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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