How pigs caused a stink in medieval England

Summary

History Extra Podcast: How Pigs Caused a Stink in Medieval England

Release Date: January 13, 2025

In the episode titled "How Pigs Caused a Stink in Medieval England," host Ryan Reynolds engages in an enlightening conversation with historian Dolly Jorgensen. Produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine, this episode delves into the integral role pigs played in medieval urban life, exploring their economic importance, the challenges they presented, and the societal responses to managing them.

---

1. The Ubiquity of Pigs in Medieval Cities

Ryan Reynolds opens the discussion by questioning the prevalence of pigs in medieval English cities:

"Why were pigs such a common sight in our cities in the Middle Ages? Why did so many people own them?" (01:14)

Dolly Jorgensen explains that pigs were uniquely suited for urban environments due to their omnivorous diet and efficient space utilization:

"Pigs are omnivores like humans, and they eat pretty much anything you give them... they can be kept in a pretty small sty and still function." (01:35)

She emphasizes that pigs provided a sustainable solution for waste management, consuming leftovers and brewery dregs that would otherwise go to waste. Additionally, pork products like bacon and lard were essential for medieval diets, offering easy preservation methods through salting and smoking.

---

2. Economic and Practical Advantages

Jorgensen highlights the multifaceted benefits of pig ownership:

"Pig meat is really easy to preserve... it's also good to make fat from, so lard." (03:15)

She notes that lard was a primary cooking fat before butter became widespread. Pigs' ability to convert waste into valuable resources made them indispensable in urban settings, especially as towns expanded during the mid-1200s to 1300s.

---

3. Urban Management and Pig Penalties

The conversation shifts to how medieval authorities managed pig populations to prevent urban chaos. Reynolds probes the living conditions of urban pigs:

"So they literally just kept them in styes, essentially in their gardens. Is that how it worked?" (05:07)

Jorgensen confirms that pigs were typically housed in back gardens but were subject to strict regulations to prevent nuisances:

"If you didn't maintain your sty or if your pig was running around... people tended to take other people to court." (05:12)

Court records from the era frequently document disputes arising from pig mismanagement, such as improper waste disposal leading to foul smells and contaminated water sources.

---

4. Notable Conflicts and Anecdotes

Reynolds references specific incidents illustrating the tensions caused by pigs:

"An unruly sow breaks down the door, knocks over a cradle and eats a blanket." (07:54)

Jorgensen explains that while such events weren't everyday occurrences, they were significant enough to be recorded over centuries. For instance, in Norwich, pigs were notorious for disrupting cemeteries by exhuming bodies, leading to local proclamations aimed at restoring order.

---

5. Regulatory Measures and Swineherds

To curb the chaos, medieval cities implemented various control measures. Reynolds inquires about the role of swineherds:

"Did they do the thing you referred to earlier, where they were basically employed to go round up pigs and inverted commas, take care of them?" (14:39)

Jorgensen details the responsibilities of swineherds, who were tasked with herding pigs using tools like pigging sticks and leashing techniques:

"They also took them out to graze... they would lead this herd of pigs... to forage in the woods or fields." (12:01)

Additionally, cities employed "swine killers" to handle loose pigs, ensuring that pigs adhering to regulations remained within controlled environments.

---

6. Pigs and Medieval Superstition

The episode explores the sinister reputation pigs held in medieval society. Reynolds asks about pigs' association with the devil:

"Why is that? And how did their devilish reputation sort of impact their treatment?" (20:43)

Jorgensen cites biblical stories and folklore that portrayed pigs negatively, associating them with demons and impurity. For example, Jesus's miracle of exorcising demons into a herd of swine reinforced the view of pigs as unclean and morally corrupt animals. These perceptions influenced societal attitudes, leading to stricter control and often disdainful treatment of pigs within urban settings.

