Is this informative discussion going to move on to recipes? Dale's
account certainly moves the debate on. My comment about horse meat
being difficult to obtain was merely an observation that it is only
available through small numbers of specialised retailers in Britain,
unlike, say, France or Belgium. The fact that 'surplus' feral ponies
are rounded up and exported is a clear illustration of the English
aversion to hippophagy. Those of us who have undertaken fieldwork in
Shetland, and been harassed and molested by the feral ponies that infest
those islands, might not share that traditional aversion!
Terry O'C
[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> What fun to see that a food taboo has raised one of the most lively exchanges on
> zooarch.
>
> This is my take on the subject ...
>
> Many of the people who have contributed to this debate have pointed out the
> rational and less rational reasons why people are more reluctant to eat horse
> meat than beef. But they have not explained why today the British Isles and the
> Anglo-Saxon world (not just England please!) still reject horse meat while
> others eat it.
>
> The prohibition by Pope Gregory was promulgated at a time when Christian faith
> and European society was still threatened by peoples of Eastern Europeans who
> were closer to the horse eating tribes of the steppe. It was intended to
> distinguish converts to Christianity and all Christians in Europe from the still
> unconverted tribes to the east. I believe that horse meat consumption was
> at a low level in all of Europe in the middle ages - but am happy to be
> corrected on this point. Despite the prohibition, we do sometimes see butchered
> horse bones in English medieval sites suggesting that the meat was eaten.
> However, I have not seen butchered horse bones on any of the monastic sites I
> have been involved with (St Albans Abbey, Eynsham Abbey, St Gregory's Priory,
> Canterbury); those I have seen have all been from town sites. So the prohibition
> does seem to have stuck with the religious, if not with all townsfolk and
> peasants.
>
> In the 19th hippophagy was taken up again deliberately, in France and Belgium in
> particular. It seems to have had a rational basis in the ideas of the French
> revolution with its deliberate anti-clericalism. Horse meat helped to feed the
> increasing numbers of people coming to the towns to work in the 19th century
> factories, especially in northern France and Belgium. (see a paper in an early
> Anthropozoologia which I can't at the moment find the reference to).
>
> Britain, I suspect, rejected taking up eating horse meat because of the 19th
> century antipathy in Britain to Napoleon and the ideas of the French Revolution.
> We did have a rational tradition and one aspect of it was the societies which
> tried to promote the consumption of all sorts of animals, but the idea didn't
> catch on. (See Bompas, G. C. 1885. Life of Frank Buckland. London, Smith &
> Elder). Also Britain seems to have been able to produce enough beef during the
> 19th century. There were parts of the British Isles (Scotland, Wales, Ireland)
> where cattle were raised in large enough numbers to supply the growing towns
> with enough beef, before the supplies from Argentina, the Empire, etc, began to
> arrive.
>
> It is not true (pace Terry O'Connor) that horse meat would be difficult to
> obtain. The New Forest ponies are rounded up annually to be sold as riding
> ponies, but there are always lots each year which don't get sold which are
> shipped to France and Switzerland for food, or at least they did until recently.
>
> I am not sure where donkey and horse eating in Spain and Italy would fit this
> picture. What do our colleagues there think?
> Dale
>
> Dale Serjeantson
> Department of Archaeology
> University of Southampton
> Email: [log in to unmask]
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