Having worked on a farm that kept modern pigs, I can tell you I never think of them as plump little squeakers. They're cunning massive tricksters that will escape their pens whenever it's least convenient... like clockwork.
Ditto, but on a smallholding. I can imagine it was hell back then to keep them penned in; only a stout wall with good footings must have worked (but this would have been of lime not cement). Another reason they would /have little choice but to let them roam.
My daughter works with pigs at a restaurants small holding & every time I ask her about her day it starts with “the pigs got out overnight…”. Pigs are pranksters of the highest order
That reminds me of a comics from the iconic Czech Rychlé šípy series by Jaroslav Foglar... these five boys from the city. In that one, they're spending the summer on a farm in the countryside. One of them lets the pig out of its small pen because he feels sorry for it, and when it shoots out like greased lightning they spend the rest of the page trying to recapture it. They lose to the pig, which proves unexpectedly fast and cunning. Since the author was a city boy with family or friends in the country, and also spent several months on a farm in Switzerland as a boy, I'm fairly certain it is partially autobiographical. :-)
I used to work in a pub which had a goat. He might have been a nice small goat when they got him, but he was a bloody big one-horned goat by the time I worked there. I had to take him out each morning, which usually meant him dragging me across the car park by his chain, and then bring him back in in the evening, which meant trying to get him down from whatever tree he had climbed, then me dragging him across the car park by his chain. One night, he broke out of his stall and chewed the pipe off the fuel oil tank... The pub cat managed to get covered in fuel oil, so, once I had got the pipe back on the tank, and the goat back in his stall, I had to then hold the cat under the shower for an hour until I got the oil off it.
My older brother used to keep pigs. I can attest that they are indeed crafty. He renamed one Houdini--yes, because he was our escape artist. We were always looking for that sneaky little guy.
In Ireland, the landlords would lend a piglet to each tenant every year so that they could fatten it on scraps then sell it to pay rent and pay back the price of the piglet. They were a tall, thin sort of pig called an Irish greyhound. There was a good poem about these Irish pigs which I'll paste below for anyone who wants to read. Twas an evening in November, As I very well remember, I was strolling down the street in drunken pride, But my knees were all aflutter, So I landed in the gutter, And a pig came up and lay down by my side. Yes I lay there in the gutter Thinking thoughts I couldn’t utter, When a colleen passing by did softly say, "Ye can tell someone that boozes By the company they chooses" - So the pig got up and quickly walked away.
@@lakshmibhaskara1516 Glad you enjoyed it. I was trying to find from when the poem originated but it may be unknown. I did find there was a song based on this poem from the 30s by a Clarke Van Ness. It's called 'the famous pig song' and has some funny verses about other farm animals.
my father's Irish and told me about wild pigs that used to roam Ireland when the oak forests were really heavy and there was plenty of mast for them to eat-they were long and thin beasts, like greyhounds, as you say. very funny poem too!
Portuguese here. First of all, thank you for your amazingly informative TH-cam channel. That being said, you mentioned the "bristles" in the boar neck and back, and I immediately remembered that when I was young, whenever someone kill a wild boar it would be sold on the village "square", and several people would buy several parts of that boar. My grandfather would sometimes buy those "bristles" to make shoes or to sew leather. I also remember seeing pigs on the street and they were marked with some kind of dye, usually just the owner initials. I'm from a small village on the Portuguese countryside mountains, and I remember a number of things, traditions, that may well been preserved from the medieval times.
@@jezblades9913 I don't think it's needed. Many of the countryside people still remember or even keep the "old way" alive. There are still people cultivating and process linen for clothing, for example. This happens in the deep countryside, specially in the "Portuguese Highlands" like I use to call it. My village is in a mountain range plateau, 700 meters high. If any of you ever come to Portugal, please take a trip around that area...very welcoming and friendly people. And because most are well educated you'll have no problem finding someone that speaks English.
@@DiaboLusitano i agree whit jez. Sadly lots of information get lost becaus it was belived that there are enough wo keep the traditonal way alive. 2 examples i am strugeling:1) the meaning of a white ribon on appletrees? (After time i have found the answer) 2) there are evidence of pig brissel used for uppolsty, but no Information on how this was procesd/used.
@@DiaboLusitano thanks for the invite/recommendation! And for the story.🙂 You may be right in that it's not "needed", but my guess is there are plenty of people who'd be interested in reading what you remember from that time, if you ever get the urge to write some of it down. 👍
I live in Hawaii, where there's a thriving wild boar population. They're classic ancient boars. Big, deadly tusks, packed with muscle, black skin, covered with long wiry bristles. Their screams come straight from a horror movie. They cause serious damage by breaking fences and demolishing gardens. A full-grown boar can weigh 200lbs/90kg, and never assume that they're 200lbs/90kg of lazy, and won't chase you down. My big brother is a hunter, and we shared ownership of a couple dogs. He and his hunting buddies had a pack that they use to track and take down pigs. Everyone in the party, man and dog (usually dog), would often turn up with massive, ugly gashes. As a kid I was warned never to go near a baby pig, because a mama is always nearby. Bear rules apply.
@@BeNGun86 Wild boar are hardcore. Most people here in Germany don't know that if we didn't have hunters, we'd all be killed by wild boar during the next decade. No kidding.
@@BeNGun86 Southern Swabia here talking. The best look i had to a wild boar was at night on a better dirt path outside of a big village. One the left side was a steep slope down to a "primal forest ravine", on the right small Villas(and than wet fields...): And before us a very, very Big Boar. He was stepping slowy accross the road when he was caught in the headlights of our car. He was uninpressed. He faced us. walked to my moms OPEN window and made very low unhappy noises....that was when she hit the gas pedal. This Thing was big enough to look in our car while only half a armslenght away from the it.(granted he has to look up a bit but still) No dog, even our newfoundlander was even close as tall or big.
Given the fact that a feral hog can easily kill a person and is shockingly fast, going into the woods without a horse must have been quite the adventure if you heard a pig scream near you 😅
sounds like an ecofriendly person wanted a sustainable way to get rid of home waste, but didn't think it through. in the future we could have little robots that fee don plastic waste and at night you let them loose into the streets. I wouldn't eat them though.
If my reenactment group, we would have a boar hunt where someone would dress up in furr and hide in the forest. He had two daggers to represent tusks. The rest of us would split up and try to get the boar. Boars are tough, so we had the beast be tough to kill. It often got a few of us. Turns out a boar spear works well.
They can and have eviscerated taller modern horses, so smaller medieval horses would have been in as much danger as their riders! I'd much rather have two or three hounds and a pointy stick.
@@jamesanderson6769 Where did the "hog" put its daggers? 😅 I just imagined that person running after you guys and trying to kill you with their knives 😆😅
In doing some family history research I found that one of my ancestor's claim to fame was that he killed the last wild boar of Westmoreland. For doing that he received a 4,000 acre estate. There's also a poem written about it called “Minstrels of Winandermere.”
I also want to mention just how nice this comment section is. You should be proud of this Jason. Cultivating a viewership that is kind and friendly to one another is no small thing.
@@ModernKnight He's right, you know. Your channel is such a refreshing atmosphere. Thank you for all you do to cultivate such a great channel and community!
I guessed wild boar! I live in Asia and wild boars can still be a serious problem in the rural places. These creatures are tough, aggressive and scary. I never realised that pigs were so ubiquitous in mediaeval European societies. They were important in ancient China - the Chinese character for 'house' is basically the character for 'pig' with the character for 'roof' over it. So if you had a roof over your head, and a pig in your backyard, you had a house.
I grew up on a farm. Pigs are quite formidable creatures. When I was a child, a woman in my area was killed by her own pigs. Her small child was crying, and it triggered the pigs. The lady got her child out of the pen but they knocked her down before she could climb the fence.
@@ModernKnight It's been about 55 years, and I've never forgotten to be careful of pigs. We have wild pig where I live, and subsistence hunting is an important part of the local economy.
I grew up on a farm also. My dad would never keep pigs. His parents had kept pigs when he was a child. He told me a story about his parents' pigs masacring the family's flock of chickens. There had been a particularly rainy week. The chickens got stuck in the mud, and the pigs completely tore them up. Once my dad was grown, he wouldn't have pigs on his farm. He wouldn't even eat pork after that.
The university I went to had a massive Agricultural department, one of the largest single pig-holders in Alabama. My friend was getting his post-grad degree in pigs. He said, when the lab tech was taking them on the catwalk over the pigpen -- industrial-sized, we're talkkng several thousand pigs in one massive hangar -- the tech said ominously: "Don't fall in -- or else, by the time we get to you, there won't be enough left to bury." That is absolutely terrifying.
@@ModernKnight this video raises an interesting question. What was pet ownership like back then? I mean did they have collars like we do for identification was there a pet shop in town for potential buyers? I'd love to see your research on it
I always thought that the picture of pigs rummaging and scrounging through medieval cities was a stereotype. You see it in a lot of movies and shows depicting the so-called "Dark Ages". Pigs are mostly used in that way to exemplify how filthy and unsanitary those times were. Finding out that it's actually historically accurate was surprising to me! I never knew so many people kept pigs, and even in the cities too! Such an insightful little piece of information!
