Paul Cobb

At the start of the 11th century the population of Anglo-Saxon England was about a million.  Only 10% of people lived in towns and were able to buy their food rather than needing to  grow it. So society was overwhelmingly agrarian, with people living in villages like the one I  describe in Thegn of Berewic, farming the land around them that belonged to them or to  their thegn. A thegn (pronounced ‘thane’) held a manor, land granted by the king, and  ranked between an ordinary freeman and a hereditary noble.

We know a lot about how Anglo-Saxon crops were grown and how livestock was kept. Pigs,  sheep, goats, cattle and poultry were not fed on specially grown cereal crops as they often  are now – productive land was needed to grow food for people – but from waste and on  ‘waste’ land. And the pig was a versatile animal that would eat just about anything and  could make use of resources in and beyond the village.

Everything but the squeal

Although pigs provided nothing (except offspring, of course) until they were slaughtered,  they gave many products, such as:

• Pork (cuts such as loin, rib, shoulder, leg and chops – Figure 1)
• Flitches (sides of bacon)
• Tripe from the stomach lining
• Sausage skins from the intestines
• Black pudding from the blood
• Heads (the boar’s head was a speciality at a feast!)
• Brawn from the boiled head
• Trotters (considered good for a sensitive stomach!)
• Bristles (used for brushes, and possibly needles for shoe making)
• Lard (for cooking, eating and household uses)

In fact you could use everything from a pig but the squeal!

Lift with one hand?

Anglo-Saxon pigs were bristly and lean like a Tamworth, our most primitive surviving breed  of pig, and much smaller than modern pigs that are bred for maximum output. There’s an  account in a contemporary source that talks about the Porter of the Welsh court having the  right to a sow if he can lift her with one hand by her bristles as high as his knees! These pigs  looked more like their wild boar cousins, which sometimes had their wicked way with them when they were out in the woods... A description of them as ‘long-legged, razor-backed and  prick-eared’ gives you a good idea of how they looked. They had a high proportion of fat  (maybe 10-15%) in comparison to other livestock of the period which were very lean. This  was an essential source of calories in the Anglo-Saxon diet to help get through the winter,  and added to a pig’s value.

Ready for the chop(s)

Although pigs can breed all year round so could have been killed at any time of year once  mature, Anglo-Saxon pigs were most likely killed in winter (around November, after the  mast season – see below) often at 2 years of age, when ready for turning into the various  products I’ve described. Slaughter was a messy business. The pig was held on a bench or  ‘form’, then a poleaxe (a spike on the back of a blade – Figure 2) was rammed into the skull, followed by a long spike to destroy the nervous system. The throat was cut to drain blood  (without the poleaxe, this may have been the killing method), and the carcass hung to let  the meat flavour and tenderise. This is best done in cool conditions and needs to avoid the  meat becoming high; another reason to slaughter your pig in the winter months.

Do you take bacon?

As the meat spoils quickly, traditionally pork was never eaten in summer. Flesh and fat were  preserved by salting (dry rubbing and/or in brine) and smoking (in the rafters of the home, making use of the smoke from the open fire) or a combination of both. If you couldn’t afford  to slaughter an animal for a single meal, being able to preserve meat was very important to  a gebur (peasant) like Eadric in Thegn of Berewic. Rents, tithes and probably many taxes  were paid in ‘food rents’ with produce like flitches, though as a gebur Eadric would have  paid for his pasture rights by ploughing his thegn Æadgytha’s demesne (land held by the  thegn for their own use). The value of a pig when fattened for the table in various Anglo Saxon sources was somewhere between cattle (20-30 pence) and sheep (a shilling).

