The Chicken, the Cookshop and the Cathedral

Amelia Doherty considers the importance of chickens to the medieval food economy, particularly for the poor. Caring for them was woman’s work, and studying them opens up insights into the lives of working-class women. 

 

Chickens are particularly interesting to me, but it was about how they are intertwined with womanhood and class that really drew me in. Working-class women don’t leave behind evidence in the same way as upper-class men. They’re primarily illiterate in medieval Europe, if not entirely so, and even if they’re not, they’re not wasting their paper on things like chicken-keeping. This means that most of our understanding of caring for chickens comes from male writing, even though most of the people that do the labour of it are women. 

Perceptions of chickens are rarely present compared to other animals such as horses or dogs or sheep, and this is because they’re not worth very much. They are described as the most inferior of birds by Bartholomew the Englishman in his encyclopedia in the early thirteenth-century, and as weakened by children by Sextus Platicus in his Uses of Animals in Medicine.[1] Most of the records on chickens reflect this sort of emphasis on motherhood, as egglayers, rather than, for instance, the gallantry of her male counterpart, or the use of the meat in sustaining families. 

This is a pretty depressing picture which may make you wonder why chickens are so important. They’re barely spoken about, and when they are it’s negative. The answer is very simple. They are one of the most accessible foodstuffs for the poor, living in both urban and rural areas. Their connection between the working-class woman and the hen is Biblical in basis and well-established by the medieval period. It continues even to this day, in American sitcoms and Chinese idioms. 

When I talk about chickens as an important historical source, I always start closest to home here in England. Later medieval England was very food insecure; for example, a famine in 1315-17 killed nearly 20% of the population. Chickens, in the decades following, cost around half a penny, or eighty times less expensive than a pig. Chickens are animals that do not require much cost to raise either, as they primarily ate grasses at the time. We do have some evidence that they were fed, such as some feeding mazes that would have contained grain, perhaps, but generally, they were let out to roam in rural areas and fed scraps in cities. 

 

A cockerel with hens and chicks

This meant that they were great for the use of cookshops, early fast food joints that would provide hot meals from stalls in medieval London in streets too narrow for seating. Cookshops became a quick way for the poor to get a hot meal, and some local authorities even placed pricing restrictions so that they couldn't get too expensive for the destitute. Cookshops soon became lifelines for the homeless and other destitute in London, and chickens were one of their most frequent - and cheapest - meat options, as well as the most reliable: with other meat often being missold as a more expensive cut, chicken became the option most trustworthy for those on a budget. While we do not have accurate statistics of the medieval homeless, we know runaway wives and prostitutes were particularly at risk of homelessness, as well as those who had immigrated (including within the nation). While they were predominantly run by men, attached to other businesses, such as butchers, there are still a significant minority of cookshops run by women, either in their own right or on behalf of their husbands, and with many medieval women being responsible for shopping and accounts, they were also frequent customers. 

The urban cookshops of London, Norwich, and Bristol, among others, are not alone in relying on the chicken for their long-term sustainability. Norwich’s Cathedral Priory bought eleven-thousand eggs a week, for their three hundred residents (and, assumedly, the local community around them).[2] In the Cathedral, it was likely some of the female residents would have been responsible for chicken-keeping, fitting the cultural expectation of women’s domestic labour. Caring for chickens was almost certainly unpaid, yet their meat and eggs were lifelines for the medieval poor, supported by both government and religious initiatives. 

I find it impressive that one little creature, raised by the most ordinary collection of medieval women, could have such immense importance in people’s lives, and is why I enjoy studying them, and especially their connection to women. When women are unable to leave behind writing, we must try to piece together their stories in inventive ways. Archaeology does not just have to be human, and we can use censuses, court rolls, cathedral accounts, and so many more stories to bring together medieval life. The chicken is my lens into the medieval lifetime, and I think that makes her the most interesting thing in the world.

 

 

 A parson and a war veteran ignore a woman bringing them a dish of cooked chicken

 

Notes 

[1] Martha Carlin, ““What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?”: The Evolution of Public Dining in Medieval and Tudor London” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (2008): 201 

[2] Philip Slavin, "Chicken Husbandry in Late-Medieval Eastern England: c. 1250-1400" Anthropozoologica, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2009): 48

Biography 

After finishing her studies at the University of York, Amelia began working on her first publication, Introducing the Medieval Hen, which will be published by the University of Wales Press. She focuses primarily on the chicken, and how studying animals can tell us more about human experiences.

 

Picture Credits 

A cockerel with hens and chicks looking for food outside a pig sty, engraving by P Tempest, ca 1690, after F Barlow, Wellcome Collection, Public Domain. 

A parson guilty of long tedious sermons has fallen asleep as a veteran relates at length the tactics used at the battle of Dettingen: both ignore a woman who brings them a dish of cooked chicken; etching by T Rowlandson, 1784; Wellcome Collection, Public Domain.