of medieval herd size: among the free tenants from Needword, herds of 20 or 30 were common; the abbot of Cumbermere could put 40 pigs out for pannage; the manor of Alrewas recorded payment for 200 to 250 pigs annually in the 1330s.56 In medieval Florence pigs were 21

The Medieval Pig typically in herds of c. 30 animals, but there was one herd of 400 in 1427.57 The polyptych for the monastery of Prüm shows estates holding anything from ten to 1,000 pigs.58 Some of these might have been joint herds in which each peasant owned one or two pigs, which were herded together for feeding and then sent back to their particular owner.

Herding swine None of these pigs was allowed to wander higgledy-piggledy around the countryside. Instead, swineherds ensured that pigs went into the correct pasturing areas. Control was key.59 Being in the right place at the right time was a legal requirement. Magnus Eriksson’s law from c. 1350 for his Swedish–Norwegian kingdom levied a fine for allowing more swine out in the woodlands than a person had the right to.60 In the AngloSaxon Laws of Ine a provision is made to fine a pig owner when his pigs are discovered in another’s oak or beech woods. For the first infraction the fine was one shilling, for the second, two shillings, and so on, up to six shillings. In late medieval Castillón, Spain, pigs were explicitly forbidden in cultivated fields such as olive groves.61 The swineherd was ultimately responsible for where the pigs went and when. Swine herds could be driven long distances for good feeding locations. Transhumance – the seasonal movement of livestock to pastures – was practised in the Middle Ages in places such as the open wood pasture landscape of Spain (called dehesa) and the Weald forests of south-eastern England. Whereas cattle and sheep are generally herded from the lowland in winter to the highland in summer for grazing, pigs would be herded in the autumn to woodlands take advantage of acorn and beech crops as well as grasses. Primarily it would have been yearling pigs, called hoggasters, who would have been driven to distant feeding grounds.62 Dennis Turner and Rob Briggs have created a convincing model of Anglo-Saxon pig management that features pigs moving between the main estate and woodland feeding areas known as denns through intermediate pastures.63 As they note, even when most of the pigs (including pregnant sows and those destined for death under the butcher’s knife that year) were herded back to the main estates for winter, some of the animals could have stayed in wood pastures year-round, with swineherds staying with those animals. It is possible that some pigs were slaughtered at the outlying feeding areas and the meat immediately salted or otherwise preserved. This would allow the shipment of only the meat, rather than the animal, which would lose fat along the way.64 While moving pigs to take advantage of 22

In the Country wild food sources could fatten them, paradoxically, moving them back home on the hoof would reduce their size. Medieval landholders often had estates spread out across large geographical areas, encompassing different types of land and vegetation, so pigs could be moved between these areas to take advantage of good pasture. For example, the priory of Winchester, England, held herds of over 50 pigs on six of their manors in Hampshire, but these herds were supplemented with their pigs raised in Wiltshire manors, which stopped on the Hampshire chalk downs for fattening before reaching Winchester.65 Pigs from their estates were driven to Winchester in October and November, each manor sending about one quarter of their herd to feed the priory.66 A major study of English records from 1250 to 1450 shows that swine were more likely than other livestock to be subject to intra-estate transfer.67 Tenants or cottagers could be required to drive the swine to and from the woodlands. For example, four tenants of Temple Ewell near Dover, England, were responsible for taking the swine at least 20 miles to the Weald in 1185.68 Longer drives than that were possible as well, such as the 600 swine herded over 40 miles across the Weald from Kent to Sussex in 1189–1199.69 Pigs were not always welcome, however, when on the move. The Ordinances of Badajoz, Spain, from 1500 excluded transient pigs from their local dehesas, which were limited to cattle pasturage.70 There is physical evidence of these herding practices left in the landscape. A system of droveways, which can be either deep or wide, developed in these transhumance landscapes because of the seasonal movement of large numbers of animals, such as the surviving Wickhurst Lane droveway linked the settlement at Sullington with woodland for 30 swine in Broadbridge in the Weald woodlands.71 Archaeological investigations have also found evidence of small timber herder huts and livestock pens that would have been used during these seasonal migrations in the Weald.72 The medieval swineherd managed the animals during drives with simple techniques. As mentioned in the previous chapter, medieval calendars frequently used swineherds tending to pigs feeding on acorns as the representative labour of the month of October or November. These images appear in manuscripts, in church stained glass windows, on door jambs, under choir seats, and even on baptismal fonts. The scene is fairly standardised, typically showing one or more pigs standing eagerly under an oak tree awaiting the acorn bounty that will rain down on them with the strike of the swineherd’s staff on the tree. Sometimes the pigs are already filling their mouths in delight. These images exist across medieval artistic media, from a luxurious Book of Hours calendar from c. 1500 showing two swineherds tending their charges in a grove, to a 23

The Medieval Pig Figure 7: A swineherd beating oaks in November and a swine being slaughtered in December on the late twelfthcentury Norman lead font in Saint-Evroultde-Montfort in Orne, France. Photograph by author.

wooden carving under a choir seat in Worcester showing a swineherd knocking down acorns for two pigs below, to a late twelfth-century lead font in Orne, France illustrating a swineherd beating oaks (Figure 7), to a stone carving on the entrance portal of the Basilica of Saint-Denis, outside Paris (Figure 8).73 Bartholomaeus Anglicus had commented that since November is the month for fattening swine, the image of the rustic beating the oak was appropriate for the calendar.74 In his sixteenthcentury book on husbandry the Englishman Thomas Tusser wrote about beating the trees to get down the fruits for pigs: ‘Get pole, boy mine! / Beate hawes to swine.’75

24

In the Country Figure 8: Roundel showing feeding the pigs on acorns on a twelfth-century portal of the Basilica of SaintDenis, France. Photograph by author.

Yet, even with the stick, some acorns might have been out of reach. In that case, the swineherd may have climbed the tree. Several surviving medieval images record that swineherds sometimes climbed trees to knock the acorns down for their animals. In the famous Luttrell Psalter a man sits up on one of the highest branches using his stick to knock down the topmost acorns for the two hungry pigs below.76 In a French calendar of 1302–1303, a swineherd has similarly climbed up into the tree and is beating the oak with his clubbed stick.77 Another manuscript from c. 1430 shows a man up in a tree reaching for nuts, while his comrades use sticks from the ground to knock down the lower acorns and a woman gathers acorns.78 Old English scholar Herbert Meritt even argued that the Old 25

The Medieval Pig English poem Christ by Cynewulf may refer to this practice when it refers to climbing trees as a gift endowed by God.79 Some acorns were collected for later use as fodder over the winter rather than letting the pigs consume all of them on the spot. Acorns can be collected, spread out on the ground to dry (piled up, they tend to rot), put into sacks, and then stored.80 Later, the pigs will crack open the acorns and discard the shells. Several medieval images show workers, including women, collecting extra acorns in baskets while pigs feed nearby.81 Acorn collection is recorded in Palladius’ Opus agriculturae (also known as De re rustica), which was written in the late fourth or early fifth century and was well known throughout the Middle Ages: ‘At this time, pick the acorn crop and keep it: it is easy work for women and children’ – advice that was repeated later in the Middle Ages by Vincent of Beauvais.82 In the 1500s Tusser was giving similar advice: ‘To gather some mast, it shall stand thee upon, With servant and children, ere mast be all gone: Some left among bushes shall pleasure thy swine; For fear of a mischief, keep acorns fro kine.’83 If the trees had a particularly productive year or the herd was smaller than usual, collected acorns and beechnuts could be stored and fed to the pigs later. In the visual sources, swineherds are almost always with pigs in the woodlands. Although the pigs had free range of the woodland, swineherds would have regularly gathered them together. While there is a tradition in Lincoln that a statue atop a turret is a swineherd blowing a horn,84 there is no other evidence of swineherds in the Middle Ages – unlike later periods – using horns to call in their herds. But, even without a horn, they would still have needed to be able to gather in the herd. Protecting the pigs from thieves was a particular concern. An example of thievery shows up in a court case in 1277 in which Theobald de Verdun sued Walter de Wyleshyre and 21 others for seizing 160 of Theobald’s pigs that were in four woodlands.85 Pigs could be branded so that it was easy to identify the owner – at least until the pig was turned into bacon. Branding also made it easy to confiscate unbranded pigs, as they were a sure sign that the owner did not have the pannage rights to feed the pigs in a particular area. Woodland rights documents called marke boeken in the eastern Netherlands from the fourteenth century indicate that brands were used this way. In 1512 the commoners of the Eder bos in the Veluwe area decided to put their local brand into a box with two locks to ensure that it was used only on their own pigs.86 A local government proceeding from Trondheim, Norway, in 1313 also mentions marked pigs.87 Another reason to bring the herd in was to check their health. Although pigs could scavenge for their own food, we should not think of them as easy livestock to keep healthy. Opus agriculturae discusses potential ailments such as fever or swollen glands and potential treatments, 26

In the Country including medicinal bleeding, herbal rubs, and ingestible drugs. Palladius noted that pigs should be pastured with access to mud to cool themselves. He also remarks on known swine behaviours, including overeating fruit in times of seasonal abundance and devouring their own young if hungry.88 These were all traits that required management and control. Swineherds, if they were freemen, received payment for their services to manage the herds. In twelfth-century Glastonbury a swineherd was paid one sucking pig, the entrails of the best pig slaughtered, and the tails of all pigs slaughtered.89 Swineherds could also be unfree. For example, around 990, the will of Aethelgifu, a wealthy woman from Hertfordshire, England, included two enslaved swineherds.90 The Icelandic Völsunga saga also mentions an enslaved swineherd.91 Even when not technically slaves, dependent tenants might owe their lords service as a swineherd.92 There was division of labour among the herders: the text Rectitudines Singularum Personarum from c. 1025 recorded three classes of swineherds, called æhteswan, gafolswan, and inswan, some of whom were free and others unfree.93 In an Italian edict of 643 there were master swineherds (porcarius magister), apprentices (discipuli), and lower-ranking swineherds (inferiores porcarii).94 In Castellón, Spain, a decree of 1419 established two levels of swineherds: senior swineherds, who could guard 30 pigs, and juniors, who could guard ten. Age restrictions were later placed on top of this: those under 12 years old should not be placed in charge of more than five pigs and those between 12 and 14 should not have more than ten. Similar age restrictions were in force in Villarreal, Villafamés, and Benasal.95 Children serving as swineherds are also mentioned in the Icelandic Eddic poem Rígsþula.96 These herders would probably all have been male. There is a hagiographical story of the sixth-century St Brigit of Ireland taking care of the pigs one day as a girl, but the story does not glorify the female as a good swineherd.97 In fact, the reason that the story is recounted is to show how God miraculously replaced pigs that had been stolen under her watch. The visual evidence always shows men as the swineherds, although a few women do appear gathering acorns alongside them.

Beyond the woods Raising pigs in the medieval countryside was filled with contradictions. Pigs are naturally voracious eaters, so it was easy for them to find their own food in woodlands, yet, because woodland had other uses, the pigs needed to be controlled by swineherds. Domestic pigs were not hunted like their wild boar cousins, but they were also not as free. Herding pigs was a simple

27

The Medieval Pig task, on the one hand, but on the other it required specialised tools and knowledge to make the woodland a productive space for pig production. Paradoxically, while woodland and pasture feeding provided an opportunity to use natural resources to ensure fattened pigs, pigs in the countryside were also stall-fed. Studies of the isotope contents of pig bones from rural sites in late medieval Flanders indicate that some medieval pigs were fed heavily on sea fish or animal protein, rather than plant foods.98 Across the channel, isotope analysis of pig bones recovered from the rural settlement of Wharram Percy in England showed that one of the adult pigs acquired most of its dietary protein from animal products, indicating that it was stall-fed even in a rural setting.99 Large amounts of legumes and grains were fed to the pigs on the estates of Peterborough Abbey in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries;100 peas were indispensable fodder for intensive pig management in sties.101 Two sagas about the medieval Faroe Islands indicate that pigs were kept in pens and given fodder.102 This was particularly important in winter, when wild food was scarce. The Rhineland monasteries of Prüm, Wissembourg, and Lorsch required their tenants in the ninth century to take a few of the monks’ pigs to their own farms for feeding over winter.103 Even in the Basque country, where animal transhumance was practised, pigs appear to have shifted to eating food in domestic spaces: isotopic results from early medieval pigs in the Álava area indicate free ranging in woodland pastures, whereas those from high medieval pigs suggest an omnivorous diet, probably mainly domestic food scraps.104 Even in the countryside we have to look beyond the woods to find the pigs. These countryside pigs were connected to towns and cities. The pig briskly walking with its herder on its heels into Siena depicted in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fresco of Good Government in the Sala dei Nove is a visual reminder of the connection of rural and city pig life (Figure 9). Many pigs were produced in countryside locations and then taken on the hoof to the larger cities. This was the case in Siena, which received pork transported live from its surrounding territories, such as the Tuscan frontier castle Sant’Angelo in Colle, which was a significant producer of pigs and cured pig meats.105 In northern France rural farms supplied the pigs to urban markets such as Compiègne and Senlis through commercial arrangements.106 Pig herds were raised in large numbers commercially in Inner Flanders in the tenth and eleventh centuries, with breeders participating in large commercial networks to supply pork to the maritime areas, which raised few pigs.107 Countryside and city were intimately connected through pig production. The swineherd guided the pig from country to city with his pigging stick in one hand and a rope around the pig’s ankle in the other. Now we take the journey with the pig into the city. 28

Figure 9: A pig and swineherd entering the city from the countryside. Fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Sienna, Italy, 1338–1339.

3 In the City

T

he large, bristly pig leads the way on the street. The swineherd follows behind, holding on tight to a rope tied around the animal’s back leg. He uses his stick to guide the pig, possibly striking it on the rump if it stops in an unwanted spot. They are probably on their way either to the city’s market or the slaughterhouse. The artist drew this pig and his keeper in a manuscript in fourteenth-century France to depict snapshots of urban life, and naturally animals such as pigs were part of the scene (Figure 10).1 Pigs were as integrated into the cityscape as they were into the countryside of medieval Europe. Pigs would have been brought on the hoof into cities and towns to be sold at markets. Manors around large urban centres such as Paris or London could be guaranteed to have outlets for selling excess swine. A study of manors in the London area around 1300 showed that over half of them sold pigs.2 Some of these estates made a significant income from selling pigs to urban markets. The mean sale price of non-breeding meat pigs was twice that of an adult sheep and two and a half times that for a beef calf.3 Pigs could be big business as marketed commodities. Yet pigs were not just rural residents itinerantly in the city – they lived there all the time and many townspeople owned them. Owning one or two pigs was quite common for city dwellers: a taxation roll from 1297 for Reading, England, shows that 30 of the 102 assessed persons owned pigs, yet only six people had more than two.4 These pigs were raised and bred within the city walls. Medieval Turku, for example, had a ‘self-sufficient pig-raising system’ in which a portion were killed each year and others were allowed to mature and reproduce.5 The number of piglet bones found in Anglo-Scandinavian York likewise indicates that there were breeding sows in the town and some of the pig teeth recovered have wear patterns consistent with stalled pigs.6 Some governments restricted how many pigs urban households could have. In 1410 the local government of Ulm in Germany limited the number of pigs that a resident could own to 24, and limited the driving of pigs on the town roadways to one hour at midday.7 Pozsony (Bratislava), Hungary, allowed urban householders to keep only two pigs, with the exception of butchers, who could keep four.8 Castellón, Spain, likewise regulated the number of pigs that owners could have on their property.9

In the City

Figure 10: Detail of a swineherd and pig coming into town. The swineherd holds the pig on a leash. Yves de Saint-Denis, Vita et passio sancti Dionysii, BnF Français 2092, fo. 18v. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.

Pigs are relatively easy livestock to take care of in urban settings because they need little space (at least compared with horses and cows) and can consume domestic waste products, thereby turning urban refuse into dinner meat. In spite of this flexibility, their owners needed to provide them with space, infrastructure, and food. Placing the pig in urban spaces required forethought.

Pig provisioning Porcine life in medieval cities and towns was mostly confined to sties. Urban regulations required pigs to be placed in dedicated structures. The laws for the town of Aberdeen, Scotland, from the twelfth century stated that swine could be within the town only if they were usually kept in a sty.10 Šibenik in Croatia had a similar rule about pigs always being kept in well-guarded pigsties,11 as did the town of Lynn, England.12 Sties would have been simple wooden structures in the yards next to buildings. We get some idea of possible pigsty designs from manuscript images, such as a Flemish calendar page from about 1510 that shows 31

Figure 11: Pigs inside and outside a sty, getting food in a trough. Illustration for November in the Spinola Hours, dated to about 1510 and made in Belgium. Getty MS Ludwig IX, fol. 6v. Image reproduced under Getty’s Open Content Program.

In the City pigs in a wooden sty being trough-fed in a town setting (Figure 11). In this case, a dovecote is integrated into the upper part of the structure to maximise the use of space. A woodcut illustration by Albrecht Dürer in Sebastian Brant’s ‘Das Narrenschiff’ from 1494 shows two pigs and geese housed inside a wooden building, sticking their heads out of an open hinged wooden door in order to eat from a trough.13 A French manuscript illumination from about the same time shows pigs feeding in a trough in front of a small wooden building, presumably the sty.14 Husbandry texts of the sixteenth century describe closed swine sties with little light and stone floors inside.15 Archaeological evidence supports these textual and artistic sources. A study of dental wear patterns indicates that pigs at the Gilbertine priory of St Andrew in late medieval York were fed either in stalls with hard floors or in paddocks with short grass because their teeth show evidence of a soft-textured diet and no rooting behaviour.16 Owners were not free to set up sties wherever they pleased. In 1287– 1288 there were two court cases in Norwich about a pigsty that was outside the owner’s property limits and was blocking the road.17 The same concern with pigsty placement appeared in the 1377 ordinances of York, England, which banned them from being set up in the streets.18 In Goslar, Germany, pig pens could not be made in front of a house by the street.19 In the fifteenth century the local government of Coventry, England, told residents that they could not place pigsties next to the road or alongside the city’s main drainage ditch.20 Sties had to be regularly cleaned out to remove manure. In fourteenthcentury Norwich pig sties were cleaned out every Saturday afternoon, which was the only time that the pigs were permitted to be out of the sties.21 Smell was considered a particularly dangerous health hazard, so activities that generated strong odours were controlled.22 Regulations such as those of Goslar specified that sties had to be maintained so that they were not an odorous nuisance.23 In Ghent, the city government demanded that sties be ‘kept in such a way that the neighbourhood is not exposed to stench or foul air’ and banned disposing of pig manure into waterways.24 Pig manure had to be transported only before or after sunset in Kampen, The Netherlands, in order to limit residents’ exposure to the smell.25 Pigs in sties were at the mercy of their caretakers for food, but luckily there was typically plenty to choose from. Because of pigs’ omnivorous nature, they have great flexibility in what they eat. Many medieval crafts generated biological waste products that could potentially become pig fodder. Butchery generated waste from entrails considered unfit for human consumption; brewing created grain-based dregs in the bottom of the barrels; dairy processing and baking left residual solids in containers. Victualling tradespeople tended to own a couple of pigs that could be economically fed on these by-products. But that does not mean they could feed their pigs anything – local governmental 33

The Medieval Pig

Figure 12: A swineherd watching over his pigs in a marketplace. Illustration in Thomas de Saluces, Le Chevalier errant, BnF, Français 12559, fol. 167. Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits.

statutes restricted these practices. For example, the butchers of Coventry were told in 1474 not to give pigs the entrails of other slaughtered animals.26 Yet people tended to feed pigs whatever was on hand. There were the leftovers from human dinner plates, as well as rotten or spoiled foods (which happened quickly due to a lack of refrigeration). In 1380 a retaining wall on the River Thames had broken and flooded a piece of land; the upside of the disaster for locals was that a large number of young fish ended up in the shallow pools, which could be caught and fed to their pigs.27 According to one court case in Norwich in 1288, pigs were being taken by swineherds to the city ditches to feed on the grasses and herbs growing in them.28 The other way to feed urban pigs was to take them out to surrounding pastures or woodlands. This required the services of a swineherd. Most towns mandated the presence of swineherds to move with pigs through the urban space (Figure 12). Some town governments even employed an official swineherd. Deventer, Netherlands, had a town pig herder by 1348.29 The English town of Lynn employed a city swineherd from at least 1360/61.30 34

In the City The German town of Goslar employed a swineherd, and in 1461 they added the job of swine castrator to castrate both old and young males to improve meat quality.31 Swineherds had to gather up the pigs of the townsfolk and herd them out to feed beyond the walls. In 1395 the local court in Nottingham heard a complaint about the swineherd Nicholas Swynnard, who was common swineherd for Nottingham from 1390 to 1395. Ralph Pollard accused Nicholas of negligence because pigs had destroyed the walls of Ralph’s garden in Bar Gate. Nicholas defended himself, claiming that it was customary to gather the pigs at Bar Gate and that he had not been negligent in keeping the pigs. The court ruled that Nicholas had properly managed his charges.32 Pigs required oversight and control. Nuisance pigs There was a standing concern in medieval urban areas about pigs grazing in the wrong places. In Coventry, England, the mayor’s proclamation of 1421 commanded that pigs be taken to the ‘wastes’ surrounding the city rather than into productive gardens, meadows, or fields.33 In 1365 William Baldewyne, tanner of London, had to pay a fine for feeding his pigs illegally in the city and was forced to get rid of them.34 Goslar, Germany, regulated city pigs in 1427: they could not be kept in the marketplace; they were not allowed to roam free in the streets or go to the cemetery; and a swineherd was required to lead the herd.35 Some of these regulations evolved and became more specific over time. For example, in York’s earliest urban ordinance, dated to 1301, no one was permitted to keep pigs that roamed the streets either during the day or at night; later, the town government specified that pigs and other beasts were not permitted on the walls of the town, in the market streets, in alleys, on the Ouse Bridge, or on the quay.36 Wandering pigs were notorious for destructive behaviour. The Norwich Book of Customs recorded a graphic description of damage by pigs in 1354: Whereas great injuries and dangers so often have happened before this time in the City of Norwich and still happen from day to day in as much as boars, sows and pigs before this time have gone and still go vagrant by day and night without a keeper in the said city, whereby divers persons and children have thus been hurt by boars, children killed and eaten, and others [when] buried exhumed, and others maimed, and many persons of the said city have received great injuries as wrecking of houses, destruction of gardens of divers persons by such kind of pigs upon which great complaint is often brought before the said Bailiffs and Community imploring them for remedy on the misfortunes, dangers and injuries which have been done to them.37

