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Pigs · room 3 of 6 · Rome to the 1700s

Pigs in Europe

Roman pork, the medieval forest pig, the cottage pig, the town pig, and Chinese blood in English breeds.

The wild boarBecoming domesticPigs in EuropePigs in SpainPigs in the AmericasReality?
About 200 BCE to 400 CE

Rome: the empire of pork

historytrade & commercialization

Claim: pork was the favorite meat of ancient Rome. Evidence: the Roman cookbook known as Apicius has more recipes for pork than for any other meat; the Romans made sausages, among them the Lucanian sausage still remembered in Italian and Portuguese names, and the Greek geographer Strabo reports hams shipped to Rome from Gaul.

Ask: why would pigs suit a city of a million people better than cattle?

Sources: Apicius, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, trans. J. D. Vehling (Project Gutenberg); Strabo, Geography, book 4
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Middle Ages

The forest pig and pannage

historyeconomics

Claim: in medieval Europe, pigs fattened in the woods. Evidence: each autumn villagers paid for "pannage," the right to turn pigs into the forest to eat acorns and beech nuts. England's Domesday Book (1086) often measured woodland not in acres but in how many pigs it could feed, such as "woodland for 100 pigs."

Ask: what does measuring a forest in pigs tell us about what people valued in it?

Sources: The National Archives (UK), Domesday Book; Open Domesday
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1600s to 1940s

The cottage pig

historyeconomics

Claim: for centuries a family pig was a rural household's savings account. Evidence: cottagers fattened one or two pigs on scraps and garden waste through the year, cured bacon and ham in winter, and used nearly every part; in Britain during the Second World War, neighborhood "pig clubs" kept the custom alive under rationing.

Ask: compare a family pig with money in a bank. What risks did each carry?

Sources: Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (Hambledon, 1998)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1700s to 1800s

Pigs in the city

historyeconomics

Claim: pigs once lived in the middle of big cities. Evidence: in London, pig keepers and brickmakers crowded the "Potteries and Piggeries" of Notting Dale in the 1800s, and reformers blamed such yards for disease; across the Atlantic, thousands of hogs roamed New York's streets as scavengers until sanitation campaigns drove them out in the 1850s.

Ask: the town pig ate the garbage. What replaced it, and who paid?

Sources: Survey of London, vol. 37: Northern Kensington (1973), Notting Dale; Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Harvard, 2014)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1700s

Chinese blood in English breeds

biologyhistorytrade & commercialization

Claim: Britain's famous breeds are part Chinese. Evidence: in the 1700s, traders brought pigs from China and Southeast Asia that fattened fast and bred early; farmers crossed them with local stock, and DNA studies find Asian ancestry in European breeds such as the Large White and the Berkshire.

Ask: the "English" pig was a global product. Find another farm animal or crop with a hidden trade history.

Sources: Giuffra et al., "The origin of the domestic pig: independent domestication and subsequent introgression," Genetics 154 (2000); Bosse et al., "Genomic analysis reveals selection for Asian genes in European pigs following human-mediated introgression," Nature Communications 5 (2014)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
To 1938

Bristles: the world brushed with pig hair

trade & commercializationeconomicshistory

Claim: until the age of plastics, almost every good brush was made of hog bristle. Evidence: stiff bristles from pigs' backs went into paintbrushes, hairbrushes, shaving brushes and toothbrushes, and China was the leading exporter. In 1938 DuPont used its new nylon in a toothbrush, and during the Second World War, when Chinese supplies were cut off, the United States treated bristles as a strategic material.

Ask: what other animal products did plastics replace in the 1900s?

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Brush; Hagley Museum and Library, DuPont nylon history
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1700s to now

Heritage breeds of the barnyard

biologyhistory

Before industrial farming, pigs came in dozens of local breeds: the Berkshire and Tamworth of England, the Large Black, the Gloucestershire Old Spot of the orchards, the American Mulefoot with its solid hoof, the Red Wattle and the Gulf Coast Native (Choctaw) hog. Most are now rare, kept alive by small farms and chefs.

Breeds are a library of solutions to old problems.

Sources: The Livestock Conservancy, Heritage Breeds List
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
France and Italy

The truffle pig

biologyeconomics

Claim: the pig's nose made it a hunter of buried treasure. Evidence: truffles, the costly underground fungi of France and Italy, give off a scent close to a boar's sex hormone, so sows were long used to sniff them out. Pigs, though, tend to eat the find and churn the soil, so most hunters now use dogs, and Italy banned pigs from truffle hunting in 1985.

Ask: why would a hunter switch from a pig to a dog, if the pig smells better?

Sources: Claus, Hoppen and Karg, "The secret of truffles: a steroidal pheromone?" Experientia 37 (1981); Italy, Legge 16 dicembre 1985, n. 752 (truffle law)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Middle Ages to now

Pigs that clear and feed the land

biologyeconomicshistory

Claim: pigs have long been put to work as living plows and fertilizer. Evidence: medieval farmers turned pigs onto stubble and fallow fields, where rooting broke up the soil and dung fed it; American colonists let hogs clear brush and acorn woods around new farms; and some farms today rotate pigs in movable pens, a "pig tractor," to turn and manure a garden plot before planting.

Ask: what does a pig do for a farm besides becoming food? Count the jobs.

Sources: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004); Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig: A History (1998)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Watch and look

Picture gallery

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Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer) · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0
JoachimKohler-HB · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Jakub Hałun · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
-ani- at German Wikipedia Original local file name Wollschweinferkel IMGP8139.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 de
Caroline Ford · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Calistemon · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Calistemon · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Calistemon · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Calistemon · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Suiren2022 · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Suiren2022 · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Albin Mesnel, Édouard Riou, Edward Blyth, Alphonse de Neuville · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
F. Babbage (photographer). · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Unknown author · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
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