It's kind of interesting on how that stereotype changes the view of the situation. Filmmakers and whoever else might show a bunch of pigs in the streets to make medieval cities look dirtier, but real-life urban pig-ownership was actually an important practical matter.
Had a friend in college come in late one day and said a hog messed up his truck. I was thinking "How did Wilbur" mess up a truck?" That's when I learned how insane wild hogs were.
I have a cousin who grows out a couple of pigs most years. The full scale domestic variety is still a dangerous animal, and they are also quite good escape artists.
We have hogs in large paddocks, the bottom of the fence buried down at least 2-1/2 ft with large rocks, and cement blocks to prevent them from digging under the fence, not to mention several strands of barbed wire from the ground to about 2-1/2 ft up, and gates that can't be lifted off the pins (yes, hogs will figure out how to lift a gate), and we still have to check daily to make sure they can't get out. They have water, shade, pasture, and woods to live their best lives with right up to when we sell or butcher them. When it comes down to it, cattle may be bigger, but hogs are faster, smarter, and more deadly to deal with. They are also prolific breeders, with the average sow have 2 litters of 8-12 pigs each, and those pigs grow rapidly, so they are a steady source of meat and not all that expensive to feed. We also turn some of them out in the garden early each spring to root around and loosen the soil up for planting.
@@allisonshaw9341 My Dad grew up in rural southern Ireland and recalled a local farmer who would drive his pigs up to the orchard to eat the fallen apples. All good until there was a particularly wet period and the apples had fermented. My Dad reckoned a dozen drunk pigs staggering back from the orchard, bouncing off the walls and getting narky with each other was probably the funniest thing he ever saw.
In Spain, a few towns still practice having a “comunal pig” though I suppose in medieval times it would’ve been a “comunal herd”. Basically this pig is allowed free roam and the whole town feeds it scraps etc, and when the time comes, the town enjoys a nice dinner
@@TheMysteryDriver Indeed!, they throw animals from towers, spit olive bones in competitions etc... Is very embarrasing for the rest of us tbh. They're our rednecks but without trucks
This is amazing. Those are the sorts of unspoken binds between individuals which make for a cohesive group. Our modern lives sometimes seem so senseless in comparison.
There used to be a custom in Valencia in which the casal would set a pig free around town that people would feed scraps and such. When it was big enough it was sold to finance the Fallas. I don't know if any towns still do this, but that was the case during my father's childhood in the town I grew up in. He was born in 1959, so it wasn't that long back, especially for a town that today is considered quite rich, with a lot of suburban area with huge houses, and even has a couple of famous football players living around.
Last autumn I visited a manor in the Netherlands where pigs are kept basically wild in the forest. It is amazing to see how fast even piglets can turn pristine ground into a battle field.
As a young child, my daily evening chore was to feed the pig the meal my mom had prepared for it. It would be butchered every fall. We would empty the pen of dirt and "stuff" every spring before getting the new pig. The dirt and stuff was then dumped on the vegetable garden. It sure made things grow! Lots of memories.
My opa raised pigs! Every fall he'd get three pigs. Two for him and his wife, and one for my family. During the winter whenever we go up to visit, we'd feed them expired milk that my opa picked up from the local food bank. Every spring around late March or early April, the pigs would be butchered and we'd spend the day cutting and packing the meat.
That sounds really strange. My grandmother and uncles owned farms. They were fed slop…..the remains of every edible things that were discarded. The idea of ‘preparing a meal’ is hilarious to me
"domesticated" pigs can revert pretty quickly to a wild form, if you let them free in a year tops will regrow fur and act more aggressively. Not a boar but still very tanky
Great subject! I also watch Goldshaw Farm and he has talked at length about the destructiveness of even just a few pigs. I can’t imagine the havoc in a town if everyone had one!
Another good demonstration of the havoc pigs can cause is how much of a problem feral pigs currently are in much of the US and in many other parts of the world. They're extremely good at finding food, reproduce like mad, and in the US at least have essentially no natural predators other than humans (the states that have massive feral pig problems generally lack big predators like Cougars, Wolves, Grizzly Bears, and Jaguars that can kill them). They even look just like the medieval pigs that Jason describes in this very video. The feral pig problem is so bad in some parts of the US that not only do many states allow hunters to kill as many of them as they want, they actively encourage hunters to kill them. In Texas, for instance, it's legal to hunt them from helicopters; the helicopters are generally used to flush the pigs out into the open where they can be shot and killed more easily, not unlike how some dog breeds are used to flush prey animals out of burrows and vegetation.
Great video! Thoughts on the marking of pigs - it's a problem shared among many kinds of livestock, and I've read that before branding was super common, ear notches may have been preferred. The trouble with branding, I think, usually had to do with the risk of infection, and the notching of an ear might have been less troublesome - plus you could notch them very young and the mark would remain visible. Branding on cattle tends to be placed on the hindquarters if I understand right, but with these pigs I don't know if the hind end is any less bristly than the rest of it. Though I find it extremely amusing to contemplate painted pigs, I feel like that would not have been so common. When you say writing on them I first thought "yes, the skin would show color well" but then I remembered, these are hairy beasts. So I wonder if pigment of any sort would really stay, or if the animal would just rub it off over the course of a day. "Municipal swineherd" sounds like a fabulous insult though, haha!
On sheep ear notches are very clear identification even after the hair grows back in, I'm sure it would work well on pigs. Was standard practice to punch the ears of non stud animals through the 80s and 90s here (unsure if it's still done) ...come to think of it, we tattooed the ears of the stud flock. And I doubt that was a modern invention!
And this is the origin of the term “earmark”. A term still in use in the English speaking countries today. For example; funds could be earmarked for a particular project or use. According to one source I found; the first recorded usage of that term is 1515. I expect that the origin is far more ancient.
I wish I could remember the name, but in Germany there is a town that has a huge pig-roasting festival every year as a sort of revenge against pigs. From what I remember of the town’s story, back in the either late medieval or early Renaissance period, the gatekeeper for the main gate misplaced his key and could not properly seal the door for the night. Rather than miss out on going to the tavern, he decided a carrot would do quite nicely as a temporary door bar replacement. What he didn’t factor were the roaming pigs, one of which found an easily accessible carrot that would do quite nicely as a snack. With the impromptu door bar gone, the gate opened, and a large band of marauders (maybe an enemy army?) seized the opportunity to sack the town. Upon recovering from the attack and rebuilding, the town resolved to roast as many pigs as they could every year.
Wittlich, The story behind the Pig Fest or as legend has it, during ancient times the city was threatened by a horde of Huns. They felt secure behind their Roman walls; however, the night prior to the Huns arriving, the evening guard charged with locking the gate could not find the peg to secure the door. So a soldier placed a turnip in its place. (There seems to be some dispute as to whether it was a turnip or carrot but the official city statement does say turnip.) Well, during the night a pig came along and ate the turnip leaving the gate unlocked and allowing the Huns to enter and sack the city. Once the Huns left, the people of Wittlich slaughtered all of the pigs as punishment. Today the city cooks up over a 100 large pigs for the annual Pig Festival.
The more I watch these videos, the more I am convinced that Sir Jason is secretly an immortal that decided to do something with his first-hand knowledge of medieval life...
When I was a kid the old forest warden in my home village in Southwestern Germany had a wild sow that he found as a piglet. He raised her alongside his new dog and taught both the same commands. Even though she wasn't fully domesticated she always behaved. But it was clear that getting her back into the wild wasn't an option because she was too accustomed to humans and might have caused problems with hiking tourists. It was pretty funny though to go down main street and see a grown wild sow sitting next to a comparably tiny dachshund outside the grocery shop. But I've also seen what chaos can be caused by a sounder running in panic. Happens quite often in Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany because here they have lots of agriculture and only small woodlands. Not like in the dense Palitanate Forest where I grew up. There they sometimes messed up an unfenced garden at the edge of the forest in the middle of the night. But here wild boars often come to the fields in the middle of the day, especially in harvest season to feast on the maize or simply get to another spot. When they get surprised by a tractor or combine harvester and can't escape back into the woods, they run into human settlements. A few years ago a few boars even showed up in the middle of a small town and one ran into a optometrist shop where it crashed into the stands and broke lots of glass. Luckily no one was injured. Another rather funny thing happened at a lake. A sow and her piglets came to a swimming pond in the middle of the day to search for food. But instead the sow ran away with a nudist sunbather's laptop bag and he chased behind her. Luckily the sow was pretty chill around all those humans even though she had her piglets with her or else the chase could have ended pretty bad.
They possibly identified individual hogs by notching ears. Was still done until fairly recently in the United States for many types of livestock. Early version of an ear tag.
German here. I just wanted to share an interesting anecdote concerning pigs: In German, there is the phrase "die Sau rauslassen" (="letting the sow out") for having lots of fun. The background to this phrase is that in medieval university towns, members of students' fraternities were sometimes required as a dare to sneak into a yard at night, open the pen, and chase the pigs out onto the street, where they'd cause chaos - and lots of fun for the other students (not so much for people trying to sleep).
The good old days when German universities still had prison cells where they would keep unruly students on water and bread for up to a week. People were so much tougher back then. Today students faint when someone uses a wrong pronoun.
"Clean food never fattened a pig."- My father, a few occasions when someone freaked about dropping a bit of food. This was before the 5 second rule was passed.