---

7. Decline of Urban Pigs

Despite their importance, pigs eventually disappeared from city landscapes. Reynolds probes the timeline of this decline:

"When do pigs begin to disappear from our cities?" (24:06)

Jorgensen attributes their decline to early 20th-century sanitation movements aimed at "cleaning up" cities. The rise of supermarkets reduced the necessity of backyard pigs, and improved waste management systems minimized the need for pigs as waste consumers. World Wars saw temporary resurgences due to meat demands, but post-World War II advancements in food distribution and hygiene standards effectively eradicated pigs from urban environments.

---

8. Lessons from Medieval Animal Management

In the episode's conclusion, Reynolds asks Jorgensen about contemporary lessons from medieval pig management:

"Is there anything that you believe we can learn from our medieval ancestors when it comes to our relationship with animals like pigs?" (27:29)

Jorgensen reflects on the closer relationship medieval people had with animals, emphasizing a greater understanding and respect for animal life and waste management. She suggests that modern society can benefit from this awareness, fostering a more conscientious approach to how we interact with and depend on animals in our daily lives.

---

Conclusion

"How Pigs Caused a Stink in Medieval England" offers a comprehensive exploration of the indispensable yet challenging role pigs played in medieval urban settings. Through Dolly Jorgensen's expertise, listeners gain insights into the economic, environmental, and societal dimensions of pig ownership, as well as the regulatory frameworks that sought to balance human needs with animal management. The episode not only sheds light on historical practices but also encourages reflection on modern relationships with animals and sustainability.

For more engaging historical content, subscribe to the History Extra podcast and explore additional episodes on HistoryExtra.com.

---

Notable Quotes:

• Dolly Jorgensen (01:35): "Pigs are omnivores like humans, and they eat pretty much anything 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."

• Dolly Jorgensen (03:15): "Pig meat is really easy to preserve in that it can be readily salted and preserved through brine. It can also be smoked, and it maintains its good quality."

• Dolly Jorgensen (20:43): "Medieval kind of theological commentators say, well, that's because pigs are closer to the devil... pigs are in a way... corrupted."

---

Produced by Jack Bateman.

Transcript

[Ryan Reynolds]

Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet resolutions.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

A way for us all to try.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And do a little bit better than we did last year. And my resolution, unlike big wireless, is to not be a raging and raise the price of wireless on you every chance I get. Give it a [e-mail] switch $45 upfront.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Payment required equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first 3 month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited. See mintmobile.com for details.

[Spencer Mizzen]

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 misdemeanors, pigs were an indispensable part of urban life in the Middle Ages. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, 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.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

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 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 so one thing has to do with the food, the other has to do with how much room pigs need. So unlike your large livestock, pigs can actually be kept in a pretty small sty and still function. So that means you could really have a pig in your back garden without much of a problem. And in fact, people did all the way through World War II. The other thing is about the pig meat that made it really useful in an urban setting is that pig meat is really easy to preserve in that it can be readily salted and preserved through brine. It can also be smoked, and it maintains its good quality. Obviously, you have smoked bacon still, so that quality also made it a very good meat to have around for the wintertime, when you couldn't really have fresh meat in the same way.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So it's good for storage then as well?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Absolutely, absolutely. You can have bacon preserved meats like ham that is smoked or cured. So pork is very good in that way. It's also good to make fat from, so lard. So you use it in place of what? Today most people use butter for everything. But in the Middle Ages, that actually comes in quite late to start using butter as the primary fat. You tended to use more, you know, animal fat like lard.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So let's set some background here then. So where are we talking? Was it all over England? When are we talking and how many pigs are we talking about in total?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Well, it's a great question. So, first of all, it isn't actually just England. All across Europe, people follow a similar pattern in keeping pigs in safety cities because of these great qualities of pigs. Within England, we have some records because record keeping is pretty spotty. Before you start to have the rise of town governments in the mid-1200s and the 1300s, you really start to get a lot more information. And at that time, which was also the time of, if you will, great urbanization, people were starting to move into bigger and bigger towns that it was pretty standard to have one in every three or four people in a town would have at least one pig. And most people had just one, two in the records that we have. But sometimes you would actually see somebody who is obviously a pig keeper or pig breeder who might have a herd of 20 or something in an urban setting. But most of the time, you know, it's like one in every three or four people in the tax lists from the 1300s will show they had a pig.

