[HN Gopher] Pigeon towers: The rise and fall of a 17th-century s...
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Pigeon towers: The rise and fall of a 17th-century status symbol
(2015)
Author : jihadjihad
Score : 56 points
Date : 2024-06-03 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| xenocratus wrote:
| First time I became aware of dovecotes was on a trip to Egypt,
| when we were trying to figure out what the weirdly shaped
| buildings were. Here's another Atlas Obscura article about them:
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gahmr-delta
|
| Closer photo:
|
| https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/traditional-egyptian-dovecot...
| kentosi-dw wrote:
| So fascinating! TIL that: 1. People farmed pigeons in the 17th
| century, which makes me wonder at what point chickens were
| introduced. 2. England and France seemingly have no native root
| vegetables to plant for winter.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > at what point chickens were introduced
|
| In southern Europe, early iron age, circa 800BCE.
|
| Pigeons were farmed because their meat was considered to be
| better than that of chickens, which were a "lower class" meat.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| The idea that pigeon meat was considered to be better than
| chicken meat is fascinating.
|
| That said - is there a volume challenge with pigeons (vs.
| chickens)?
|
| Like, I feel like now-a-days I can get a reasonably good
| volume of chicken meat on the bone (breasts, drumsticks to
| some extent, maybe some wings?) but pigeons seem small enough
| that you'd need like 4-10 for a single meal for a 4 person
| family.
|
| It feels like it's easier to produce more chicken meat, and
| more cheaply (is this why it's less desirable than pigeon
| meat)?
|
| Also, it's time for lunch apparently :)
| truculent wrote:
| I'm not sure where the article is getting this from, but it
| seems as though turnips and other root vegetables were
| available before the Columbian exchange took off:
|
| > The Old English word neep - a name now only seen in Scotland
| alongside tatties and haggis - goes back to at least the 10th
| century, but turnip ("turn-neep") is only about 500 years old.
|
| > Historically, the word "turnip" didn't only refer to the
| round purple root, but root vegetables of various shapes,
| colours and sizes. Sixteenth-century botanist John Gerard was
| particularly keen on "small turneps", which he said were much
| sweeter than the large kind and grown in a village called
| Hackney outside London.
|
| From: https://theconversation.com/turnips-how-britain-fell-out-
| of-...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Pigeons are still farmed.
| jollyllama wrote:
| The pigeonhole principle makes more sense after looking at the
| interior picture here.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why weren't commoners allowed to build dovecotes? Did they think
| the carrying capacity of the land was limited to what the lords
| could eat? Would pigeons see other dovecotes and decide to roost
| there instead of the lord's?
| kibwen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
|
| _" The laws often prevented commoners from imitating the
| appearance of aristocrats, and could be used to stigmatize
| disfavoured groups. In Late Medieval cities, sumptuary laws
| were instituted as a way for the nobility to limit the
| conspicuous consumption of the prosperous bourgeoisie.
| Bourgeois subjects appearing to be as wealthy as or wealthier
| than the ruling nobility could undermine the nobility's
| presentation of themselves as powerful, legitimate rulers."_
| garciansmith wrote:
| Sumptuary laws might have been part of it. But likely it was
| that natural resources were all highly regulated by the end
| of the Middle Ages in Western Europe. That was especially
| true of hunting and fishing rights (even things like taking
| firewood from a forest could be regulated), so I imagine that
| keeping animals like pigeons were an offshoot of those kinds
| of customary rights and laws.
| legitster wrote:
| Manorial and feudal societies were a much different paradigm.
| _Everything_ was seen as the purview of the lord - you couldn
| 't build a pond, barn, stable, etc unless it was in service of
| the manor. In this regard dovecotes are not particularly
| special.
|
| While there may have been class restrictions in certain times
| and places, in all likelihood most lords probably sold pigeons
| at the market and commoners bought them that way.
| jollyllama wrote:
| It's really not that different now; try building a dovecote
| and see what your local officials think of it.
| adolph wrote:
| If the manor lord did not exist, it would be necessary to
| invent him in the form of a HOA.
|
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/276172/if-god-
| di...