35

The Medieval Pig The description paints pigs as urban villains, damaging property, rooting up bodies from the cemetery, and even killing children. Property damage by pigs was recorded in court proceedings. In a 1398 Nottingham court case John Bank claimed that Robert Hayward had allowed his pigs to roam free and they had devoured a cockerel and some fish that belonged to Bank, causing ten shillings’ worth of damage.38 In about 1490 the Dominican friars of Shrewsbury complained that pigs (‘hogges’) were picking up dung and butchery leftovers that residents had scattered in the streets and bringing them into the church.39 There were real safety issues with keeping pigs, which are, after all, large and bulky animals, out of the streets. In 1131 the French Prince Philip was killed when his horse collided with a pig in the streets of Paris.40 To keep the streets passable for carts and horses, street maintenance in London in 1315 comprised of three components: pavement repair, street cleaning, and removing vagrant pigs.41 Pigs were also a public health hazard. The more serious claims about pigs injuring or maiming residents are less often documented than property damage, but still occurred. Fourteenth-century poets repeated the claim that pigs killed babies: Chaucer stated that ‘the sowe freten the child right in the cradel’ in the Knight’s Tale and Eustache Deschamps commented that pigs strangled children in their cradles (enfans estranglent es berseaulx).42 These fears were based on real incidents. Some were gruesome: in 1392, the Oxford coroner inquest determined that a sow ‘ate the head’ of six-monthold Agnes Perone, who died from the injuries.43 There were also pigs put on trial for murdering young children in France.44 Historian Marissa CrannelAsh has identified 43 cases of child murder by pigs between 1293 and 1572 in the Duchy of Burgundy.45 Clearly, pigs were extremely dangerous animals in the medieval space. Local governments attempted to keep pigs under control by fining their owners and seizing wandering pigs. A London rule from 1277 mandated that when a pig was found wandering the street or common lands the pig should be killed and, if the owner was known, the pig’s killer should get fourpence from them as a fine.46 The ordinances of York, compiled in 1377, also levied a fine of fourpence on owners of pigs at large in the city, whether at night or in the day; the city officer who captured it had the right to kill the animal as well as collect the fine.47 Maldon, England, similarly fined owners of pigs running loose; the fine was split between the person who captured the pig and the city coffers.48 A city ordinance from Colchester, England, in 1488 made it illegal to have ‘any Bores, sowes, or any other maner hogge wandryng or wrotyng [rooting] in the comen strets’; the animals would be seized and sold at auction, with the proceeds being split between the government and the finder.49 The ordinance was repeated in 1538.50 The English town of Lynn issued a bylaw in 1331 that forbade pigs wandering in the streets on any day of the week except 36

In the City Saturday, which was the common cleaning day when pigs were let out of the sties.51 Owners of pigs found on the streets were fined and the common sergeant would retain the pig. Court records show that these were not just empty legislative words. Records of fines collected in Lynn demonstrate that the ‘no pigs in streets’ rule was enforced. In 1370/71, 47 different pig owners were fined, some for multiple offences; the fine was halved two years later and the records show that 86 pig owners were fined in a total of 675 cases.52 In 1356 a goldsmith and his son assaulted the town crier of Leicester because he had seized their pigs for wandering.53 Pigs were not, of course, the only nuisances in the city. Some regulations grouped pigs together with other nuisance animals. For example, in 1437, Norwich ordered that owners forfeit all pigs and ducks found wandering in the streets.54 The leading official in Dublin, Ireland, took an oath that he would not allow cattle to be slaughtered in town or swine to run in the streets.55 London had an official surveyor of the streets and lanes, whose duties included killing all pigs and geese he found wandering the streets, selling them at the best price he could get, and splitting the proceeds with the city coffers.56 But, in general, pigs could cause much more damage than other animals. This is apparent in a regulation from the town of Skradin, Croatia, which set the penalty for pig damage to vineyards, fields, or gardens twice as high as for damage by sheep or goats and two and half times as high as that by cows or horses.57 Some city governments became frustrated with ongoing pig nuisances and ordered pigs out of the urban space. In the thirteenth century the Croatian town of Korčula ‘decided that no one can keep pigs or sows in the city (under the penalty) of five perperi for each offence’, with an exception for the period between Michaelmas and Christmas.58 The exception meant that pigs were expected to be in the countryside during the spring and summer, but were allowed in the city to fatten on stall feed during the autumn months and then be slaughtered in town. In 1423 the Coventry council decided that no one, including butchers, would be permitted to keep swine in sties, stalls, or houses from then on. Violators would be fined and would forfeit the pig.59 When the city listed all the duties of aldermen in 1517, they included ensuring that there were no swine sties within the walls of the city.60 It appears that such restrictions were enforced, at least some of the time. The baker John Lichefield was fined for ‘kepying swine within the Cite’ of Coventry in 1540.61 In 1489 the duke of Bedford informed the Dublin city assembly that the king had ordered the mayor to remove all swine, swine sties, and dung from the streets because they ‘infect the air and produce mortality, fevers and pestilence throughout the city’.62 York similarly commanded in 1498 that no swine could be kept in the city or the suburbs, whether in sties, houses, or any 37

The Medieval Pig other place, because of ‘the foule corrupcion that cometh of theym’.63 The town council of Halle, Germany, also banned the keeping of pigs in an ordinance from 1468.64 But these outright bans were few and far between. Pigs were too valuable as livestock owned by the masses to be forbidden. Most of the time, urban residents lived alongside their porcine neighbours, who generally spent their days in their pigsties when not being guided by a swineherd to feed outside the city proper. While city living provided ready access to food for the pigs in the form of leftovers, butchery scraps, and brewery dregs, it also demanded control of the swine to avoid conflicts with – and danger to – human residents. There were always trade-offs with raising pigs.

A study of urban pigs The medieval English town of Ramsey in Cambridgeshire, which probably had around 1,000 inhabitants during the late medieval period, has an extensive number of surviving court rolls that reveal how pigs were managed in a small-town setting.65 The printed rolls recorded fines levied on individuals for violations of trespass and nuisance, both of which could involve swine, as well as recording the city ordinances. Because these records are extensive, Ramsey offers the opportunity to see how swine were managed in one place over a long period of time.66 Pig keeping was common in medieval Ramsey. The surviving court rolls name 77 individuals who had pigs during this period, and, since only about half of the rolls have survived, there were certainly many more. Many people must have had more than one pig in the household. For example, Stephen Parker had three pigs in 1341; John Luff had three grown hogs running around town in 1436; Giles Warde and John Boyse each had two wandering sows, while John Whitewell, Robert Toly, and William Rynge had ‘diverse’ pigs roaming free in 1456.67 The occupations of many of the pig owners are not recorded, but for those whose trade is available, bakers and brewers top the list. Because both bakers and brewers generate significant waste products edible by pigs, it makes sense that they would have taken the opportunity to fatten pigs rather than let the material go to waste. It is possible that not everyone was permitted to keep pigs. In other towns there were restrictions on pig ownership: barbers were not allowed to have pigs because it was feared that they would feed the pigs blood from bloodletting in both Ghent and Brussels.68 The location of pigsties was the most common swine-related complaint reported by the Ramsey jury. In fact, the first surviving court decision about pig management in Ramsey dealt with the location of a pigsty in 1295. 38

In the City Pigsties were constructed too close to the road, adjacent to a neighbour’s wall or property, or over drainage ditches. There were no early ordinances specifically about sties; instead, these cases were handled as generic nuisances. In 1473 there was an order to remove all pigsties on the common land of New Field Holt, and in 1533 pig owners were told to put all swine in their own orchard or sty (called ‘le Coty’, meaning ‘the swinecote’ or sty) at night.69 Sties as dedicated agricultural structures for pigs in the urban area were probably quite common. It is possible that there was even a town sty held in common by the householders by the mid-sixteenth century. The evidence confirms the construction of urban sties on individual properties, although pigs may also have lived in owners’ houses. Even if the pig was kept in the house, provisions would have to be made to ensure that it was not a nuisance. For example, in Nijmegen and Utrecht, citizens were not allowed to keep pigs in basements that had windows facing the street because passersby might be offended by the smell.70 There was general interest in locating sties away from neighbouring property, roads, and ditches. In the fifteenth century there appears to have been a growing concern about pigs wandering at large in Ramsey. The court issued an ordinance in 1414 banning pigs from lying or feeding in the road. This was followed in 1423 with an ordinance requiring that pigs be leashed and have a keeper ‘out of fear of injury to children’. The ‘leashing’ requirement mentioned in this ordinance may have implied tying a rope to a hind leg of the swine, which was used by the swineherd to control the animal (see Figures 9 and 10).71 This practice is also attested to in a literary work by Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. 1240).72 In the story, an abbot is walking on the road with the Devil when the two are met by a man leading a pig on a rope. When the pig tries to wander off, the man is enraged and curses at the pig: ‘May the devil have you!’ Leasing regulations in Ramsey were reissued in 1443, 1456, and 1460. Repetition of the ban at such close intervals indicates that the problem of wandering pigs during that period was systemic. The growth in fines related to wandering pigs would appear to confirm that. Beginning in 1429, owners were fined for having unleashed animals. A single entry in the record for pigs ‘running loose’ on the street can have multiple people listed as violators, so this was not an isolated occurrence.73 Wandering pigs could cause potential damage to property and, as the court noted, to children. In 1391 Henry Coupere was fined twelvepence when his pig that ate his neighbour’s goslings. The court justified the high fine because Coupere had been warned about the pig’s destructive behaviour in the past. In 1436 Luff was fined three shillings and fourpence for having an unleashed boar and two sows, one of which broke down a door, knocked over a baby’s cradle, and ate a blanket.74 This type of incident probably prompted the issuance and reissuance of the wandering ordinances. 39

The Medieval Pig Some individuals had habitual difficulties with keeping their pigs according to the rules. For example, the baker William Barbor was fined three separate times for having an improperly placed pigsty. He was fined numerous times for putting dung and ashes on another’s property and in the drainage ditch and encroaching on the common ditch in other ways. Likewise, the swineherd William Botiller was fined two years in a row for an illegal pigsty and once for trespassing in the fields in autumn with his pigs, as well as receiving fines for having a stinking privy over the common ditch and for improper waste disposal. The continual misbehaviour of residents such as Barbor and Botiller must have been frustrating for the court.75 It is interesting to note that the fines collected and the amounts stipulated in the ordinances do not match. The earliest wandering pig ordinance of 1414 specified a fine of fourpence. Nine years later it was raised tenfold to three shillings and fourpence (40 pence). Then in 1460 it was lowered substantially to one penny (or a half-penny for piglets) plus the impounding of the animal. Yet the fine incurred for one wandering pig in 1429 and 1430 was only twopence. In 1456 a fine of two shillings was given to several people for ‘diverse pigs’ wandering in town and in 1459 a fine of six shillings and eightpence was handed out for the same. Only this last one, which is equivalent to two times the three shillings and fourpence fine, appears consistent with the fine structure in force at the time. This indicates that the fines listed in medieval local ordinances may have been more of a guideline (and perhaps a deterrent if set high enough), rather than strictly enforced.76 Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Ramsey required pigs to be ringed when sent to pasture in the common areas of Stocking Fen and New Field Holt. In 1531 ringing was extended to all pigs, inside and outside the town, from autumn until spring, but they could be unringed in the summer months. The practice of ringing involves putting a metal ring through the pig’s snout to prevent it from digging up the ground (Figure 13).77 This was an old practice when Ramsey mandated it. Three centuries earlier, in 1248, the king of England had mandated that pigs in his Forest of Clarendon have rings so that they could not root.78 Leicester had a similar ordinance from 1335 to 1336, which required pigs walking on the main high street to be ringed.79 Ghent in the Low Countries likewise required that pigs in town had to be ringed from 1400 onwards.80 In Ramsey, three people were fined for having unringed pigs in 1543 and another person in 1592.81 Ringing urban pigs would have limited the damage they could cause by rooting in gardens, but they could still knock things down with their heavy weight, hence the reason for limiting their wandering in town without a keeper.

40

Figure 13: A pig with a nose ring. Guillaume de La Perrière, Le theatre des bons engins: auquel sont contenuz cent emblemes moraulx (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Denys Ianot imprimeur & libraire, 1545), emblem XXIIII. Public domain.

The Medieval Pig The preoccupation with ringing aligned with concerns about pasturage in Ramsey. Pigs were permitted in particular pastures only at set times; and they were not allowed in the grain fields until after the harvest and after the poor had been given a chance to glean the fields, according to a 1396 ordinance. In 1425 a group of six swineherds was fined for allowing their pig to trespass in the fields in autumn against this ordinance. The abbot of Ramsey, who owned much of the property around the town, also restricted pigs in his nearby woodlands. This was probably due to the abbot having his own pigs there or his desire to reserve the wood for other uses, such as hunting. Ramsey’s records indicate that pigs were permitted to scavenge harvested fields, as well as feeding in other nearby woodlands.82 Overall, the Ramsey evidence shows how seriously medieval governments took swine management. Many individuals owned pigs and kept them within the urban space. Pig movements were restricted, leashes or rings were required, swineherds stayed with the animals, and feeding practices were specified. While the regulations were enforced through fines, that did not prevent some recalcitrant repeat offenders.

Pigs in urban places Pigs had many advantages as urban livestock, with limited needs for space and dietary flexibility. It is no wonder that many medieval townspeople had a porker or two in their household. At the same time, they were large and dangerous animals that needed to be controlled. While pigs were easy to raise in urban areas, they were simultaneously difficult to raise in a way that was not damaging to others. Legal and economic structures were implemented to deal with that paradox: pigs were banned from certain places, swineherds hired, sties required, and fines handed out. The unruliness of the pig meant that it had to be kept on a tight leash. In spite of the difficulties of raising urban pigs, people went to the trouble because the pig was a walking larder, a ready source of meat and fat for urban and countryside residents alike. As we will see in the next chapter, the benefits of pork on the table and grease in the pan outweighed the costs.

42

4 On the Plate

A

butcher straddles the pig on the building floor, holding its front leg safely out of the way. With his knife, he slits the pig’s throat with precision so that the precious blood gushes into a waiting pan held by a woman. The blood will be transformed into culinary treats and hearty meals. Next to the couple is another pair of butchers carving up a pig carcass. The slaughter, portrayed in a manuscript calendar for the month of December (Figure 14), takes place late in the year as a way of stocking the food stores and reducing the number of mouths to feed over the lean months. This is an image of medieval pig butchery to keep in mind in this chapter. It was a visceral, physical process with close contact between human and pig. The late fourteenth-century French poet Eustache Deschamps wrote a ballad about pigs extolling their place in medieval society. Its refrain, ‘A pig does no good in its life’ (Pourcel ne fist bien en sa vie), sums up the medieval relationship with pigs.1 As demonstrated in the previous two chapters, pigs required much attention because they tended to behave badly if not controlled. Deschamps lists the many useful things from pigs, including pork back, neck, hams, sausages, lard, and pork fillets – all of which come from the dead pig. The pig may not have done good in its life, but it did come to do good in its death.

The demand for pork The reason pigs were kept as livestock was to produce meat. Dietary records of medieval times indicate widespread consumption of pork. Archaeological data from medieval England indicates that pigs were consumed equally in both rural areas and towns. Pig bones occur less frequently than either cattle or sheep, but they are still significant, making up 10–20 per cent of the bones recovered.2 In Basque areas, pig bones are about 10 per cent of the total recovered bones.3 Norwegian excavations have similarly shown 5 to 15 per cent of the bones to be swine.4 Similar numbers are found in the Anglo-Saxon period: in Dorchester, England, from the sixth until the eleventh century 13 to 16 per cent of all animal

The Medieval Pig Figure 14: Image of pig butchery. One butcher has sliced the jugular vein of a pig and the blood is being collected by a woman holding a pan. Another is carving up a pig carcass on a table by chopping off the limbs. Illustration for December in the Spinola Hours, dated to about 1510 and made in Belgium. Getty MS Ludwig IX, fol. 6v. Image reproduced under Getty’s Open Content Program.

bones in refuse were pig bones; at Cheddar, pig provided 30 per cent of the meat consumed from 980 to the eleventh century.5 As these numbers show, pork was not the major part of the medieval diet, but most people ate it. An assessment of archaeological remains of the three main domesticates (cattle, sheep, and pigs) from English sites indicates that pig bones are less frequently recovered than the other domesticates and are more prevalent at castle sites than in towns and villages. Pig numbers in Belgium’s archaeological records are not ‘high enough to create a system of self-sufficiency in the town’s meat supply’ – instead, cattle, which were imported into the towns from countryside pastures for slaughter, were much more frequently consumed.6 Evidence from thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Tuscany indicates that, although 44

On the Plate cattle provided the most meat, and sheep and goats were the most numerous livestock, pigs were definitely part of the meat economy.7 Even though pork was not the primary medieval meat, pigs were commonplace in medieval towns and cities. Pork appears to have had significance as a high-status food. In Icelandic sagas pork is often mentioned in connection with noble feasting and entertainment, with suckling pigs a desirable delicacy.8 Pig bones tend to be more abundant at high-status sites, including religious houses.9 In a study of the diet of Westminster monks from c. 1495 to c. 1525, pork, excluding bacon and dishes made with entrails, made up 14 per cent of the total weight of meat consumed; boiled pork was commonly served in the winter, mid-September until Easter.10 Much of the meat consumed in those settings would have been brought in rather than produced locally. That said, most castles, manors, villages, and religious houses could have had a local pigsty because the cost of owning it was relatively low.11 Since pigs were exploited for meat alone, raising them did not give any benefits beyond food, which might account for their perhaps being a higher-status speciality item.12 The household roll from the year 1265 for the household of Eleanor de Montfort, countess of Leicester and Pembroke in England, allows glimpses into the high-status consumption of pigs and pig products. Eleanor’s clerks recorded the items purchased or consumed from the castle’s stock by the kitchen every day.13 There are regular entries for the consumption of bacon from the castle larder: four on 6th April, two on 9th April, two on 13th April, eight on 14th April, etc. These numbers refer to a side or rack of bacon, not one piece, but it is unclear how large these slabs were. One entry, dated 28th July, shows the purchase of pigs’ trotters, or feet. Some of the entries indicate that a whole pig was taken by the kitchen. More than 20 pigs were recorded in the five months covered by the roll. These were probably pigs that were then processed into bacon and other cuts by the kitchen to stock the larder. The source of the pig was noted: sometimes they came from the stock of the castle and sometimes they were brought from a subsidiary estate. Some pigs were also purchased for cash, such as the pigs purchased for fourteen pence on 18th June and for two shillings and six pence on 21st June. Overall, the roll gives the impression that pigs were regularly consumed in the noble household. There might have been changes in pork consumption over the Middle Ages. The percentage of pig bones goes steadily downward in England from the period before the Norman Conquest (ninth–tenth centuries) to the period after the Black Death (fourteenth–sixteenth centuries), although this may be a relic of the relative increase in production of other animals rather than a decrease in the number of pigs eaten.14 But it is difficult to interpret the archaeological evidence. Because bone assemblages have 45

The Medieval Pig biases – different disposal, preservation, and recovery based on the animal in question – it is possible that more pigs were consumed than the archaeological evidence indicates.15 Pig bones may not show up in the archaeological record because they are slaughtered younger, when the bones are softer, so the bones have a higher rate of decay than other animals’, and/or because pig meat is often salted, and salted pork produces no bones at the point of consumption.16 The other thing that might have happened with pig bones is their conversion into goods. Archaeological finds of worked pig bones indicate that long bones from pigs’ feet were turned into clasps and pins, as well as toys.17 In spite of questions over the archaeological evidence for the volume of pigs consumed, pigs were, as shown in previous chapters, a standard feature of the urban landscape, both as animals sold in numbers at market and as inhabitants of small-scale backyard pig pens, and they were produced in droves in the countryside. All these pigs were raised for meat. And to be turned into meat, they of course needed to be slaughtered.

Slaughtering pigs Most medieval pigs would have been one to two years old when slaughtered. Because of their large litters, few adult pigs are needed as breeding stock to maintain the production of meat. This is reflected in the small number of adult pig bones recovered in medieval excavations. Instead, nearly all bones come from sub-adults, which is the optimum age for meat production. Younger animals would probably have been preferred for fresh pork consumption over older animals, which are more suited for processing as cured meat. Because of limited food supply in winter, the slaughtering season took place at the end of autumn. As French historian Georges Duby remarked, ‘There was a mass killing of pigs because their meat could be salted, one reason incidentally why this commodity was so important to the rural economy.’18 By allowing the pigs to gorge on nuts and mast before the slaughter, the amount of meat and fat could be greatly increased. Because pigs normally had their piglets between March and May, if the pigs were killed after the autumn feeding for winter meat preservation they would either be seven to nine months or 18 to 20 months old at slaughter.19 Archaeological evidence appears to confirm that this was standard. For example, some sites in Yorkshire indicate that most pigs were killed at about 18 months old, while in others they were about two years old.20 Investigations in Dürres, Albania, also show butchering in the second year.21 In late medieval Basque towns swine remains indicate 46

On the Plate that slaughtered animals were typically immature (but not newborn) or young adults.22 Suckling pig was a delicacy, but most pigs were fattened before slaughter.23 Although it appears that slaughter before maturity was common, some places did not follow this trend. Archaeological evidence from medieval Tuscany points to the survival of some pigs into their third year, although most were killed when between one and two years old, as was usual elsewhere.24 In Norway about three-quarters of the pigs were older than two years at the time of slaughter in both Oslo and Trondheim, with three and a half to five years being the normal age at death in Oslo.25 Males and females may have also been slaughtered at different rates. This would particularly hold true at breeding sites such as West Cotton, England, where many more female bones were found, indicating that it was a producer site for breeding and potentially had a market orientation.26 On the other hand, there was no reason to keep around more than one boar for a herd of pigs, so males would normally be castrated, fattened, and killed as soon as it was profitable to do so. While some households could kill their family pig at home, this was not the most common thing to do. In general, professional butchers were called upon. Medieval butchery was a regulated trade with guild status. In Florence, Italy, taxes were collected multiple times on each animal to be slaughtered: when it entered the town, when it was sold, and when it was slaughtered. The tax on each pig butchered was 18 denari, twice as much as that on sheep and goats, although only a third of the cost of cattle.27 Butchery was a dirty business and, by the late medieval period, royal and town governments heavily regulated the profession and tried to control where activities happened within city walls.28 The butchers of Coventry, England, for example, were not permitted to slaughter animals in the street or tie up animals outside.29 Coventry was not alone in forbidding street slaughter. King Charles VI of France ordered the demolition of the meat market near his Châtelet in Paris because of ‘the filth of the slaughtering and skinning of beasts’ and ordered that those kinds of activities must move to places ‘less dangerous to the public health’.30 According to the financial rolls, York fined three butchers in 1475 for slaughtering animals in the street, contrary to city ordinances.31 Because medieval pigs had bristles, their carcasses needed to be either scalded or singed to remove the hairs before further processing. This was a messy process. Scalding involved pouring boiling water over the pig carcass, which loosened the bristles, after which the hair was scraped off, the organs removed, and edible entrails cleaned of faeces (Figure 15). Some illustrations show the pig in the butcher’s furnace (Figure 16) or on an open fire to get rid of the bristles. The need to remove the bristles

47

Figure 15: In the left room, one butcher empties intestines, while another singes a pig to remove the hairs. In the room on the right, a butcher wearing an apron slits the throat of a pig. Portable Benedictine psalter made in Ghent about 1320, Bodl MS Douce 5, fol 7r. Image courtesy of The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

On the Plate

Figure 16: A butcher holds an axe over the head of a pig while another has been placed in an oven or furnace to singe off the bristles. Book of Hours, c. 1318, SaintOmer, France, BL, Add. MS 36684, fol. 11v. Image in public domain courtesy of British Library.

would have been one compelling reason to take the household pig to the local butcher rather than attempting a home slaughter. This process also produced filth. Medieval urbanites were quite concerned about the sanitary conditions in their towns and many towns attempted to strictly control waste disposal within the urban space.32 In Coventry, England, a mayoral proclamation of 1421 required that all pig slaughter took place at the common scalding house, which was located along the local river next to a latrine house. This was specifically to avoid scalding wastes being created elsewhere. The inherent problem of scalding waste generation is evident in a complaint from 1370, which was brought in London against a butcher and his wife for having a scalding house in their tenement, because the water used in the scalding process, mixed with blood and hair, was ejected into a ditch, causing a vile stench. At least using a common scalding house avoided replicating the waste problem throughout town.33 Local governments explicitly forbade butchers from throwing pig butchery waste into rivers because of water contamination.34 Blood was of particular concern. The Coventry council specifically ordered each butcher to ‘keep his door clean from blood and other filth’.35 In fourteenth-century Lucca, Italy, allowing animal blood to flow into a public space was punishable by a fine; officials who failed to stop animal blood discharges could also be fined.36 Blood takes centre stage in late medieval images of pig slaughter (Figures 14 and 17) and, as such, it becomes a signifier not just of nature but of culture.37 There are practical reasons for bleeding: the blood can be 49

The Medieval Pig collected for use in foodstuffs, such as blood sausage, and bleeding before slaughter allows fresh meat to be kept longer. Bleeding is also a practice culturally situated in the Mosaic tradition of pouring out blood as part of the sacrifice; this blood is taboo for consumption yet can be used as a ritualistic purifying agent.38 Medieval Europeans (and indeed modern European peoples) have continued to practise bleeding. Noëlie Vialles’ remarkable anthropological study of French industrial slaughterhouses reveals how the process of separating blood from meat turns the animal’s body from corpse into de-animated, usable products. Bleeding makes the flesh bloodless while making the blood visible. This creates a paradox, since ‘all visible blood is an image of present life and a sign of potential death’.39 Vialles argues that butchers involved in the bleeding have thus historically been thought of as violent and brutal, as stained by the blood of their victims, even though they are making a product for wider consumption. Blood for later consumption required careful handling during the slaughtering process to ensure its cleanliness. In some of the pig slaughter images in medieval calendars urban sanitation controls appear to be in force. The pig is sometimes being bled within a domestic room with some kind of tile floor. Although some images place the slaughter in the street of a rural town, others are more obviously a dedicated butchery space. In one sixteenth-century depiction the pig to be slaughtered has been placed on a table with a rope tied around its snout.40 A fifteenth-century Book of Hours, made in southern France, contains a richly detailed image of a pig lying on the floor while four individuals work on butchering it: one slits the throat while holding down the front legs, another holds the pan to catch the gushing blood, the third holds the head up, and the fourth holds down the back legs (Figure 17).41 The two individuals in front are wearing aprons and the one cutting the throat is wearing a mask covering his mouth and nose. A tub, presumably filled with hot water for scalding, and two other containers stand ready for use. The scene is clearly placed in a room with white walls and a timbered roof. An open door is visible behind the action. The scene is so rich in detail, and different from other simpler depictions of the same activities, that the artist must have previously observed the process being shown.

