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.
> 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.
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.
Everything is a little like this. You don’t have choice really. Couple cereal companies thats it. Couple car companies. Couple CPU companies. A couple political parties. Billions of people on earth and only a couple of choices on the marketplace for many goods and services. Cartels are both strong and invisible.
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.
> 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.
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.
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:
Kinda off-topic but it took me awhile to realise what those were in AC Origins. They went for a fair amount of detail in the minute parts of the countryside.
Makes even more sense when you consider that the places where people go to pick up their snail mail in an academic institution are commonly called "pigeon holes" [0]
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
"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."
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.
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.
The upper class wanted to publicly differentiate themselves from the peasantry and yeoman classes. You couldn't easily do it with displays of wealth (since the town yeomanry were often well-off even if they lacked titles), so they did it by making it illegal for commoners to do stuff. Like have dovecotes, or wear certain colours.
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.
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.
Wouldn't the pigeons avoid the tower after noticing that humans came by periodically to catch them? It seems weird that they'd voluntarily live in such a dangerous home.
When they weren't being caught, they had food, water, and a safe and cosy place to roost. If anything, the pigeon death rate might be lower than in the wild.
So much stuff in San Diego is named after Palomar which is the Spanish word for dovecots. It's difficult trying to find some modern analogue for what those even are. It's not like they're birdhouses that we're familiar with. Maybe the past just had a lot more pigeons than we do now. I always find it striking in India when you arrive at some intersection with like 600 pigeons (favorite Hindi word kabootar) eating snacks the locals provide them.
Pigeon towers seem to be making a comeback in India (and apparently they were found in ancient Persia too).
I was visiting India last year and came across a colorful tower, about 60 feet tall and teeming with pigeons. There the aim is to provide housing and support for pigeons, and not to use them as a source of food. Many people believe feeding birds is "good karma" and having a pigeon tower allows one to have a ready supply of birds to feed.
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.
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)?
This is not your answer, but the eating habits of the past are fascinating to me.
Want to live like we used to? Eat way less protein in meats. This is the solution.
I just built a set of chairs that were in a picture from a shaker museum. I managed to get the scale correct because there was a soda next to one in the photo.
It turns out that 1840's people were WAAAAY smaller than they are today. Not fat. But overall dimensions.
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.
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.