I was able to guess the beast after watching videos of hog trapping in Texas. If it's that hard to to trap/contain pigs in the modern time, I can't imagine how hard it must have been then.
Ugh, I volunteered at a ranch in Texas and the dratted things were such a pain. They tore up one field so badly and got so bold we had to move the horses out and stop using it for a while. The owner of the ranch did allow hunting on his property for them, which, after dealing with the damage, was completely understandable.
In my city, boars are somewhat frequently seen on the streets. They live in the nearby woods, but aren't afraid of paying a visit to the suburbs (where they often dig around for food in people's gardens) and the recreational areas. A family of boars walking on the beach promenade is not an uncommon sight. Trash is usually kept in enclosed sheds, so nowadays they don't often get the opportunity to dig around in trashcans. People just know to keep their distance, especially from families, knowing that sows can be quite aggressive around their young. Somehow, this approach of just keeping distance and letting them be is sufficient. Accidents are very rare, and more often than not if something bad does happen, it's either a car accident involving a boar, or a boar that somehow got lost in the more urban areas and vets/police had to intervene. Haven't heard of any injuries caused by boars in a while. Though my parents complain about boars digging under their fence and plundering the vegetable garden.
Fascinating. It brought back memories of a project did in high school economics class. The teacher had us in Medieval times and we drew a role out of hat...I got the job as Pig Farmer. We were given $50 (monopoly money of course🤣) and was a semester long project to see how well we did with business and making a profit. I did well (bartering, then buying as little as possible and having NOTHING go to waste...even had hides tanned for water bottles, shoes, ect.) I made it to top ten in the class. But I didn't know for sure how things REALLY were in Medieval times. From what I learned from the video...I probably would have done well.😁
Always a delightful wealth of information and always a fantastic subject! It's great to see you! Got a preorder at Amazon on your new book. Happy February! May spring come early to you in the UK this year!! 🌹💕🌹
I came across a magazine article some years ago that was about hogs. A varmint hunter of feral hogs was interviewed. In his opinion, there were 2 kinds of people in the world: "Them that has pigs, & them that WILL have pigs".
Pigs are still turned out into the New Forest (southern England) in the autumn. The New Forest is known for free-range ponies and these can suffer from eating too many acorns. The pigs are able to eat the acorns and so keep the ponies safe.
I'm imagining Hawk the Slayer doing battle with a huge, ferocious were-pig on the night of a full blood moon. Hawk slashes at the beast, dealing it a fatal blow. Through the power of the mind stone, we hear the dying thoughts of the abomination: "swill. . . all I wanted was some swill. . . gasp. . . what does a pig have to do around hear to get a fresh cup of swill?"
Interesting to hear about the municipal Swineherd being a thing back then as well, I happened to come across them in the Victorian era in my home town. There were some interesting rules as well (although I don't know how far back they all went but they happened to be mentioned in the Victorian period); "It is an offence to give any pig, boar or any manner of hog; any wine, beer, brandy, whiskey or any manner of strong drink, though small beer is accepted, within the town, nor is it permissible to take a pig to be patron of a public house (tithed or free standing), Inn or tavern. No pig may walk or be walked through the streets of the town on a Sunday, lest it has permission in writing from the vicar to do, is attending church with it's owner or taking part in other business of a lawfully congregated church. Any pig, boar or hog consuming tobacco in the streets or public places of the town shall result in a fine for its owner. Any violations of these offenses shall be subject to fines as to the amount the magistrate sees fit in accordance with any relevant statute or common law." There is also legend of a law requiring pigs to wear a hat in public but historians of the town have found no trace of such a bylaw.
The quality of your show and also the format is up there with what you would see back in the day in cable TV like History channel, this sort of semi-documentary shows with a more down to earth approach with the host on screen, very relaxing, before they devolved into complete nonsense with car shows. Very good job as always.
What a fun video! Complete with pig dialog. Do you think the porcine bells were crotal bells? Must have been confusing to hear crotal bells around a corner and not know whether a horse or a pig was coming.
A Bit of information from southern Germany. Bells are still used for sheep, cows and goats. The traditon requiers that the shape, material and sound of the bell must be acording to the animal including the age and position in the flock. Somone who is familiar to the sound of a flock can distingish the individuals only by listen the bells.
3:37 when my Gran would watch my brothers and I 40 years ago shed say she felt like a swine herder. It was a fitting description. Cheers from Canada, great video.
Terrific video! As an aside, speaking of pigs, back in the 1980’s when I was a policeman in Victoria, Australia, we had a PIG lapel badge we used to wear on our uniform or plain clothes. It had the word PIG = Pride. Integrity. Guts. A slightly different slant, but it was in the face of detractors. 🐖
I consider myself a (above all classic ancient and medieval) history enthusiast, but I I have to confess I never thought on that, though it makes absolutely sense as you tell it. Great documentary!
Delightful video, thank you! I love to think how astounded people in the past would be to know our interest in their common ways. Like how they identified whose pig was whose. 😂 I wonder what future people will wonder about us that we can’t imagine.
May I just say what an utter joy it is to watch you ride. You are excellent on horseback! When I was young I could post bareback, so I consider myself able to judge a good rider. This video was completely fascinating. I know about pigs being problematic as there are areas in the southern USA that are overrun by massive numbers of wild pigs. They are dangerous and incredibly destructive.
In the town of York (now Toronto) by-laws 1794-1820's show that pigs were identified by notches, nicks or slits cut into left ear, right ear or both ears. Every year there were new by-laws about how sturdy fences and gates needed to be - pigs being escape artists.
I'd quite like a video on how the medieval English kept chickens and cattle as well. I'm learning more about history from channels like this than I ever did when I went to scool.
I read there were multiple cases of pigs attacking and even killing people in city streets. Children were especially vulnerable, but even as an adult, an angry pig isn’t something I’d want to tangle with.
Yep and there was cases of the pigs (not the pig owners) being put on trial for those reasons. If found guilty they were executed (usually by hanging). I couldn't find if the meat is good to eat or not or would that be consider cannibalism.
You can see here how dangerous a wild boar can be, when it terrorizes a Russian community. It literally took multiple hits with a car and was eventually taken out by a kitchen sink. th-cam.com/video/eg_shDIaRIs/w-d-xo.html
@@GallowglassAxe They would actually try the pigs who didn't stop the other pigs and the other pigs. Yes, you could eat the meat, that style of death does not transform them from one species into another. Pretty funny how stupid people were not that long ago. This was still being done in Europe in the mid to late 1700s.
We have this problem in the USA. Feral pigs are causing havoc in our rural areas. Very hard on wildlife. Apparently it doesn't take long for a domestic pig to turn feral.
Only heard of one account while station in Germany and out in the field doing training. One of our guys was walking along others watch him as a few Wild Bores follow him.
I've spent many days, often solo in the Australian bush, with snakes, Saltwater crocs, dingos, Kangaroos, buffalo, spiders, sharks on the coast, wedgetailed Eagles, wild horses, cattle, camels, horses and donkeys. The animal I have ALWAYS respected, nay feared the most is the feral pig. Almost every other animal will hurt you if you mess with them,but pigs! Smarter than dogs, pack hunters, and they like the way we taste!
Shepherds can identify their sheep by a glance. It would not be farfetched to think that people could identify their pigs back in the day, especially if they only had one or two.
When my family had 2 dozen horses, most bay, I could identify each from a considerable distance or parts visible past the barn wall, or by whinney. Besides appearance, animals will have different personalities and reactions to familiar people which would make semi domesticated swine easy to identify.
Wild boars used to be quite plentiful around where I live. They were still hunted. Recently, though, wild boars are now being domesticated more and more. Sometimes they're hybridized with domestic pigs.
In Poland its becoming dangerously common to meet a boar in the woods, earlier the population was at a sustainable level but with more "green" activists they are growing out of control to the point of damaging not only farmers land, but also the woodlands and plains.
@@boguslav9502 There's this weird religious cult in my area, they own a large lot of forest and they are vegans and want to live in harmony with all animals. The hunters in the surrounding areas can hardly keep up with the hogs there. And the hogs are intelligent enough to know where to run to when being shot at. The cult will take every hunter to court who trespasses on their property, so it's really hard for them. They basically only shoot hogs all season long, they don't even have time for deer.
Gday from Downunder I guessed it would be the pig. Anyone who has run into feral pigs (and the damage they do to the landscape) here would not be surprised. Thanks you and similar channels I was very aware of the importance of pigs to a household be it Gentle, Townsman, Serf or Villein. Thank you for the content.
I'm surprised you didn't arrange a visit to one of the farms rearing iron age pigs. They're probably the closest thing we have today to medieval breeds like the greyhound pig (survived in Ireland up until the 50s).
Do you agree if I say that the intros with Jason on horseback on each video are the most epic things on TH-cam? This music makes me feel like King Arthur in person! "𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬, 𝐦𝐲 𝐤𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲!" ☠💀☠💀☠💀☠
I appreciated your story, however as others have noted, "plump little squeakers"? I think not. For no sane reason, I've had chance to visit farms in Australia, Canada, and England. And in England they had a lot of pigs, and the farmers told me many stories. Then years later I read a story by famed author Harry Harrison, "The man from P.I.G." (a interplanetary law man who traveled, and worked with, Pigs) who gave quite an interesting (and humorous) description of pigs and their history/abilities. Thank you so very much for your videos.