Home and away

Individual pigs could be fattened in sties and fed on scraps, milk or spent grain from brewing – a good poor man’s resource, and the practice of keeping a pig at home or on an allotment  didn’t change for centuries. But pigs were also kept or brought together in herds to be  driven to woodlands to feed in the autumn. The value of woodland was often stated in the  number of pigs it could support. The manors around the Andredswald, the huge wooded area stretching across the Weald of Kent and into Sussex and Surrey, had rights to  ‘pannage’, to drive pigs to their ‘dens’ (pastures in the woodland), and fatten them on  acorns, beech mast and other forest fruits. Although people like the charcoal burners live  there, in my upcoming second novel England’s Æthling, the Andredswald is seen as a dark and  dangerous place, not to be ventured into lightly (or alone). The trackways the swineherds  followed, starting in the North and South Downs and leading over the Greensand Ridge into  the Weald, are called ‘droves’. Over centuries of passage they became deeply cut into the  landscape and can still be traced today, running more or less north and south (Figure 3). A  study has found that three quarters of the dens in Kent belonged to areas lying north of the  Downs and at its scarp foot. As these were the earliest-settled parts of the county, it means  the practice of pannage was long established by the period of The Book and the Knife novel series, and the droves may predate Saxon times.

Wanted; swineherds for seasonal work

In Thegn of Berewic the Sussex manor of Berewic has a den in the Andredswald to the north  where it sends its pigs in autumn each year. The practice enabled large numbers of pigs to  be kept, and it needed swineherds to move the pigs to the dens, then live there and watch  over them. When Eadric is given a peasant holding in Berewic, among his duties he has to  provide six loaves to the swineherds, who will be living away with the pigs for around seven weeks (Figure 4). A swineherd may be a slave given the job, or a free man paying a rent or a  tribute (gafol) in pigs, to the woodland owner for the right to take his pigs. His specialist  work is valued, and in the novel Cuthred the manor reeve is delighted to get his son Botulf a  job as a swineherd. Some herds of pigs may have been into the hundreds, so probably  combined the pigs from ordinary villagers as well as the thegn’s.

In Kent we had lathes

In Kent, the Andredswald seems to have begun as unenclosed commons used by the people  of its ‘lathes’ (its old administrative divisions) before quickly becoming swine pasture  assigned to individual manors and their tenants. Grants of land for swine pasture in the  period include those of many local places in the Kentish Weald such as Sandhurst, Tilden,  Surrenden, Hemsted and Biddenden, so as you can see the term den for swine pasture  survives to this day as a common place name element familiar to us locals.

Why Wye?

As a ‘lathe’ centred on a royal vill or township and situated north east of the Andredswald,  Wye, where I live now, was an important place in Anglo-Saxon Kent. After the Norman  invasion, three of my characters pass through Wye in my upcoming third novel Outlaw of the Conquest and get short shrift from the locals! (Sorry, Wye.) At the Domesday survey of 1086  Wye had dens ‘sufficient to support 300 pigs’, running from Kingsnorth to Hawkhurst,  including five in Hawkhurst parish. ‘The Jutish Forest’ by K P Witney has a wonderfully  detailed account of the development of dens in the Weald of Kent, and the importance of  Wye as one of the Kent lathes (Figure 5). The scattering of Wye dens in the easternAndredswald shows the remnants of a ‘lathe common’ (the wi-wera-wald) after grants had  been made out of it to create various lordships and manors. This meant that whereas before  manor tenants could pannage their pigs anywhere along the Wye lathe common, now they just had to stick to the Wye manor dens and get along with their fellows in sharing the  pasture. You wonder how that went!

Going... if not gone

However, even in the Weald the custom of pannage began to decline as the dens became  more cultivated and used for timber and firewood. The dens could be up to 50 miles from  their manors and pigs are difficult to drive – they are clever and don’t respond to dogs,  which were probably used more for scaring off wolves than herding. By Domesday most  places had much more ‘woodland for pigs’ than they had pigs to put in them, and the  description of woodland being able to support a number of pigs was more a convenient measurement of area. So at the time of Thegn of Berewic and the following novels in the Book and the Knife series, while pannage was still the chief use of the Andredswald, it had  already passed its height.