Filling the larder A ninth-century text from Tuscany divides the year into the ‘time of acorns’ (tempus de glande) and the ‘time of lard’ (tempus de laride).42 While the time of acorns was a period of preparing animals to become food, the time of 50

On the Plate

Figure 17: Pig butchery. Book of Hours, France, c. 1440–1450. Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.358, fol. 12r. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum. New York.

lard was a period of keeping animal bodies preserved as food. After the fattening time in the autumn, more pigs would be slaughtered than could be eaten immediately. This meant that the larder (lardum) would be filled, not only with pig lard but also with preserved meats. In spite of the relatively small percentage of pig bones in archaeological finds, the regularity of pork consumption is attested to in medieval recipe collections. A fourteenth-century Parisian householder wrote detailed instructions on pork preservation, including blood for black pudding, chitterlings (cooked pig intestine), sausage, and salting various cuts of pork.43 In medieval Poland, pork preparations such as ham (szoldre), sausage (salsucia), and blood pudding (farcimina) were commonplace; towards the end of the fifteenth century small sausages similar to frankfurters appear in Polish sources as well.44 A late fourteenth-century Italian household shows that pig products were a staple of the kitchen: pork haunches were 51

Figure 18: A butcher at work. Sausages hang to dry; fresh meat is cut up. Bonmont Psalter, c. 1260, Besançon BM MS0054, fol. 6. Image courtesy of IRHT-CNRS.

On the Plate salted, hams smoked, sausages stuffed, and pork gelatine stiffened.45 Cuts of meat and sausages were hung to cure in butcher shops and in kitchens (Figure 18). Pig intestines were used for making sausages of all types – the filling could be chicken, liver, and even cheese with herbs. The Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum from the twelfth or thirteenth century specifically calls pig intestine a good food contra other animal intestines.46 A Torta Parmigiana recipe, for example, included pork intestines stuffed ‘with good herbs and cheese’ and then boiled; pork fat was also used liberally in this recipe.47 Entrails could also be fried in bacon fat, according to the late thirteenth-century Viandier French recipe collection.48 Even a pig’s head could be used to make a stew with eggs, pepper, saffron and vinegar, according to a Middle English recipe.49 Chiquart Amiczo, chef of the duke of Savoy, wrote a collection of recipes in 1420, many of which feature pork. For example, his pork rissoles were made by frying ground pork, combining it with spiced cooked figs, prunes, and dates, and making patties that were then breaded and fried in pork fat. To make the rissoles worthy of the duke’s table, they were then gilded with gold and sprinkled with sugar.50 This kind of fried pork patty appears in other cookbooks too, such as a fifteenth-century English example that flavours the pork with dates, powdered ginger, pepper, saffron and salt.51 Both Chiquart’s main dishes and sauces relied on pork, often including bacon for flavour. Chiquart’s almond–leek sauce was made by boiling leeks and bacon in bouillon and then combining the leeks, bouillon, and ground almonds to make a pureed sauce.52 The bacon in this recipe was used only as flavouring. Lard, which is fat extracted from pigs, was a staple of medieval cooking.53 It appears in several recipes of the earliest known medieval recipe collection, the thirteenth-century Danish Harpestreng cookbook, as a cooking fat (smolt) for preparing chicken.54 In Chiquart’s collection, pork lard is specifically recommended for frying onions and meat in two rabbit recipes, among others.55 Lard was the fat of choice in the early Middle Ages, although it appears to have been gradually supplanted by butter as a fat in the late medieval period.56 Using pig bones for soup stock may also have been common. Archaeological evidence from southern France indicates that long bones were cut into chunks, or the ends separated during the butchery process.57 Bone sections were saved, then later used in prolonged cooking recipes to add fat to the liquid. The use of bones in this way could partially explain why so few pig bones are typically found in middens. Pork was prepared both at home and by marketplace cooks. Pasties, sausages, and puddings of pork are all mentioned in legal records from Norwich, England, typically because the seller was found selling a product that was considered unhealthy. For example, sellers from the nearby 53

The Medieval Pig village of Sprowston were accused in 1287–1288 of using diseased pigs in their sausages and puddings, and the cooks of Norwich were accused of reheating meat-filled pasties that were two or three days old.58 Pigs were often slaughtered at the onset of winter, which was practical as it both avoided the need to feed them over the lean months and provided necessary nourishment for humans. But it also meant that a large amount of meat would be produced at once. Smoking and pickling in brine were the two most common approaches to preservation. Pork was often salted and then stored in lard in wooden tubs.59 In a widely circulated fifteenth-century legend of ‘The Three Clerks’, featuring St Nicholas, a butcher murders three young clerks who are lodging with him. When the butcher discovers they have no money, the butcher’s wife suggests salting the bodies like pork: ‘pastis and pyus … for pork hy cholleth ben solde’ (pasties and pies … they should be sold as pork).60 The clerks are then butchered and stuffed into a pickling tub, whereupon St Nicholas discovers the crime and reassembles the butchered clerks before they can be turned into pies. Bacon ‘was probably the most common meat eaten by people living in rural communities’, according to medieval archaeologist Umberto Albarella.61 In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, bacon appears in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale. The widow in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is said to have eaten milk, dark bread, broiled bacon, and sometimes an egg.62 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue mentions a custom in Dunmow, Essex, of allowing a man to claim a side of bacon after the first anniversary of his marriage: The bacon was not fet for them I trow, That some men have in Essex at Donmow.

The mid-fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman alludes to the same custom: Thauk thei don hem (go) to Donemowe. Bote the devil hem helpe. To folwen for the flicche, feecheth thei hit never. Bote thei bothe be forswore that bacon thei tyne.63

While bacon was certainly standard lower-class fare, and Deschamps commented that pork ‘was not a royal meat’ (ce n’est pas viande de roy), it was also a food of the nobility.64 The English king’s court was regularly supplied with pigs for bacon. In February 1274 Edward I sent out orders to the sheriffs of each county to supply food for the court and eight of the sheriffs were told to include bacon pigs: four of them were to provide 25, four 38, and two 62. This was in addition to an earlier order that each sheriff needed to provide 40 bacon pigs, 60 swine, and two fat boars (along with 60 oxen, 60 live sheep, and 3,000 capons and hens) for the king’s coronation 54

On the Plate feast.65 Feasting on pork for Christmas was common. The Shepherd’s Play of the Chester Cycle from the fourteenth century has the shepherds in the field sitting down to a veritable feast before receiving the news of Christ’s birth.66 Bacon is the first item on the list of the festive foods, along with pig’s foot and several puddings. Bestowing particular guests with the best cut of meat was a symbol of power and prestige.67 In the Irish story of Mac Dathó’s Pig, which appears in a manuscript from the twelfth century but probably originates several centuries before, the king Mac Dathó slaughters his unbelievably large pig, which has been fed on the milk of 60 cows for seven years, according to the tale.68 The giant pig is served to the guests and a competition ensues to determine who among the guests is the bravest hero in Ireland, and thus deserving of the choice meat. It is noteworthy that the pig in this story is a domesticated pig, fed on milk. Piglets before weaning were a delicacy, although thirteenth-century Italian physician Aldebrandin of Siena believed it was unhealthy to consume milk-fed piglet meat because it was ‘more moist, more cold, and more sticky than other meats’ (plus moiste, et plus froide et plus wischeuse d’autre char).69 Basing his ideas on the medical theory of humours standard in his time, Aldebrandin considered wild boar meat to be good fare because it was hot and dry, unlike domestic pork, which was cold and moist because the animals were fed on grain.70 Cooking domestic pork on an open fire would warm and dry the meat to make it more suitable.71 The Augustinian hermit Jean Corbechon described the difference of these two meats in his Middle French Livre des propriétés des choses from 1372: The flesh of a boar is much drier and less cold than that of the domestic pig according to Isaac and that is why the boar moves more often and lives off very dry meats and in hotter air than the domestic pig, and because of this his head is tougher and his fat and flesh more delicious; and from this results that the domestic pig is hunted and chased around for a very long time when one wants to kill him, because through such movement his meat is rendered more tender and also of better taste.72

While medieval theoreticians might have disapproved of milk-fed pork meat, in the Irish story Mac Dathó and his clan clearly favoured it. Pork could be consumed on a large scale. For example, from early in the 1300s Norwegian pigs were included in international exchange.73 Large quantities of bacon pigs were used for supplying troops, as in December 1376, when the treasurer of Calais bought 100 carcasses of oxen and 400 bacon pigs from William Webbe, butcher of London, for soldiers stationed there.74 For feeding troops in Harfleur, the sheriff of Sussex was ordered to buy 1,000 bacons (these were probably sides of bacon rather than whole pigs for making bacon) in Kent and Sussex in January 1416; in April 1416, 2,000 more were commissioned from him and two London 55

The Medieval Pig men were commissioned for another 1,000; 200 more were ordered in May 1416.75 These kinds of numbers reinforce the idea that pigs must have been produced on a commercial scale in the Middle Ages.

Versatile, edible pigs Pigs were versatile in life and in death. They could be fattened in both the countryside and the city on all kinds of scraps and waste, grains, and nuts. That fat could then be converted into human consumables through butchery and cooking. Whether turned into sausage, bacon, lard, or fresh pork cuts, the pig became highly coveted calories as table fare for medieval people. This was a good deal for the people – but, of course, we can also turn our gaze around to see this from the pig’s point of view. The pig’s adaptability and ability to be fattened quickly was a death sentence. It probably would not reach its second birthday (although that is still a much longer life than modern commercial porkers). Its final resting place was on the plate. As we conclude this discussion of pigs on the plate, it is worth remembering that pigs were edible to most medieval Europeans, but not all. Both Jews and Muslims considered the pig to be an unclean animal and pork as taboo. These members of European society would not have raised pigs or consumed their products because of their beliefs. While medieval plays such as the Prima Pastorum of the Towneley Cycle and the De pastoribus of the Chester Cycle show the shepherds, who would have been Jews at the time, feasting on pork products, those meals are representative of Christian practice, not Jewish.76 As the next chapter will show, even Christians had to reconcile their consumption of pork with contradictory notions of pigs as unclean, gluttonous, and sinful creatures.

56

5 In the Mind

P

igs lived in the medieval countryside and city, but they also inhabited the medieval mind. Paradoxically, while the pig was a blessing, providing meat for the winter, it was also an animal representing sin and debauchery. Camille observed that images of pigs show ‘no distinction between sacred and profane’.1 This chapter explores the place of the symbolic pig in medieval society, focusing on these contradictions. Medieval European Christian notions of the pig were founded on biblical gospel stories and the medieval theological interpretation of these. There are two well-known gospel stories about pigs. The first is that of Jesus driving a legion of demons from a possessed man into a herd of swine, who then leap off a cliff and drown (Matthew 8:28–32; Mark 5:1–13; Luke 8:26–33). In this story, often called the Miracle of the Gadarene Swine, the pigs were innocent bystanders feeding nearby on a hillside while being guarded by swineherds. St Augustine interpreted this as indicating that Christ did not equate humans with animals, since he allowed the pigs to be inhabited by the demons and die.2 In a later interpretation of the Gadarene Swine, the thirteenth-century philosopher Albertus Magnus noted that pigs were permitted as the demon host because the pig ‘is a filthy animal, by nature, by law, by custom’.3 He explained that the pig’s nature (by which he meant its body) breaks the rules of animals: it has a divided hoof like cattle, but does not chew cud; has nipples along the length of the body, instead of under the hind legs like cows; gives birth to many babies, unlike sheep and cows; and has soft flesh covered with bristles, rather than soft hair. He then noted that by law under Leviticus 11:7 the pig is unclean. Finally, he explained that custom deems the pig unclean because it rolls in the mud, nourishing itself on the unclean. The common pictural composition for the Gadarene Swine miracle includes Jesus exorcising the demons from the man and the pigs in the water, perhaps based on Ottonian representations from around the year 1000, which were probably, in turn, based on now lost Carolingian models.4 Such images appear, for example, in the Codex Egberti of the late 900s, the Aachen Gospels of Otto III from around the year 1000, and the Getty’s Anglo-Saxon leaves of around 1000.5 On one of the Magdeburg Ivories, commissioned in 968, three pensive pigs stand next to the possessed man rather than being shown entering the water (Figure 19). Images of the exorcism of the demons into the swine appear in later medieval manuscripts, such as the

The Medieval Pig

Figure 19: The Miracle of the Gadarene Swine. Part of the series of Magdeburg Ivories, mid-900s. Collection of Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt.

fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman Holkham Picture Bible. The pigs in this image are shown in two positions within the story: they are under a tree as the demons enter them and then they are drowning in the sea. The pigs are integral to the miracle narrative, although they were simply bystanders that became involved in the miracle. The second biblical text often referenced by medieval commentators is the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is related by Jesus to his followers in the Gospel of Luke (15:11–32). In the narrative of the Prodigal Son, 58

In the Mind

Figure 20: The Prodigal Son is watching over a herd of pigs (right) and knocking down acorns for them (left). Thirteenth-century stained glass, Chartres Cathedral, France. Photograph by author.

after the son has left home and squandered his money, he gets a job as a swineherd. This is a debasing position, as pigs are considered unclean by the Jews, and the sad state of affairs is only heightened when the son has nothing left to eat except pig slop. It is at this low point that the son decides to return home. The story was a favourite of stained-glass designers for Gothic cathedrals.6 At Chartres a large window is dedicated to the story, with two sections showing pigs: the son knocking down acorns for the herd, and the son eating food from the swine trough alongside the pigs (Figure 20). At Sens, the son, carrying a standard pigging stick, is shown with a herd of six pigs in an open woodland. These windows more or less replicate the scenes of autumnal pig feeding that appeared in many medieval calendars. This reveals an underlying tension between the fact that medieval Christians would happily consume the pictured pigs, whereas the prodigal son was an outcast for even being near them. In both significant gospel narratives involving pigs, the pigs themselves are seen only as a resource: they become the home of demons and they are herded for potential meat. The idea of pigs as demonic themselves – or at least in communion with the devil – appears in local folklore rather than in the Gospels. In the probable ninth-century Middle Irish saga Cath 59

The Medieval Pig Maige Mucrime (‘The Battle of Mag Mucrime’), the name of the area (Mag Mucrime = Plain of Pig-Counting) is explained by a tale of magic pigs that ascend from Hell though the cave of Crúachain and cannot be counted.7 Although they can be seen, and they cause seven years of damage to all agricultural areas that they pass through, all attempts to count them fail. The pig was thus a portent of bad things to come and a co-worker of the devil. Similarly, in the Icelandic Vilmundar saga viðutan a herd of 50 swine is called out of the forest by witchcraft to fight against the heroes of the story.8 There is a negative connotation to the pigs’ lives, which are seen as dirty and debased because of the association with the devil and witchcraft.

Saintly associations Although pigs possessed general negative connotations in the biblical texts, they were also paradoxically associated with saints in the Middle Ages. St Anthony, an Egyptian hermitic saint who lived from the mid-third to the mid-fourth century, is regularly shown with a pig in images made after 1300 (Figure 21). Of the textual lives of St Anthony, neither the earliest vita written by Athanasius of Alexandria between 356 and 362 nor the much later biography in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend mention pigs. Yet by the early fourteenth century they are a fixed iconographic attribute of this saint.9 The association appears to arise because the late medieval Hospitaller Orders of St Anthony kept pigs in urban centres. Pigs were often gifted to the order as financial support, probably in exchange for prayers.10 The Order of St Anthony ran hospitals, and often its patients suffered ergotism, a vascular disease caused by a fungal infection of rye and other grains that came to be known as St Anthony’s fire. Pigs may have played a role in the patient’s treatment, by replacing grain consumption with meat.11 In addition, swine lard was probably used as an ingredient of an ointment known as St Anthony’s balsam, which was used as a topical treatment for ergotism patients.12 The Order of St Anthony received the privilege of owning free-ranging urban pigs in a papal bull of Innocent IV in 1256, and a bell in the ear was adopted as the mode of recognition for these pigs.13 The practice of letting St Anthony’s pigs roam freely in urban centres is attested in places as far apart as London, England, and Zadar, Croatia.14 Goslar, Germany, a medieval city with 6,000 or 7,000 inhabitants, also allowed the Hospitallers of St Anthony to have free-roaming pigs. A document from 1468 in the Goslar city archive shows that there were two pigs running free without a leash, but they had bells in their ears to mark them as St Anthony’s pigs. The common people looked after these pigs, feeding them with scraps. When the pigs were 60

In the Mind

Figure 21: St Anthony’s pig wearing a bell. Mural from c. 1300, St Matthew’s church, Murau, Austria. Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber, CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

slaughtered the meat was given to the poor supported by the Hospitallers. While Goslar allowed only two pigs, larger cities with Anthonian orders allowed more: Lubeck in 1465 had 20, Munich in 1475 had four, Bamberg in 1481 had six, and Würzburg in 1502 had six.15 Some people might have tried to take advantage of the monks’ privilege to have free-running swine. In 1311 Roger of Winchester, who was renting a building from the House of St Anthony in London, was discovered to be claiming free-range rights for his own pigs by putting St Anthony’s bell on them. He was required as part of a legal proceeding to swear that: he would avow no swine, found wandering about the streets of the City, in the name of St Antonine, as being alms given for motives of charity by any person to the said house; and that he would not put any bells on the necks of his own swine or of others, either himself or by any other person: nor, to the utmost of his power, would he allow such bells to be put on any other swine than those which for charity should happen to have been given to the said house.16

61

The Medieval Pig St Anthony became identified as the patron saint of swineherds – and pigs more generally – because of these urban pigs. Although the original hagiography of the saint did not include a pig, a mid-fourteenth-century text, reportedly from Barcelona, included a miracle of a sow bringing a sick piglet to Anthony to be healed.17 The miracle narrative was probably inspired by the St Anthony urban pigs rather than the other way around. The same goes for imagery. Many late medieval images of St Anthony include a pig at his feet; sometimes the pig is even wearing a bell. The bells may have been placed around the neck or in the ear. A Book of Hours from the Low Countries, dated to the 1480s, shows a St Anthony’s pig with a bell pierced through the ear.18 In late medieval Estonia the veneration of St Anthony was manifested in St Anthony’s Day (tõnisepäev) becoming a folk holiday of the pig.19 Although medieval evidence for the practices is scarce, early modern commentators in Estonia described pigs being sacrificed in the name of St Anthony as part of the general festivities. Because the saint’s feast day was in the winter, on 17th January, the ritual pig slaughter was probably also tied to the annual agricultural calendar and the eating of pigs over the winter, as described in the previous chapter. Anthony was not the only saint associated with pigs: according to a vita written by Cogitosus around 650, St Brigit of Ireland was a swineherd as a young girl, as mentioned in Chapter 2. Two of the miracles in the vita involve pigs. In one story a wild boar, which was running from hunters, ended up rushing into her pig herd. Brigit blessed the boar and it stayed with the herd from then on, which her biographer interprets as a sign that ‘even brute animals and beasts were unable to resist her words and her will’.20 In another miracle wolves acted as swineherds, leading a herd of pigs along the road toward Brigit. The wolves had been ‘working hard at the task of rounding up and driving the pigs’ for two or three days when Brigit’s messengers encountered the wolves and unharmed pigs on the road.21 In both miracles, pigs are protected through the saint. Other saints could also associate themselves in positive ways with pigs through miracles. In parallel with the miracle of St Nicholas, who raised the clerks out of the pork salting barrel (discussed in the previous chapter), even pigs might be raised from the dead. In the late eleventhcentury life of St Malo, a young swineherd had killed a mother sow by accident; the saint took compassion on the swineherd, who would have been reprimanded by his master, and resurrected the sow.22 St Malo recognised the value of the pig to the swineherd and the economy more generally in his story. Pigs appear with saints because they were a valuable commodity, needing protection in both the countryside and the city. The associations of pigs with saints did not make the pigs

62

In the Mind themselves saintly, but they did indicate that pigs, like the ones herded by the prodigal son, were not innately evil creatures. There are, however, other stories of saints and pigs that paint pigs in a much more negative light. In two vitae, by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, St Francis of Assisi, who is generally considered a nature lover, cursed a sow that had killed a newborn lamb. Francis considered the lamb to be innocent, like Jesus, the Lamb of God, so the pig was a murderer. As soon as he uttered the curse ‘may no man or beast ever eat of her’, the sow became sick and eventually died. The carcass was discarded in the monastic moat.23 The pig in this story had committed a crime that polluted her flesh. While ‘a pig does no good in its life’, as the poet Deschamps said, this pig was also not permitted to do good in death. Her whole existence had been meaningless.