[Ryan Reynolds]

And so they literally just kept them in styes, essentially in their gardens. Is that how it worked?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Yes. So you kind of had a back garden, and styes are really common. And we see that actually in court records often, because, of course, if you didn't maintain your sty or if your pig was running around, or if you didn't clean out the pig waste, people tended to take other people to court. So we have all kinds of court records that show when people were not doing the things that were expected, and that included, you know, this kind of pig management. So we know that they were often in the back garden at the property line, you know, you want it as far away from the house as possible. Although there are a few cases which people kept pigs inside the house, like in a basement or things. Again, because those show up in court records where it's considered that they've done something improper or, you know, aren't managing it or it's starting to smell. Cause a lot of people lived in tenements or very close, you know, like kind of row houses, and if you didn't maintain your pigs, your neighbors were gonna smell your pigs.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So that is essentially how we know about a lot of what we know about the way that medieval pigs were kept is when things kind of went wrong and people find themselves up in court because of some kind of mismanagement. To elaborate on that a bit you mentioned then, it sometimes caused friction between neighbours in medieval cities. If you've got any good examples you can tell us about, are things really kicking off between neighbours because having arguments over pigs?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Yeah. So one example in Coventry, there is a ditch called the red ditch in medieval documents. And what happened in a number of cases was that people built their sties basically up against the ditch and then would throw all of that pig waste into the ditch. And so people brought before the magistrates and said, yeah, there's all this waste that's in the ditch that smells, that's contaminating the water. And so when people in the Middle Ages complain about things like this, they're generally complaining about that something smells. Right. So they would say it was making the water filthy or the air, that there's a miasma or kind of a diseased error that was being caused.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You also bring up an anecdote in your feature. There's a series of flashpoints you mentioned in the feature. I mean, there's one in which I think you said it was in 1436. An unruly sow breaks down the door, knocks over a cradle and eats a blanket. I mean, that must have been quite distressing for the people who lived in that house. I mean, was this quite common? Pigs running wild and causing mayhem?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Well, what we see in the records is that they do show up, but it's not an every time the court meets type of thing. It's not even necessarily an every year type of thing. But when you look at records that are over, say 500 years, well, you're gonna see a lot of these cases come up. Another scholar has looked at some French cases and seen that, you know, There were like 60 court records where pigs were brought before the court for running Free and causing havoc. So certainly it was something that happened and it's something that people reacted to. The town of Norwich had issued a kind of proclamation about keeping the town clean. And one of the topics that they bring up there is about the pigs. That pigs were running around and going into the cemetery and exhuming bodies and eating them. Oh, that's really not good. That's like, whoa, you know, don't eat dead people. Because of course, not only is it a problem that the pig has consumed the dead person and desecrated the holy space of the cemetery, but you clearly had a problem then in that you couldn't eat the pig afterwards because the pig's meat has also then, if you will, symbolically been contaminated by eating this unhealthy, unnatural food.

[Ryan Reynolds]

What did the authorities do to mitigate against that? How did they ensure that pig meat wasn't defiled in this way?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

One of the things that cities did was to make restrictions, laws, which our cities do now, right, you have laws about speeding. It doesn't mean that there aren't people who don't speed, but it does mean that on average, people probably don't. And so they made laws that were, well, if you have a pig, you have to have it in a sty. You can only take it out at set times or with a swineherd. So you had to hire somebody to then take your pig out to the field around town to kind of graze on the stubble or to take it into the woods to find and forage food. So they set up restrictions and said you had to have your pigs in a sty, you had to have a swineherd, any pig that was found loose. So most towns of any size have a rule that says that the person who finds the pig can take it and they can take it to the authorities and they will get money for having taken the pig off the street. So basically, you kill the pig and you kind of split the profits between the city and the person who found it. The other thing cities did was actually hire a city swineherd. So a number of English towns have records of paying a person who was called their town swineherd. And he would go around and it was. He's in this case, would go around and pick up everybody's pigs and take them out and then bring them back.