| legitster wrote:
| > This Elizabethan convenience food, however, was not available
| to all. "Dovecotes for the time were a badge of the elite," says
| John Verburg, a dovecote devotee and self-styled "Jane Goodall of
| pigeons." During the reign of Elizabeth I, a pigeon tower was a
| privilege reserved only for feudal lords. And this law was
| enforced: Cooke wrote of a case in England in 1577 in which a
| "tenant who had erected a dovecote on a royal manor was ordered
| by the Court of Exchequer to demolish it."
|
| This is actually how a lot of manorial/serf institutions worked.
| You weren't allowed to build anything unapproved that might
| compete with the services "offered" by the local lord. In many
| places, building an _oven_ was illegal as it would undercut the
| dues the lord would be paid for using his.
|
| Most pigeons were probably sold to the local peasants, and the
| rules were about enforcing state monopoly.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| thats much more 14th century.
|
| by the 17th century serfdom had been "abolished" (old lizzy the
| first did that)
| legitster wrote:
| Sure, but the article quotes a 1577 ruling to justify the
| case that pigeons were only eaten by the elite.
|
| By the 17th century the private dovecote might have hung
| around as a status symbol, but there's no reason to believe
| that in certain places and circumstances and fashions during
| this whole period common folk were not eating pigeons if they
| could afford it.
| golergka wrote:
| Similar monopolies are in place in many countries today --
| healthcare, education, telecommunications and public utilities
| like water and electricity are sometime regulated to the extend
| that you literally have no choice but to use the services
| offered by the state.
| garciansmith wrote:
| My grandparents had a two-story pigeonnier attached to their old
| house in the Charente countryside. It was quite dilapidated, but
| my grandfather still kept pigeons there up until he was no longer
| mobile in the early 1990s. He'd occasionally catch a couple for
| the family to eat for lunch. He took me up there a few times to
| watch him feed his flock, which I always thought was neat. (Less
| neat was when he served a pigeon with a hurt wing that my cousin
| and I were trying to nurse back to health!)
|
| After he died the pigeons moved on. Eventually his children sold
| the place, but it took a long time to do that. I went up to the
| pigeonnier one final time before the place was sold: no one had
| been there in 15 years, the stairs were missing some rungs and I
| wondered if the rotten floor of the top floor would hold my
| weight. The only resident that remained was a lone bat who was
| probably surprised to see a human up there. Would have been nice
| if the next owners restored it, maybe even converted it into a
| living space. But it was likely slated to be demolished.
|
| I've always liked pigeons.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario has a dovecote built in the
| 1830s; they were still a status symbol in the colonies in the
| 19th century.
|
| Visiting this estate a few years ago sent me down the rabbit
| hole, reading about pigeon towers around the world.
| akurtzhs wrote:
| Other fallen status symbols that come to mind, although lower
| costs were the reason over better alternatives.
|
| Aluminum before better material science dropped the price.
| Dishes, utensils, the cap on the Washington Monument.
|
| Pineapples before Dole setup plantations.
|
| Gelatin had two phases: before refrigeration, it needed hours of
| work in the kitchen. Then the status came from electrification
| and owning a refrigerator.
| legitster wrote:
| The reverse often happens, too!
|
| Anytime I see grits on the menu at a fancy restaurant for $15 I
| chuckle to myself quietly.
| adolph wrote:
| And inversely, "Consider the Lobster"
|
| _Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some
| colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than
| once a week because it was through to be cruel and unusual,
| like making people eat rats._
|
| http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
| evtothedev wrote:
| > At the time, root vegetables had not yet arrived in Britain,
| meaning that in winter, farmers could not rely on their usual
| crops to feed livestock such as pigs and cows. They were
| therefore bereft of beef and bacon, and turned to alternative
| sources of meat.
|
| What the heck is going on in these two sentences.
|
| First, I suspect they meant to say that potatoes hadn't yet
| arrived. Turnips, for example, go back for over a thousand years.
|
| Second, is the implication they couldn't keep any livestock over
| winter because of a lack of root vegetables? Because what about
| barley? Or silage?
