Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  And yet food rules proved hard to throw off entirely. Even the Acts of the Apostles hedged its bets, telling Christians they must “abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled.” This preserved the Levitical law against mingling flesh and blood, the very concept that had led to the ban on pig flesh. The laws of Anglo-Saxon England specifically outlawed the consumption of strangled animals, and Christians generally embraced the Jewish prohibition against eating carnivores like bears, wolves, and cats—animals that ate flesh from which the blood had not been drained and were therefore polluted. An Irish text warned people not to eat “a scab from one’s own body”: since humans eat meat, this mild self-cannibalism constituted eating the flesh of a predator.

  The pig’s omnivorous diet, combined with the heavy symbolic freight the animal carried, prompted anxiety. Irish priests created the most elaborate pork regulations. If a swine ate carrion just “once or twice,” it could be eaten once that carrion was “ejected from its intestines,” according to seventh-century rules known as the Canons of Adamnan. That’s assuming that the carrion in question was not a human corpse. “Swine that taste the flesh or blood of men are always forbidden,” the rules warned.

  Other Christians were more permissive toward pigs that had dined on people. Theodore of Tarsus, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 668 ad, set down another set of dietary rules. If swine merely tasted human blood, they remained clean, but if they “tear and eat the corpses of the dead, their flesh may not be eaten until they become feeble and weak and until a year has elapsed.” By then, the fat derived from the human flesh would be purged, and the pig could be fattened on clean food and eaten.

  Medieval swine had frequent opportunity for scavenging human remains. Medieval armies could be slow to collect their dead after battles, and executed prisoners, suicides, and people excommunicated from the church were often left unburied as a form of punishment. In Shakespeare’s Richard III, the title character is described as a “foul swine” who “Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough / In your embowell’d bosoms.” Such habits of pigs necessitated caution by those who ate pork. “Cows feed only on grass and the leaves of trees,” the Canons of Adamnan noted, but “swine eat things clean and unclean.”

  “Clean” food for pigs became harder to find as the medieval era progressed. In 1000 ad most of the great European forests where pigs foraged remained intact. Over the next two hundred years, Europe changed dramatically as farmers captured coastal marshes from the sea and, further inland, cut down trees to plant wheat, barley, and rye. The process was nudged along by the Medieval Warm Period, roughly from 950 to 1250 ad, when average temperatures rose a degree or two and growing seasons lengthened.

  As towns and cities grew, pigs came in from the dwindling forests and took up residence in the streets. We know about this mostly from attempts to banish pigs from cities. In 1131 in Paris, a boar ran under the legs of a horse ridden by young Prince Philip, causing the boy to be thrown to the street and killed. In response, Parisian authorities banned pigs from running loose in the city. Similarly, in 1301 the English city of York passed an ordinance reading, “No one shall keep pigs which go in the streets by day or night, nor shall any prostitute stay in the city,” thus drawing an equivalence of sorts between unrestrained animals and unrestrained women.

  The frequency with which cities issued and reissued prohibitions on pigs indicates that the bans didn’t work, and they didn’t work because pigs played a necessary role. In Paris and most other towns and cities in Europe, the rule governing sanitation was tout à la rue, “everything in the street,” which meant Parisians simply flung garbage and the contents of their chamber pots out the window. The wealthier might have pit latrines or cesspools, but the men who cleaned them often dumped the waste in the gutter. Sometimes this filth was collected as fertilizer or as a raw material for making gunpowder, but much of it found its way into the stomachs of pigs. A set of German playing cards from 1535 depicted pigs roasting excrement on a spit and then eating it. The theologian Honorius of Autun, writing in the eleventh century, describes wicked people as “shit for the stomach of pigs,” a metaphor that reflects the animal’s dining habits. In an English text, a woman explains that she won’t serve pork because the local pigs “eat human shit in the streets.”

  And that wasn’t the pig’s worst offense.

