I'd love to hear about how vital acorn crops were to swineherding actually
okay I can't say much about it on my own but here's a cool bit from the book The Medieval Pig by Dolly Jorgensen (which has been really interesting so far):
Pigs were present in the woodlands, particularly in autumn, when they could easily take advantage of the high-calorie foods acorns and beechmast. The autumnal bounty of tree fruit products, which is called mast, lasted only a limited time and was inconsistent from year to year. Oak and beech trees are notorious for uneven fruit production, with some lean years and some bumper crops, but even with that variability, most trees produce some crop every year, making it a dependable source of pig fodder. When the acorns really failed over a large area it was a noteworthy tragedy, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1116 notes: âthis year was so barren of mast that none was heard tell of in all this land nor also in Walesâ. The value of trees as pig fodder and shelter providers was recognised by ancient custom and led to their protection. Large productive oak trees were especially valued and conserved. The Laws of Ine, issued in seventh-century Wessex, set the fine for illegally cutting down a tree that could âshelter 30 swineâ at twice the amount of a regular tree.
The most often cited medieval documentary evidence for feeding pigs in woodlands is the late eleventh-century Domesday Book. The Domesday survey was created to take stock of all the properties and payments due on landholdings throughout England, which had recently been acquired by William I. In Domesday the normal formula for woodland size is âwood for x swineâ (silva ad x porcos) although Shropshire entries are more specific: âwood for fattening (incrassandis) x swineâ. In 1950 the geographer H. C. Darby compiled the most extensive study of Domesday woodland geography to date and came to the conclusion that âwood formed an important item in the economy of the eleventh century because its acorns and beech-mast provided food for swineâ. ... Domesday, however, was not the first documentation to specify the connection between pigs and trees. In the Carolingian world the ninth-century estate inventories known as polyptychs measured woodlandâs size and value based on its capacity to pasture swine. The monks of Montier-en-Der, for example, had 12 estates in Champagne that could fatten an average of 800 pigs each.
the woodlands that the pigs fed in would have been highly managed spaces (Figure 6). Trees could be pollarded (the practice of cutting off the branches of a mature tree above the grazing height of animals and utilising the regrowth for a variety of purposes). Oaks growing in open wood pasture, rather than in dense forests, produce more acorns per tree, and the open areas also encourage grass growth, so it would have made sense to keep grazing areas open to allow pigs more food sources to forage. Oaks tend not to produce a significant number of acorns until about the age of 20 so, while it was not necessary to cultivate young trees, care would have been taken to keep old trees alive if a medieval herder
wanted food for his pigs.
Feeding pigs in woodlands came at a cost, literally. The fee for grazing pigs was known as pannage (in medieval Latin pasnagio) or glandage, which conferred the right to feed pigs in an area in exchange for a number of fattened pigs or an equivalent amount of cash. Use of a woodland for pannage or driving pigs through it is one of the most frequently recorded rights in woodland, including the administrative areas called forest in medieval documents. Pigs may have been driven considerable distances to seasonal pastures.
also re: those last points, here's a bit from a masters dissertation I've been reading ("Power Relations In The Royal Forests of England" by Andrew Pattinson) abt how seriously potential abuse of all this might be taken:
Illicit sales (or gifting) of wood was a crime the foresters were often accused of in the records. In Peter [de Neville, a corrupt forester]'s case however the scope of the illegal felling was fairly exceptional: Over the course of a dozen years, some 7,000 oaks were allegedly
cut and sold to wood sellers, lime burners and charcoal burners, amounting to an estimated 7,000 shillings in grift â monies which rightly belonged to the king. ... The inquisition mentions de Neville pocketing monies for agistment, that is, the right (for a small fee) to fatten oneâs pigs on the acorns of the forest during the autumn, a critically important privilege amongst forest dwellers. In Peterâs case, he is accused not only of stealing the fees but also of agisting more animals than the forest could handle and (illegally) agisting his own pigs, nearly 300 per year, totaling some 940 shillings of damage.
also some images of pigs & swineherds in the forest (you can see the acorns & even see the swineherds knocking them off trees for the pigs):
*worth noting though that this is rural swineherding in places where there are woods, other places might do it differently
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