Pigeon towers: The rise and fall of a 17th-century status symbol (2015)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
After he died the pigeons moved on. Eventually his children sold the place, but it took a long time to do that. I went up to the pigeonnier one final time before the place was sold: no one had been there in 15 years, the stairs were missing some rungs and I wondered if the rotten floor of the top floor would hold my weight. The only resident that remained was a lone bat who was probably surprised to see a human up there. Would have been nice if the next owners restored it, maybe even converted it into a living space. But it was likely slated to be demolished.
I've always liked pigeons.
This is actually how a lot of manorial/serf institutions worked. You weren't allowed to build anything unapproved that might compete with the services "offered" by the local lord. In many places, building an oven was illegal as it would undercut the dues the lord would be paid for using his.
Most pigeons were probably sold to the local peasants, and the rules were about enforcing state monopoly.
by the 17th century serfdom had been "abolished" (old lizzy the first did that)
By the 17th century the private dovecote might have hung around as a status symbol, but there's no reason to believe that in certain places and circumstances and fashions during this whole period common folk were not eating pigeons if they could afford it.
Unless I'm missing something, turnips were in the UK since the early middle ages. I know the argument is that they pulled up turnips and swedes for winter storage, but I don't think that's true. Pulling up root vegetables is hard fucking work.
I'm going to call bollocks on that reasoning. Around the 17th century people made the change from using oxen just for pulling to horses. Which meant cows were more for eating than ever before.
Plus you'd have sheep, pigs, rabbit, fish, deer, and chickens for winter protein.
Why? Expense. In Domesday era [c. 1066-1086, before the horse collar advent] small tenant farmers could get away with a single yoke of oxen — a single pair. While large farms used teams of up to 8 to pull a plow through the rough clay.
As the medieval period transitioned into the modern you saw larger and larger farms. A Domesday era villein might keep only 120 acres under plow (48 hectares); a small holder with a single yoke might only hold 30-40 acres (12-16 hectares).
Average farm sizes continues to grow to this day. Today the average English farm is nearly 220 acres (88 hectares). Larger farms, and more varied farmwork, meant the expense of horses could be afforded better.
A chart in this report shows how the sheer number of horses did not equal the number of oxen until the late 15th Century, when it was estimated a little less than 400,000 of each creature plowed fields throughout Britain.
There was a gap in the records until the middle of the 16th Century. By then, and afterwards, the number of horses well exceeds the number of oxen. That number continued to skyrocket into the Victorian era, by which time use of oxen was nearly eliminated.
And then, when the steam engine (and eventually petrol engine) tractors came along, you'll see the agricultural horse population likewise collapse.
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gahmr-delta
Closer photo:
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/traditional-egyptian-dovecot...
Aluminum before better material science dropped the price. Dishes, utensils, the cap on the Washington Monument.
Pineapples before Dole setup plantations.
Gelatin had two phases: before refrigeration, it needed hours of work in the kitchen. Then the status came from electrification and owning a refrigerator.
Anytime I see grits on the menu at a fancy restaurant for $15 I chuckle to myself quietly.
Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was through to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.
Afterwards was reincarnated as Anthony CookingShowEatAnythingDude Bourdain.
What the heck is going on in these two sentences.
First, I suspect they meant to say that potatoes hadn't yet arrived. Turnips, for example, go back for over a thousand years.
Second, is the implication they couldn't keep any livestock over winter because of a lack of root vegetables? Because what about barley? Or silage?
Makes you start to question the rest of the article.
Of course you need a lot of animals around to raise the next generation. Still if you plan to eat it in winter the best best was kill it in fall.
"The laws often prevented commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats, and could be used to stigmatize disfavoured groups. In Late Medieval cities, sumptuary laws were instituted as a way for the nobility to limit the conspicuous consumption of the prosperous bourgeoisie. Bourgeois subjects appearing to be as wealthy as or wealthier than the ruling nobility could undermine the nobility's presentation of themselves as powerful, legitimate rulers."
While there may have been class restrictions in certain times and places, in all likelihood most lords probably sold pigeons at the market and commoners bought them that way.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/276172/if-god-di...
In culinary terminology, squab is an immature domestic pigeon, typically under four weeks old, or its meat. Some authors describe it as tasting like dark chicken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squab
[Edit]
Another note about pigeons: they feed their young milk produced from a gland inside the upper throat: crop milk.
Pigeon's milk begins to be produced a couple of days before the eggs are due to hatch. The parents may cease to eat at this point in order to be able to provide the squabs (baby pigeons and doves) with milk uncontaminated by seeds, which the very young squabs would be unable to digest. The baby squabs are fed on pure crop milk for the first week or so of life, or about 10-14 days. After this the parents begin to introduce a proportion of adult food, softened by spending time in the moist conditions of the adult crop, into the mix fed to the squabs, until by the end of the second week they are being fed entirely on softened adult food.
Visiting this estate a few years ago sent me down the rabbit hole, reading about pigeon towers around the world.
That is not just a maybe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon
Passenger pigeons were once found in huge flocks in North America. They were very easy to kill and they have been hunted to extinction.
I was visiting India last year and came across a colorful tower, about 60 feet tall and teeming with pigeons. There the aim is to provide housing and support for pigeons, and not to use them as a source of food. Many people believe feeding birds is "good karma" and having a pigeon tower allows one to have a ready supply of birds to feed.
Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453716
In southern Europe, early iron age, circa 800BCE.
Pigeons were farmed because their meat was considered to be better than that of chickens, which were a "lower class" meat.
That said - is there a volume challenge with pigeons (vs. chickens)?
Like, I feel like now-a-days I can get a reasonably good volume of chicken meat on the bone (breasts, drumsticks to some extent, maybe some wings?) but pigeons seem small enough that you'd need like 4-10 for a single meal for a 4 person family.
It feels like it's easier to produce more chicken meat, and more cheaply (is this why it's less desirable than pigeon meat)?
Also, it's time for lunch apparently :)
Want to live like we used to? Eat way less protein in meats. This is the solution.
I just built a set of chairs that were in a picture from a shaker museum. I managed to get the scale correct because there was a soda next to one in the photo.
It turns out that 1840's people were WAAAAY smaller than they are today. Not fat. But overall dimensions.
Why?
Eat less protein.
> The Old English word neep – a name now only seen in Scotland alongside tatties and haggis – goes back to at least the 10th century, but turnip (“turn-neep”) is only about 500 years old.
> Historically, the word “turnip” didn’t only refer to the round purple root, but root vegetables of various shapes, colours and sizes. Sixteenth-century botanist John Gerard was particularly keen on “small turneps”, which he said were much sweeter than the large kind and grown in a village called Hackney outside London.
From: https://theconversation.com/turnips-how-britain-fell-out-of-...
Turnips? Carrots? Onions? All existed in Western Europe by the time of the Romans, and mostly way before.