I remember being too drunk in a pub garden one night when the landlord released his two large pigs for their evening run about. One of them ran straight into the smoking area and in three gulps, devoured an entire bucket of fag ends mixed with sand. It remains one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever witnessed and I’ve never looked at pigs the same way.
Beautiful. We don't have pigs, but we have chickens that take care for our (and even a few other families) food waste. Once in a while we bring a pair of ponies to mow the yard 🐴🦄. A few times we brought a camel and a donkey for that, but the camel demolished our fences, so we stopped that...🤣🐪
I did managed to guess that it was about pigs, but I had no idea about urban pigs or the municipal swine herder, thanks! Also, do not underestimate modern pigs. They can still kill a man!
Hi from the US. Great video. Even today here in the US, feral pigs destroy millions of dollars of crops, destroy fences and injure many people, some fatally. In several states, pigs have dropped from a game animal you can hunt to the category of vermin, something to be eliminated at any cost by any means. They are really a serious problem.
In North America - wild hogs are a HUGE nuisance - to the point where THOUSANDS are killed every year, but they are still spreading and destroying millions of dollars worth of crops and animals.
My ancestor, Alberic De Vere had the nickname "le sanglier" which means "the wild boar" He was pals with William the Conqueror and you can imagine with a nickname like that what sort of ferocious warrior he was.
Today, in Louisiana, I photographed hog damage, that was undermining an elevated roadway. We drove past miles of rooting along tree lines. One friend killed 500 last year, and didn’t dent the population.
Very interesting, was not going to watch this but glad I did. Another thing that eats waste and tastes good is chickens, some years ago my veg garden got out of control as I was not at home a lot and someone said get chickens, I did and two chickens cleared my garden in weeks! Plus you get eggs as well.
Chicken was a holy bird back then :D it was expensive to kill a chicken since it would mean you lose the eggs. So the chicken probably was quite more expensive meat available in rare occasions for the peasants.
@@S3l3ct1ve Yes I agree, you don't kill something that gives you food but even todays chickens only lay for 3 to 4 years then they just eat for no return so why not eat them ?
@@S3l3ct1ve Not really true. Chickens stop laying eggs eventually and there were also all the excess male chickens. Plus you can only feed so many chickens so the herd would have to be culled regularly.
Feral hogs are a big problem in Alabama; they are invasive here from stock introduced in the 1500s. Extremely dangerous and destructive and have no natural predators. It's such a problem that instead of limiting hunting, there are no bag limits, it's always open season, day or night hunting is permitted, and occassionally they send out notices asking hunters to take hogs.
Having worked in hog building construction and having one of those monsters try and pull me into its pen while I was working on the feed system, I have a very healthy respect for them. Pulled a 280lb guy by steel toe boot. Sow didn't expect 20oz framing hammer to head. Pigs are smart, strong, and low center of gravity.
I think it was in 2006, there was a Drive hunt or battue on our side of the river. The wild boars swam across the river and destroyed fences, gates and shops in the village on the other side.
This is no surprise to people who live in rural areas of the US southeast. Feral pigs do a great deal of damage to crops. There have been some attacks against humans, and while the injuries can be severe, they are not usually fatal.
In the US, there were things called Dutch doors. The front door was in two pieces . A lower part of the door and a upper part that could be opened independently. Also called pig doors. You could open the top for air or conversation and the lower to keep the roaming pigs out.
Pigs are one of the fastest domestic animals to go wild. Irc it takes about 2 weeks for them to basically go from a pink oinker into a hairy, tusked, feral hog. They are a massive problem in certain parts of the US to this day. My pappy used to hunt them. I have one on mounted on the living room wall wearing a tattered old scarf. His name is doug.
A domestic breed of pig allowed to go feral will grow upwards of a thousand pounds. People say they mutate but they've never seen a mature hog. They get slaughtered way before that as juveniles. The invasive feral Black boar we have here in the US are originally from Russia. Looks completely different full grown. I have a salt lick and get them on the camera every now and then.
As an archeologist i worked in a excavation site in italy dating to the neotlithic/early bronze age and there are quite a few remainings of domestic/feral pigs, the line between a wild and domestic pig is basically none, the modern pig is very recent, most of the pigs that we farmed in human history was not much different from a boar
They can also revert back rather quickly. In some parts of the USA, domesticated pigs that escaped into the wild turned into feral hogs in a couple of generations, and they are hardly different from "real" wild boar. Tusks and black hair and everything.
Listening to this information, it becomes easier to believe that the story behind the movie "The hour of the pig" is based on true facts. Colin Firth fans who see all his movies usually seem to think "The hour of the pig" is something absurd; A pig accused of having killed a child is taken to court, gets itself a lawyer who finds the real killer, but the pig is finally acquitted because its identity can't be established... Many people can't imagine such things could ever happen for real. They should all subscribe to your videos.
Even the modern pigs will bite off your fingers or take a chunk of your leg if you are not careful and they will rip up ground if given chance. And they can be bloody smart.
So are you preparing us for the video where you have a couple of Tamworths or similar? Knepp estate has a few interesting stories from when they reintroduced pigs 😂
Im going with the rat....well, looks like I was wrong. I seem to recall reading in Dan Jones' most recent book that the Conquistadors set pigs loose in central American when they landed there to use them as a food source but a side effect was that they spread disease to the region as well.
![[UNCUT] The Loyal Pin ปิ่นภักดิ์ EP.15 (1/4)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TLBjiHvkKtE/mqdefault.jpg)
Having worked on a farm that kept modern pigs, I can tell you I never think of them as plump little squeakers. They're cunning massive tricksters that will escape their pens whenever it's least convenient... like clockwork.
Ditto, but on a smallholding. I can imagine it was hell back then to keep them penned in; only a stout wall with good footings must have worked (but this would have been of lime not cement). Another reason they would /have little choice but to let them roam.
My daughter works with pigs at a restaurants small holding & every time I ask her about her day it starts with “the pigs got out overnight…”. Pigs are pranksters of the highest order
That reminds me of a comics from the iconic Czech Rychlé šípy series by Jaroslav Foglar... these five boys from the city. In that one, they're spending the summer on a farm in the countryside. One of them lets the pig out of its small pen because he feels sorry for it, and when it shoots out like greased lightning they spend the rest of the page trying to recapture it. They lose to the pig, which proves unexpectedly fast and cunning. Since the author was a city boy with family or friends in the country, and also spent several months on a farm in Switzerland as a boy, I'm fairly certain it is partially autobiographical. :-)
I used to work in a pub which had a goat. He might have been a nice small goat when they got him, but he was a bloody big one-horned goat by the time I worked there. I had to take him out each morning, which usually meant him dragging me across the car park by his chain, and then bring him back in in the evening, which meant trying to get him down from whatever tree he had climbed, then me dragging him across the car park by his chain.
One night, he broke out of his stall and chewed the pipe off the fuel oil tank... The pub cat managed to get covered in fuel oil, so, once I had got the pipe back on the tank, and the goat back in his stall, I had to then hold the cat under the shower for an hour until I got the oil off it.
My older brother used to keep pigs. I can attest that they are indeed crafty. He renamed one Houdini--yes, because he was our escape artist. We were always looking for that sneaky little guy.
In Ireland, the landlords would lend a piglet to each tenant every year so that they could fatten it on scraps then sell it to pay rent and pay back the price of the piglet. They were a tall, thin sort of pig called an Irish greyhound. There was a good poem about these Irish pigs which I'll paste below for anyone who wants to read.
Twas an evening in November,
As I very well remember,
I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,
But my knees were all aflutter,
So I landed in the gutter,
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Yes I lay there in the gutter
Thinking thoughts I couldn’t utter,
When a colleen passing by did softly say,
"Ye can tell someone that boozes
By the company they chooses" -
So the pig got up and quickly walked away.
great poem
Thanks for the poem . It's great!!
@@lakshmibhaskara1516 Glad you enjoyed it. I was trying to find from when the poem originated but it may be unknown. I did find there was a song based on this poem from the 30s by a Clarke Van Ness. It's called 'the famous pig song' and has some funny verses about other farm animals.
my father's Irish and told me about wild pigs that used to roam Ireland when the oak forests were really heavy and there was plenty of mast for them to eat-they were long and thin beasts, like greyhounds, as you say. very funny poem too!
That’s brilliant sir
Portuguese here.
First of all, thank you for your amazingly informative TH-cam channel.
That being said, you mentioned the "bristles" in the boar neck and back, and I immediately remembered that when I was young, whenever someone kill a wild boar it would be sold on the village "square", and several people would buy several parts of that boar. My grandfather would sometimes buy those "bristles" to make shoes or to sew leather.
I also remember seeing pigs on the street and they were marked with some kind of dye, usually just the owner initials.
I'm from a small village on the Portuguese countryside mountains, and I remember a number of things, traditions, that may well been preserved from the medieval times.
This is so cool! Thanks for sharing your history
Perhaps if you wrote down what you can remember it might be interesting for posterity?
@@jezblades9913 I don't think it's needed. Many of the countryside people still remember or even keep the "old way" alive. There are still people cultivating and process linen for clothing, for example. This happens in the deep countryside, specially in the "Portuguese Highlands" like I use to call it.
