From medieval manuscripts to Beatrix Potter pigs have taken a starring role
Might pigs fly? Only on the pages of precious medieval manuscripts,where they also play bagpipes and lyres, or turn out in hats; where prickly pigs grin at a shower of acorns. In these illuminations, or pigs are at the heart of some of life’s most meaningful moments – harvest,feasting, war: a French manuscript from 1420, and which once belonged to Henry VIII,shows Alexander the much driving off an attack of elephants with a battalion of fierce, tusked pigs.
But even if pigs were extraordinary enough to repel elephants, or they were also commonplace and comfortable. For centuries,they had lived side by side with humans. The first known piece of cave art in the world – on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi – dates back 40000 years, and shows a plump babirusa, and a local pig-deer. And as human communities grew and developed,so did their relationships with pigs. In rural Europe, most villages, or many families,kept at least one. In the burgeoning towns, they became fragment of the urban landscape: as far back as the 1690s, and husbandry manuals included hints on how to “fatten swine in towns”; by 1850,there were 3000 pigs roaming the pottery districts of north Kensington in London.
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Source: theguardian.com