[Amazon]

This episode is brought to you by Amazon. Sometimes the most painful part of getting sick is the getting better part. Waiting on hold for an appointment, sitting in crowded waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy. That's painful. Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. Remove those painful parts of getting better with things like 24. 7 virtual visits and prescriptions delivered to your door thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.

[Capella University]

Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life. At Capella University. Our game changing flexpath learning format lets you set your own deadline so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you. It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earn your degree without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Edu So he literally walked around collecting pigs and then walked outside the city where they could forage?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what he did. And we see that in pictures that these swineherds basically lead this herd of pigs. They have some tools and techniques that they use for doing that. So one is that they have this stick, a pigging stick, in which they kind of herd the pigs. You can kind of poke them on their side to make sure they keep moving the direction you want to move. It's also quite useful when you come out into the woods to knock down things like acorns. So you use your stick. They also, in the images often show leashing of the pig. So you tie a rope around the pig's trotter and hold it so it can't really get away from you too far. So that's one way of keeping them from running off. We have a tendency to think of pigs now as only stye animals because that's what they are in a modern situation society for the most part. But that isn't the case with medieval pigs. Certainly they were kept in styes, and often they were fed in styes, but they also took them out in order to graze because, well, as I said, pigs are omnivorous. They can eat just about anything. So they could go out and eat on bracken, they could dig up truffles, other roots. They can just find seeds and all kinds of nuts, you know, in a forest. So they, they both grazed in kind of forest and in pasture land as well as the kind of fields after they've been harvested. So, you know, if you think you're, you're cutting off wheat with a scythe, you're going to have a fair number of grains that don't make it into your basket, that you're going to take. And a pig was a perfect answer to be able to actually take advantage of that. So they would go through the fields after they'd been gleaned and you would get kind of the leftovers, and that turns those leftovers into food for people.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So you can see the attraction of keeping pigs then in that case, they fulfilled so many functions, didn't they?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Absolutely. It means they were easy to keep in many ways, but they do require control. Because the thing is, pigs are small, smart, and they can get rather large and they can be very aggressive. So you had to both manage the fact that, okay, they're a great animal to have around for this purpose, but also you need to control them and you need to ensure that the city is set up to do that.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So speaking of that control, you mentioned in the feature that London employed four swine killers. Some ominous sounding job title. I mean, how did that work? Did they do the thing you referred to earlier, where they were basically employed to go round up pigs and inverted commas, take care of them?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Exactly. So they were going around and seeing if there were pigs that were loose, because I said you were not allowed to have your pigs running around free. So that's kind of a myth that gets told about the medieval period, that, oh, there's just pigs, you know, running around loose in the city and. No, in fact, because we know that when they were running around loose in the city, they get taken away. The one exception to this is the Hospitallers of St. Anthony. So the Hospitallers in the 1400s then were allowed to have pigs. Those pigs would wear a bell around their neck. So this was the sign that they were St. Anthony's pigs. And so they ran hospitals. Those hospitals would treat patients who had things like leprosy and ergotism, which is a fungal disease that you get from wheat, bad wheat. And one of the things that they would do is to feed those patients a high meat diet, which made sense because they were people who were getting sick because of having too much grain or bad grain. So they would use their pigs that way, as well as the lard in the pigs probably used to make the ointments that they would put onto these kind of skin conditions. So they had special permission in many, many towns across Europe to let their pigs roam free. But so they had to wear this bell to be identified, so they were protected and they would go around, you know, and kind of eat trash.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Picts, obviously didn't just live in medieval cities, they also died in them. Can you tell us a bit about the process of pig butchery back in the Middle Ages, and how was it done and how did it affect the environment?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