  The court records of medieval Europe record dozens of cases in which pigs were tried and convicted of attacking children. In France in 1494, for example, a young pig entered a house and, according to court records, “ate the face and neck” of a young boy, killing him. The pig was jailed, tried, convicted, and hanged.

  The earliest medieval animal trials date to thirteenth-century Burgundy, and thereafter they spread throughout France and into the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy. There was biblical precedent for punishing animals. “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned,” according to the book of Exodus, “but the owner of the ox shall be clear.” Oxen, however, rarely found themselves in the docket. Medieval courts disproportionately prosecuted pigs.

  Pigs accounted for well over half of all the animal executions in medieval Europe. Roaming free on farms and in towns, they sometimes fell victim to their own omnivorous appetites. In modern-day Papua New Guinea, where pigs wander through villages much as they did in medieval Europe, children are sometimes bitten as the animals steal food from their hands. These medieval pigs were perhaps attracted by bit of gruel on an infant’s upper lip and then got carried away.

  The owners of killer pigs were held blameless. When a young pig was hanged for killing a five-year-old boy near Chartres in 1499, the pig’s owners were fined—not for failing to control their pig but for failing to protect the child, who had been left in their care. The guilt for the murder itself lay entirely with the animal.

  To modern minds, the rationale for such trials seems bewildering. One European court explained that a pig would be hanged so that “an example may be made and justice maintained,” as if other pigs might heed the lesson. In another case the court noted that the pig had killed an infant and eaten its flesh “although it was Friday”: the animal, in other words, had violated not only the commandment against murder but also the church’s prohibition against eating meat on that day of the week.

  A particularly unusual execution took place in France in 1386, after a sow killed a three-year-old boy. The animal was dressed in a jacket and trousers, with white gloves on its front hooves and a mask resembling a human face over its snout, and hanged not by the neck but by the rear feet. Local laws mandated the upside-down position, if not the costuming: “If an ox or horse commit one or more homicides,” the law noted, the beast should be forfeited to the local lord but not killed. “But if another animal or a Jew do it, they should be hung by their rear legs.” Pigs and Jews suffered the same sort of humiliating execution.

  Pigs loom large in the appalling history of European anti-Semitism. People are often defined by their foods: Englishman are roast beefs; Sicilians are macaronis; the French are frogs. Jews, in an odd reversal, became most closely identified with the animal they refused to eat. English illustrations of the crucifixion often depicted Christ’s tormentors as humans with pig snouts, just one expression of the familiar charge that the Jewish people were “Christ killers.” In Germany a common anti-Semitic image was the Judensau, or “Jew’s sow,” which portrays Jews suckling at the teats of a giant sow and eating her excrement—a vicious echo of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf. Martin Luther, in a religious tract, addressed Jews directly: “You are not worthy of looking at the outside of the Bible, much less of reading it. You should read only the bible that is found under the sow’s tail, and eat and drink the letters that drop there.”

  Given the pig’s diet, Jewish abstention from pork seems wise: pigs, after all, killed children, scavenged corpses, and ate feces. The great rabbi Maimonides,
writing in the twelfth century, linked the biblical pork prohibition to the animal’s habits. Jews rejected the pig because of “its being very dirty and feeding on dirty things,” he explained. “If swine were used for food, marketplaces and even houses would have been dirtier than latrines.” Christians, who cooked and ate these nasty beasts, might reasonably be considered more piglike than Jews.

  Medieval Europeans tried and executed dozens of pigs for the crime of killing children. The sow depicted in this illustration was hanged by her rear legs, a humiliating measure reserved for pigs and Jews. The vicious anti-Semitism of medieval Europe often paired Jews with swine, perversely equating Jews with the animal they refused to eat.

