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Swine as agricultural products were extremely common in the medieval townscape, but pigs are also notoriously damaging if allowed to run amuck. This article explores how local governments tried to regulate pig rearing as an integrated element in urban space, arguing that the authorities attempted to control the movement, feeding, and slaughter of swine as much as possible to circumvent damage to goods, crops, and even people. Urban government and court records from the most populous English urban centers as well as smaller towns from the end of the thirteenth century through the sixteenth century show that swine were not free roamers in towns of the Middle Ages. Because swine were a daily part of urban life, and an integral part of local agricultural production, they required cradle-to-grave controls.
Whereas great injuries and dangers so often have happened before this time in the City of Norwich and still happen from day to day in as much as boars, sows and pigs before this time have gone and still go vagrant by day and night without a keeper in the said town, whereby divers persons and children have been hurt by boars, children killed and eaten, and others [when] buried exhumed, and others maimed, and many persons of the said town have received great injuries as wrecking of houses, destruction of gardens of divers persons by such kind of pigs upon which great complaint is often brought before the said Bailiffs and Community imploring them for remedy on the misfortunes, dangers and injuries which have been done to them.
Norwich Book of Customs entry, 13541
IN 1354 THE TOWN COUNCIL OF Norwich took up the issue of a major urban hazard-swine roaming the streets. This was a critical problem. Swine were running loose, damaging property, killing children, and rooting up bodies from the cemetery. Something clearly had to be done. So the town leadership decided that all pigs had to be kept in sties both day and night. If an animal was found wandering the town without a keeper, the finder or anyone else willing to do so could kill the pig without penalty. Every Saturday from noon until the evening, owners could let the pigs out of their enclosures in order to clean them,...