Re(2): SC - Re: Butchery

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

Hi all from Anne-Marie (who knows how to butcher and used to invite her 
high school boyfriends home on Chicken killing day :D)

In the 12th century, common peasants knew how to butcher. Alexander 
Neckham  (_Daily LIving in the 12th Century_ by Urban Tigner Holmes Jr) 
carefully lists all the things that a peasant should have. This list 
includes many kinds of livestock, many of which (except the mules) we 
have recipes for their use as food. I find it very unlikely that the 
peasant would have livestock and then call in a butcher from the city to 
kill and dismember said beasties. The same treaatise discusses the 
butchers in Paris, though, so one thinks that perhaps city dwellers 
didn't raise their own livestock and so bought already dead meat bits.

Livestock, according ot Holmes, were driven into town and then butchered 
as needed by professional guilded butchers. I guess this means that some 
city slicker could go through life without ever killing a chicken of 
their own, but most people in the middle ages were not city slickers, and 
so most would have been responsible for the butchering of their own 
livestock.

In the 14th century, a middle class merchant knew 
how to butcher. _le Menagier a Paris_ gives great detail on this matter.

In the 15-16th centuries, peasants butchered their own meat as is 
evidienced by the Books of Hours illuminations on this subject.

Killing animals is easy. I did it when I was a kid. We didn't have any 
fancy anatomy lessons first...we just had someone show us once how to do 
it. 

- --AM

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Anne-Marie Rousseau
rousseau at scn.org
Seattle, Washington