  But there was no problem of logic that could not be solved by fancy theorizing. Medical practice at the time derived from the Greek physician Galen’s theory that good health required a balance among the body’s four “humors”: blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy. Food could be used to adjust a disordered system, but not in any simple way: for instance, chicken, being delicate, improved the humors of those with weak constitutions but might incinerate completely within the bodies of the strong, leading to “burnt” humors. Digestion, physicians believed, was a complex process that transformed foreign matter into human flesh, and the foods easiest to digest were those most similar to the human body. This led to the troubling conclusion that cannibalism was a wise dietary choice. According to one authority, no other food “is more agreeable to man’s nourishment than human flesh.”

  Human flesh being forbidden, pork offered the best substitute. Galen had first suggested the similarity between the two. The idea emerged, perhaps, from the similar diets of people and pigs or from their similar anatomy. At a time when the church forbade human dissection, pigs served as substitutes. The twelfth-century text Anatomia porci advised dissecting pigs because the body of no other animal “appears to be more like ours than is that of the pig.” The similarities, some said, were culinary as well as anatomical. One medical book reported, “Many have eaten man’s flesh instead of pork, and could perceive neither by the savour nor the taste but that it had been pork.” A butcher reportedly passed off human flesh as pork until one unlucky diner found a finger in his meat.

  Because of its similarity to human flesh, pork was considered the most healthful meat—but only for Christians. According to the theory of humors, when people ate an animal, they could absorb its behavior along with its flesh. One might assume that this would render the eaters of pigs more piglike, but it wasn’t that simple. As Christians saw it, both Jews and pigs were prone to lust and gluttony. Jews would grow even more sinful if they ate an animal afflicted with those same qualities; God, the wise physician, had therefore forbidden them to eat it. Christians saw themselves as in better control of their sinful natures and therefore capable of enjoying the benefits of pork without its drawbacks. Christians, one authority explained, can transform even dangerous food into virtuous nourishment, “just as honey changes the bitterness of the orange’s peel into sweetness.”

  It gets worse: some Christians asserted that Jews, denied the meat of the pig, lusted after its closest equivalent: human flesh. An English rhyme told the tale of Hugh of Lincoln, an eight-year-old Christian boy supposedly killed by a Jewish woman.

  She’d laid him on the dressing table,

  And stickit him like a swine.

  And first came out the thick, thick blood,

  And syne came out the thin.

  European Christians learned hatred of Jews in the cradle, through nursery rhymes and legends, and nothing was more frightening than tales of children killed by Jews, their flesh salted and eaten, their blood collected and used to make matzo or to concoct magical potions. These invented tales had brutally real effects: Jews were tried and executed—often hanged upside down, like child-killing swine—for allegedly committing these crimes. Such “blood libel” accusations, fantastical as they may seem, were taken seriously down through the Nazi era and persist even today.

  Perhaps these theories involving pigs and Jews were just elaborate post hoc justifications for popular prejudice. The connection might have been as simple as this: pigs were the most despised animals, and Jews were the most despised people. A London town ordinance of 1419 referred to “Jews, Lepers, and Swine that are to be removed from the City.” All threatened Christians with filth and contagion.

  Equating pigs with Jews didn’t stop some Christians from embracing pork as a symbol of their faith. This was especially true in Spain. The Visigoth rulers, who adopted Christianity in 589 ad, passed laws promoting the raising of pigs. Monasteries kept large herds of swine, and in many towns the central religious festivals involved Saint Anthony and Saint Martin of Tours, both closely associated with pigs. Unlike much of the rest of Europe, Spanish farmers continued to raise pigs on acorns in the forests and thereby preserved the pig’s reputation as a noble creature of the woods rather than a dirty scavenger of the streets.

  Muslim forces invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and ruled over it for nearly eight hundred years. According to the Quran, “Forbidden to you is that which dies of itself, and blood, and the flesh of swine.” All of those substances were also prohibited to Jews, and the Islamic law clearly owed a debt to its fellow Abrahamic religion. Environmental and political reasons—the unsuitability of swine for arid conditions and the desire to prevent the poor from raising their own food—likely also played a role in the Islamic pork ban. As Islam spread rapidly across the globe, it arrived in regions like Spain, where pigs were central to agriculture and cuisine. During the centuries of Muslim rule, Catholic monasteries protected Spain’s legacy of swine.