My village is in a mountain range plateau, 700 meters high.
If any of you ever come to Portugal, please take a trip around that area...very welcoming and friendly people. And because most are well educated you'll have no problem finding someone that speaks English.
@@DiaboLusitano i agree whit jez. Sadly lots of information get lost becaus it was belived that there are enough wo keep the traditonal way alive. 2 examples i am strugeling:1) the meaning of a white ribon on appletrees? (After time i have found the answer)
2) there are evidence of pig brissel used for uppolsty, but no Information on how this was procesd/used.
@@DiaboLusitano thanks for the invite/recommendation! And for the story.🙂
You may be right in that it's not "needed", but my guess is there are plenty of people who'd be interested in reading what you remember from that time, if you ever get the urge to write some of it down. 👍
I live in Hawaii, where there's a thriving wild boar population. They're classic ancient boars. Big, deadly tusks, packed with muscle, black skin, covered with long wiry bristles. Their screams come straight from a horror movie. They cause serious damage by breaking fences and demolishing gardens. A full-grown boar can weigh 200lbs/90kg, and never assume that they're 200lbs/90kg of lazy, and won't chase you down. My big brother is a hunter, and we shared ownership of a couple dogs. He and his hunting buddies had a pack that they use to track and take down pigs. Everyone in the party, man and dog (usually dog), would often turn up with massive, ugly gashes. As a kid I was warned never to go near a baby pig, because a mama is always nearby. Bear rules apply.
Village boy from Germany ✌🏻
Also grew up with that rule
@@BeNGun86 Wild boar are hardcore. Most people here in Germany don't know that if we didn't have hunters, we'd all be killed by wild boar during the next decade. No kidding.
@@BeNGun86 Southern Swabia here talking. The best look i had to a wild boar was at night on a better dirt path outside of a big village. One the left side was a steep slope down to a "primal forest ravine", on the right small Villas(and than wet fields...): And before us a very, very Big Boar. He was stepping slowy accross the road when he was caught in the headlights of our car. He was uninpressed. He faced us. walked to my moms OPEN window and made very low unhappy noises....that was when she hit the gas pedal. This Thing was big enough to look in our car while only half a armslenght away from the it.(granted he has to look up a bit but still) No dog, even our newfoundlander was even close as tall or big.
calm down ok
We had one here 986lbs state record.
Given the fact that a feral hog can easily kill a person and is shockingly fast, going into the woods without a horse must have been quite the adventure if you heard a pig scream near you 😅
sounds like an ecofriendly person wanted a sustainable way to get rid of home waste, but didn't think it through.
in the future we could have little robots that fee don plastic waste and at night you let them loose into the streets. I wouldn't eat them though.
If my reenactment group, we would have a boar hunt where someone would dress up in furr and hide in the forest. He had two daggers to represent tusks. The rest of us would split up and try to get the boar. Boars are tough, so we had the beast be tough to kill. It often got a few of us. Turns out a boar spear works well.
Always bring dogs
They can and have eviscerated taller modern horses, so smaller medieval horses would have been in as much danger as their riders! I'd much rather have two or three hounds and a pointy stick.
@@jamesanderson6769 Where did the "hog" put its daggers? 😅 I just imagined that person running after you guys and trying to kill you with their knives 😆😅
In doing some family history research I found that one of my ancestor's claim to fame was that he killed the last wild boar of Westmoreland. For doing that he received a 4,000 acre estate. There's also a poem written about it called “Minstrels of Winandermere.”
There's a pub called the Wild Boar between Windermere and Kendal based on this very event! Grew up 15 minutes down the road from it
@@lucaswatson1913 Oh, wow, I did not know that! Will definitely have to look into it some more--thanks!!!
That's fascinating history!
See? Easter eggs like these comments are icing on the cake with this channel.
I think that’s sad. The last one!
I also want to mention just how nice this comment section is. You should be proud of this Jason. Cultivating a viewership that is kind and friendly to one another is no small thing.
Thanks, I try to keep it pleasant. These days, I don't have to deal with too many unpleasant comments.
@@ModernKnight and now I want to be rude, lol.... video bout pigs and all. Or the yankee in me... ;)
@@ModernKnight He's right, you know. Your channel is such a refreshing atmosphere. Thank you for all you do to cultivate such a great channel and community!
HEAR here!
I fart in your general direction!
I guessed wild boar! I live in Asia and wild boars can still be a serious problem in the rural places. These creatures are tough, aggressive and scary. I never realised that pigs were so ubiquitous in mediaeval European societies. They were important in ancient China - the Chinese character for 'house' is basically the character for 'pig' with the character for 'roof' over it. So if you had a roof over your head, and a pig in your backyard, you had a house.
That's so funny but also pragmatic in hindsight haha
I Would love to learn more about Chinese culture
I grew up on a farm. Pigs are quite formidable creatures. When I was a child, a woman in my area was killed by her own pigs. Her small child was crying, and it triggered the pigs. The lady got her child out of the pen but they knocked her down before she could climb the fence.
how awful and yes they can be super dangerous.
@@ModernKnight It's been about 55 years, and I've never forgotten to be careful of pigs. We have wild pig where I live, and subsistence hunting is an important part of the local economy.
I grew up on a farm also. My dad would never keep pigs. His parents had kept pigs when he was a child. He told me a story about his parents' pigs masacring the family's flock of chickens. There had been a particularly rainy week. The chickens got stuck in the mud, and the pigs completely tore them up. Once my dad was grown, he wouldn't have pigs on his farm. He wouldn't even eat pork after that.
The university I went to had a massive Agricultural department, one of the largest single pig-holders in Alabama.
My friend was getting his post-grad degree in pigs. He said, when the lab tech was taking them on the catwalk over the pigpen -- industrial-sized, we're talkkng several thousand pigs in one massive hangar -- the tech said ominously:
"Don't fall in -- or else, by the time we get to you, there won't be enough left to bury."
That is absolutely terrifying.
@@ModernKnight this video raises an interesting question. What was pet ownership like back then? I mean did they have collars like we do for identification was there a pet shop in town for potential buyers? I'd love to see your research on it
I always thought that the picture of pigs rummaging and scrounging through medieval cities was a stereotype. You see it in a lot of movies and shows depicting the so-called "Dark Ages". Pigs are mostly used in that way to exemplify how filthy and unsanitary those times were. Finding out that it's actually historically accurate was surprising to me! I never knew so many people kept pigs, and even in the cities too! Such an insightful little piece of information!
It's kind of interesting on how that stereotype changes the view of the situation. Filmmakers and whoever else might show a bunch of pigs in the streets to make medieval cities look dirtier, but real-life urban pig-ownership was actually an important practical matter.
Even in cities in the 1700s and early 1800s there were farms and roaming animals.
Some German towns actually did have laws - pigs were to be kept in pens and could only be moved on certain days and on certain streets.
@@chrismath149 the last dairyfarm in the heart of Berlin close his doors in 1982. Livestock in citys was not only a medieval thing.
Its still being done in villages across the world, mainly eastern parts of the world nowadays, as the western regions got considerably more wealth.
Had a friend in college come in late one day and said a hog messed up his truck. I was thinking "How did Wilbur" mess up a truck?"
That's when I learned how insane wild hogs were.
I have a cousin who grows out a couple of pigs most years. The full scale domestic variety is still a dangerous animal, and they are also quite good escape artists.
Most definitely. They are NOT cuddly little creatures. They are large, nasty, aggressive animals, and are absolutely dangerous.
@@duckrivermama66 Farmers have a saying, "a fence needs to be horse high, bull strong, and pig-tight"
We have hogs in large paddocks, the bottom of the fence buried down at least 2-1/2 ft with large rocks, and cement blocks to prevent them from digging under the fence, not to mention several strands of barbed wire from the ground to about 2-1/2 ft up, and gates that can't be lifted off the pins (yes, hogs will figure out how to lift a gate), and we still have to check daily to make sure they can't get out. They have water, shade, pasture, and woods to live their best lives with right up to when we sell or butcher them. When it comes down to it, cattle may be bigger, but hogs are faster, smarter, and more deadly to deal with. They are also prolific breeders, with the average sow have 2 litters of 8-12 pigs each, and those pigs grow rapidly, so they are a steady source of meat and not all that expensive to feed.
We also turn some of them out in the garden early each spring to root around and loosen the soil up for planting.
That reminds me of the Tamworth Two who escaped from an abattoir. They made their escape by getting through a fence and swam across a river.
@@allisonshaw9341 My Dad grew up in rural southern Ireland and recalled a local farmer who would drive his pigs up to the orchard to eat the fallen apples. All good until there was a particularly wet period and the apples had fermented. My Dad reckoned a dozen drunk pigs staggering back from the orchard, bouncing off the walls and getting narky with each other was probably the funniest thing he ever saw.
In Spain, a few towns still practice having a “comunal pig” though I suppose in medieval times it would’ve been a “comunal herd”. Basically this pig is allowed free roam and the whole town feeds it scraps etc, and when the time comes, the town enjoys a nice dinner
Rural Spain is so antiquated in lots of ways. It's pretty wild.