Virtues and vices Just as pigs in the Bible and saints’ stories might be seen in both positive and negative contexts, domestic pigs and their wild cousins could be associated paradoxically with both virtues and vices in the medieval mind. The pig as allegory of human behaviour was facilitated by the resemblance between pigs and humans anatomically, which had been noted as early as Aristotle. The early twelfth-century anatomical manual Anatomia Porci noted that, although animals such as monkeys might appear outwardly like humans, no animal was more similar to humans in internal structure than pigs.24 Dissection of the pig could replace human dissection to understand interior bodily design. There was an oft-repeated pun using the Latin words porcus (pig) and corpus (body) interchangeably, which made the comparison to humans particularly easy, though this was always done as a way of affirming the superiority of humans. As Steel has argued, ‘paradoxically, the pig’s very likeness to humans further confirms the pig’s status as the most animal of animals, precisely because its likeness to humans demands that it be treated like a pig in order to be one.’25 Wild boar were often portrayed as noble animals, appearing as heraldic emblems in the Middle Ages. The boar was the sacred beast of the Nordic god Freyr and was ridden by the goddess Freyja, and thus is associated with growth and fertility as well as nobility in the sagas.26 Tacitus wrote that Germanic tribes wore armour with emblems of the wild boar.27 A biography of Alfred the Great (d. 899) compared him in battle to ‘the rush of the wild boar’.28 Romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries extol the boar as a symbol of valour, with tales such as Tristan fighting like a boar among sheep in Gottfried von Strassburg’s thirteenth-century version of Tristan’s 63

The Medieval Pig romance.29 In the tales of King Arthur he emblazoned his shield with the head of a boar, and the House of York from 1461 to 1485 displayed a white walking boar.30 Both implied that the boar was a fierce and worthy opponent. In Lüneburg, Germany, a wild sow was credited with the discovery of the town’s salt mine.31 According to legend, two men saw a white wild sow and decided to pursue it. It turned out that she was white because salt crystals were stuck in her fur. They found the salt spring where she had wallowed. Lüneburg ended up making its fortune as a salt provider from that spring from the twelfth century. By the end of the Middle Ages a reliquary for the ‘salzsau’ holding a couple of wild boar bones was set up in the Lüneburg town hall. This was certainly an example of a virtuous wild pig. At the same time, the wild boar could also stand in for an enemy. Although King Arthur is the Boar of Cornwall, the king Twrch Trwyth was turned into a black boar because of his sins and driven into the sea.32 Evil characters in the Icelandic sagas deploy shapeshifting into either a boar or sow as a tactic to become stronger for battle or evade capture.33 In the fourteenth-century Middle French hunting treatise Les Livres du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio, the boar is not only a dangerous opponent but also a beste noire, identified with Satan. The text expounds on ten characteristics of the boar, which are interpreted allegorically.34 He is black and bristling, like people lacking spiritual light. He is wrathful, like those lacking in charity and humility. He is too prideful to flee his pursuers, like sinners who go towards instead of away from the devil. He turns on his pursuers, like men who turn on each other. He is armed with tusks, like men who carry daggers. He runs with a downward head, like those obsessed with low thoughts. He wallows in the mud, like those who bathe in the filth of the Antichrist. He is cross-toed, like someone deformed and scorned by God. Finally, he ends up deep under the earth that he has rooted up, being eaten by worms as all mortals are. In addition to these traits, in Modus et Ratio the boar speaks on behalf of the Antichrist, acting as a false counsellor who exhorts others to sin. This characterisation of the boar as a fountain of evil speech is related to the boar’s role in earlier literature. Marcelle Thiébaux has tied this to the boar as a symbol of the Germanic heathen, deserving defeat.35 Early Christian thinkers, such as Clement of Alexandria, used the pig as a symbol of sin, particularly of a sexual kind: ‘The pig refers to pleasure-loving and unclean desire for food and lewd and defiled license in sex, always itching for matter and lying in mud, fattening for slaughter and destruction.’36 Pigs are known for their fecundity and thus could be tied to sexual excess. A York city ordinance from 1301 equated the transgressions of pigs with prostitutes: ‘No one shall keep pigs which go in the streets by day or night, nor shall any prostitute stay in the city.’37 Anyone who captured a wandering pig could kill it and cut off its hooves; the bailiff would imprison prostitutes and seize the roof timbers and door of the prostitute’s house.38 That pigs and 64

In the Mind

Figure 22: Venus, signifying lust, rides a swine in an illustration accompanying Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine. BnF Francais 376, fol. 66v. Image courtesy of BnF, Département des Manuscrits.

prostitutes are mentioned within the same line reveals a connection in the medieval mind. The pig was linked to lustiness through this association.39 The image of the spinning sow (truie qui file) is documented on house signs in many medieval French towns (two survive in place in Chartres and Malestroit). Camille noted that spinning was a female task and that the spindle can be thought of as being fondled.40 Spinning then takes on sexual symbolism. The choice of a pig as the spinner is tied to the notion of the pig’s sexual lust. The pig was even the animal of the goddess Venus in the Middle Ages.41 Venus, signifying lust, appears in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine riding a pig (Figure 22).42 Camille contrasts the spinning sow with the Virgin Mary symbolism common at the time: ‘The spinning pig, whether it articulates the power of women 65

The Medieval Pig in rites of sexuality and fertility or their dangerous status as unclean and malefic, does so in relation not only to the Virgin Mary carved on the same house but also to all the images of the virgins that inhabited the city including the cathedral.’43 The pig signs placed on houses were a reminder of the pig’s sexuality as construed by the medieval mind. Sows also appear as bagpipe players on misericords from the fifteenth century onwards in England and in manuscripts such as the Trés Riches Heures of the Duc de Barry (before 1416). According to codicologist Kathleen L. Scott, this medieval iconography ‘represented the ugly-sounding pipes in the arms of an ugly-sounding animal’.44 The bagpipe might also be linked to the pig as a phallic symbol.45 In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Miller, who plays the bagpipes, is likened physically to a sow – his beard is as red as a sow and his warty nose is as red as the bristles of a sow’s ears – to make this connection.46 When the pig is being ridden by an ape or playing bagpipes in images, the artist may be referring to sins of greed and lust as defined by Clement of Alexandria.47 In addition to sexual deviance, pigs were attributed a gluttonous nature. The vast majority of images of pigs from the Middle Ages show them eating acorns. As seen in Chapter 3, their voracious appetites often made pigs the target of urban controls. In the late thirteenth-century fable of ‘The Moral Lesson Taught by the Ants’, swine ravage the grain that the hardworking ants have saved up for the winter.48 According to the third-century Roman author Aelian, pigs were so gluttonous that they would even eat their own young.49 This was (and is) a real concern in raising pigs, since sows will eat their young if too many are born in one litter. George Druce studied the appearance of the sow and piglets motif in English churches, where they commonly appear on bosses, misericords, cornices and corbels.50 In some images, the sow is feeding the piglets in a manner similar to that seen in bestiary illustrations from the thirteenth century (see Figure 4),51 but in others the sow plays a musical instrument and the piglets dance. Pigs making music and dancing appears particularly on misericords, but also in other ecclesiastical contexts including bosses, gargoyles, and stained glass. There are no images of the sow eating the piglets, but there still may be an implication that the piglets are eating greedily or dancing in excess. While Isidore of Seville had only remarked that pigs were dirty (‘For it plunges into mud and mire and smears itself with slime’), later medieval commentators would pick up on Aristotle’s statement that ‘pigs also fatten the better by being allowed to wallow in mud’ to associate mud with gluttony.52 Corbechon made this connection explicit in Livre des propriétés des choses: ‘The sow is a foul and gluttonous beast which runs in the muck as Aristotle says.’53 The pig’s gluttony could lead to it being rejected as meat – the only reason for its existence. In the seventh-century Irish penitential of Adomnan, pork was considered inedible if the pig had consumed 66

Figure 23: Casting flowers (rather than pearls) before swine. Late fifteenthcentury carved wood misericord, Toledo Cathedral, Spain. Photograph by author.

The Medieval Pig human flesh or blood or even carrion, unless it had been consumed so long ago that the pig had lost the fat created by the consumption (i.e. that the carrion’s influence had been expelled from the animal).54 Swine were associated with additional negative qualities, including being prideful and base. Albertus Magnus noted that ‘pigs are men devoid of voice and reason, addicted to muddy actions, feeding on the mountain of pride. And unless any man live like a pig, the devil does not receive power over him.’55 Jesus employed swine in the proverb ‘Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine’ (Matthew 7:6). Pigs in this parable are undiscerning – they have no appreciation for things of value. Dante Alighieri deploys the proverb in Il Convivio, to talk about revealing one’s true purpose in an action: ‘Here it should be noted that, as our Lord has said, one should do not cast pearls before swine, for it does them no good and brings harm to the pearls.’56 In medieval images of this parable, instead of pearls, there are often flowers being cast before the pigs. Examples are often carved as misericords, including in Toledo Cathedral (Figure 23) and Rouen Cathedral.57 This mixed-up imagery was the result of a mistranslation: instead of pearls (margaritas), the artists depicted daisies (margarites).58 The pig does not appreciate the flowers (or pearls) for their beauty, instead consuming them greedily. While the wild boar had some redeeming qualities as a strong and brave animal, pigs were associated with filth, gluttony, sexual lust, and pride.

The Jewish pig In the later Middle Ages European Christians came to associate pigs, with all their vices of uncleanliness, gluttony, and lustfulness, with Jewish Europeans. The Jewish faith considered pork unclean because pigs do not fulfil the requirements of clean animals – having cloven hooves and chewing the cud – as written in Leviticus 11:7. But although Christianity had grown out of Judaism, the ban on pork consumption was quickly rejected. In the biblical Book of Maccabees, which tells of a revolt by the Jews against the Seleucid ruler Antiochus V in the second century AD, the king had required sacrificing pigs and other unclean animals and eating unclean food. But many of the Jews chose not to eat the unclean food and were punished with death (1 Maccabees 1:52–53). While the image in Maccabees might give a positive reading of the Jews for not eating the unclean pork, Christians almost always negatively associated Jews with pigs and their dietary prohibitions against it. The Israeli historian Isaiah Shachar traced the linkage of pig and Jew in medieval image primarily to De rerum naturis (also called De universo) by 68

In the Mind Hrabanus Maurus, composed between 842 and 847, which refers to the Jews as impure like the pig. Hrabanus based most of his encyclopaedic entry of the pig on Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. In Isidore’s text, which was later picked up by standard bestiary texts, swine signify sinners and unclean persons, in particular those who confess their sins but then repeat the same sin. In this way, the sinner who returns to his sin is like the washed sow that ‘bathed in a slough of mud, becomes again more filthy’.59 Hrabanus supplemented Isidore with information about the pigs from other texts, including the Carolingian exegetic glossary Clavis Melitonis and the sixth-century Expositio Psalmorum, by Cassiodorus.60 He moved beyond these texts, however, in reinterpreting these sources to make a novel textual association between pigs and Jews, writing that animals ‘described as unclean, stand for those of the Jewish people’.61 Since his De rerum naturis was a leading encyclopaedia from the ninth century onwards, its portrayal of the tie between Jew and pig would have significant consequences. Imagery developed from the thirteenth century onwards of the ‘Judensau’, a sow with Jews suckling on her teats, in German architectural sculpture and decoration.62 The sow and piglets motif appeared commonly in English churches from the thirteenth century, as noted above, and there are even examples in Germany in the twelfth century, but it is the later German images that turn the piglets into Jews.63 The Judensau also appeared in Bohemia and Moravia, where the oldest depictions are architectural sculpture. Later, book illumination appeared that employed the same iconography.64 The Judensau functioned as an abusive stereotype that remained popular for hundreds of years in Germany. Although the meaning of the Judensau shifts somewhat over the late medieval period, all representations make the basic claim that ‘the Jews belong to the sow, the sow to the Jews’.65 Through this association, the Jews were labelled as something less than human. The Judensau motif takes several forms. Excellent photographs of these can be found in Shachar’s Judensau, so a description of a few early examples he includes will suffice. On a column capital dated to c. 1230 in the Brandenburg Cathedral, four piglets and a human are suckling from a sow with a human head wearing a pointed Jewish hat. In Xanten Cathedral the sow is not a hybrid or marked as a Jew, but there is a small man wearing a Jewish hat at the sow’s teat and another man standing in front of her while she bites the hat. In St Peter at Wimpfen im Thal, a late thirteenth-century gargoyle is shaped as a sow with the gutter spout as the sow’s mouth, with a piglet suckling on one side and a Jewish man suckling on the other. As these descriptions demonstrate, the sow itself is sometimes, but not always, suggested as Jewish. The humans suckling the sow are indicated as Jews by the inclusion of a distinctive 69

The Medieval Pig pointy hat and sometimes beards and side-locks (Figure 24).66 In the Christian context, these images are representations of vices (greed or gluttony in particular) and sin. Over time it appears that the Judensau tradition became more detailed. A woodcut from the first half of the fifteenth century expands the scene to a sow with nine Jews, four of whom are sucking the teats and three of whom are caressing the animal. Shachar argues that while the earliest Judensau were allegorical images depicting vices, later images become anti-Jewish depictions unrelated to vice per se. Extra-biblical tradition may have reinforced the Judensau motif. One apocryphal story recorded in a Muslim text of the tenth/eleventh century is told by Shachar: The Jews, tells the legend, once tried Christ’s omniscience. They hid a Jewess with children (in some versions a Jew or children alone) behind a wall (in other variants, in a pigsty, barrel, trough, oven, or pail) and asked him what was there. Jesus replied, ‘A woman with children’, to which the Jews falsely replied, ‘No, these are sow and pigs’, and mocked him. Christ said, ‘If so, let them be sow and pigs’, and the Jewess with the children were accordingly transformed.67

Another story about the child Jesus and Jews as pigs appears in an apocryphal infancy poem written in the thirteenth century. In this tale the child Jesus was looking for his playtime companions, but they had been hidden by their Jewish parents in ovens to keep them from interacting with him. When Jesus asked what had been put in the oven, the parents answered that it was swine. Jesus replied, ‘And let them be swine evermore.’68 The Jewish children then emerged from the oven as pigs, as shown in an illustration of the miracle in a French verse translation made in England and dated 1315–1325, of the Gesta infantiae salvatoris, also called the Enfances Jésus Christ (Figure 25). All of the known images of the miracle of the oven are in English manuscripts, which has led art historian Kathryn Smith to surmise that in England this takes the place of the Judensau images from the Continent.69 As a moral of the story, the author says that this incident was the reason that Jews do not eat pig, since ‘the Jews have considered each pig as a kind of brother’.70 Like the Judensau, the miracle of the oven story was probably created by Christians to explain why Jewish dietary restrictions forbade pork, and could also be used to ‘other’ and villainize the Jews. Biblical dietary laws, particularly the distinction between clean and unclean animals as practised in Judaism, were widely discussed in Christian commentaries. In the eighth-century Syrian text The Disputation of Sergius the Stylite against a Jew, the categorisation of the pig as impure is debated. The Jew in the text argues that the impurity of the pig is natural 70

Figure 24: Judensau corbel relief, early fourteenth century. Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden. Image courtesy of Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Shelfmark B_4305.

Figure 25: The children hidden in the ovens emerge as pigs in the Miracle of Jesus and the Oven. Bodl, MS Seldon Supra 38 pt 1, fol. 23r. Image courtesy of The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

In the Mind and reflected in its behaviours. The Jew asks, ‘Why do you eat the pig which is the most defiled and impure among the animals, and which the law also declares more impure and defiled than all animals. And also its appearance is abominable to look upon. For its food is every impure thing on the face of the earth?’71 Sergius answers that lots of animals eat nasty things, but are not taboo, therefore the taboo must be humanmade, not inherent. Then the debate turns to whether the pigs taken by Noah on the ark were clean or unclean. Sergius argues that highly fertile animals such as the pig were made to be eaten, otherwise there would be fewer of them. In the ninth-century Islamic writer Al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals the prohibition on eating pig meat is premised similarly to the Syrian Jew’s position: the pig is ugly, depraved, eats dung and vermin, and is dangerous, showing that the prohibition is because of the pig’s nature. Then Al-Jahiz adds a twist to the Noah’s Ark story, claiming that pigs were intentionally created by God on the ark out of elephant dung so that the pigs could eat the cat’s dung, which was accumulating on board.72 Later texts, such as a twelfth-century Latin translation of a dialogue between Mohammed and a Jew, retell this story as the reason that pigs are unclean food for both Jews and Muslims. To the Christian reader, the linkage of pig and Jew was founded on religious dietary restrictions, but the result of the taboo was not a distancing of pig and Jew, but rather a closing of the gap. The pig could stand in for, and even be, a Jew, or vice versa.

Crime and punishment Even pigs of the mind could have real-world implications. The popular association of Jews and pigs extended beyond legend to practice: legal proceedings in the German lands from the thirteenth century required Jewish participants to swear their oath while standing barefoot on a sow’s skin.73 The medieval association between Jews and pigs was not just restricted to books and images. Pigs also entered the legal world as live defendants. Much has been written about animals, especially pigs, on trial in the Middle Ages.74 From the thirteenth century onwards, some animals were brought before court to be punished for what were deemed crimes. This may sound sensational – a pig in the witness box – but animal trials in the courts have to be understood within the context of processes initiated by authorities to maintain law and order. Historian Peter Dinzelbacher has argued that animal trials were ‘attempts to relieve the disquieting and uncontrollable effects of the animal world by asserting the accustomed moral order and using a public ritual 73

The Medieval Pig meant to heal the offended society’.75 Trials were a way for society to process and make sense of destructive events perpetuated by nonhuman actors, and to resolve disputes.76 The pigs that came before medieval courts were almost always accused of murder, rather than homicide, indicating that they were accused of killing with malice and not just an unfortunate accident.77 Of the pigs on trial catalogued by Evans, killing children is the common thread of all the cases, except one in which a pig was hanged in 1394 for eating a consecrated wafer.78 The examples discussed include a young pig imprisoned in Pont de Larche in 1408 for murdering an infant;79 a pig that was hanged for murdering a child in Roumaygne;80 and another condemned to hanging for killing an infant in 1494 in St Martin de Laon.81 The criminal trial of a pig in April 1499 in Séves, France, ended with the pig sentenced to hang for the murder of a toddler aged one and a half years; the owners of the pig were fined 18 francs for negligence.82 This last case, in which the owners were fined in addition to the pig losing its life, shows how animal trials were also trials of owners. As seen in Chapter 3, violations of city ordinances that restricted where pigs could go and when they could be out were legal offences that could lead to fines or loss of property. These court proceedings fitted into that scheme. Animal trials imbued pigs with a legal personhood. They were thought of as beings that could make choices and had to be held to the consequences of those choices.83 When the monks of Sainte Geneviève ordered a pig to be publicly burned alive in 1266 for having eaten a child,84 it was punishment for a crime that the pig should have known better than to commit. When, in 1379, Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, granted a petition to pardon two herds of swine that had been imprisoned, executing only the four most guilty animals and sparing the rest, he was treating them as legal subjects on a par with humans.85 These were serious legal proceedings framed within standard medieval legal procedures. The basic assumption was that pigs had rationality and could take responsibility for their actions.86

Imagining pigs Pigs as imagined by medieval Europeans were full of contradictions. The pig was a precious resource worth saving for St Brigit and the Hospitallers of St Anthony, but it was also a creature of mud, both gluttonous and lustful, revelling in sins that should be avoided. It was dinner on the Christian table, but it was also somehow Jewish bodies and legal persons.

74

In the Mind These imagined pigs were not divorced from physical pigs. Pigs’ own animal traits – their eating habits, breeding characteristics, and behaviours such as mud wallowing – were the basis of moral judgements. The pig is present in these mental images. Yet these assessments were not really made to characterise pigs, but rather to characterise people. In the medieval Christian mind, a prostitute or a Jew could be equated to a pig through these characteristics, as a way of defining them as Other and immoral. The pig, as a commonplace animal in the Middle Ages, offered an opportunity to reflect, project, and amplify social ideas. The pig of the mind was a human construct, based in the physical reality of pigs’ lives, that allows insight into human lives.

75

6 The Pig’s Place

T

he pig was everywhere in medieval Europe. It was commonplace. It was in the countryside, in the city, on the plate, and in the mind. One would not have to look far to see a pig. They might be eating under an oak tree or out on a grassy knoll. They might be walking in the street with the swineherd close behind at their heels. They might be dismembered, for sale in the butcher shop, a potentially delicious meal for dinner. They might be on the signs hanging from the house or under the choir stalls in the cathedral, dancing, playing the bagpipes, or suckling young pigs or people. Pigs were in all these places. But what was the pig’s place? What role did pigs really have in medieval society? Perhaps the comparison of pigs with prostitutes made by the York civic ordinances is the place to start. Like medieval prostitutes, the pig was both shunned and accepted; understood as necessary while not necessarily being understood. The pig’s biological qualities – its eating habits, growth rate, and fecundity – were what made it desirable. But these same qualities also transgressed social norms, making the pig a target of moral condemnation. A paradox pervaded every place the pig went. Pigs were visible in medieval society, much more so than in our own. Highly concentrated intensive confinement systems for swine are the norm in modern industrial production. Their bodies are disciplined and controlled far from sight of the average consumer.1 Rather than being tucked away out of sight in mass piggeries, medieval pigs were co-inhabitants of rural and urban settlements. Pigs and people lived side by side. Medieval pigs’ bodies were also disciplined and controlled, but this happened largely within view of the people who would later consume their meat. Large numbers of people had a pig living in a sty on their property. Owners fed their pigs, cleaned up dung, and drove them to the market. Swineherds led them to pasture, knocked down acorns, and kept a watchful eye over them. Butchers bled them, cut them up, and emptied their intestines. Cooks prepared the meat in pasties and stews and fried the bacon and lard. The medieval human–pig relationship was physical and visceral. The relationship was also mental and emotional. We do not know what medieval pigs (or any pigs for that matter) thought about humans, but we know that medieval humans thought about pigs. Theologians argued about the origins of the pig’s unclean status and moralised piggy qualities.

The Pig’s Place Poets composed verses about the pig and likened humans to swine. Court clerks recorded their trespasses and punishments. Artists depicted realistic scenes of pig pannage and slaughter while also creating fantasies about spinning sows and Jewish pigs. Pigs were good to think with. We can find thinking with pigs in many medieval sources. Pigs are regularly the reference animal to assign characteristics to humans. In William Langland’s fourteenth-century Piers Plowman the figure of gluttony who drinks all day and eats even on fast days is also known to ‘breden as burghe swyn’ (breed like town swine) and has a stomach that grumbles like ‘two gredy sowes’ (two greedy sows).2 In Dante’s Inferno paying for crimes in hell is compared to pigs wallowing in mud: ‘How many up above now count themselves / great kings, who’ll wallow here like pigs in slime, / leaving behind foul memories of their crimes!’3 From ‘if the pig dreams, it is of food’ to ‘every man feeds the fat pig for the lard’, pigs also feature in medieval proverbial sayings beyond the well-known ‘do not cast your pearls before swine’.4 While these sayings and literary references make moral judgements about people, they also encapsulate ideas of the pig itself. The pig’s existence is framed as about food – both food for the pig and the pig as food. The proverb ‘child is pig and father is the bacon’ (Porcellus nati fit perna patris veterati), which is recorded in both Middle English and Latin in a fifteenth-century manuscript, encompasses the pig’s whole life story – as a cute piglet it is cared for by the child of the household, but it will one day be butchered and turned into bacon.5 The saying commonly refers to parents who do not keep their promises to their children, but the saying also reveals people’s interactions with their pigs. These literary deployments of pigs were ways of placing pigs into relations with people. Perhaps Deschamps was wrong when he claimed that a pig did no good in life. Pigs did do good in life – they made medieval people think and act in consideration of both humans and pigs. If humans wanted to keep pigs they had to organise their space (pastures, woodland, sties) and their labour (swineherds, butchers, cooks) to accommodate the pig’s needs and qualities. Good pasturage had to be identified, cultivated, and designated for swine. Woodland had to be managed for porcine inhabitants in balance with other competing users. Transhumance and market systems of movement developed to get pigs to the right place at the right time, whether to fatten up, overwinter, or be slaughtered. Sties had to be built across the medieval townscape in just the right places to house all the urban porkers. Town governments, estate holders, and landlords great and small employed or owned swineherds who monitored and managed the herds on a day-to-day basis. Swineherds learned their trade of watching, leading, and provisioning swine. Butchers learned techniques of butchering pigs, from scalding to bleeding. Cooks, both in the personal 77

The Medieval Pig kitchen and the market stall, created tasty, hardy treats with pork and lard. Pigs imposed on humans certain ways of doing and being. In order to take advantage of all the pig’s great qualities and to continue to have pigs around they had to be bred, raised, fed, herded, controlled, and killed in ways that respected their own way of being. Humans also organised their thoughts around the pig: understandings of gluttony, sexuality, and even Otherness were built upon the pig’s biology. Medieval pigs were thus one of the forces that ordered medieval routines. Pigs were in all places – in the countryside, in the city, on the plate, and in the mind – and they mattered to how those places functioned. Pigs, by being pigs, occupied a central place in medieval life.