  After the Reconquista—the retaking of Spain by Christian forces, completed about 1500—pigs emerged from their sanctuary among the monks and assumed a prominent role. The Christian authorities carried out a policy of forced conversion of Muslims and Jews, with an emphasis on questions of diet. Christians assumed that their new coreligionists would rejoice at being freed from the burdens of the dietary laws—after all, Christians had long assumed that Jews secretly craved pork. One Christian text depicts Jews lamenting the culinary pleasures they had denied themselves and crying out, “How much ham we could have had!”

  This coerced conversion made Christians fear—not without reason—that erstwhile Muslims and Jews were secretly maintaining their former ways. Many converts tried to combat such suspicions by displaying in their homes a slice of pork, called a medalla or medallion, as a fleshy talisman to ward off the Inquisition. In a work by the great playwright Lope de Vega, a character explains that he hung a side of bacon on his wall “so that the King will know that I am neither a Moor nor a Jew.”

  Inquisitors became obsessed with pork consumption. A convert named Gonzolo Perez Jarada appeared before the Inquisition in Toledo in 1489 to answer charges that he “did not eat bacon.” In a similar case, a woman named Elvira del Campo was tried in Toledo in 1567 on charges of “not eating pork.” The official record states that she was stripped, put on the rack, and interrogated. “I did not eat pork for it made me sick,” she said at first. Then, after cords were twisted tightly around her wrists—“They hurt me! Oh my arms, my arms!”—she confessed that she abstained from pork because she remained an observant Jew. The Inquisitors confiscated her property and sentenced her to three years in prison.

  Following the Reconquista, eating pork—even more than partaking of the Eucharist at a Catholic Mass—became the key marker dividing Christian from Jew. At about the same time, pork consumption emerged as a different type of boundary marker as well, one that delineated not just religious groups but also social classes. The demographic swings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a human population boom, followed by a fearsome die-off due to famine and disease—brought surprising changes to the way pigs lived and the way people thought about pork.

  eight

  “The Husbandman’s Best Scavenge
r”

  In Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, a jester asks a swineherd what he calls the animals under his care. “Swine, fool, swine,” the herdsman replies. The jester then asks what the animal is called after it is butchered. “Pork,” comes the reply. The jester, after playing dumb, then makes an astute point about power, language, and food: The word “swine” is Saxon in origin, while “pork” is French. When living and under the care of “a Saxon slave,” the animal goes by its Saxon name, the jester explains. When cooked and served at a “feast among the nobles,” the swine magically becomes pork, because French is the language of the ruling class.

  The scene dramatizes a great moment in linguistic history. Ivanhoe, published in 1820, is set in the twelfth century, immediately following William the Conqueror’s conquest of England in 1066. When French nobles took over, their language took on a higher status, while the words of the defeated Saxons became vulgar. Thus “swineflesh” became pork (from the French porc), “cowflesh” became beef (boeuf), and “sheepflesh” became mutton (mouton). The scene in Ivanhoe points to a corresponding distinction in who ate what: “slaves” cared for livestock, but “nobles” ate them.

  Such distinctions grew more significant over time. Tribal cultures, such as the very first farming villages of the Near East, had produced little wealth and therefore had simple social hierarchies consisting of food producers and rulers. Their cuisines had remained undifferentiated: kings and farmers ate the same foods. But as economies grew richer, societies were minutely carved into many classes—soldiers and laborers, priests and merchants, peasants and nobles. Diet helped define status. This had been true in ancient Mesopotamia, where the priests dined on lamb and the laborers ate pork, as well as in Rome, where senators banqueted on suckling pig and slaves made do with bread and tripe.