Child-killing "demon-hosts": pigs in the medieval city

They killed children, exhumed dead bodies and caused an almighty stink. So why, asks Dolly Jørgensen, were our ancestors so dependent on the urban pig?

Published: October 15, 2024 at 5:26 PM

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The abbot of St Mary’s in York could not stand the stench any longer. He complained to King Edward I in 1298 that the air was corrupted and infected in the streets of the Bootham district north of York Minster.

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He pinned the blame on pigsties along the lanes, swine wandering about the streets, and dung heaps. The court concurred that this was completely unacceptable and ordered the bailiffs to destroy the pigsties by the roads and to ban pigs feeding, or wandering unattended.

At nearly the same time, in London, city authorities ordered the removal of pigsties in the streets and elected four ‘swine killers’, who were ordered to find and eliminate any pigs found on the main roads. They got half of the proceeds of the sale of the carcass for their service.

English medieval cities and towns in the late 13th century were experiencing a pig problem. The reason was simple: more people in towns equalled more pigs.

In 1436, an unruly sow broke down a door, knocked over a baby’s cradle and ate a blanket

Pigs were a part of everyday life in medieval English towns. Raising pigs in the back garden of medieval homes was a standard practice. A taxation roll for Reading in 1297 shows that 30 of 102 taxed households owned pigs. Almost all of them had one or two pigs, indicating that the animals were raised for personal consumption. There were, however, a few people who were raising pigs for commercial slaughter, like one person who had six pigs and four cows.

A court case from London in 1320 demonstrates that raising pigs could be a shared endeavour. In this case, the plaintiff, Adam of Eytone, stated that William of Oxford had agreed to keep a sow of his, who was worth 6 shillings. In return, William would get to keep half of its piglets. The lawsuit was brought because, although the said sow farrowed three times while in his custody, William had refused to return the sow or to deliver half of the piglets to Adam.

Eat and be eaten

People kept pigs for one simple reason: to eat them. Unlike other livestock, which had uses while they were alive (cows produced milk, chickens laid eggs, horses transported riders), pigs were valuable only when dead. Pig products such as lard and salted bacon, which kept well over the winter, were crucial to the medieval diet.

As towns filled up with people and pigs, governments realised that these animals, and the men and women who kept them, needed to be controlled. While the abbot in York had complained about the stench, medieval pigs were also dangerous. In Norwich in 1354 boars damaged houses and gardens, attacked people, exhumed bodies from the graveyard, and even killed children. In 1436, John Luff of Ramsey left a boar and two sows unleashed and one of them broke down a door, knocked over a baby’s cradle, and ate a blanket.

Residents tried to fight back against wayward pigs. In Colchester, William Leycestre used a stick to drive off a pig from his yard in 1311, and the servants of Roger Alfred killed a pig they found in Roger’s garden in 1312. While having swines in the city was a convenient meat source, they clearly needed to be closely managed.

And medieval town records indicate that pigs were indeed tightly controlled. The most straightforward thing to do was to ban them from the streets. In the earliest surviving town ordinance from York, which is dated to 1301, no one was permitted to let their pigs roam the streets day or night. Later, the regulations specified that pigs were not permitted on the walls of the town, in the market streets, in alleys, on the Ouse Bridge, or on the quay. Fines were set for people who broke the law. The sergeant or officer who found offending pigs could kill them and sell the carcass, as well as receive part of the fine.

Yet, pigs had to be regularly taken out of their pigpens. According to some town bylaws, sties had to be cleaned of manure on Saturdays when the municipal waste cart came around. The nearby forests, grassy meadows and harvested fields provided good foraging ground for domestic swine, so they would be herded to these locations by swineherds. In the Yorkshire town of Beverley, only pigs under the care of a swineherd going to pasture, and sows with litters, were allowed to be in the streets.

Medieval pigs were literally kept on a leash. In medieval drawings, the swineherd leading a pig in the urban area holds a rope tied to a hindfoot of the pig so he can pull it back. The swineherd also carried a staff to steer the animal and nudge it forward.

Town administrators paid swineherds to collect the pigs from householders and take them out to graze. Yet not everyone was satisfied with their service. In 1395, the Nottingham resident Ralph Pollard accused the aptly named Nicholas Swynnard of letting pigs ruin the walls of his garden. Swynnard defended himself vigorously, arguing that it was common practice to herd the pigs in that area and that he had not been negligent in his duties.

Having restrictions on pig movements, and even appointing swineherds, did not mean that all owners managed their pigs properly. In a Nottingham court case of 1398, John Bank claimed that Robert Hayward had allowed his pigs to roam free, instead of keeping them in a sty or in his house, contrary to the mayor’s ordinance. The pigs, Bank claimed, devoured his cockerel and some herring, causing 10 shillings in damages.