78

NOTES 1. Placing the Medieval Pig 1



2



3



4





5

6





7



8



9

Michael Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”: The “Other” Chartres and Images of Everyday Life of the Medieval Street’, in History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 266. On animal domestication see Juliet Clutton-Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). For a good example of how humans modify domesticates and domesticated animals in turn modify human social and cultural structures see Edmund Russell, Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History of England, 1200–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). See John Berger’s classic essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ in John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016); J. L. Anderson, Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019); Frederick Cameron Sillar and Ruth Mary Meyler, The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961); Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (London: Hambledon and London, 2001); Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). Richard Lutwyche, The Pig: A Natural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) and Julian Wiseman, The Pig: A British History, 2nd ed (London: Duckworth, 2000). The simplest title for a book on the subject is just Pig (Brett Mizelle [London: Reaktion Books, 2011]). Sam White, ‘From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History’, Environmental History 16 (2011). Babe, directed by Chris Noonan (Universal Pictures, 1995); E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952). Clutton-Brock, Natural History of Domesticated Animals. There is debate about whether Sus scrofa should actually be divided into more than one species: Colin Groves, ‘Current Views on Taxonomy and Zoogeography of the Genus Sus’, in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 22–26. Colin Groves, ‘Current Views on Sus Phylogeography and Pig Domestication’, in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Genetic data points to potentially five independent

Notes to 'Placing the Medieval Pig', pp. 2–6 domestication centres: Greger Larson et al., ‘Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication’, Science 307, no. 5715 (2005). 10 Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy, eds, Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 11 Bridget Ann Henisch, The Medieval Calendar Year (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 309. 12 Jules Janick, ‘Art as a Source of Information on Horticultural Technology’, in Proceedings of the XXVII International Horticultural Congress on Global Horticulture: Diversity and Harmony, ed. Jules Janick (Seoul: International Society for Horticultural Science, 2007); Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Illuminating Ephemeral Medieval Agricultural History through Manuscript Art’, Agricultural History 89, no. 2 (2015). 13 Sándor Bökönyi, ‘The Development of Stockbreeding and Herding in Medieval Europe’, in Agriculture in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Sweeney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 48. 14 Lutwyche, The Pig, 65. 15 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), Book 8, Chapter 77. 16 For a complete overview of tail usage, see Irene Camerlink and Winanda W. Ursinus, ‘Tail Postures and Tail Motion in Pigs: A Review’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 230 (2020): [105079]. 17 Henri de Ferrières, Le Livre du Roy Modus et de la Royne Racio, nouvelle edition, ed. Elzéar Blaze (Paris: Elzéar Blaze, 1839), Folio 32. 18 Umberto Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, in Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, ed. C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 85, and White, ‘From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs’. 19 Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, 85. 20 For scholarship on how humans modify animal genetics through cultural practices and how these biological modifications in turn modify human culture see Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 21 Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, 85. 22 Some human societies have consumed acorns, usually by grinding them into a flour that is mixed with ash to neutralise the tannins; for example, oak acorns may have made up as much as half of the diet of California’s native population: David Bainbridge, ‘The Rise of Agriculture: A New Perspective’, Ambio 14, no 3 (1985). 23 Roel C. G. M. Lauwerier, ‘Pigs, Piglets and Determining the Season of Slaughtering’, Journal of Archaeological Science 10 (1983): 485. 24 ‘Walter’ in Dorothea Oschinsky, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 335 and ‘Husbandry’ in Oschinsky, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises, 425. One of the manuscripts of Walter of Henley says three times a year, but this is probably an error. 25 Christian Brunel, ‘L’élevage dans le Nord de la France (XIe–XIIIe siècles). Quelques jalons de recherche’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 106, no. 1 (1999): 48. 26 Lauwerier, ‘Pigs, Piglets and Determining the Season of Slaughtering’, 485.

80

Notes to 'Placing the Medieval Pig', pp. 6–9

Tamara Lewit, ‘Pigs, Presses and Pastoralism: Farming in the Fifth to Sixth Centuries AD’, Early Medieval Europe 17, no. 1 (2009): 79–81. 28 Terry O’Connor, ‘Animal Bones from Anglo-Scandinavian York’, in Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York, ed. R. A. Hall et al. (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2004), 442–43. 29 Bruce Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 168; Julie Hamilton and Richard Thomas, ‘Pannage, Pulses and Pigs: Isotopic and Zooarchaeological Evidence for Changing Pig Management Practices in Later Medieval England’, Medieval Archaeology 56 (2012). 30 Anton Ervynck and Wim Van Neer, ‘Beef, Pork and Mutton: An Archaeological Survey of Meat Consumption in Medieval and Postmedieval Towns in the Southern Low Countries (Flanders & Brussels, Belgium)’, Quaternary International 460 (2017). 31 Frank Salvadori, ‘Animals in Italian Medieval Towns: From Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages’, in Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, ed. Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz (Oxford: BAR, 2017), 134. 32 Símun V. Arge, Mike J. Church and Seth D. Brewington, ‘Pigs in the Faroe Islands: An Ancient Facet of the Islands’ Paleoeconomy’, Journal of the North Atlantic 2 (2009). 33 John Hare, ‘The Bishop and the Prior: Demesne Agriculture in Medieval Hampshire’, Agricultural History Review 54, no. 2 (2006): 207. 34 Roger Grand, L’agriculture au moyen âge de la fin de l’empire Romain au xvie siècle (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950), 508; Constance Hoffman Berman, ‘Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians. A Study of Forty-Three Monasteries’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 76, no. 5 (1986): 96. 35 Hare, ‘The Bishop and the Prior’, 207. 36 John Brownbill, ed., The Ledger Book of Vale Royal Abbey (Manchester: Manchester Record Society, 1914), British History Online, http://www. british-history.ac.uk/lancs-ches-record-soc/vol68, folios 53 and 54. 37 Tourunen, Auli. ‘Animals in an Urban Context: A Zooarchaeological study of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Town of Turku’. PhD thesis (University of Turku, 2008), 54–55. 38 Tourunen, ‘Animals in an Urban Context’, 80. 39 Katalin Szende, ‘All the Priests’ Horses and All the Priests’ Hens…: Animals in the Households of Late Medieval Hungarian Urban Clergy’, in Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, ed. Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 77–83 (Oxford: BAR, 2017), 80. 40 Arge et al., ‘Pigs in the Faroe Islands’. 41 Lenka Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, MA thesis in Nordic religion (University of Iceland, 2011), 94. 42 Della Hooke, ‘The Woodland Landscape of Early Medieval England’, in Place-names, Language and the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, ed. Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, 143–174 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 148–150. 43 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 8, Chapter 77. 44 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 8, Chapter 78. 45 Joannus de Garlandia, Opus Synonymorum, in Patrologiae cursus completus, vol. 150, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Migne, 1854), 1579. 46 Karl Steel, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 180. 27

81

Notes to 'Placing the Medieval Pig', pp. 9–10; 'In the Country', pp. 12–16

47 48



49

Hildegard as cited by Steel, How to Make a Human, 181. Isidore’s text discussed in Robert M. Grant, Early Christians and Animals (London: Routledge, 1999), 125. This is based on British Library manuscript Harley 4751 and translated in George C. Druce, ‘The Sow and the Pigs: A Study in Metaphor’, Archaeologia Cantiana 46 (1934).

2. In the Country See Chapter 2 of Ellen Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 2 See Richard Keyser, ‘The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management: Commercial Sylviculture in Medieval Champagne’, French Historical Studies 32, no. 3 (2009), and Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 3 Caroline Grigson, ‘Culture, Ecology, and Pigs from the 5th to the 3rd millennium BC around the Fertile Crescent’, in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 98–99. 4 Aberdeen Bestiary, translation provided by University of Aberdeen Library, http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/translat/21v.hti. The text is from Isidore’s Etymologies, Book 12, 1:27. Isidore’s text on the boar (aper) does not have the final line here. 5 Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 20–22. 6 Eric J. Goldberg, In the Manner of the Franks: Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 131. 7 See Annie Grant, ‘Food, Status and Religion in England in the Middle Ages: An Archaeozoological Perspective’, Anthropozoologica 2 (1988). 8 Stephen J. Harris, ‘Ælfric’s Colloquy’, in Medieval Literature for Children, ed. Daniel T. Kline (New York: Routledge, 2012), 120. 9 These are in Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar and Hrólfs saga kraka, which are discussed in Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, 90–91. 10 Marcelle Thiébaux, ‘The Mouth of the Boar as a Symbol in Medieval Literature’, Romance Philology 22, no. 3 (1969): 281–82. 11 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum (Nuremburg: Anton Koberger, 1483), book 18. 12 Albert S. Cook, trans., Asser’s Life of King Alfred (Boston, MA: Ginn & Co, 1906), 33. 13 This is told in ‘The Third Wife’s Tale’ in Killis Campbell, The Seven Sages of Rome (Boston, MA: Ginn & Co., 1907), 33–34. 14 Despite year-to-year fluctuations, moderate crop sizes are just as common as extreme years; see W. B. Koenig and J. M. H. Knops, ‘The Behavioral Ecology of Masting in Oaks’, in Oak Forest Ecosystems: Ecology and Management for Wildlife, ed. W. J. McShea and W. M. Healy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). In France, oaks produce a plentiful seed crop every three to four years, but an absolute failure of acorns is rare, with some acorns still found on isolated trees per Theodore Woolsey, Studies in French Forestry

1

82

Notes to 'In the Country', pp. 16–18 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1920). For the latest overview of scientific studies of masting behaviour see Walter D. Koenig, ‘A Brief History of Masting Research’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376 (2021): article 20200423. 15 Michael Swanton, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (New York: Routledge, 1996), 247, which is the entry for 1116 in the Peterborough Manuscript. 16 K. P. Witney, ‘The Woodland Economy of Kent, 1066–1348’, The Agricultural History Review 38, no. 1 (1990): 22. 17 The Laws of Ine, capitulary 44, in Frederick L. Attenborough, ed. and trans., The Laws of the Earliest English Kings (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). 18 H. C. Darby, ‘Domesday Woodland’, The Economic History Review 3, no. 1 (1950): 23. 19 Data extracted from J. Palmer, ed., Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086, 2nd ed (UK Data Service, 2010), DOI: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-5694-1. 20 Witney, ‘Woodland Economy of Kent’, 23. 21 Keyser, ‘Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management’, 360. 22 Della Hooke, ‘Pre-Conquest Woodland: Its Distribution and Usage’, Agricultural History Review 37, no. 2 (1989): 117. 23 Berman, ‘Medieval Agriculture’, 97. 24 For example, see Grand, L’agriculture au moyen âge, 509; H. R. Davidson, The Production and Marketing of Pigs (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948), 252. 25 Earl B. Shaw, ‘Geography of Mast Feeding’, Economic Geography 16, no. 3 (July 1940): 236. 26 Davidson, The Production and Marketing of Pigs, 252. See also Shaw, ‘Geography of Mast Feeding’, 236. 27 Massimo Montanari, Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table, trans. Beth Archer Brombert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 110. 28 Even in modern times, Iberians have continued the practice of allowing pigs to range freely in woodlands and consume grassland vegetation outside of the masting time; see Shaw, ‘Geography of Mast Feeding’, 240 and Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Pigs and Pollards: Medieval Insights for UK Wood Pasture Restoration’, Sustainability 5 (2013). 29 Robert Trow-Smith, A History of British Livestock Husbandry to 1700 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 81. 30 Trow-Smith, History of British Livestock Husbandry, 82–83. 31 Cited in Hooke, ‘Pre-Conquest Woodland’, 116. 32 Arge et al., ‘Pigs in the Faroe Islands’, 28. 33 Musei Vaticani, inventory number MV.45007.0.0. 34 Walter of Henley, Seneschaucy, in Oschinsky, Walter of Henley and Other Treatises, 285. 35 David Bates, ed., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I, 1066–1087 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), no. 175. 36 Dolly Jørgensen and Peter Quelch, ‘The Origins and History of Medieval Wood-pastures’, in European Wood-pastures in Transition: A Social–Ecological Approach, ed. Tibor Hartel and Tobias Pleininger (New York: Routledge, 2014). 37 See Jørgensen, ‘Pigs and Pollards’, for a discussion of these ecological relations.

83

Notes to 'In the Country', pp. 20–23

Jules N. Pretty, ‘Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages: The English Manor’, Agricultural History Review 38 (1990): 16. 39 Keyser, ‘Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management’, 366–67. 40 Peter Szabó, Woodland and Forests in Medieval Hungary, BAR International Series 1348 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), 131–33. 41 H. C. Maxwell Lyte, ed., Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III: Volume 14, 1374– 1377 (London: HMSO, 1913), 128. 42 Jean Birrell, ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest: Disputes and Conflicts in the Thirteenth Century’, Past & Present 117 (1987): 25. 43 Della Hooke, ‘Royal Forests – Hunting and Other Forest Use in Medieval England’, in New Perspectives on People and Forests, ed. Eva Ritter and Dainis Dauksta (Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2011), 52. 44 See Birrell, ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest’, 39–40 for examples. 45 Birrell, ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest’, 40. 46 Laws of Ine, capitulary 49 in Attenborough, The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. The law begins: ‘Gif mon on his mæstenne unaliefed swín gemete, genime þonne VI scill. weorð wed … .’ and continues to enumerate the penalties by the number of times the swine have been caught in the woods previously and to specify how the penalty is paid in kind. 47 Brownbill, Ledger Book of Vale Royal Abbey, 195. 48 Brunel, ‘L’élevage dans le Nord de la France’, 57. 49 Bates, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, no. 215. 50 Bates, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, no. 205. 51 Bates, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, no. 260. 52 H. C. Maxwell Lyte, ed., Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I: Volume 5, 1302–1307 (London: HMSO, 1908), 303. 53 Charles Johnson, and H. A. Cronne, eds, Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066–1154, volume 2: Regesta Henrici Primi, 1100–1135 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), no. 1479. 54 Trow-Smith, History of British Livestock Husbandry, 51. 55 Trow-Smith, History of British Livestock Husbandry, 80. 56 Birrell, ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest’, 37–38. 57 Gillian Clark, ‘Animals and Animal Products in Medieval Italy: A Discussion of Archaeological and Historical Methodology’, Papers of the British School at Rome 57 (1989): 160. 58 Arnold, Negotiating the Landscape, 70. 59 I have discussed the various aspects of controlling pigs (where, when, and how many) in Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Controlling Pigs in Countryside and City for Sustainable Medieval Agriculture’, in Conservation’s Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100–1800, ed. Abigail P. Dowling and Richard Keyser (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020). 60 Åke Holmbäck and Elias Wessén, eds, Magnus Erikssons Stadslag i Nusvensk Tolkning (Lund: Carl Bloms Boktryckeri, 1966), section X. 61 José Sánchez Adell, ‘Ganadería porcina medieval en Castellón’, Millars: Espai i Història 15 (1992). 62 Witney, ‘Woodland Economy of Kent’, 23. 63 Dennis Turner and Rob Briggs, ‘Testing Transhumance: Anglo-Saxon Swine Pastures and Seasonal Grazing in the Surrey Weald’, Surrey Archaeological Collections 99 (2016): 182. 64 Witney, ‘Woodland Economy of Kent’, 24. 65 Hare, ‘The Bishop and the Prior’, 197. 38

84

Notes to 'In the Country', pp. 23–27 Hare, ‘The Bishop and the Prior’, 207. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 167. 68 Turner and Briggs, ‘Testing Transhumance’, 179. 69 Turner and Briggs, ‘Testing Transhumance’, 183. 70 Vincent Clément, ‘Spanish Wood Pasture: Origin and Durability of an Historical Wooded Landscape in Mediterranean Europe’, Environment and History 14 (2008): 74. 71 Andrew Margetts, ‘To Browse and Mast and Meadow Glades: New Evidence of Shieling Practice from the Weald of South-East England’, in Ruralia XIII: Seasonal Settlement in the Medieval and Early Modern Countryside, ed. Piers Dixon and Claudia Theune (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2021), 340–41. 72 Margetts, ‘To Browse and Mast and Meadow Glades’, 344–46. 73 Hours of Henry VIII: Morgan Library & Museum, MS H.8, fol. 6r; Francis Bond, Wood Carvings in English Churches, vol. 1 Misericords (London: Oxford University Press, 1910), 95. A similar font is in Brookland, Kent: Francis Bond, Fonts and Font Covers (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), 80; George Zarnecki, English Romanesque Lead Sculpture (London: Alec Tiranti, 1957), 17–18. 74 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum. 75 Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, ed. W. Mavor (London: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1812), 45. 76 The Luttrell Psalter: BL, Add. MS 42130, fol. 59v. 77 Breviary of Renaud de Bar or Marguerite de Bar: BL, Yates Thomson 8, fol. 6. The late thirteenth-century Flemish calendar Bodl, MS Add. A. 46 is similar, although the swineherd appears to be shaking the branches rather than hitting them with a stick. 78 Book of Hours: Morgan Library, MS M.64, fol. 11r. 79 Herbert Meritt, ‘Beating the Oaks: An Interpretation of Christ 678–9’, American Journal of Philology 66, no. 1 (1945). 80 Davidson, Production and Marketing of Pigs, 252. 81 Some examples are BL, Additional 18852, f. 11v, and Morgan Library, MS M.64, fol. 11r. 82 Palladius, Opus Agriculturae, ed. J. C. Schmitt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898); Vincent of Beauvais. Speculi Maioris (Venice: Dominicum Nicolinum, 1541), Book 6, Volume 2, Chapter 148. 83 Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 21. 84 Richard John King, Handbook to the Cathedrals of England (Oxford: John Murray, 1862), 274. 85 Plea Rolls for Staffordshire, 5 Edward I in G. Wrottesley, ed., Collections for a History of Staffordshire, Vol. 6 Part 1 (London: Staffordshire Record Society, 1885), 82. 86 G. H. P. Dirkx, ‘Wood-pasture in Dutch Common Woodlands and the Deforestation of the Dutch Landscape’, in The Ecological History of European Forests, ed. Keith J. Kirby and Charles Watkins (Wallingford: CAB International, 1998), 57. 87 Ingvild Øye, Middelalderbyens agrare trekk (Bergen: Bryggens Museum, 1998), 52. 88 Palladius, Opus Agriculturae, in Palladius: The Work of Farming (Opus Agriculturae), ed. John G. Fitch (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2013), 251–52. 89 Wiseman, The Pig, 4. 90 Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 122. 91 Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, 97. 66 67

85

Notes to 'In the Country', pp. 27–28; 'In the City', pp. 30–31 Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 123. Meritt, ‘Beating the Oaks’, 4. Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 125. Sánchez Adell, ‘Ganadería porcina medieval en Castellón’, 76. Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, 96. Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 122. Anton Ervynck, An Lentacker, Gundula Müldner, Mike Richards, and Keith Dobney, ‘An Investigation into the Transition from Forest Dwelling Pigs to Farm Animals in Medieval Flanders, Belgium’, in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 185. 99 Gundula Müldner and Michael P. Richards, ‘Fast or Feast: Reconstructing Diet in Later Medieval England by Stable Isotope Analysis’, Journal of Archaeological Science 32 (2005): 44. 100 Kathleen Biddick, ‘Pig Husbandry on the Peterborough Abbey State from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century AD’, in Animals and Archaeology, Husbandry in Europe, vol. 4, ed. C. Grigson and J. Clutton-Brock (Oxford: BAR, 1984). 101 Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 229. 102 Arge et al., ‘Pigs in the Faroe Islands’, 29. 103 Kreiner, Legions of Pigs, 124. 104 Juan Antonio Quirós, ‘Archaeology of Early Medieval Peasantry in the Basque Country: Landscapes, Economic Trends and Societal Change in Álava’, Historia Agraria 82 (2020): 228; Carmina Sirignano et al., ‘Animal Husbandry during Early and High Middle Ages in the Basque Country (Spain)’, Quaternary International 346 (2014): 145. 105 Anabel Thomas, Garrisoning the Borderlands of Medieval Siena: Sant’Angelo in Colle: Frontier Castle under the Government of the Nine (1287–1355) (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 15, 18. 106 Brunel, ‘L’élevage dans le Nord de la France’, 57. 107 Erik Thoen and Tim Soens, ‘Élevage, prés et pâturage dans le comté de Flandre au Moyen Âge et au début des Temps modernes: Les liens avec l’économie rurale régionale’, in Prés et Pâtures en Europe occidentale, ed. Francis Brumont (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2008). 94 95 96 97 98 92 93

3. In the City

1 2



3 4

7 5 6



8 9



10

BnF, Francais 2092, fol. 18v. Margaret Murphy and James A. Galloway, ‘Marketing Animals and Animal Products in London’s Hinterland, circa 1300’, Anthropozoologica 16 (1992): 95. Murphy and Galloway, ‘Marketing Animals and Animal Products’, 98–99. Barbara Dodwell, ‘Reading Records (3): Taxation Roll, 1297’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal 60 (1962). Tourunen, ‘Animals in an Urban Context’, 141. O’Connor, ‘Animal Bones from Anglo-Scandinavian York’, 434. Hans-Dieter Dannenberg, Schwein haben: Historisches und Histörchen vom Schwein (Jena: Fischer, 1990), 67. Szende, ‘All the Priests’ Horses and All the Priests’ Hens’, 77. Sánchez Adell, ‘Ganadería porcina medieval en Castellón’. Cosmo Nelson Innes, ed., Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland, vol. 1, 1124–1424. (Edinburgh: Printed for the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1868), 41.