@@TheMysteryDriver Indeed!, they throw animals from towers, spit olive bones in competitions etc... Is very embarrasing for the rest of us tbh. They're our rednecks but without trucks
Awesome
This is amazing.
Those are the sorts of unspoken binds between individuals which make for a cohesive group. Our modern lives sometimes seem so senseless in comparison.
There used to be a custom in Valencia in which the casal would set a pig free around town that people would feed scraps and such. When it was big enough it was sold to finance the Fallas. I don't know if any towns still do this, but that was the case during my father's childhood in the town I grew up in. He was born in 1959, so it wasn't that long back, especially for a town that today is considered quite rich, with a lot of suburban area with huge houses, and even has a couple of famous football players living around.
Last autumn I visited a manor in the Netherlands where pigs are kept basically wild in the forest. It is amazing to see how fast even piglets can turn pristine ground into a battle field.
their nose looks soft but can magically escavate ground. Wondrous creatures I tell you
Pigs can dig in the concrete with their snout. I live in a farm, I saw that
Lol. Into concrete 🤣 gtavel yes. But propper concrete? Nope, never happened. Biologist here
@@Seelenschmiede i trust farmers over biologists on knowing what farm animals have done
@@masonmp1889 you should doubt his knowledge of concrete. If an animal can do that it's more like stucco or something
As a young child, my daily evening chore was to feed the pig the meal my mom had prepared for it. It would be butchered every fall. We would empty the pen of dirt and "stuff" every spring before getting the new pig. The dirt and stuff was then dumped on the vegetable garden. It sure made things grow! Lots of memories.
My opa raised pigs! Every fall he'd get three pigs. Two for him and his wife, and one for my family. During the winter whenever we go up to visit, we'd feed them expired milk that my opa picked up from the local food bank. Every spring around late March or early April, the pigs would be butchered and we'd spend the day cutting and packing the meat.
@@Nemo-Nihil Couldn't imagine what they smelled like being given expired / soured milk.
That sounds really strange. My grandmother and uncles owned farms. They were fed slop…..the remains of every edible things that were discarded. The idea of ‘preparing a meal’ is hilarious to me
"domesticated" pigs can revert pretty quickly to a wild form, if you let them free in a year tops will regrow fur and act more aggressively. Not a boar but still very tanky
So take a party with high DPS, possibly include a Bard for buffs!
@@PasqualItizzz they are solid as DPS as well, these suckers are VICIOUS
And they interbreed with wild boars to make larger yet still well adapted to being free animals. Some can grow to hundreds of kgs.
Their snouts will even change and they'll grow tusks. It's pretty amazing.
@@michaelnurse9089 Yep Giant Domestic Pig + Wild Boar = Hogzilla.
Great subject! I also watch Goldshaw Farm and he has talked at length about the destructiveness of even just a few pigs. I can’t imagine the havoc in a town if everyone had one!
Another good demonstration of the havoc pigs can cause is how much of a problem feral pigs currently are in much of the US and in many other parts of the world. They're extremely good at finding food, reproduce like mad, and in the US at least have essentially no natural predators other than humans (the states that have massive feral pig problems generally lack big predators like Cougars, Wolves, Grizzly Bears, and Jaguars that can kill them). They even look just like the medieval pigs that Jason describes in this very video.
The feral pig problem is so bad in some parts of the US that not only do many states allow hunters to kill as many of them as they want, they actively encourage hunters to kill them. In Texas, for instance, it's legal to hunt them from helicopters; the helicopters are generally used to flush the pigs out into the open where they can be shot and killed more easily, not unlike how some dog breeds are used to flush prey animals out of burrows and vegetation.
There is someone who posts on TH-cam who kills wild pigs in the Australian bush for a living. He makes a very good living from it.
Great video! Thoughts on the marking of pigs - it's a problem shared among many kinds of livestock, and I've read that before branding was super common, ear notches may have been preferred. The trouble with branding, I think, usually had to do with the risk of infection, and the notching of an ear might have been less troublesome - plus you could notch them very young and the mark would remain visible. Branding on cattle tends to be placed on the hindquarters if I understand right, but with these pigs I don't know if the hind end is any less bristly than the rest of it.
Though I find it extremely amusing to contemplate painted pigs, I feel like that would not have been so common. When you say writing on them I first thought "yes, the skin would show color well" but then I remembered, these are hairy beasts. So I wonder if pigment of any sort would really stay, or if the animal would just rub it off over the course of a day.
"Municipal swineherd" sounds like a fabulous insult though, haha!
On sheep ear notches are very clear identification even after the hair grows back in, I'm sure it would work well on pigs. Was standard practice to punch the ears of non stud animals through the 80s and 90s here (unsure if it's still done)
...come to think of it, we tattooed the ears of the stud flock. And I doubt that was a modern invention!
@@nahtanha Ear notches work well on my GF...
You and I are of a mind! I was considering ear notching as well.
My degree was in Animal Science, came here to say the pigs were almost certainly ear notched.
And this is the origin of the term “earmark”. A term still in use in the English speaking countries today. For example; funds could be earmarked for a particular project or use.
According to one source I found; the first recorded usage of that term is 1515. I expect that the origin is far more ancient.
I wish I could remember the name, but in Germany there is a town that has a huge pig-roasting festival every year as a sort of revenge against pigs. From what I remember of the town’s story, back in the either late medieval or early Renaissance period, the gatekeeper for the main gate misplaced his key and could not properly seal the door for the night. Rather than miss out on going to the tavern, he decided a carrot would do quite nicely as a temporary door bar replacement. What he didn’t factor were the roaming pigs, one of which found an easily accessible carrot that would do quite nicely as a snack. With the impromptu door bar gone, the gate opened, and a large band of marauders (maybe an enemy army?) seized the opportunity to sack the town. Upon recovering from the attack and rebuilding, the town resolved to roast as many pigs as they could every year.
Shouldn't they get revenge against the lazy guard instead of the pigs that literally did nothing wrong? Humans can truly be awful. 🐗
did they hang that gatekeeper for dereliction of duty? should have.
Wittlich, The story behind the Pig Fest or as legend has it, during ancient times the city was threatened by a horde of Huns. They felt secure behind their Roman walls; however, the night prior to the Huns arriving, the evening guard charged with locking the gate could not find the peg to secure the door. So a soldier placed a turnip in its place. (There seems to be some dispute as to whether it was a turnip or carrot but the official city statement does say turnip.) Well, during the night a pig came along and ate the turnip leaving the gate unlocked and allowing the Huns to enter and sack the city. Once the Huns left, the people of Wittlich slaughtered all of the pigs as punishment. Today the city cooks up over a 100 large pigs for the annual Pig Festival.
@@luxste But the one guard didn't have enough meat to feed the town, the pigs on the other hand...
@@skaldlouiscyphre2453 lol! I suppose you're right. The meat of one average man wouldn't go far.
The more I watch these videos, the more I am convinced that Sir Jason is secretly an immortal that decided to do something with his first-hand knowledge of medieval life...
He is the real highlander.
Psh! We all know THAT here!😁😉👍
Though some of us ARE convinced he's actually a Gondorian from Minas Tirith, quite likely of Numenorian descent...🤔
@@Eowyn3Pride I mean, the two are not mutually exclusive...
There can be only one.
When I was a kid the old forest warden in my home village in Southwestern Germany had a wild sow that he found as a piglet. He raised her alongside his new dog and taught both the same commands. Even though she wasn't fully domesticated she always behaved. But it was clear that getting her back into the wild wasn't an option because she was too accustomed to humans and might have caused problems with hiking tourists.
It was pretty funny though to go down main street and see a grown wild sow sitting next to a comparably tiny dachshund outside the grocery shop.
But I've also seen what chaos can be caused by a sounder running in panic. Happens quite often in Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany because here they have lots of agriculture and only small woodlands.
Not like in the dense Palitanate Forest where I grew up. There they sometimes messed up an unfenced garden at the edge of the forest in the middle of the night.
But here wild boars often come to the fields in the middle of the day, especially in harvest season to feast on the maize or simply get to another spot.
When they get surprised by a tractor or combine harvester and can't escape back into the woods, they run into human settlements. A few years ago a few boars even showed up in the middle of a small town and one ran into a optometrist shop where it crashed into the stands and broke lots of glass. Luckily no one was injured.
Another rather funny thing happened at a lake. A sow and her piglets came to a swimming pond in the middle of the day to search for food. But instead the sow ran away with a nudist sunbather's laptop bag and he chased behind her. Luckily the sow was pretty chill around all those humans even though she had her piglets with her or else the chase could have ended pretty bad.
They possibly identified individual hogs by notching ears. Was still done until fairly recently in the United States for many types of livestock. Early version of an ear tag.
German here. I just wanted to share an interesting anecdote concerning pigs: In German, there is the phrase "die Sau rauslassen" (="letting the sow out") for having lots of fun.
The background to this phrase is that in medieval university towns, members of students' fraternities were sometimes required as a dare to sneak into a yard at night, open the pen, and chase the pigs out onto the street, where they'd cause chaos - and lots of fun for the other students (not so much for people trying to sleep).
The good old days when German universities still had prison cells where they would keep unruly students on water and bread for up to a week. People were so much tougher back then. Today students faint when someone uses a wrong pronoun.