I'm at Bayes, an environmental historian. So that's actually where my interest in pigs in many ways had started, was looking at this kind of environmental effect of butchery processes. Now, pigs have a very bristly kind of hair that covers their skin. And in the Middle Ages, this was pretty bristly. So we shouldn't think, I guess, a medieval pig, you shouldn't think about some beautiful pink, round, big porker. In fact, they were kind of lanky and often darker, and they had a lot more hair. And that hair, those bristles were pretty long, often, and very prickly. So what you do with a pig is you take it to a scalding house. So basically, you're taking the carcass and you're pouring hot boiling water over it. Or you can put it into an oven and singe it. So you're trying to get the hair off. That's what you're doing, so that then you can get in and actually cut it up. And so they would cut it into big pieces. They would also take out the intestines. So intestines are quite useful, sausage casings, as well as actually in dishes as tripe. All of this, then all this meat, you need to rinse, right? You need to wash it. And that is where you get kind of the wastewater generated from it. That's gonna be pretty dirty. It's gonna have some blood. It's gonna have some meat, kind of, you know, pieces, and it's gonna also have that inside of the intestine waste.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So did this happen in the middle of the city?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Well, in most cities, you had a place, an actual scalding house that you would take it to. So, for example, Coventry in the 1400s actually has records of this scalding house. And they require that the city council says if you're going to kill a pig, you have to take it to the scalding house on Palmer Lane. So it wasn't like an option that you could kill a pig anywhere. You had to go there.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So it's mandatory to go there.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Yes. And that was specifically to control this waste. Right. So that the waste wouldn't just go anywhere, but it was kind of localized to one place. So primarily in the Middle Ages, you know, you kind of have two things you can do with waste. One is to put it into a landfill. So you take it to the tip and bury it, put it in a pile, basically, or you can put it into water. And running water, a river going by, was considered a perfect place to put waste because, of course it disappears. Right. It goes downstream to somebody else.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Somebody else's problem.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Well, exactly. So it was very common that these kind of operations, and butchers in general, would be located near running water because you needed to have water for these processes, like cleaning the meat and washing and scalding. So you have to have a lot of water. You want to be close by because you don't want to have to carry buckets. Right. We forget how much water piping does for us. But it's also good for the waste because you just dump it all in there. And in fact, that created some big problems in both London and in York. There are multiple court cases that happen between the friars who have a monastery that sits up against the river and the butchers who take the waste down to the water and who wash the entrails and things in the water where the friars are really upset about them contaminating the water and making it smell.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Can I ask you about another point you make in the feature which is quite interesting, and that was the fact that in the Middle Ages, pigs were kind of believed by some people to be Satan's representatives on earth. Why is that? And how did their devilish reputation sort of impact their treatment?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

There's two biblical stories that a lot of the kind of way pigs are thought about, you know, is based. Because, of course, in medieval period, everybody is Christian for the most part. I mean, you have Jews and Muslims also in Europe, but they're not majority. And so Jesus has one parable and one action that he takes. So one is the healing of a person who's been infested by demons and this miracle. Then he orders the demons out of the person and they go into a herd of swine who then jump off a cliff. So that's one. And the other is the parable of the prodigal son, Right? So the. The son who's left and squanders all the money and ends up being a swineherd, which in Jewish terms is exactly the thing you don't want to do, because pigs are unclean animals. In both of these cases, then pigs are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but they somehow contain bad things. So the demons enter the pigs. And so medieval kind of theological commentators say, well, that's because, you know, pigs are closer to the devil, or this is why God would let that happen. Why Jesus ordered them into those pigs is because they are somehow corrupted. So you have those stories. And then you have folk tales, too. So there's an Irish folk tale that's actually older, that's about these black pigs that come out from the ground and ravage the countryside and return down to the underworld. So, you know, you combine those kind of visions, and pigs kind of take on this somewhat sinister nature. And then there's just, well, the way pigs are. So as I said, everybody's around pigs all the time. Pigs are there in the cities, they're in the countryside. You know, you're eating pigs. Well, that means you can observe pigs. And so some pig characteristics, like, they like to be cool by being in mud. So that's a biological thing that they do. But what happens is commentators talk about that and say, well, the reason they like to be in the mud is, of course, because they're dirty and filthy and unclean. And that's why they're being in the mud. Right? So they say, oh, so if a person is unclean or has done something filthy, then they're compared to a pig laying in the mud. Pigs also, of course, good for us if we're going to eat them. They have lots of piglets at one time. Right. But as a medieval commentator, you can also kind of say, oh, well, that's because they're too sexual and lewd as animals. And that's why they have like all these babies all the time, because they would have piglets two or sometimes even three times a year. And so you can take these normal things about a pig, it's biology, and turn them into something kind of sinister and negative.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But despite these kind of slightly sinister connotations, pigs remained in cities for years when they begin to disappear from our cities.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

So at the beginning of the 1900s, you start to have these movements about making the cities more clean.