Yet modern readers should not think that pigs were running around creating havoc all the time. Town ordinances reminding owners about the rules governing the management of pigs appear infrequently over the 250 years from 1250 to 1500. Roaming pigs were considered out of the ordinary and unacceptable. Despite the swine-fuelled problems experienced in cities such as York and London, most people were minding their pigs on an everyday basis.

Filthy diets

Whether they were tightly controlled or roamed free, all pigs had to be fed. Single swine often ate scraps. But those that lived in herds were often owned by butchers, and were thus fed the leftovers from the butchery process. Local authorities often took a dim view of this practice. In the mid-14th century, Coventry’s authorities told butchers that they could not take their pigs to the waste pits to feed on butchery entrails or other “filthy” material. In London, two butchers were fined for feeding their pigs butchery waste in the street. Medieval town leaders were clearly concerned about the health implications of eating meat from an animal with such a poor diet.

The rise of landfills for food waste in the 1960s severed the link between living pigs and city-dwellers

The authorities were also concerned about manure. This was, of course, a natural byproduct of urban pig-keeping – and it generated a significant stink. Pig-owners sometimes constructed sties next to urban rivers and ditches, in order to make the job of cleaning up after the animal easier. Yet this wasn’t enough to stop them clashing with their neighbours. In fact, if the court records of Ramsey (now in Cambridgeshire) are anything to go by, the location of pigsties was the most common swine-related complaint across the 14th century. Pigsties were, the records reveal, often constructed too close to roads, over drainage ditches, or – perhaps worst of all – next to a neighbour’s wall or property.

While it was the job of the individual owner to feed, house and (hopefully) clean-up after their pigs, they tended to outsource the task of killing the animal to a medieval butcher. Urban butchery was a regulated business, with guild rules and town ordinances governing practices and procedures.

Some urban laws required that pig butchery take place at a scalding house (where boiling water was poured over the pig carcass, the hair scraped off, the organs removed, and edible entrails cleaned of faeces.) The mayor of Coventry commanded that pig slaughter had to take place at such a facility, one of which was under construction in 1421, next to a latrine along the Sherbourne river. The scalding house’s riverside location meant that blood and waste from the process could be disposed of easily. Yet, as with pigsties, it would have had a significant impact on local waterways.

To city-dwellers today, the idea of swineherds shepherding pigs through the streets, and homeowners cleaning up manure in their back garden, may appear completely alien. Yet pigs and humans lived cheek by jowl until comparatively recently. In fact, it wasn’t until the late 19th/early 20th century that city beautification and sanitation movements forced pigs out of urban tenement zones.

Even when they were banished from our cities, pigs continued to live off the leftovers from our ever-growing urban areas – never more famously than when ‘victory pigs’, fattened up by food-waste collection programmes, helped ward off hunger during the Second World War.

It was the rise of sanitary landfills in the 1960s as the preferred method of disposal for food waste that finally severed the link between the living pig and the city-dweller. While we continue to eat pork in huge quantities in the 21st century, swine are a common sight on the highways and byways of our towns and cities no more.

Sex, gluttony and demon hosts

Why people believed that pigs were in league with the devil

Pigs are Satan’s representatives on Earth. That was the belief of many residents of medieval England – even as they kept swine in their gardens and feasted on salted bacon. Pigs’ demonic associations stem chiefly from stories in the Bible. One is the well-known gospel tale of Jesus casting a legion of demons from a possessed man into a herd of pigs. The 13th-century philosopher Albertus Magnus wrote that Jesus allowed the pigs to become demon hosts because the pig “is a filthy animal, by nature, by law, by custom”.   Pigs are used as a metaphor for sin in another famous Bible story, the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The main protagonist of the tale falls upon hard times – so hard, in fact, that he has to take a debasing job as a swineherd. To work with pigs was to associate yourself with filth, gluttony and sexual indiscretion.  Pigs are also cast as a malevolent force in the ninth-century Irish saga Cath Maige Mucrama (The Battle of Mag Mucruma). This popular tale describes how a band of magical swine ascend from hell though the cave of Crúachain, causing seven years of damage to agricultural areas – and defying all attempts to count them.  So why did the pig acquire such a devilish reputation? The answer appears to lie in its  natural characteristics. It has large litters of piglets at one time, which was equated to lasciviousness. It likes to wallow in mud, regarded as unclean. And it is a rapacious eater of almost anything, which was identified with gluttony. Such traits persuaded the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria that swine are inherently evil. “The pig refers to pleasure-loving and unclean desire for food and lewd and defiled license in sex,” he declared. It is “always itching for matte and lying in mud, fattening for slaughter and destruction”. 

Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her latest book, The Medieval Pig, was published by Boydell Press in April

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This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

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