86

Notes to 'In the City', pp. 31–35

Hrvoje Kekez, ‘Oxen, Pigs and Sheep in the Medieval City: Analysis of Regulations Concerning Domestic Animals in Statutes of Medieval Dalmatian Towns’, in Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, ed. Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz (Oxford: BAR, 2017), 71. 12 Stephen Alsford, ed., ‘Lynn By-laws’, Medieval English Towns website, http://users.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/lynnlaws.html. 13 ‘De peccantibus super dei misericordiam’ in Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, University of Houston Libraries, PT1509.N34 1498. 14 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS 74, fol. 11r. 15 Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. 16 T. Wilkie et al., ‘A Dental Microwear Study of Pig Diet and Management in Iron Age, Romano-British, Anglo-Scandinavian, and Medieval Contexts in England’, in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17 William Hudson, ed. Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich During the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892), 16, 24. 18 Maud Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, Lettered A/Y in the Guildhall Muniment Room, Part 1 (Durham: Andrews, 1912), 17. 19 Wulf Dahlke, ‘Von Beken und Schwienen. Urkunden aus dem 15. Jahrhundert zu Wasserwirtschaft und Schweinehaltung in Goslar’, Antoniter-Forum 14 (2006): 71. 20 Mary Dormer Harris, ed., Coventry Leet Book: or Mayor’s Register, Containing the Records of the City Court Leet or View of Frankpledge, AD 1420–1555, with Divers Other Matters, 4 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907– 1913), 1:27, 2:360, 3:653. 21 W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, eds, The Records of the City of Norwich (Norwich: Jarrold, 1906–1910), 2:205–06. 22 On medieval smell and sanitation see Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Environment. Managing urban sanitation for sanitas’, in A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages (800–1450), ed. Iona McCleery (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 23 Dahlke, ‘Von Beken und Schwienen’, 71. 24 Cited in Janna Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 206. 25 Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 207. 26 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 2:389. 27 Reginald R. Sharpe, ed. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: H, 1375– 1399 (London: HMSO, 1907), 151. 28 Hudson, Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, 5. 29 Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 207. 30 Alsford, ‘Lynn By-laws’. 31 Dahlke, ‘Von Beken und Schwienen’, 72. 32 Corporation of Nottingham, Records of the Borough of Nottingham, being a Series of Extracts from the Archives of the Corporation of Nottingham, 8 vols (Nottingham: Thomas Forman, 1882–1952), 1:269. 33 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 1:27–28. 11

87

Notes to 'In the City', pp. 35–37 A. H. Thomas, ed., Calendar of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London: Volume 2, 1364–1381 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1929), Roll A 10: (i) 1364–65. 35 Dahlke, ‘Von Beken und Schwienen’, 71. 36 Michael Prestwich, York Civic Ordinances, 1301 (York: St. Anthony’s, 1976), 16; Sellers, York Memorandum Book, 1:18, 164. 37 Hudson and Tingey, Records of the City of Norwich, 2:205–06. 38 Corporation of Nottingham, Records of the Borough of Nottingham, 1:357–59. 39 C. F. R. Palmer, ‘The Friar-preachers, or Blackfriars, of Shrewsbury’, The Reliquary 26 (1886). 40 Fred. R. Coles, ‘Notes on Saint Anthony’s Chapel; with Views and Plans’, Proceedings of the Society (March 9, 1896). 41 Reginald R. Sharpe, ed., Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: E, 1314– 1337 (London: HMSO, 1903), folio xcix b. 42 Steel, How to Make a Human, 183; Eustache Deschamps, ‘Sur les pourceaux’, in OEuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, pub. d’après le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque nationale par le marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, ed. Auguste Henry Édouard marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1878), 242. 43 H. E. Salter, ed., Records of Medieval Oxford. Coroners’ Inquests, the Walls of Oxford, etc. (Oxford: The Oxford Chronicle Company, 1912), 46. 44 Lesley Bates MacGregor, ‘Criminalising Animals in Medieval France: Insights from Records of Executions’, Open Library of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2019), 6. See also the cases in Edward Payson Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 336–55. 45 Marissa Crannell-Ash is preparing a PhD thesis at University of Rochester on the topic of medieval animal crime and kindly shared this number with me. She gave a paper titled ‘“I Haven’t Had This Much Fun Since the Pigs Ate My Brother”: Pigs as Childhood Hazards in Medieval Europe’ at the American Society for Environmental History 2023 conference. 46 Reginald R. Sharpe, ed., Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: A, 1275– 1298 (London: HMSO, 1899), folio 129b. 47 Sellers, York Memorandum Book, 1:18. 48 Stephen Alsford, ed., ‘Ancient Usages and Customs of the Borough of Maldon’, Medieval English Towns website, http://www.trytel.com/~tristan/ towns/maldon6.html. 49 W. Gurney Benham, trans., Red Paper Book of Colchester (Colchester: Essex Country Standard Office, 1902), 98. 50 Benham, Red Paper Book of Colchester, 131. 51 In a later fifteenth-century ordinance, Saturdays were named as the cleaning day on which pigs could be let out of sties in Lynn. 52 Alsford, ‘Lynn By-laws’. 53 Mary Bateson, ed., Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1327–1509, vol. 2 (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1901), 82, 103–04. 54 Hudson and Tingey, Records of the City of Norwich, 2:88. 55 Thomas King Moylan, ‘Poverty, Pigs and Pestilence in Medieval Dublin’, Dublin Historical Record 31, no. 4 (September 1978): 155. 56 Sharpe, Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: H, folio ccliii, 355. 57 Kekez, ‘Oxen, Pigs and Sheep in the Medieval City’, 75. 58 Kekez, ‘Oxen, Pigs and Sheep in the Medieval City’, 69. 59 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 1:58.

34

88

Notes to 'In the City', pp. 37–40 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 3:652–53. Levi Fox, ‘Some New Evidence of Leet Activity in Coventry 1540–41’, English Historical Review 61.240 (May 1946): 242. 62 Moylan, ‘Poverty, Pigs and Pestilence in Medieval Dublin’, 156. 63 Joyce W. Percy, ed., York Memorandum Book (B/Y) (Gateshead: Northumberland, 1973), 217–18. 64 Dannenberg, Schwein haben, 68. 65 This section on Ramsey’s pig managment is based on Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Running Amuck? Urban Swine Management in Late Medieval England’, Agricultural History 87 (2013). 66 All Ramsey court cases are from Edwin Brezette DeWindt, trans. and ed., The Court Rolls of Ramsey, Hepmangrove, and Bury, 1268–1600 (Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009), cited as roll:entry number. 67 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll39702:8, BLAdd.Roll39649:25, BLAdd.Roll39653E:27, BLAdd.Roll39666B:8, BLAdd.Roll34366d:65, BLAdd. Roll39653B:8; Wiseman, Pig, 12. 68 Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 208. 69 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll39598r:81, BLAdd.Roll34362r:17, TNA/SC2/179/18 m.5r:94, BLAdd.Roll39603r:47, BLAdd.Roll39611d:54–56, BLAdd.Roll39632r:48, BLAdd.Roll39652:41, BLAdd.Roll39627r:37, BLAdd.Roll39629r:38, BLAdd.Roll34368:42, BLAdd.Roll34369:25, BLAdd. Roll39656:32, BLAdd.Roll3966d:28. 70 Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 208. 71 For manuscript illustrations of leading pigs, see, for example, BnF, MS 2092, fol. 18v; Pierpont Morgan Library, MS S.7, fol. 12r. The practice of leading pigs by a rope is discussed in H. Meyer, ‘Schwein am Seil’, Deutsche tierärztliche Wochenschrift 111, no. 9 (September 2004). 72 Caesarius of Heisterbach, ‘An Administrator Carried Off Alive by the Devil’, The Dialogue of Miracles, in The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux, ed. Larry D. Benson and Theodore M. Andersson (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971). 73 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll39645r:45, BLAdd.Roll34369:45, BLAdd.Roll39650:39, BLAdd.Roll39653E:28, BLAdd.Roll39653A:35, TNA/ SC2–179/59 m.8r:38–39. 74 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll39630r:13, BLAdd.Roll39649:25. 75 Barbor’s misdeeds are recorded in DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd. Roll39627r:37, BLAdd.Roll39629r:38–39, BLAdd.Roll39630r:21–22, BLAdd. Roll39631r:41, BLAdd.Roll39632r:43, 48; BLAdd.Roll39635:46. Botiller is cited per DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll34368:41–42, BLAdd. Roll34369:25, BLAdd.Roll39643:45, BLAdd.Roll39646r:55. 76 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll39645r:45, BLAdd.Roll34369:45, BLAdd.Roll39650:39, BLAdd.Roll39653A:35, TNA, SC2–179/59 m.8r:39, BLAdd.Roll39646r:58, BLAdd.Roll39653E:27, BLAdd.Roll39653B:25. 77 For general descriptions of ringing practices see Malcolmson and Mastoris, The English Pig, 76–82 and C. L. Ten Cate, Wan god mast gift: Bilder aus der Geschichte der Schweinezucht im Walde (Wageningen, Netherlands: Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1972), 109–15. 60 61

89

Notes to 'In the City', pp. 40–42; 'On the Plate', pp. 43–46 H. C. Maxwell Lyte, ed. Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry III: Volume 6, 1247–1251 (London: HMSO, 1922), 88. 79 Bateson, Borough of Leicester, 2:21, 103. 80 Coomans, Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries, 206. 81 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, TNA/SC2/179/63 m.5r:35, BLAdd.Roll39659:20, BLAdd.Roll39658:22 BLAdd.Roll39666B:8–10, BLAdd.Roll34406:31. 82 DeWindt, Court Rolls of Ramsey, BLAdd.Roll39635:47, BLAdd.Roll39643:45, BLAdd.Roll39658:8.

78

4. On the Plate

Deschamps, ‘Sur les pourceaux’, 243. Umberto Albarella, ‘Meat Production and Consumption in Town and Country’, in Town and Country in the Middle Ages: Contrasts, Contacts and Interconnections, 1100–1500, ed. Kate Giles and Christopher Dyer (Leeds: Maney, 2007). 3 Idoia Grau Sologestoa, Umberto Albarella, and Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo, ‘Urban Medieval and Post-Medieval Zooarchaeology in the Basque Country: Meat Supply and Consumption’, Quaternary International 399 (2016): 5. 4 Øye, Middelalderbyens agrare trekk, 52. 5 Ann Hagen, A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink: Production & Distribution (Hockwold cum Wilton: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1995), 120. 6 Ervynck and Van Neer, ‘Beef, Pork and Mutton’. 7 Graeme Barker, ‘The Economy of Medieval Tuscania: The Archaeological Evidence’, Papers of the British School at Rome 41 (1973): 162–63. 8 Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, 100–04. 9 Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, 80–81. 10 Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 51–53. 11 Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, 84. 12 Grant, ‘Food, Status and Religion in England in the Middle Ages’. 13 The household roll has been transcribed and translated in Louise J. Wilkinson, The Household Roll of Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Leicester and Pembroke 1265. British Library, Additional MS 8877 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Pipe Roll Society, 2020.) The roll runs from February to August and has entries for 176 days. 14 Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, 76. 15 Umberto Albarella, ‘“The Mystery of Husbandry”: Medieval Animals and the Problem of Integrating Historical and Archaeological Evidence’, Antiquity 73 (1999). 16 Hagen, A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink, 115. 17 Terry O’Connor, ‘Animals in Medieval Urban Lives: York as a Case Study’, in Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, ed. Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz (Oxford: BAR, 2017), 119; Nicola Rogers, Games and Recreation c. AD 1400–1700 (York: York Archaeological Trust for Excavation and Research, 2017), 10. 18 Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. C. Postan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 149. 1 2

90

Notes to 'On the Plate', pp. 46–49

Catherine Smith, ‘A Grumphie in the Sty: An Archaeological View of Pigs in Scotland, from Their Earliest Domestication to the Agricultural Revolution’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 130 (2000): 712. 20 M. L. Ryder, ‘Livestock Remains from Four Medieval Sites in Yorkshire’, Agricultural History Review 9, no. 2 (1961): 107; O’Conner, ‘Animal Bones from Anglo-Scandinavian York’, 434; Terry O’Connor, ‘Bones as Evidence of Meat Production and Distribution in York’, in Feeding A City: York. The Provision of Food from Roman Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, ed. E. White (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000), 51. 21 Antonietta Buglione, Giovanni De Venuto, and Barbara Sassi, ‘Zooarchaeological Research from an Elite Urban Building in Medieval Durrës (Albania)’, in Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, ed. Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz (Oxford: BAR, 2017), 189. 22 Grau Sologestoa et al., ‘Urban Medieval and post-Medieval Zooarchaeology in the Basque Country’. 23 Albarella, ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’, 83. 24 Barker, ‘The Economy of Medieval Tuscania’, 161. 25 Øye, Middelalderbyens agrare trekk, 52–53. 26 Albarella, ‘“The Mystery of Husbandry”’. 27 Clark, ‘Animals and Animal Products in Medieval Italy’, 160–61. 28 See Jørgensen, ‘Running Amuck?’; Ernest L. Sabine, ‘Butchering in Mediaeval London’, Speculum 8 (1933); and David R. Carr, ‘Controlling the Butchers in Late Medieval English Towns’, The Historian 70 (2008). 29 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 1:42–43. 30 R. Lespinasse, ed., Les Métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris I: XIVe– XVIIIe siècle, ordonnances générale, metiers de l’alimentation (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886), 274, quoted in Carole Rawcliffe, ‘Sources for the Study of Public Health in the Medieval City’, in Understanding Medieval Primary Sources: Using Historical Sources to Discover Medieval Europe, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (London: Routledge, 2012). 31 R. B. Dobson, ed., York City Chamberlains’ Account Rolls 1396–1500 (Gateshead: Surtees Society, 1980), 145–46. 32 See Carole Rawcliffe, Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013) for details about public health measures in the period. 33 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 1:32. The location is given in two land leases, Coventry Town Archives, BA/C/4/3/1, 1 Dec. 1448 and BA/C/4/3/2, 25 Dec. 1465. The second lease allowed the butchers access to draw water for the scalding house, see Helena M. Chew and William Kellaway, eds, London Assize of Nuisance, 1301–1431: A Calendar (London: London Record Society, 1973), misc. roll. FF, Feb. 16, 1369–May 5, 1374 (nos 550–599). 34 Sellers, York Memorandum Book, Lettered A/Y, 15. 35 Harris, Coventry Leet Book, 1:42–43: ‘kepe his durre clene fro bloode and other fylthis’. 36 Guy Geltner, ‘Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History’, Urban History 40, no. 3 (2013). 37 See Dolly Jørgensen, ‘Blood on the Butcher’s Knife: Images of Pig Slaughter in Late Medieval Illustrated Calendars’, in Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 19

91

Notes to 'On the Plate', pp. 50–54 Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 210. 39 Noëlie Vialles, Animal to Edible, trans. J. A. Underwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 76. 40 Bond, Wood Carvings in English Churches, 88. 41 Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.358, fol. 12r. 42 Montanari, Medieval Tastes, 43. 43 Nicole Crossley-Holland, Living and Dining in Medieval Paris: The Household of a Fourteenth-Century Knight (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 131. 44 Maria Dembińska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland: Rediscovering a Cuisine of the Past, revised and adapted by William Woys Weaver and trans. Magdalena Thomas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 [1963]), 89–90. 45 Katherine McIver, Kitchens, Cooking, and Eating in Medieval Italy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 61–64. 46 Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, in Patricia Willet Cummins, ed., A Critical Edition of Le Regime Tresutile et Tresproufitable pour Conserver et Garder la Santé du Corps Humain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976). 47 McIver, Kitchens, Cooking, and Eating in Medieval Italy, 99. 48 Terence Scully, ed., The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1988), recipe 10. 49 Constance B. Hieatt, ‘The Middle English Culinary Recipes in MS Harley 5401: An Edition and Commentary’, Medium Ævum 65, no. 1 (1996): 62. The recipe is called Cenellis. 50 D. Eleanor Scully and Terence Scully, Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 94. 51 Harley MS 4016, in Thomas Austin, ed., Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books (London: N. Trübner for Early English Text Society, 1888), 82. 52 Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 133. 53 Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 26. 54 M. Kristensen, ed., Harpestræng: Gamle danske Urtebøger, Stenbøger og Kogebøger (Copenhagen: H. H. Thieles, 1908–1920), 198. 55 Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 151–52. 56 Montanari, Medieval Tastes, 103–04. 57 Dianne Unsain, Vincent Buccio, and Pierre Magniez, ‘Zooarchaeology, Medieval Economy and Culinary Practices: The case of Petra Castellana Castrum (South of France)’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 30 (2020): article 102170, 9. 58 Martha Carlin, ‘Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England’, in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), 39. 59 Dembińska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland, 91. 60 Steel, How to Make a Human, 214. For more about the legend, see Joel Fredell, ‘The Three Clerks and St. Nicholas in Medieval England’, Studies in Philology 92 (1995). Some versions of the story use children instead of clerks. 61 Albarella, ‘The Mystery of Husbandry’, 871. 62 Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Lines 2844–45.

38

92

Notes to 'On the Plate', pp. 54–56; 'In the Mind', pp. 57–60 Both poems and some other references are quoted in Reginald Hardy, A History of the Parish of Tatenhill in the County of Stafford (London: Harrison and Sons, 1907), 59. 64 Deschamps, ‘Sur les pourceaux’, 243. 65 H. C. Maxwell Lyte, ed., Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I: Volume 1, 1272–1279 (London: HMSO, 1900), 68. 66 Gerard NeCastro, ed., The Chester Cycle, ‘From Stage to Page – Medieval and Renaissance Drama’, https://web.archive.org/web/20150909155557/http:// ummutility.umm.maine.edu/necastro/drama/chester/play_07.txt. 67 Montanari, Medieval Tastes, 187. 68 An English translation of the tale is available in Nora Kershaw Chadwick, An Early Irish Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927). 69 Aldebrandin de Sienne, Le régime du corps, ed. Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1911), 122. 70 Aldebrandin de Sienne, Le régime du corps, 122. 71 Scully and Scully, Early French Cookery, 29. 72 Translation provided in Sven Gins, ‘Everything but the Squeal: The Politics of Porcinity in the Livre des Propriétés des Choses’, Religions 12: manuscript 260, 19. 73 Øye, Middelalderbyens agrare trekk, 53. 74 Hannes Kleineke, ed., Borough Market Privileges: The Hinterland of Medieval London, c.1400 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2006), 16/12/1376. 75 Kleineke, Borough Market Privileges, 07/01/1416; 16/04/1416; 20/04/1416; 01/05/1416; 10/05/1416. 76 Robert Adams, ‘The Egregious Feasts of the Chester and Towneley Shepherds’, The Chaucer Review 21, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 103.

63

5. In the Mind 3 1 2

4



5



6

7



8



9



10



11

Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”’, 231. Grant, ‘Food, Status and Religion in England in the Middle Ages’, 10–11. Albertus Magnus. Opera Omnia, vol. 22 Super Lucam, ed. Steph. Cæs. Aug. Borgnet (Paris: Bibliopolam Editorem, 1894), 567. Adam S. Cohen and Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, ‘The Getty Anglo-Saxon Leaves and New Testament Illustration Around The Year 1000’, Scriptorium 53, no. 1 (1999). See the plates in Cohen and Teviotdale, ‘The Getty Anglo-Saxon Leaves’. See Wolfgang Kemp, The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass, trans. Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for discussion and examples of the telling of the Prodigal Son in Gothic cathedrals. See Chapters 34–37 of the text published in Whitley Stokes, ‘The Battle of Mag Mucrime’, Revue Celtique 13 (1892). Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, 92–93. Laura Fenelli, ‘Pigs in Medieval Cities: Saint Anthony’s Unusual Attribute’, in Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, ed. Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz (Oxford: BAR, 2017), 54. Robert N. Swanson, ‘Marginal or Mainstream? The Hospitaller Orders and Their Indulgences in Late Medieval England’, Schriftenreihe Ricerche dell’Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma 3 (2007): 175. Inna Põltsam-Jürjo, ‘The Cult of Saint Anthony in Medieval and Early Modern Estonia’, Acta Historica Tallinnensia 27, no. 1 (2021): 52.

93

Notes to 'In the Mind', pp. 60–65 14

Fenelli, ‘Pigs in Medieval Cities’, 54. Fenelli, ‘Pigs in Medieval Cities’, 54–56. The Statues of Zadar allowed St. Anthony pigs: Kekez, ‘Oxen, Pigs and Sheep in the Medieval City’, 70. 15 Dahlke, Von Beken und Schweienen, 72–73. 16 H. T. Riley, ed., Memorials of London and London Life in the 13th, fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 83. 17 Fenelli, ‘Pigs in Medieval Cities’, 55. 18 Morgan Library, MS M.234, fo. 41v. 19 Põltsam-Jürjo, ‘The Cult of Saint Anthony’, 59. 20 Sean Connolly and J.-M. Picard, ‘Cogitosus’s “Life of St Brigit” Content and Value’, The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 117 (1987): 18. 21 Connolly and Picard, ‘Cogitosus’s “Life of St Brigit”’, 19. This incident is also included in a hymn to St Brigit in the Irish Liber Hymnorum: see the text in J. H. Bernard and R. Atkinson, eds, The Irish Liber Hymnorum, vol. 1 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1898), 121. Interestingly, there is a marginal note on the folio with this incident containing a short theological debate in Latin on Christ sending the demons into the swine. This shows that the Irish scribe was making a linkage between Brigit’s swine miracle and the Gadarene Swine miracle. 22 Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 91. 23 David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 45. 24 Steel, How to Make a Human, 184. 25 Steel, How to Make a Human, 186. 26 Thiébaux, ‘The Mouth of the Boar’, 285. Freyja’s boar is her steed in the Old Norse poem Hyndluljóð. 27 Tacitus, Germanica, in Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. Alfred John Church, William Jackson Brodribb, and Lisa Cerrato (New York: Random House, 1942), 45. See Thijs Porck, ‘Boars of Battle: The Wild Boar in the Early Middle Ages’ for more discussion of the boar on helmets and shields. 28 Cook, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 21. 29 Thiébaux, ‘The Mouth of the Boar’, 286. 30 Sarah Phillips, ‘The Pig in Medieval Iconography’, in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 384–85. 31 H. Düselder and C. Reinders-Düselder, Lüneburg. Kleine Stadtgeschichte (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2022), 13. See also the children’s illustrated book Heinz-Joachim Draeger, Die Sage von der Lüneburger Salzsau (Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2013). 32 Thiébaux, ‘The Mouth of the Boar’, 287. 33 Kovárová, ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’, 142–47. 34 Thiébaux, ‘The Mouth of the Boar’. 35 Thiébaux, ‘The Mouth of the Boar’. 36 Clement Miscellanies 5.51.3 cited in Grant, Early Christians and Animals, 7. 37 Prestwich, York Civic Ordinances, 1301, 16. 38 Prestwich, York Civic Ordinances, 1301, 16–17. 39 Phillips, ‘The Pig in Medieval Iconography’, 377–79. 40 Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”’. 12 13