"a swine in before nine saves a fine" - Chaucer, 1348 (probably)
Or "A swine after nine lets you dine"
"Clean food never fattened a pig."- My father, a few occasions when someone freaked about dropping a bit of food. This was before the 5 second rule was passed.
It's funny how medieval art always seems like badly drawn cartoons, then you realize it's actually pretty accurate.
Including, of course, all those brave knights fighting the giant snails that used to haunt the medieval ages ;D
@@letsplaysvonaja1714 As a knight who still fights giant medieval snails, they never left. They just got smarter and stealthier.
usually it is not accurate, though.
I was able to guess the beast after watching videos of hog trapping in Texas. If it's that hard to to trap/contain pigs in the modern time, I can't imagine how hard it must have been then.
Ugh, I volunteered at a ranch in Texas and the dratted things were such a pain. They tore up one field so badly and got so bold we had to move the horses out and stop using it for a while. The owner of the ranch did allow hunting on his property for them, which, after dealing with the damage, was completely understandable.
Texan here. As soon as the title of the video popped up, my first thought was "feral hog." They are such a nuisance.
Also in Texas they have helicopter hog hunts. Just to try to keep them somewhat controlled since they breed so fast.
In my city, boars are somewhat frequently seen on the streets. They live in the nearby woods, but aren't afraid of paying a visit to the suburbs (where they often dig around for food in people's gardens) and the recreational areas. A family of boars walking on the beach promenade is not an uncommon sight. Trash is usually kept in enclosed sheds, so nowadays they don't often get the opportunity to dig around in trashcans.
People just know to keep their distance, especially from families, knowing that sows can be quite aggressive around their young. Somehow, this approach of just keeping distance and letting them be is sufficient. Accidents are very rare, and more often than not if something bad does happen, it's either a car accident involving a boar, or a boar that somehow got lost in the more urban areas and vets/police had to intervene. Haven't heard of any injuries caused by boars in a while. Though my parents complain about boars digging under their fence and plundering the vegetable garden.
Fascinating. It brought back memories of a project did in high school economics class. The teacher had us in Medieval times and we drew a role out of hat...I got the job as Pig Farmer. We were given $50 (monopoly money of course🤣) and was a semester long project to see how well we did with business and making a profit. I did well (bartering, then buying as little as possible and having NOTHING go to waste...even had hides tanned for water bottles, shoes, ect.) I made it to top ten in the class. But I didn't know for sure how things REALLY were in Medieval times. From what I learned from the video...I probably would have done well.😁
Always a delightful wealth of information and always a fantastic subject! It's great to see you! Got a preorder at Amazon on your new book. Happy February! May spring come early to you in the UK this year!! 🌹💕🌹
Considering old manuscripts I expected snails 😂
I came across a magazine article some years ago that was about hogs. A varmint hunter of feral hogs was interviewed. In his opinion, there were 2 kinds of people in the world: "Them that has pigs, & them that WILL have pigs".
I don’t get it
@@debbylou5729
If you don't have feral pigs, just wait and a sounder will arrive whether you want it or not.
Just Joined a SCA group as well as been doing HEMA, and your videos are a great resource for garb, cutlery and general information 🤺
Pigs are still turned out into the New Forest (southern England) in the autumn. The New Forest is known for free-range ponies and these can suffer from eating too many acorns. The pigs are able to eat the acorns and so keep the ponies safe.
So glad that you're posting again. Your videos are always interesting and informative. Thank you.
I'm imagining Hawk the Slayer doing battle with a huge, ferocious were-pig on the night of a full blood moon. Hawk slashes at the beast, dealing it a fatal blow. Through the power of the mind stone, we hear the dying thoughts of the abomination: "swill. . . all I wanted was some swill. . . gasp. . . what does a pig have to do around hear to get a fresh cup of swill?"
I love these odd history lessons. Funny, and info that I'm actually really happy to now know. Favorite channel on YT.
Interesting to hear about the municipal Swineherd being a thing back then as well, I happened to come across them in the Victorian era in my home town.
There were some interesting rules as well (although I don't know how far back they all went but they happened to be mentioned in the Victorian period);
"It is an offence to give any pig, boar or any manner of hog; any wine, beer, brandy, whiskey or any manner of strong drink, though small beer is accepted, within the town, nor is it permissible to take a pig to be patron of a public house (tithed or free standing), Inn or tavern. No pig may walk or be walked through the streets of the town on a Sunday, lest it has permission in writing from the vicar to do, is attending church with it's owner or taking part in other business of a lawfully congregated church. Any pig, boar or hog consuming tobacco in the streets or public places of the town shall result in a fine for its owner. Any violations of these offenses shall be subject to fines as to the amount the magistrate sees fit in accordance with any relevant statute or common law."
There is also legend of a law requiring pigs to wear a hat in public but historians of the town have found no trace of such a bylaw.
I have seen pet pigs at The Blessing of the Animals - the only time I have seen pigs attending church!
@@eric2500 I guess they wrote the law that way just in case. Laws can get strange in the wording, since they 'have to' cover every eventuality.
Yes! These videos have become among my favorite to watch and look forward to.
I love watching your videos. Please make more!! ❤
The quality of your show and also the format is up there with what you would see back in the day in cable TV like History channel, this sort of semi-documentary shows with a more down to earth approach with the host on screen, very relaxing, before they devolved into complete nonsense with car shows. Very good job as always.
Glad you enjoy it!
That was delightful. Really paints the picture of the past. Thank you.
What a fun video! Complete with pig dialog. Do you think the porcine bells were crotal bells? Must have been confusing to hear crotal bells around a corner and not know whether a horse or a pig was coming.
The mention doesn't say, but it's certainly plausible.
A Bit of information from southern Germany. Bells are still used for sheep, cows and goats. The traditon requiers that the shape, material and sound of the bell must be acording to the animal including the age and position in the flock. Somone who is familiar to the sound of a flock can distingish the individuals only by listen the bells.
Thank you for the awesome content!
3:37 when my Gran would watch my brothers and I 40 years ago shed say she felt like a swine herder. It was a fitting description. Cheers from Canada, great video.
Terrific video! As an aside, speaking of pigs, back in the 1980’s when I was a policeman in Victoria, Australia, we had a PIG lapel badge we used to wear on our uniform or plain clothes. It had the word PIG = Pride. Integrity. Guts. A slightly different slant, but it was in the face of detractors. 🐖
I consider myself a (above all classic ancient and medieval) history enthusiast, but I I have to confess I never thought on that, though it makes absolutely sense as you tell it. Great documentary!
Delightful video, thank you! I love to think how astounded people in the past would be to know our interest in their common ways. Like how they identified whose pig was whose. 😂
I wonder what future people will wonder about us that we can’t imagine.
May I just say what an utter joy it is to watch you ride. You are excellent on horseback! When I was young I could post bareback, so I consider myself able to judge a good rider. This video was completely fascinating. I know about pigs being problematic as there are areas in the southern USA that are overrun by massive numbers of wild pigs. They are dangerous and incredibly destructive.
In York we have an area called Swine gate where the pigs would be driven through.
In the town of York (now Toronto) by-laws 1794-1820's show that pigs were identified by notches, nicks or slits cut into left ear, right ear or both ears. Every year there were new by-laws about how sturdy fences and gates needed to be - pigs being escape artists.
I'd quite like a video on how the medieval English kept chickens and cattle as well.
I'm learning more about history from channels like this than I ever did when I went to scool.
Must have been a ruckus after dark in Canterbury. Imagine the sounds of pigs running around fighting eachother or encountering stray dogs.
Always enjoy these
I read there were multiple cases of pigs attacking and even killing people in city streets. Children were especially vulnerable, but even as an adult, an angry pig isn’t something I’d want to tangle with.
Yep and there was cases of the pigs (not the pig owners) being put on trial for those reasons. If found guilty they were executed (usually by hanging). I couldn't find if the meat is good to eat or not or would that be consider cannibalism.
yeah it has mass, speed and it's very tanky.
Killer Pigs !
You can see here how dangerous a wild boar can be, when it terrorizes a Russian community. It literally took multiple hits with a car and was eventually taken out by a kitchen sink.
th-cam.com/video/eg_shDIaRIs/w-d-xo.html
@@GallowglassAxe They would actually try the pigs who didn't stop the other pigs and the other pigs. Yes, you could eat the meat, that style of death does not transform them from one species into another. Pretty funny how stupid people were not that long ago. This was still being done in Europe in the mid to late 1700s.
We have this problem in the USA. Feral pigs are causing havoc in our rural areas. Very hard on wildlife. Apparently it doesn't take long for a domestic pig to turn feral.
Only heard of one account while station in Germany and out in the field doing training. One of our guys was walking along others watch him as a few Wild Bores follow him.
boar*
I've spent many days, often solo in the Australian bush, with snakes, Saltwater crocs, dingos, Kangaroos, buffalo, spiders, sharks on the coast, wedgetailed Eagles, wild horses, cattle, camels, horses and donkeys. The animal I have ALWAYS respected, nay feared the most is the feral pig. Almost every other animal will hurt you if you mess with them,but pigs! Smarter than dogs, pack hunters, and they like the way we taste!
In the case of an apocalypse, the final battle on earth will be fought between termites and wild boar. Everything else will already be dead 🤣
@@maximilianmustermann5763, cockroaches are tough li'l survivors, too! Add them to the list.