|
| Makes you start to question the rest of the article.
| hobs wrote:
| It also implies beef and bacon had to die every winter or
| something, which is obviously not the case.
| bluGill wrote:
| Beef and pigs had to die every fall - except for a "small"
| amount that you would raise for next spring to start the next
| generation. If possible you would prefer not to store food
| for animals that you don't need to, so when the snow flies
| you kill all the animals and then freeze it (snow = freezing
| temperatures), storing it and using for the rest of the
| winter to the best of your ability to store it. Smoking and
| other preservatives methods would also be done to any meat in
| fall, again so you don't have to harvest food to feed those
| animals all winter. Harvest uses a lot of labor, so storing
| food to feed animals isn't a good option when you can just
| kill them and eat later.
|
| Of course you need a lot of animals around to raise the next
| generation. Still if you plan to eat it in winter the best
| best was kill it in fall.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > that dovecotes were in a great measure doomed when first the
| turnip and the swede were introduced to British agriculture,
| early in the eighteenth century,
|
| Unless I'm missing something, turnips were in the UK since the
| early middle ages. I know the argument is that they pulled up
| turnips and swedes for winter storage, but I don't think that's
| true. Pulling up root vegetables is hard fucking work.
|
| I'm going to call bollocks on that reasoning. Around the 17th
| century people made the change from using oxen just for pulling
| to horses. Which meant cows were more for eating than ever
| before.
|
| Plus you'd have sheep, pigs, rabbit, fish, deer, and chickens for
| winter protein.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| The horse collar got to England by the 12th Century -- around
| or just after the late Norman era. However, it took until the
| early 19th Century (c. 1840) for oxen to finally disappear from
| the plowfield.
|
| Why? Expense. In Domesday era [c. 1066-1086, before the horse
| collar advent] small tenant farmers could get away with a
| single yoke of oxen -- a single pair. While large farms used
| teams of up to 8 to pull a plow through the rough clay.
|
| As the medieval period transitioned into the modern you saw
| larger and larger farms. A Domesday era villein might keep only
| 120 acres under plow (48 hectares); a small holder with a
| single yoke might only hold 30-40 acres (12-16 hectares).
|
| Average farm sizes continues to grow to this day. Today the
| average English farm is nearly 220 acres (88 hectares). Larger
| farms, and more varied farmwork, meant the expense of horses
| could be afforded better.
|
| A chart in this report shows how the sheer number of horses did
| not equal the number of oxen until the late 15th Century, when
| it was estimated a little less than 400,000 of each creature
| plowed fields throughout Britain.
|
| There was a gap in the records until the middle of the 16th
| Century. By then, and afterwards, the number of horses well
| exceeds the number of oxen. That number continued to skyrocket
| into the Victorian era, by which time use of oxen was nearly
| eliminated.
|
| And then, when the steam engine (and eventually petrol engine)
| tractors came along, you'll see the agricultural horse
| population likewise collapse.
|
| https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
| adolph wrote:
| Something that I don't see noted within the comments is that the
| purpose wasn't to eat pigeon but to eat squab.
|
| _In culinary terminology, squab is an immature domestic pigeon,
| typically under four weeks old, or its meat. Some authors
| describe it as tasting like dark chicken._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squab
|
| [Edit]
|
| Another note about pigeons: they feed their young milk produced
| from a gland inside the upper throat: crop milk.
|
| _Pigeon 's milk begins to be produced a couple of days before
| the eggs are due to hatch. The parents may cease to eat at this
| point in order to be able to provide the squabs (baby pigeons and
| doves) with milk uncontaminated by seeds, which the very young
| squabs would be unable to digest. The baby squabs are fed on pure
| crop milk for the first week or so of life, or about 10-14 days.
| After this the parents begin to introduce a proportion of adult
| food, softened by spending time in the moist conditions of the
| adult crop, into the mix fed to the squabs, until by the end of
| the second week they are being fed entirely on softened adult
| food._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_milk
| Lammy wrote:
| TIL the etymology of my favorite IMAP server's name
| https://www.dovecot.org/
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(page generated 2024-06-03 23:00 UTC)