94

Notes to 'In the Mind', pp. 65–70

Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”’, 264. The text at this point in the story reads “elle chevauchoit un pourcel”; this means that she is riding a domestic pig rather than a wild boar, which should have been written as sanglier. Text in Guillaume de Deguileville, Le pèlerinage de vie humaine, ed. J. J. Stürzinger (London: Nichols & Sons, 1893), 319. 43 Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”’, 276. 44 Kathleen L. Scott, ‘Sow-and-bagpipe Imagery in the Miller’s Portrait’, The Review of English Studies 18, no. 71 (1967): 289. 45 Phillips, ‘The Pig in Medieval Iconography’. 46 Scott, ‘Sow-and-bagpipe Imagery in the Miller’s Portrait’, 287. 47 Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”’, 258. 48 Lynnea Brumbaugh-Walter, ‘Selections from the Gesta Romanorum’, in Medieval Literature for Children, ed. Daniel Kline (Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003), 34. The moral of the story is that the treasures gathered up by rich men will be taken away. 49 Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals, 3 vols, trans. A. F. Scholfield (London: William Heinemann, 1958), Book X:16. 50 Druce, ‘The Sow and Pigs’. 51 In particular, BL, MS Harley 4751, fol 20, and Bodl, MS Bodley 764, fol 37v. The bestiaries do not actually discuss sows and suckling, so the choice was not inspired directly by the text. 52 Isidore of Seville, On Animals, Book 12, Chapter 25, in Grant, Early Christians and Animals; Aristotle, Historia Animalium, trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Book 8, Chapter 6. 53 Quoted in Gins, ‘Everything but the Squeal’, 14. 54 Steel, How to Make a Human, 75–76. 55 Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, vol. 22 Super Lucam, 569. 56 Dante Alighieri, Il Convivio (The Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing (Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1990), Book 4, Chapter 30. 57 The Rouen example is shown in Bond, Wood Carvings in English Churches, vol. 1, 186. For a discussion of the exquisite wood stalls of Toledo, see James D. Ryan, ‘The Choir Stalls of Toledo and the Crusade to Capture Grenada’, in Bible de bois du Moyen Âge. Bible et liturgie dans les stalles médiévales, ed. Frédéric Billiet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). 58 Druce, ‘The Sow and the Pigs’, 5. 59 Bestiary of BL, Harley 4751 translated in Druce, ‘The Sow and Pigs’, 5. 60 Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and its History (London: Warburg Institute, 1974), 8–10. 61 Quoted in Shachar, Judensau, 10 (translation in footnote 30). 62 Shachar, Judensau. 63 There are some fourteenth-century examples outside Germany, including in Uppsala, Sweden, and Gniezno, Poland, which Shachar includes in his catalogue. These would appear to be based on earlier German sculptures. 64 Jan Dienstbier, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Judensau’, in Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe: Imagery of Hatred, ed. Jakub Hauser and Eva Janáčová (Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021). 65 Shachar, Judensau, 3. 66 Shachar, Judensau, 20–21. 67 Shachar, Judensau, 13. 41

42

95

Notes to 'In the Mind', pp. 70–74; 'The Pig's Place', pp. 76–77 Mo Pareles, ‘Already/Never: Jewish-Porcine Conversion in the Middle English Children of the Oven Miracle’, Philological Quarterly 98, no. 3 (2019): 222. The full text of the story is printed in the original Middle English and modern English. 69 Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours (London: British Library Publications, and University of Toronto Press, 2003), 278. 70 Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England, 278. 71 Moshe Blidstein, ‘How Many Pigs Were on Noah’s Ark? An Exegetical Encounter on the Nature of Impurity’, Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 459. 72 Blidstein, ‘How Many Pigs Were on Noah’s Ark?’, 468–69. 73 Shachar, Judensau, 14. 74 The classic work is Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. He argues that medieval jurists understood pigs as the devil, but this is not necessarily so. I will note that Evans makes entirely disagreeable arguments about crime, intelligence, and punishment as a racist Victorian commentator who ascribes to Darwinian social theory. Scholarship has questioned Evans’ use and interpretation of evidence: see Piers Beirne, ‘The Law is an Ass: Reading E. P. Evans’ The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals’, Society & Animals 2, no. 1 (1994); Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 3 (2002); and Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), which offers a rereading of Evans’ evidence in the chapter ‘Animals as Humans’. See also MacGregor, ‘Criminalising Animals in Medieval France’ for the procedural aspects of animal prosecutions as an empowering tool for the responding community. 75 Dinzelbacher, ‘Animal Trials’, 420. 76 See Paul Schiff Berman, ‘Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects’, New York University Law Review 69 (1994). 77 MacGregor, ‘Criminalising Animals in Medieval France’, 7. 78 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 156. 79 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 340–41. 80 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 336–37. 81 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 354–55. 82 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 352–53. 83 MacGregor, ‘Criminalising Animals in Medieval France’. 84 Evans, Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 140. 85 Dinzelbacher, ‘Animal Trials’, 406. 86 Salisbury, The Beast Within, 115. 68

6. The Pig’s Place

1



2

Joel Novek, ‘Pigs and People: Sociological Perspectives on the Discipline of Nonhuman Animals in Intensive Confinement’, Society & Animals 13, no. 3 (2005): 233. William Langland, Piers Ploughman, in The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, vol. 1, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas Wright (London: Reeves and Turner, 1887), lines 1077 and 3168.

96

Notes to 'The Pig's Place', p. 77 3



4



5



Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy in Digital Dante Edition, ed. Teodolinda Barolini (New York: Columbia University, 2014–2020), Inferno, Canto 8 (Mandelbaum translation). See Thijs Porck, ‘Proverbial Pigs in the Middle Ages: Ten Medieval Proverbs Featuring Swine’, Leiden Medievalists Blog, https://www. leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/proverbial-pigs for examples of piggy proverbs. The first is a late fifteenth-century proverb from a Middle Dutch collection; the second is attested in the late thirteenth-century Proverbs of Hendyng in Middle English. Max Förster, ‘Die mittelenglische Sprichwörtersammlung in Douce 52’, in Festschrift zum XII. Allgemeinen Deutschen Neuphilologentage in München, Pfingsten 1906, ed. E. Stollreither (Erlangen: Verlag von Fr. Junge, 1906), 54.

97

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, Robert. ‘The Egregious Feasts of the Chester and Towneley Shepherds’. The Chaucer Review 21, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 96–107. Aelian. On the Characteristics of Animals, 3 vols. Translated by A. F. Scholfield. London: William Heinemann, 1958. Albarella, Umberto. ‘Meat Production and Consumption in Town and Country’. In Town and Country in the Middle Ages: Contrasts, Contacts and Interconnections, 1100–1500, edited by Kate Giles and Christopher Dyer, 131–48. Leeds: Maney, 2007. Albarella, Umberto. ‘“The Mystery of Husbandry”: Medieval Animals and the Problem of Integrating Historical and Archaeological Evidence’. Antiquity 73 (1999): 867–75. Albarella, Umberto. ‘Pig Husbandry and Pork Consumption in Medieval England’. In Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition, edited by C. M. Woolgar, D. Serjeantson, and T. Waldron, 72–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Albarella, Umberto, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter RowleyConwy, eds. Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Intheraction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Albertus Magnus. Opera Omnia, vol. 22 Super Lucam. Edited by Steph. Cæs. Aug. Borgnet. Paris: Bibliopolam Editorem, 1894. Aldebrandin de Sienne. Le régime du corps. Edited by Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1911. Alexander, Dominic. Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008. Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. In Digital Dante Edition, edited by Teodolinda Barolini. New York: Columbia University, 2014–2020. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/. Alighieri, Dante. Il Convivio (The Banquet). Translated by Richard H. Lansing. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 1990. https:// digitaldante.columbia.edu/text/library/the-convivio/. Alsford, Stephen, ed. ‘Ancient Usages and Customs of the Borough of Maldon’. Medieval English Towns website, http://www.trytel. com/~tristan/towns/maldon6.html. Alsford, Stephen, ed. ‘Lynn By-laws’. Medieval English Towns website, http://users.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/lynnlaws.html.

Bibliography Anderson, J. L. Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. Appuhn, Karl. A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Arge, Símun V., Mike J. Church, and Seth D. Brewington. ‘Pigs in the Faroe Islands: An Ancient Facet of the Islands’ Paleoeconomy’. Journal of the North Atlantic 2 (2009): 19–32. Aristotle. Historia Animalium. Translated by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Volume 4 of The Works of Aristotle, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. Arnold, Ellen. Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Attenborough, Frederick L., ed. and trans. The Laws of the Earliest English Kings. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Austin, Thomas, ed. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books. London: N. Trübner for Early English Text Society, 1888. Babe. Directed by Chris Noonan. Universal Pictures, 1995. Bainbridge, David. ‘The Rise of Agriculture: A New Perspective’. Ambio 14, no. 3 (1985): 148–51. Barker, Graeme. ‘The Economy of Medieval Tuscania: The Archaeological Evidence’. Papers of the British School at Rome 41 (1973): 155–77. Bartholomaeus Anglicus. De Proprietatibus Rerum. Nuremburg: Anton Koberger, 1483. Bates, David, ed. Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I, 1066–1087. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Bateson, Mary, ed. Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1327–1509, vol. 2. London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1901. Beirne, Piers. ‘The Law is an Ass: Reading E. P. Evans’ The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals’. Society & Animals 2, no. 1 (1994): 27–46. Benham, W. Gurney, trans. Red Paper Book of Colchester. Colchester: Essex Country Standard Office, 1902. Berger, John. ‘Why Look at Animals?’ In About Looking, John Berger. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Berman, Constance Hoffman. ‘Medieval Agriculture, the Southern French Countryside, and the Early Cistercians. A Study of Forty-Three Monasteries’. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 76, no. 5 (1986): 1–179. Berman, Paul Schiff. ‘Rats, Pigs, and Statues on Trial: The Creation of Cultural Narratives in the Prosecution of Animals and Inanimate Objects’. New York University Law Review 69 (1994): 288–326.

99

Bibliography Bernard, J. H. and R. Atkinson, eds. The Irish Liber Hymnorum, vol. 1. London: Harrison and Sons, 1898. Biddick, Kathleen. ‘Pig Husbandry on the Peterborough Abbey State from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century AD’. In Animals and Archaeology, Husbandry in Europe, vol. 4, edited by C. Grigson and J. Clutton-Brock, 161–77. Oxford: BAR, 1984. Birrell, Jean. ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest: Disputes and Conflicts in the Thirteenth Century’. Past & Present 117 (1987): 22–49. Blidstein, Moshe. ‘How Many Pigs Were on Noah’s Ark? An Exegetical Encounter on the Nature of Impurity’. Harvard Theological Review 108, no. 3 (2015): 448–70. Bökönyi, Sándor. ‘The Development of Stockbreeding and Herding in Medieval Europe’. In Agriculture in the Middle Ages: Technology, Practice, and Representation, edited by D. Sweeney, 41–61. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Bond, Francis. Fonts and Font Covers. London: Oxford University Press, 1908. Bond, Francis. Wood Carvings in English Churches, vol. 1 Misericords. London: Oxford University Press, 1910. Brownbill, John, ed. The Ledger Book of Vale Royal Abbey. Manchester: Manchester Record Society, 1914. British History Online, http://www. british-history.ac.uk/lancs-ches-record-soc/vol68. Brumbaugh-Walter, Lynnea. ‘Selections from the Gesta Romanorum’. In Medieval Literature for Children, edited by Daniel Kline, 29–44. Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003. Brunel, Christian. ‘L’élevage dans le Nord de la France (XIe–XIIIe siècles). Quelques jalons de recherche’. Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 106, no. 1 (1999): 41–61. Buglione, Antonietta, Giovanni De Venuto, and Barbara Sassi. ‘Zooarchaeological Research from an Elite Urban Building in Medieval Durrës (Albania)’. In Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, edited by Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 188–95. Oxford: BAR, 2017. Caesarius of Heisterbach. ‘An Administrator Carried Off Alive by the Devil’, The Dialogue of Miracles. In The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux, edited by Larry D. Benson and Theodore M. Andersson, 363– 65. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. Camerlink, Irene and Winanda W. Ursinus. ‘Tail Postures and Tail Motion in Pigs: A Review’. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 230 (2020): [105079]. Camille, Michael. ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”: The “Other” Chartres and Images of Everyday Life of the Medieval Street’. In History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, edited by Axel Bolvig and Phillip Lindley, 249–76. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.

100

Bibliography Campbell, Bruce. English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Campbell, Killis, ed. The Seven Sages of Rome. Boston, MA: Ginn & Co., 1907. Carlin, Martha. ‘Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England’. In Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, edited by Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, 27–52. London: Hambledon Press, 1998. Carr, David R. ‘Controlling the Butchers in Late Medieval English Towns’. The Historian 70 (2008): 450–61. ten Cate, C. L. Wan god mast gift: Bilder aus der Geschichte der Schweinezucht im Walde. Wageningen, Netherlands: Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1972. Chew, Helena M. and William Kellaway, eds. London Assize of Nuisance, 1301– 1431: A Calendar. London: London Record Society 1973. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol10. Clark, Gillian. ‘Animals and Animal Products in Medieval Italy: A Discussion of Archaeological and Historical Methodology’. Papers of the British School at Rome 57 (1989): 152–71. Clément, Vincent. ‘Spanish Wood Pasture: Origin and Durability of an Historical Wooded Landscape in Mediterranean Europe’. Environment and History 14 (2008): 67–87. Clutton-Brock, Juliet. Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Clutton-Brock, Juliet. A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Cohen, Adam S. and Elizabeth C. Teviotdale. ‘The Getty Anglo-Saxon Leaves and New Testament Illustration Around The Year 1000’. Scriptorium 53, no. 1 (1999): 63–81. Coles, Fred. R. ‘Notes on Saint Anthony’s Chapel; with Views and Plans’. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (March 9, 1896): 225–47. Connolly, Sean and J.-M. Picard. ‘Cogitosus’s “Life of St Brigit” Content and Value’. The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 117 (1987): 5–27. Cook, Albert S., trans. Asser’s Life of King Alfred. Boston, MA: Ginn & Co, 1906. Coomans, Janna. Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Corporation of Nottingham. Records of the Borough of Nottingham, being a Series of Extracts from the Archives of the Corporation of Nottingham, 8 vols. Nottingham: Thomas Forman, 1882–1952. Crossley-Holland, Nicole. Living and Dining in Medieval Paris: The Household of a Fourteenth-Century Knight. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996.

101

Bibliography Cummins, Patricia Willet, ed. A Critical Edition of Le Regime Tresutile et Tresproufitable pour Conserver et Garder la Santé du Corps Humain. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. Dahlke, Wulf. ‘Von Beken und Schwienen. Urkunden aus dem 15. Jahrhundert zu Wasserwirtschaft und Schweinehaltung in Goslar’. Antoniter-Forum 14 (2006): 69–85. Dannenberg, Hans-Dieter. Schwein haben: Historisches und Histörchen vom Schwein. Jena: Fischer, 1990. Darby, H. C. ‘Domesday Woodland’. The Economic History Review 3, no. 1 (1950): 21–43. Davidson, H. R. The Production and Marketing of Pigs. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948. Deguileville, Guillaume de. Le pèlerinage de vie humaine, edited by J. J. Stürzinger. London: Nichols & Sons, 1893. Dembińska, Maria. Food and Drink in Medieval Poland: Rediscovering a Cuisine of the Past. Revised and adapted by William Woys Weaver and translated by Magdalena Thomas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 [1963]. Deschamps, Eustache. ‘Sur les pourceaux’. In OEuvres complètes de Eustache Deschamps, pub. d’après le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque nationale par le marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, edited by Auguste Henry Édouard marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, 241–43. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1878. DeWindt, Edwin Brezette, trans. and ed. The Court Rolls of Ramsey, Hepmangrove, and Bury, 1268–1600. Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/ spo.5811550.0001.001. Dienstbier, Jan. ‘The Metamorphoses of the Judensau’. In Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe: Imagery of Hatred, edited by Jakub Hauser and Eva Janáčová, 1–34. Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021. Dinzelbacher, Peter. ‘Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach’. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 3 (2002): 405–21. Dirkx, G. H. P. ‘Wood-pasture in Dutch Common Woodlands and the Deforestation of the Dutch Landscape’. In The Ecological History of European Forests, edited by Keith J. Kirby and Charles Watkins, 53–62. Wallingford: CAB International, 1998. Dobson, R. B., ed. York City Chamberlains’ Account Rolls 1396–1500. Gateshead: Surtees Society, 1980. Dodwell, Barbara. ‘Reading Records (3): Taxation Roll, 1297’. Berkshire Archaeological Journal 60 (1962): 101–12. Draeger, Heinz-Joachim. Die Sage von der Lüneburger Salzsau. Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, 2013. 102

Bibliography Druce, George C. ‘The Sow and the Pigs: A Study in Metaphor’. Archaeologia Cantiana 46 (1934): 1–6. Duby, Georges. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West. Translated by C. Postan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968. Düselder, H. and C. Reinders-Düselder, Lüneburg. Kleine Stadtgeschichte. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2022. Ervynck, Anton and Wim Van Neer. ‘Beef, Pork and Mutton: An Archaeological Survey of Meat Consumption in Medieval and Postmedieval Towns in the Southern Low Countries (Flanders & Brussels, Belgium)’. Quaternary International 460 (2017): 65–73. Ervynck, Anton, An Lentacker, Gundula Müldner, Mike Richards, and Keith Dobney. ‘An Investigation into the Transition from Forest Dwelling Pigs to Farm Animals in Medieval Flanders, Belgium’. In Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy, 171–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Evans, Edward Payson. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. London: William Heinemann, 1906. Fenelli, Laura. ‘Pigs in Medieval Cities: Saint Anthony’s Unusual Attribute’. In Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, edited by Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 52–57. Oxford: BAR, 2017. Ferrières, Henri de. Le Livre du Roy Modus et de la Royne Racio, nouvelle edition, edited by Elzéar Blaze. Paris: Elzéar Blaze, 1839. Förster, Max. ‘Die mittelenglische Sprichwörtersammlung in Douce 52’. In Festschrift zum XII. Allgemeinen Deutschen Neuphilologentage in München, Pfingsten 1906, edited by E. Stollreither, 40–60. Erlangen: Verlag von Fr. Junge, 1906. Fox, Levi. ‘Some New Evidence of Leet Activity in Coventry 1540–41’. English Historical Review 61.240 (May 1946): 235–43. Fredell, Joel. ‘The Three Clerks and St. Nicholas in Medieval England’. Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 181–202. Geltner, Guy. ‘Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History’. Urban History 40, no. 3 (2013): 395–415. Gins, Sven. ‘Everything but the Squeal: The Politics of Porcinity in the Livre des Propriétés des Choses’. Religions 12: manuscript 260. DOI:10.3390/ rel12040260. Goldberg, Eric J. In the Manner of the Franks: Hunting, Kingship, and Masculinity in Early Medieval Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Grand, Roger. L’agriculture au moyen âge de la fin de l’empire Romain au xvie siècle. Paris: E. de Boccard, 1950. 103

Bibliography Grant, Annie. ‘Food, Status and Religion in England in the Middle Ages: An Archaeozoological Perspective’. Anthropozoologica 2 (1988): 139–46. Grant, Robert M. Early Christians and Animals. London: Routledge, 1999. Grau Sologestoa, Idoia, Umberto Albarella, and Juan Antonio Quirós Castillo. ‘Urban Medieval and Post-Medieval Zooarchaeology in the Basque Country: Meat Supply and Consumption’. Quaternary International 399 (2016): 1–12. Grigson, Caroline. ‘Culture, Ecology, and Pigs from the 5th to the 3rd millennium BC around the Fertile Crescent’. In Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy, 83–108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Groves, Colin. ‘Current Views on Sus Phylogeography and Pig Domestication’. In Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter RowleyConwy, 30–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Groves, Colin. ‘Current Views on Taxonomy and Zoogeography of the Genus Sus’. In Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter RowleyConwy, 15–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hagen, Ann. A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food & Drink: Production & Distribution. Hockwold cum Wilton: Anglo-Saxon Books, 1995. Hamilton, Julie and Richard Thomas. ‘Pannage, Pulses and Pigs: Isotopic and Zooarchaeological Evidence for Changing Pig Management Practices in Later Medieval England’. Medieval Archaeology 56 (2012): 234–59. Hardy, Reginald. A History of the Parish of Tatenhill in the County of Stafford. London: Harrison and Sons, 1907. Hare, John. ‘The Bishop and the Prior: Demesne Agriculture in Medieval Hampshire’. Agricultural History Review 54, no. 2 (2006): 187–212. Harris, Mary Dormer, ed. Coventry Leet Book: or Mayor’s Register, Containing the Records of the City Court Leet or View of Frankpledge, AD 1420–1555, with Divers Other Matters, 4 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907–1913. Harris, Stephen J. ‘Ælfric’s Colloquy’. In Medieval Literature for Children, edited by Daniel T. Kline, 112–30. New York: Routledge, 2012. Harvey, Barbara. Living and Dying in England 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Henisch, Bridget Ann. The Medieval Calendar Year. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Hieatt, Constance B. ‘The Middle English Culinary Recipes in MS Harley 5401: An Edition and Commentary’. Medium Ævum 65, no. 1 (1996): 54–71. Holmbäck, Åke and Elias Wessén, eds. Magnus Erikssons Stadslag i Nusvensk Tolkning. Lund: Carl Bloms Boktryckeri, 1966. 104

Bibliography Hooke, Della. ‘Pre-Conquest Woodland: Its Distribution and Usage’. Agricultural History Review 37, no. 2 (1989): 113–29. Hooke, Della. ‘Royal Forests – Hunting and Other Forest Use in Medieval England’. In New Perspectives on People and Forests, edited by Eva Ritter and Dainis Dauksta, 41–59. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media, 2011. Hooke, Della. ‘The Woodland Landscape of Early Medieval England’. In Place-names, Language and the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, edited by Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, 143–74. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011. Hudson, William, ed. Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich During the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892. Hudson, W. and J. C. Tingey, eds. The Records of the City of Norwich, 2 vols. Norwich: Jarrold, 1906–1910. Innes, Cosmo Nelson, ed. Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland, vol. 1, 1124–1424. Edinburgh: Printed for the Scottish Burgh Records Society, 1868. Janick, Jules. ‘Art as a Source of Information on Horticultural Technology’. In Proceedings of the XXVII International Horticultural Congress on Global Horticulture: Diversity and Harmony, edited by Jules Janick, 69–88. Seoul: International Society for Horticultural Science, 2007. Joannus de Garlandia, Opus Synonymorum, in Patrologiae cursus completus, vol. 150, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris: Migne, 1854. Johnson, Charles and H. A. Cronne, eds. Regesta Regum AngloNormannorum, 1066–1154, volume 2: Regesta Henrici Primi, 1100–1135. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Jørgensen, Dolly. ‘Blood on the Butcher’s Knife: Images of Pig Slaughter in Late Medieval Illustrated Calendars’. In Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, edited by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, 224–37. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Jørgensen, Dolly. ‘Controlling Pigs in Countryside and City for Sustainable Medieval Agriculture’. In Conservation’s Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100–1800, edited by Abigail P. Dowling and Richard Keyser, 31–49. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Jørgensen, Dolly. ‘Environment. Managing urban sanitation for sanitas.’ In A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages (800–1450), edited by Iona McCleery, 21–38. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Jørgensen, Dolly. ‘Illuminating Ephemeral Medieval Agricultural History through Manuscript Art’. Agricultural History 89, no. 2 (2015): 186–99. Jørgensen, Dolly. ‘Pigs and Pollards: Medieval Insights for UK Wood Pasture Restoration’. Sustainability 5 (2013): 387–99. Jørgensen, Dolly. ‘Running Amuck? Urban Swine Management in Late Medieval England’. Agricultural History 87 (2013): 429–51. 105

Bibliography Jørgensen, Dolly and Peter Quelch. ‘The Origins and History of Medieval Wood-pastures’. In European Wood-pastures in Transition: A Social– Ecological Approach, edited by Tibor Hartel and Tobias Pleininger, 55–69. New York: Routledge, 2014. Kekez, Hrvoje. ‘Oxen, Pigs and Sheep in the Medieval City: Analysis of Regulations Concerning Domestic Animals in Statutes of Medieval Dalmatian Towns’. In Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, edited by Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 69–76. Oxford: BAR, 2017. Kemp, Wolfgang. The Narratives of Gothic Stained Glass. Translated by Caroline Dobson Saltzwedel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kershaw Chadwick, Nora. An Early Irish Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. Keyser, Richard. ‘The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management: Commercial Sylviculture in Medieval Champagne’. French Historical Studies 32, no. 3 (2009): 353–84. King, Richard John. Handbook to the Cathedrals of England. Oxford: John Murray, 1862. Kleineke, Hannes, ed. Borough Market Privileges: The Hinterland of Medieval London, c.1400. London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2006. British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/ borough-market-privileges/1400. Koenig, W. B. and J. M. H. Knops. ‘The Behavioral Ecology of Masting in Oaks’. In Oak Forest Ecosystems: Ecology and Management for Wildlife, edited by W. J. McShea and W. M. Healy, 129–48. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Koenig, Walter D. ‘A Brief History of Masting Research’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376 (2021): article 20200423. Kovárová, Lenka. ‘The Swine in Old Nordic Religion and Worldview’. MA thesis, University of Iceland, 2011. Kreiner, Jamie. Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Kristensen, M., ed. Harpestræng: Gamle danske Urtebøger, Stenbøger og Kogebøger. Copenhagen: H. H. Thieles, 1908–1920. Langland, William, Piers Ploughman, in The Vision and Creed of Piers Ploughman, vol. 1, 2nd ed., edited by Thomas Wright. London: Reeves and Turner, 1887. Larson, Greger et al. ‘Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication’. Science 307, no. 5715 (2005): 1618–21. Lauwerier, Roel C. G. M. ‘Pigs, Piglets and Determining the Season of Slaughtering’. Journal of Archaeological Science 10 (1983): 483–88.