Shepherds can identify their sheep by a glance. It would not be farfetched to think that people could identify their pigs back in the day, especially if they only had one or two.
"All those pigs are mine, I don't care if they are in your pen."
I think it's important to remember till quite recently pigs were generally multicoloured as opposed to the ubiquitous Polish Whites of today.
That’s when rank comes into play.
Before the days of plastic ear tags we used to "earmark" our animals by clipping notches in their ears. Each farm had its own particular earmark.
When my family had 2 dozen horses, most bay, I could identify each from a considerable distance or parts visible past the barn wall, or by whinney. Besides appearance, animals will have different personalities and reactions to familiar people which would make semi domesticated swine easy to identify.
Wild boars used to be quite plentiful around where I live. They were still hunted. Recently, though, wild boars are now being domesticated more and more. Sometimes they're hybridized with domestic pigs.
Presumably the sows as well.
In Poland its becoming dangerously common to meet a boar in the woods, earlier the population was at a sustainable level but with more "green" activists they are growing out of control to the point of damaging not only farmers land, but also the woodlands and plains.
@@boguslav9502 There's this weird religious cult in my area, they own a large lot of forest and they are vegans and want to live in harmony with all animals. The hunters in the surrounding areas can hardly keep up with the hogs there. And the hogs are intelligent enough to know where to run to when being shot at. The cult will take every hunter to court who trespasses on their property, so it's really hard for them. They basically only shoot hogs all season long, they don't even have time for deer.
Gday from Downunder
I guessed it would be the pig. Anyone who has run into feral pigs (and the damage they do to the landscape) here would not be surprised.
Thanks you and similar channels I was very aware of the importance of pigs to a household be it Gentle, Townsman, Serf or Villein.
Thank you for the content.
I'm surprised you didn't arrange a visit to one of the farms rearing iron age pigs. They're probably the closest thing we have today to medieval breeds like the greyhound pig (survived in Ireland up until the 50s).
Thank god for this channel seriously this one channel is better than the history channel. This guy is so passionate and awesome!! Gday from Australia!
Do you agree if I say that the intros with Jason on horseback on each video are the most epic things on TH-cam? This music makes me feel like King Arthur in person!
"𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬, 𝐦𝐲 𝐤𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬, 𝐢𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐣𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲!"
☠💀☠💀☠💀☠
I don't know 🤔
I appreciated your story, however as others have noted, "plump little squeakers"? I think not. For no sane reason, I've had chance to visit farms in Australia, Canada, and England. And in England they had a lot of pigs, and the farmers told me many stories. Then years later I read a story by famed author Harry Harrison, "The man from P.I.G." (a interplanetary law man who traveled, and worked with, Pigs) who gave quite an interesting (and humorous) description of pigs and their history/abilities.
Thank you so very much for your videos.
Great to have another video!
Very well researched mate. Good work. I love to listen to your stories. Educating. We must meet at an event (battle or joust).
I remember being too drunk in a pub garden one night when the landlord released his two large pigs for their evening run about. One of them ran straight into the smoking area and in three gulps, devoured an entire bucket of fag ends mixed with sand.
It remains one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever witnessed and I’ve never looked at pigs the same way.
Thanks for the video Jason, always interesting stuff.
Glad you enjoyed it
Beautiful. We don't have pigs, but we have chickens that take care for our (and even a few other families) food waste. Once in a while we bring a pair of ponies to mow the yard 🐴🦄. A few times we brought a camel and a donkey for that, but the camel demolished our fences, so we stopped that...🤣🐪
More great information, look forward to your videos keep up the excellent work..
I did managed to guess that it was about pigs, but I had no idea about urban pigs or the municipal swine herder, thanks!
Also, do not underestimate modern pigs. They can still kill a man!
“Less dangerous than previous generations” certainly does not mean “harmless” when it comes to pigs.
Grandpa said he wanted pigs. Grandma said, "well, all right, but where are YOU going to live?"
Grandpa didn't get the pigs.
Hi from the US. Great video. Even today here in the US, feral pigs destroy millions of dollars of crops, destroy fences and injure many people, some fatally. In several states, pigs have dropped from a game animal you can hunt to the category of vermin, something to be eliminated at any cost by any means. They are really a serious problem.
In North America - wild hogs are a HUGE nuisance - to the point where THOUSANDS are killed every year, but they are still spreading and destroying millions of dollars worth of crops and animals.
My ancestor, Alberic De Vere had the nickname "le sanglier" which means "the wild boar" He was pals with William the Conqueror and you can imagine with a nickname like that what sort of ferocious warrior he was.
Today, in Louisiana, I photographed hog damage, that was undermining an elevated roadway. We drove past miles of rooting along tree lines. One friend killed 500 last year, and didn’t dent the population.
Very interesting, was not going to watch this but glad I did. Another thing that eats waste and tastes good is chickens, some years ago my veg garden got out of control as I was not at home a lot and someone said get chickens, I did and two chickens cleared my garden in weeks! Plus you get eggs as well.
Chicken was a holy bird back then :D it was expensive to kill a chicken since it would mean you lose the eggs. So the chicken probably was quite more expensive meat available in rare occasions for the peasants.
@@S3l3ct1ve Yes I agree, you don't kill something that gives you food but even todays chickens only lay for 3 to 4 years then they just eat for no return so why not eat them ?
@@S3l3ct1ve Not really true. Chickens stop laying eggs eventually and there were also all the excess male chickens. Plus you can only feed so many chickens so the herd would have to be culled regularly.
Great video, very informative. Love this channel.
Much appreciated!
Feral hogs are a big problem in Alabama; they are invasive here from stock introduced in the 1500s. Extremely dangerous and destructive and have no natural predators. It's such a problem that instead of limiting hunting, there are no bag limits, it's always open season, day or night hunting is permitted, and occassionally they send out notices asking hunters to take hogs.
Having worked in hog building construction and having one of those monsters try and pull me into its pen while I was working on the feed system, I have a very healthy respect for them. Pulled a 280lb guy by steel toe boot. Sow didn't expect 20oz framing hammer to head. Pigs are smart, strong, and low center of gravity.
Bred saddleback pigs few years ago..one sow was spicy to say the least. Wild feral ones would like these would definitely scare me!
I think it was in 2006, there was a Drive hunt or battue on our side of the river. The wild boars swam across the river and destroyed fences, gates and shops in the village on the other side.
This is no surprise to people who live in rural areas of the US southeast. Feral pigs do a great deal of damage to crops. There have been some attacks against humans, and while the injuries can be severe, they are not usually fatal.
In the US, there were things called Dutch doors. The front door was in two pieces . A lower part of the door and a upper part that could be opened independently. Also called pig doors. You could open the top for air or conversation and the lower to keep the roaming pigs out.
Dutch doors are still used on farms today.
@@theusher2893 Good to hear! They're a great idea.
Pigs are one of the fastest domestic animals to go wild. Irc it takes about 2 weeks for them to basically go from a pink oinker into a hairy, tusked, feral hog. They are a massive problem in certain parts of the US to this day. My pappy used to hunt them. I have one on mounted on the living room wall wearing a tattered old scarf. His name is doug.
A domestic breed of pig allowed to go feral will grow upwards of a thousand pounds. People say they mutate but they've never seen a mature hog. They get slaughtered way before that as juveniles. The invasive feral Black boar we have here in the US are originally from Russia. Looks completely different full grown. I have a salt lick and get them on the camera every now and then.
As an archeologist i worked in a excavation site in italy dating to the neotlithic/early bronze age and there are quite a few remainings of domestic/feral pigs, the line between a wild and domestic pig is basically none, the modern pig is very recent, most of the pigs that we farmed in human history was not much different from a boar
They can also revert back rather quickly. In some parts of the USA, domesticated pigs that escaped into the wild turned into feral hogs in a couple of generations, and they are hardly different from "real" wild boar. Tusks and black hair and everything.
Always enjoy your insights
0:12 Anybody else think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
Sooo glad to see you back again! Love your content
Listening to this information, it becomes easier to believe that the story behind the movie "The hour of the pig" is based on true facts. Colin Firth fans who see all his movies usually seem to think "The hour of the pig" is something absurd; A pig accused of having killed a child is taken to court, gets itself a lawyer who finds the real killer, but the pig is finally acquitted because its identity can't be established... Many people can't imagine such things could ever happen for real. They should all subscribe to your videos.
Even the modern pigs will bite off your fingers or take a chunk of your leg if you are not careful and they will rip up ground if given chance. And they can be bloody smart.
So are you preparing us for the video where you have a couple of Tamworths or similar?
Knepp estate has a few interesting stories from when they reintroduced pigs 😂
One day I'd love to have some pigs.
great monty python nod with the beast sounds as you walk thru the woods! lol
The Arkansas Razorback... how dud they get here?
Im going with the rat....well, looks like I was wrong. I seem to recall reading in Dan Jones' most recent book that the Conquistadors set pigs loose in central American when they landed there to use them as a food source but a side effect was that they spread disease to the region as well.
It's definitely giant enemy snails.
Love this channel. Keep it coming!
Thanks! Will do!
I love pigs, smart creatures. And I don’t eat them!
They are a smart creature aren't they.
i had as much fun watching this video as you seemed to have filming it