Random question for my history-minded friends: why didnt serfs and peasants during the Middle Ages and Renaissance own a fuckton of chickens? Like. You can support multiple hundreds or chickens on an acre of land and they produce on average 50-100 calories a day each.
Why didnt they keep a few hundred chickens on fallow land and have like...half their daily calories taken care of?
My immediate thought was "animals were expensive to get back then" but that falls apart rapidly because like. If theyre not hard to keep, that solves itself in a few generations.
My second thought was "during the winter in most places, they Couldnt support themselves and so required lots of feed" which is probably true, but doesnt explain why the mediterranean, with its mild winters and constant chapperral, wasnt overrun with chickens for half a millenia.
Current best guess is predation? Keeping 200 hundred chickens would require a Lot of oversight if youre not just letting them free range during the day and keeping them in a coop overnight, and even today foxs and yotes can massacre a hen coop. But like. It feels like it would be Worth the effort, given how efficient chickens are at converting unused land into usable calories. Obviously I know there Is a reaaonable explanation, I just cant figure out what it is.