106

Bibliography Lespinasse, R., ed. Les Métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris I: XIVe–XVIIIe siècle, ordonnances générale, metiers de l’alimentation. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886. Lewit, Tamara. ‘Pigs, Presses and Pastoralism: Farming in the Fifth to Sixth Centuries AD’. Early Medieval Europe 17, no. 1 (2009): 77–91. Lutwyche, Richard. The Pig: A Natural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Lyte, H. C. Maxwell, ed. Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I: Volume 1, 1272– 1279. London: HMSO, 1900. Lyte, H. C. Maxwell, ed. Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I: Volume 5, 1302– 1307. London: HMSO, 1908. Lyte, H. C. Maxwell, ed. Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III: Volume 9, 1349– 1354. London: HMSO, 1906. Lyte, H. C. Maxwell, ed. Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III: Volume 14, 1374–1377. London: HMSO, 1913. Lyte, H. C. Maxwell, ed. Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry III: Volume 6, 1247– 1251. London: HMSO, 1922. MacGregor, Lesley Bates. ‘Criminalising Animals in Medieval France: Insights from Records of Executions’. Open Library of Humanities 5, no. 1 (2019): article 15. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.3196. McIver, Katherine. Kitchens, Cooking, and Eating in Medieval Italy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Malcolmson, Robert and Stephanos Mastoris. The English Pig: A History. London: Hambledon and London, 2001. Margetts, Andrew. ‘To Browse and Mast and Meadow Glades: New Evidence of Shieling Practice from the Weald of South-East England’. In Ruralia XIII: Seasonal Settlement in the Medieval and Early Modern Countryside, edited by Piers Dixon and Claudia Theune, 337–48. Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2021. Meritt, Herbert. ‘Beating the Oaks: An Interpretation of Christ 678–9’. American Journal of Philology 66, no. 1 (1945): 1–12. Meyer, H. ‘Schwein am Seil’. Deutsche tierärztliche Wochenschrift 111, no. 9 (September 2004): 364–65. Mizelle, Brett. Pig. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Montanari, Massimo. Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table. Translated by Beth Archer Brombert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Moylan, Thomas King. ‘Poverty, Pigs and Pestilence in Medieval Dublin’. Dublin Historical Record 31, no. 4 (September 1978): 155–58. Müldner, Gundula and Michael P. Richards. ‘Fast or Feast: Reconstructing Diet in Later Medieval England by Stable Isotope Analysis’. Journal of Archaeological Science 32 (2005): 39–48.

107

Bibliography Murphy, Margaret and James A. Galloway. ‘Marketing Animals and Animal Products in London’s Hinterland, circa 1300’. Anthropozoologica 16 (1992): 93–100. NeCastro, Gerard, ed. The Chester Cycle. ‘From Stage to Page – Medieval and Renaissance Drama’, https://web.archive.org/web/20150909155557/ http://ummutility.umm.maine.edu/necastro/drama/chester/play_07.txt. Novek, Joel. ‘Pigs and People: Sociological Perspectives on the Discipline of Nonhuman Animals in Intensive Confinement’. Society & Animals 13, no. 3 (2005): 221–44. O’Connor, Terry. ‘Animal Bones from Anglo-Scandinavian York’. In Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York, edited by R. A. Hall et al., 427–45. York: Council for British Archaeology, 2004. O’Connor, Terry. ‘Animals in Medieval Urban Lives: York as a Case Study’. In Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, edited by Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 115–28. Oxford: BAR, 2017. O’Connor, Terry. ‘Bones as Evidence of Meat Production and Distribution in York’. In Feeding A City: York. The Provision of Food from Roman Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, edited by E. White, 43–60. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2000. Oschinsky, Dorothea. Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Øye, Ingvild. Middelalderbyens agrare trekk. Bergen: Bryggens Museum, 1998. Palladius, Opus Agriculturae, ed. J. C. Schmitt. Leipzig: Teubner, 1898. Palladius, Opus Agriculturae. In Palladius: The Work of Farming (Opus Agriculturae), edited by John G. Fitch. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2013. Palmer, C. F. R. ‘The Friar-preachers, or Blackfriars, of Shrewsbury’. The Reliquary 26 (1886): 73–82. Palmer, J., ed. Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086, 2nd ed. UK Data Service, 2010. DOI: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-5694-1. Pareles, Mo. ‘Already/Never: Jewish-Porcine Conversion in the Middle English Children of the Oven Miracle’. Philological Quarterly 98, no. 3 (2019): 221–24. Percy, Joyce W., ed. York Memorandum Book (B/Y). Gateshead: Northumberland, 1973. Phillips, Sarah. ‘The Pig in Medieval Iconography’. In Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy, 373–87. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. London: Taylor and Francis, 1855.

108

Bibliography Põltsam-Jürjo, Inna. ‘The Cult of Saint Anthony in Medieval and Early Modern Estonia’. Acta Historica Tallinnensia 27, no. 1 (2021): 39–68. Porck, Thijs. ‘Boars of Battle: The Wild Boar in the Early Middle Ages’, https://thijsporck.com/2017/02/27/boars/. Porck, Thijs. ‘Proverbial Pigs in the Middle Ages: Ten Medieval Proverbs Featuring Swine’. Leiden Medievalists Blog, https://www. leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/proverbial-pigs. Prestwich, Michael, ed. York Civic Ordinances, 1301. Borthwick Papers No. 49. York: St. Anthony’s, 1976. Pretty, Jules N. ‘Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages: The English Manor’. Agricultural History Review 38 (1990): 1–19. Quirós, Juan Antonio. ‘Archaeology of Early Medieval Peasantry in the Basque Country: Landscapes, Economic Trends and Societal Change in Álava’. Historia Agraria 82 (2020): 209–43. Rawcliffe, Carole. ‘Sources for the Study of Public Health in the Medieval City’. In Understanding Medieval Primary Sources: Using Historical Sources to Discover Medieval Europe, edited by Joel T. Rosenthal, 177–95. London: Routledge, 2012. Rawcliffe, Carole. Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. Riley, H. T., ed. Memorials of London and London Life in the 13th, fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries. London: Longmans, Green, 1868. Rogers, Nicola. Games and Recreation c. AD 1400–1700. York: York Archaeological Trust for Excavation and Research, 2017. Russell, Edmund. Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Russell, Edmund. Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History of England, 1200–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Ryan, James D. ‘The Choir Stalls of Toledo and the Crusade to Capture Grenada’. In Bible de bois du Moyen Âge. Bible et liturgie dans les stalles médiévales, edited by Frédéric Billiet, 195–209. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. Ryder, M.L. ‘Livestock Remains from Four Medieval Sites in Yorkshire’. Agricultural History Review 9, no. 2 (1961): 105–10. Sabine, Ernest L. ‘Butchering in Mediaeval London’. Speculum 8 (1933): 335–53. Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2011. Salter, David. Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Salter, H. E., ed. Records of Medieval Oxford. Coroners’ Inquests, the Walls of Oxford, etc. Oxford: The Oxford Chronicle Company, 1912.

109

Bibliography Salvadori, Frank. ‘Animals in Italian Medieval Towns: From Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages’. In Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, edited by Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 129–45. Oxford: BAR, 2017. Sánchez Adell, José. ‘Ganadería porcina medieval en Castellón’. Millars: Espai i Història 15 (1992): 72–80. Saraiva, Tiago. Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. Scott, Kathleen L. ‘Sow-and-bagpipe Imagery in the Miller’s Portrait’. The Review of English Studies 18, no. 71 (1967): 287–90. Scully, D. Eleanor and Terence Scully. Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Scully, Terence, ed. The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts. Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1988. Sellers, Maud, ed. York Memorandum Book, Lettered A/Y in the Guildhall Muniment Room, 2 pts. Durham: Andrews, 1912, 1915. Shachar, Isaiah. The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and its History. London: Warburg Institute, 1974. Sharpe, Reginald R., ed. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: A, 1275–1298. London: HMSO, 1899. British History Online, http://www. british-history.ac.uk/london-letter-books/vola. Sharpe, Reginald R., ed. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: E, 1314–1337. London: HMSO, 1903. British History Online, http://www. british-history.ac.uk/london-letter-books/vole. Sharpe, Reginald R., ed. Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: H, 1375–1399. London: HMSO, 1907. British History Online, http://www. british-history.ac.uk/london-letter-books/volh. Shaw, Earl B. ‘Geography of Mast Feeding’. Economic Geography 16, no. 3 (July 1940): 233–49. Sillar, Frederick Cameron and Ruth Mary Meyler. The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1961. Sirignano, Carmina, et al. ‘Animal Husbandry during Early and High Middle Ages in the Basque Country (Spain)’. Quaternary International 346 (2014): 138–48. Smith, Catherine. ‘A Grumphie in the Sty: An Archaeological View of Pigs in Scotland, from Their Earliest Domestication to the Agricultural Revolution’. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 130 (2000): 705–24. Smith, Kathryn A. Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. London: British Library Publications and University of Toronto Press, 2003. Steel, Karl. How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. 110

Bibliography Stokes, Whitley. ‘The Battle of Mag Mucrime’. Revue Celtique 13 (1892): 426–74. Swanson, Robert N. ‘Marginal or Mainstream? The Hospitaller Orders and Their Indulgences in Late Medieval England’. Ricerche dell’Istituto Storico Germanico di Roma 3 (2007): 169–94. Swanton, Michael, ed. and trans. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. New York: Routledge, 1996. Szabó, Peter. Woodland and Forests in Medieval Hungary. BAR International Series 1348. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005. Szende, Katalin. ‘All the Priests’ Horses and All the Priests’ Hens…: Animals in the Households of Late Medieval Hungarian Urban Clergy’. In Animaltown: Beasts in Medieval Urban Space, edited by Alice M. Choyke and Gerhard Jaritz, 77–83. Oxford: BAR, 2017. Tacitus. Germanica. In Complete Works of Tacitus, edited by Alfred John Church, William Jackson Brodribb, and Lisa Cerrato. New York: Random House, 1942. Thiébaux, Marcelle. ‘The Mouth of the Boar as a Symbol in Medieval Literature’. Romance Philology 22, no. 3 (1969): 281–99. Thoen, Erik and Tim Soens. ‘Élevage, prés et pâturage dans le comté de Flandre au Moyen Âge et au début des Temps modernes: Les liens avec l’économie rurale régionale’. In Prés et Pâtures en Europe occidentale, edited by Francis Brumont, 79–99. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2008. Thomas, A. H., ed. Calendar of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London: Volume 2, 1364–1381. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1929. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ plea-memoranda-rolls/vol2. Thomas, Anabel. Garrisoning the Borderlands of Medieval Siena: Sant’Angelo in Colle: Frontier Castle under the Government of the Nine (1287–1355). London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Tourunen, Auli. ‘Animals in an Urban Context: A Zooarchaeological study of the Medieval and Post-Medieval Town of Turku’. PhD thesis, University of Turku, 2008. Trow-Smith, Robert. A History of British Livestock Husbandry to 1700. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. Turner, Dennis and Rob Briggs. ‘Testing Transhumance: Anglo-Saxon Swine Pastures and Seasonal Grazing in the Surrey Weald’. Surrey Archaeological Collections 99 (2016): 165–93. Tusser, Thomas. Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. Edited by W. Mavor. London: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1812. Unsain, Dianne, Vincent Buccio, and Pierre Magniez. ‘Zooarchaeology, Medieval Economy and Culinary Practices: The case of Petra Castellana Castrum (South of France)’. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 30 (2020): article 102170. 111

Bibliography Vialles, Noëlie. Animal to Edible. Translated by J. A. Underwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Vincent of Beauvais. Speculi Maioris. Venice: Dominicum Nicolinum, 1541. Walker Bynum, Caroline. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952. White, Sam. ‘From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History’. Environmental History 16 (2011): 94–120. Wilkie, T. et al. ‘A Dental Microwear Study of Pig Diet and Management in Iron Age, Romano-British, Anglo-Scandinavian, and Medieval Contexts in England’. In Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, edited by Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy, 241–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wilkinson, Louise J., ed. and trans. The Household Roll of Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Leicester and Pembroke, 1265. British Library, Additional MS 8877. Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Pipe Roll Society, 2020. Wiseman, Julian. The Pig: A British History, 2nd ed. London: Duckworth, 2000. Witney, K. P. ‘The Woodland Economy of Kent, 1066–1348’. The Agricultural History Review 38, no. 1 (1990): 20–39. Woolsey, Theodore. Studies in French Forestry. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1920. Wrottesley, G., ed. Collections for a History of Staffordshire, Vol. 6 Part 1. London: Staffordshire Record Society, 1885. Zarnecki, George. English Romanesque Lead Sculpture. London: Alec Tiranti, 1957.

112

INDEX acorns 3, 6, 16–18, 23–27 see also mast Ælfric 14 Aelian 66 agriculture 2, 6, 12, 26, 39, 60 see also woodland, wood pasture Al-Jahiz 73 Albania 46 Albertus Magnus 57, 68 Aldebrandin of Siena 55 Alfred the Great 63 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 16 Anthony, St 60–62, 74 archaeology 2, 23, 33, 39 see also bones, zooarchaeology Aristotle 63, 66 Arthur, King 64 Augustine, St 57 bacon 45, 53–56, 76–77 bagpipes 66, 76 baker 37–38, 40 Bartholomaeus Anglicus 14, 24 beating oaks 23–25 Belgium see Flanders bestiary 10, 12–13, 66, 69 biblical stories see Miracle of the Gadarene Swine, Parable of the Prodigal Son blood 38, 43–44, 49–51, 68 bones as reliquary 64 size of pig 5 as soup stock 53 survival of 53 see also zooarchaeology branding 26 breeding 2, 4–5 brewer 38 Brigit of Ireland, St  27, 62 bristles 47–49

butcher in images 43–44, 48–52 in legend of ‘The Three Clerks’ 54 as morally stained 50 as occupation 5, 22, 55, 76 as pig owners 34, 37 as regulated 30, 47, 49 butchery process 43–44, 46–51 in scalding house 49 and waste generation 33–34, 36, 38, 49 see also blood, butcher Caesarius of Heisterbach 39 calendar 2–3, 19, 23–25, 31–32, 43, 50–51, 59, 62 Carolingian 17, 57–58, 69 Cath Maige Mucrime 60 cattle 1, 5–6, 20, 22–23, 37, 43–45, 47, 55, 57 Chaucer 36, 54, 66 children 14, 26–27, 35–36, 39, 70, 72, 74, 77 church decoration 66–69, 71 Clement of Alexandria 64, 66 cooking see cooks, lard, pork, recipes cooks 53–54, 76 Corbechon, Jean 55, 66 Croatia 31, 37, 60 culling 5 Cynewulf 26 Dante Alighieri 68, 77 den 7, 17, 22 Denmark 53 Deschampes, Eustache 36, 43, 54, 77 Disputation of Sergis the Stylite against a Jew 70 domestication 1, 4–5, 9

Index grazing 12, 18–22, 35 see also pannage Guillaume de Deguileville 65

Domesday Book 16–18 droveway 23 Eleanor de Montfort 45 England feeding of pigs in 28 number of pigs in 6–7, 16–17, 21, 30 pannage in 20–22 pig imagery in 69 pork consumption in 6, 43–46, 54–55 regulation of butchery in 49 regulation of urban pigs in 30–31, 33–35 swineherds in 24–26 transhumance in 21–23 see also Ramsey Estonia 62 etymology 9–10, 12, 69

Henri de Ferrières see Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Racio Hildegard of Bingen 9 Hospitaller Orders of St Anthony 60–61, 74 Hrabanus Maurus 69 human–animal relations 1–2, 9, 76–78 humours 55 Hungary 7, 20, 30 hunting 14–15, 20, 42, 64 Iceland 6–7, 27 see also sagas Ireland 27, 37, 55, 59, 62, 66 Isidore of Seville 9–10, 12, 66, 69 Italy 17, 21, 28–29, 44, 47, 49–51 ivory 58

Faroe Islands 7, 18, 28 fecundity 6, 11 see also reproduction under pig feasting 14, 45, 54–56 feeding on acorns/mast 4, 6, 16–17, 20 see also pannage on food waste 33–35, 38 in grain fields 42 in stalls 28, 32–33 on vegetation 18 fines 16, 22, 35–40, 41, 47, 49, 74 Finland 7–8, 30 Flanders 6, 28, 33, 38, 40, 44 forest 12, 16–18, 20–22, 40 France 6–7, 17, 21, 28, 36, 47, 51, 59, 65, 74 see also Normandy Francis of Assisi, St 63 Frankish kingdom 14

Jesus 57–58, 68, 70, 72 Judensau 69–71 Judaism 56, 68–73 John of Garland 9 labours of the month 2, 23, 32–33, 43–44 lard 43, 50–51, 53–54, 60 Laws of Ine 16, 22 Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Racio 5, 14, 64 leashing 29–31, 39 Livre de chasse 14 Livestock 1–2, 6 see also cattle, grazing, pig, sheep lust 64–66 Luttrell Psalter 25 Mac Dathó’s Pig 55 Magnus Eriksson’s law 22 Malo, St 62 marke boeken 26 market 28, 30, 34–35, 47 mast 4, 16–18, 23–26 meat see butchery, pasties, pork, sausage Michaelmas 7, 17, 37

Gaston Phoebus see Livre de chasse geese 33, 37, 39 Germany 30, 33, 35, 38, 64, 69, 73 gluttony 11, 16, 66, 70, 77 goats 1, 6, 37, 45, 47 Gottfried von Strassburg 63 Greenland 6

114

Index Miracle of the Gadarene Swine 57–58 misericord 66–68 monasteries 7, 17, 20–22, 28, 45, 63 mud 9–10, 12, 27, 57, 64, 66, 68 natural history 9–10

rooting behaviour of 10 seizure of 36 selling of 30, 37 as sexual 64–66 tails 5 as tax payment 7 as unclean 57, 70, 73 urban ownership of 30, 38 visibility of 75 wallowing behaviour of 9–10, 12 wearing bell 60–62 associated with witchcraft 60 in woodlands 20–27 see also branding, feeding, labours of the month, lard, leashing, pasties, pork, ringing, sausage, slaughter, sties, swineherd, trials, wild boar piglet 6–7, 9, 13, 18, 27, 40, 55, 62, 66, 69 see also reproduction under pig place-names 7, 17 Pliny the Elder 5–6, 9 Poland 51 pollarding 18 pork 1, 28, 43–46, 51, 53–56, 62, 66, 68, 70, 73 prostitution 64–65 proverbs 68, 77

Netherlands, the 26, 34, 39 Nicholas, St 54, 62 Normandy 18, 21 Norway 26, 43, 47, 55 nuisance 33, 35–39 oak 16, 18–20, 22–25 Palladius 26–27 pannage 16, 20–21, 26 see also mast Parable of the Prodigal Son 58–59 pasties 53–54 pasture  see wood pasture Piers Plowman 54, 77 pig as allegory 9, 11, 63–68, 70 banning of 37 behavioural traits of 9–10, 27, 35 in Christian scripture 57–59 colouring of 4–5 compared to humans 63–64, 76 compared to wild boar 9–10, 12 court hearings about 38–39 damage by 20, 35–37, 39–40 death by 36 driving of 20, 22–23 as filthy 9–10, 57 free-range 16–18, 26 as gluttonous 11, 66 health of 26–27, 53 in houses 39 Jews linked to 68–73 laws about 22, 30–31, 33–36, 40, 64 legal personhood of 74 lifespan of 9, 46–47 numbers of 6–7, 17–18, 21, 30, 38, 61 associated with prostitutes 64–65 physical characteristics of 2, 4–5 reproduction 6, 9, 11, 46 roaming in towns 35–37, 39–40, 60–61

Ramsey, England 38–40, 42 recipes 51, 53 Rectitudines Singularum Personarum 27 Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum 53 ringing 40–42 Roman 5–6, 9, 14, 66 sagas 14, 27–28, 45, 59–60, 63–64 Scandinavia 6, 63 see also Iceland, Norway Scotland 18, 31 Seneschaucy 18 Seven Sages of Rome 14 sheep 1, 5–6, 22, 30, 37, 43–45, 47, 54, 57, 63 Shepherd’s Play of Chester Cycle 54–56 Shepherd’s Play of the Towneley Cycle 56

115

Index slaughter age at 6, 46–47 in autumn 4, 43, 46, 54 place of 22, 37, 49 see also butcher, butchery Spain 7, 22–23, 27–28, 30, 43, 46, 67 spinning sow 65–66 stained glass 23, 59, 66 sty design of 31–33 location of 33, 38–40 owners of 39, 45 pigs confined to 31 sausage 43, 50–54 suckling pig 45, 47 swine see pig swine castrator 35 swineherd being fined 40, 42 classes of 27 climbing trees 16, 25–26, 38 driving pigs 18, 22–23 employed by towns 34–35 gathering acorns 26 gathering in pigs 26 gender of 27 knocking down acorns 16, 23–25 labour status of 27 leading pig by rope 28–31, 39 miracle involving 57, 62 numbers of 21 rents rendered by 21 associated with St Anthony 62 as saint 27, 62 treating pig health problems 27

as wolves 62 see also Parable of the Prodigal Son Tacitus 63 teeth 30, 33 thievery 26–27 transhumance 22–23, 28 trials 73–74 Tusser, Thomas 24, 26 urban life 2, 7, 30–42 Varro 6 Vincent of Beauvais 26 Weald 7, 22–23 Walter of Henley 6 waste 49 wild boar as allegory 64 eating acorns 16 eating truffles 18 etymology of 9–10, 12 hunting of 14–15 as meat 55 physical characteristics of 4–5 reproduction of 9 in saint’s life 62 associated with Satan 64 scientific status of 2 as symbol of nobility 14, 63–64 wildness 12 woodland 4, 12, 14, 16–20 wood pasture 6–7, 12, 17–23, 28 zooarchaeology 6, 8, 28, 30, 33, 43–47, 51, 53

116

Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages Previously published: 1: The Natural World in the Exeter Book Riddles, Corinne Dale 2: Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations, Michael J. Warren 3: Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac, Britton Elliott Brooks 4: The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary, Liz Herbert McAvoy 5: Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts, Liam Lewis 6: Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts, Elizabeth Marshall 7: Animal-Human Relationships in Medieval Iceland: From Farm-Settlement to Sagas, Harriet J. Evans Tang 8: Trees as Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages: Comparative Contexts, edited by Michael D. J. Bintley and Pippa Salonius