SC - Pigs-Lard production/usage

[Jenne Heise]

>I would venture 
> the opinion that  free range period pigs were  not  roaming about the coutry 
> side at will but rather confined in larger areas that included oak trees as 
> well as  meadow and that they were  most likely fed  on a regular basis with 
> slop and/or swill. Often times we think that everything we have  or do in the 
> modern world is somehow changed or different from the middle ages. While this 
> is true of  many things, it is ludicrous , imo, to  see such basic  
> agricultural and animal husbandry practices changing all that drastically 
> over the years.

Well, actually, completely free-range pigs -- not fenced or herded-- are
documented via a first-hand account from the last century in wooded
portions of the half-settled parts of the US (Wisconsin, specifically), so
I would say that your guess about practices not changing drastically
except within the last hundred years may well be true.

However, a number of agricultural and animal husbandry practices _have_
changed significantly at certain crisis points in history, usually due to
changes in either demand for agricultural products (which produced the
enclosures of the 18th and early 19th century), or radical changes in the
technology-- the three-field system, which eventually moved planting
season from fall to spring; advances in plows, which changed the nature of
the agricultural plot; and legal changes (such as the change from tithes
to money rents), which led to changes in land usage and the types of
crops.

Obviously, on the question of the free-range, unenclosed pigs in medieval
Europe, I can't ask anyone to take my word for it. When I stumble across
those pigs again in my research, I'll post the cite.

 -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"There's no use in talking when there's nobody listening, so we just ran 
away..."