Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (8 page)

SEVEN

“Swine Eat Things Clean and Unclean”

S
ometime around
1210
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, Francis of Assisi and his companion Friar Juniper paid a call on a sick friar and asked if he needed anything. The man told his visitors he was hungry for a pig’s foot. Friar Juniper immediately snatched up a knife—“I believe ’twas a kitchen knife,” his hagiographer tells us—ran toward a herd of pigs, and “falling on one of them, cuts off a foot and runs away with it.” Friar Juniper then cooked the foot and fed it to the sick friar while telling the patient “with great glee” about “the assaults he had made on the pig.”

The swine’s owner, understandably, complained to Saint Francis, who upbraided Friar Juniper for theft. The friar then explained to the pig’s owner that he had acted only out of concern for the sick man. The owner, moved by the friar’s humility, forgave him and donated “what was left of the pig” to the
monastery. Saint Francis thus managed to resolve the dispute, but he did so by treating it as a property crime, no different from stealing a loaf of bread.
The patron saint of animals expressed no sympathy for the pig hobbling about the woods on a bloody stump.

As Europe’s forests were felled to grow crops, pigs took up residence in towns, as depicted in this detail from Breugel the Elder’s 1559 drawing
Fair at Hoboken
. The scavenger pig’s diet, which included the occasional human corpse, contributed to a decline in the reputation of pork in the late Middle Ages.

According to another account of Saint Francis’s life, he once was staying at a monastery when a sow came across a newly born lamb and “slew him with her greedy jaws.” The sow had done what pigs do—eating any tasty morsel that presents itself—but Francis judged beasts by the moral standards of the church.
“Cursed be that evil beast,” the saint said, and the sow died three days later.

These stories of Saint Francis reflect a broader shift in attitudes toward swine. Medieval nobles, hunting boar in the woods
and feasting on domestic pigs, carried on the Roman tradition of swine love. But the Jewish distaste for pigs persisted as well, transformed but preserved within European Christianity.

Although Christians ate pork, many of them retained the Jewish prohibition against eating carnivores and scavengers. A pig could be eaten, but only if that pig had not dined on nasty things. As the centuries passed, clean-living pigs became harder to find. Europe’s population grew rapidly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and trees were cleared to plant crops. The pig, having lost its forest home, found a new one in the growing towns and cities, where its eating habits again came under scrutiny. To the old indictment—that pigs ate rotting animals and other filth—were added new charges that pigs devoured human corpses and killed children. Pigs were not only unclean: on occasion, they seemed downright evil.

T
he lamb stood meekly in the top spot of the Christian Bible’s hierarchy of animals, and the swine wallowed at the bottom.
According to the New Testament, Christ was “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” as well as the Good Shepherd who cares for his flock.
The Christian Bible picked up this theme from the Jewish scriptures. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” reads Psalm 23.

Pigs have less positive associations in the New Testament.
According to the Second Epistle of Peter, those who turn their back on Jesus call to mind a proverb: “The dog turns back to its own vomit, and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mud.”
The prodigal son, after squandering his inheritance, must accept the most abject work imaginable: he feeds another man’s pigs and grows so hungry that he wishes he could have “filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat.”
(
Those husks, incidentally, were likely pods of the carob tree and certainly not ears of corn, a New World crop unknown in Eurasia at the time.)

Jesus himself had little love for pigs. While traveling among the Gaderenes near the Sea of Galilee, he came across a man possessed.
He said to the demons, “Go,” and the demons went out of the man and entered a herd of pigs: “Behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.” The swine numbered 2,000, and yet no one mourned their loss. Jesus would rescue one lost sheep, but he sent thousands of swine to their deaths.

We should not be surprised. The psalm does not say, “The Lord is my swineherd, I shall not want.” The prodigal son’s father, upon welcoming him home, does not kill the fatted hog. Jesus was born a Jew and died a Jew, and he passed along to his followers the Jewish view of swine.

These prejudices, common in early Christianity, were transmitted down through the centuries. European works known as bestiaries, which circulated widely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, drew Christian lessons from the behavior of animals. The lamb was entirely blameless.
In the words of one bestiary, the lamb represents “our mystic Saviour, whose innocent death saved mankind,” as well as any Christian “who obeys his mother the Church.” All other animals have a mix of good and bad attributes, except for the pig, which is represented in entirely negative terms.
“The pig is a filthy beast; it sucks up filth, wallows in mud, and smears itself with slime,” one bestiary claimed. “Sows signify sinners, the unclean and heretics.”
In addition to filth, the pig stood for gluttony and lust, the last two of the seven deadly sins.

There is a glimmer of biological truth to some of these charges. Pigs have few sweat glands, so they wallow in mud and let evaporative cooling do the work of thermoregulation. They
are often in a hurry to eat, but that is a by-product of their diet: whereas sheep eat foods that are abundant in nature—grass and leaves—pigs need energy-intensive foods that tend to be scarce, demanding quick action that might resemble gluttony.

Nature also made pigs lustful.
During sex the boar’s penis—two feet long, thin as a pencil, and corkscrew shaped at the tip—locks into a corresponding twist in the sow’s cervix, and there the two remain, for fifteen minutes or longer, during which time the boar ejaculates up to a pint of sperm.
An early agricultural writer described pigs as “very lecherous, and in that act tedious.” Europe’s pagan cultures—the Celts, Greeks, and pre-Christian Romans—had celebrated swine for their exuberant fertility; Christians had a more troubled relationship with sex.

To modern eyes it’s difficult to blame the pig for doing what nature demands. But to medieval
Christians, brought up to find moral lessons in the natural world, the pig’s habits made it a problematic choice for the dinner table.

T
he New Testament freed Christians from most Jewish dietary laws, with Acts of the Apostles the key text. Peter, while “very hungry,” experiences a vision of “animals and reptiles and birds of the air,” and a voice tells him to “kill and eat.”
Peter protests that he has “never eaten anything that is common or unclean,” but the voice tells him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

Just as Jews defined themselves as not-Greek by refusing to eat pork, Christians defined themselves as not-Jewish by eating it.
At one of the councils of Antioch, the church fathers recommended that Christians eat pork precisely because the “synagogue execrates” it. Eating pork became a symbol of the New Law. Rather than a small tribe content to remain pure in
its own homeland, Christians sought to convert the entire world to the Gospel of Jesus, and they were happy to welcome lovers of swine. It is hard to imagine the Roman Empire embracing Christianity if Christianity had not first embraced pork.

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
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, 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
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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
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, 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.

T
he 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.