[Ryan Reynolds]

But this is the 1900s.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

1900S, yes.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Okay.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

So until then, you continue to have pigs. Pigs were commonplace. So if you look in the 1800s, there's still regular. Even the beginning of the 1900s, what you see is pictures. People will have a pig in the back garden. But at the early 1900s, you started to have kind of this city beautiful type movements. They were sanitation movements in which the middle classes often were trying to clean up the inner parts of the cities. And that came in many guises, in many forms. But one of them was about getting livestock out of the cities. So they started to move them out. There was kind of a resurgence that came, though during the World wars because, again, pigs were an easy way to create meat and so there's some great posters at the Imperial War Museum of Victory pigs that you could give your food to. So instead of throwing away your scrap, you know, make it work for the cause of fighting the war. But basically by after World War II, you really lose almost all livestock from within cities, including pigs. Pigs in your backyard were no longer really necessary because of the rise of supermarkets, of course. I mean, we don't think about these things now, but there's actually a big rise in making food readily available in a kind of self service shopping, which wasn't the case really before World War II. And then on top of that, you have changes to our waste handling structures. So you were giving all your kind of food and stuff to these pigs. And even when I was a kid in the US Our school district had a pig farm that they would take all of the food waste that was generated by the cafeteria and they fed it to these pigs. But that changes then this 1980s, because you kind of have new sanitary regulations that go into place where people say, well, this is actually potentially contaminated. Right. You may spread disease. So different ideas about how we get diseases passed between people and pigs, so we shouldn't be feeding them that waste that people have generated and that you start to have sanitary landfills. So a kind of new idea of how landfills function and better standards. So all those things put together meant you moved things like pigs out of the cities.

[Ryan Reynolds]

So with that in mind, finally, Dolly, is there anything that you believe we can learn from our medieval ancestors when it comes to our relationship with animals like pigs?

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Absolutely. I think that in the medieval times, people had a much closer relationship to animals. So they knew them because, you know, now, okay, if I want to see a pig, I need to go over to the 4H farm or whatever in order to see it. It's not a close relationship. They had a closer relationship. So they understood both how a pig had to live and how it was for it to die. That closeness meant they understood the situation and they had to order their lives to accommodate what the pig needed. Now, because we have such distance from something like pigs, you can just go to the supermarket and buy your bacon and never think twice about how did this pig live or die. You didn't have to change your life to accommodate that pig. And so I think in general, people in a medieval city understood what it meant to live with things in an entirely different way. And it's not just pigs, of course, and livestock, but all kinds of sanitation and things you do. So if you generate your waste and you have to take care of it. Right. So you have to get somebody to actually take your trash or clean out the dung or, you know, clean out your cesspit.

[Ryan Reynolds]

You see, it gives you an entirely new perspective.

[Dolly Jorgensen]

Yes. And it's not just some invisible thing that happens, you know, if I flush my toilet, you don't need to know what happens. It just happens out there. You know, stuff goes on. And the difference in the medieval city was people actually paid attention to this kind of thing. So people knew when you didn't clean your street, people knew when you threw your dung in a heap on the side of the road, because you knew what you were supposed to do with it otherwise. And it meant that people were much more conscious of how you managed waste, how you managed animal bodies, how people lived, because you were actually paying attention and had to in order to make those systems work.

[Spencer Mizzen]

That was historian Dolly Jorgensen. Her latest book is the Medieval Pig. Dolly also wrote a feature on medieval pigs for BBC History Magazine's October issue, which you can read now on the History Extra website or listen to as an audio version on one of our other podcasts, History Extra Long Reads. The link is in this episode's description. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.