How pigs caused a stink in medieval England

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. They attacked children and exhumed dead bodies, and were even thought to be in league with the devil. And yet, despite this long list of misdemeanours, pigs were an indispensable part of urban life in the Middle Ages. Here in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Dolly Jorgensen reveals why medieval city dwellers were so dependent on swine and explains what the city authorities did to prevent these pigs from running riot. So Dolly, you wrote a feature in the October issue of BBC History magazine exploring the phenomenon of pig ownership in cities across medieval England.

Why were pigs such a common sight in our cities in the Middle Ages? Why did so many people own them? Well, pigs are an animal unlike other animals like a horse that does work or a cow where you use it for milk while it's alive. What you're doing with a pig is you're trying to make it fat so you can kill it and eat it, right? That's that's what you use pigs for.

But the brilliance about pigs is that they're omnivores. like humans and they eat pretty much anything that you give them and they can put on fat with that. And so that makes them actually really ideal for having in an urban setting where you might have leftover things, both standard kind of leftover from your dinner table, scraps, but also things like brewery dregs. that otherwise would just go to a waste, you could instead feed them to pigs. So one thing has to do with the food.

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