Aleph, our A, the first letter of the Phoenician, Cretan, Greek and Latin alphabets, began life as a representation of the head of the ox, the foremost source of wealth. The pictorial element is easily recognized if one reverses the half-turn sideways imperceptibly imposed on it by scribes over the centuries.
The ox’s only real rival in the often drought-stricken countries where those alphabets were used was the camel, whose characteristic profile gave us gamal, gamma, our G, the third letter; the second letter was beta, a tent or house. In just three letters of the alphabet, the stockbreeder emerges as an established figure.
This could be taken as an indication of the respect cattle enjoyed from ancient times for the services they rendered, a respect still shown to the sacred cows of India (a country where many people are vegetarian).
There is further past evidence for it in the winged bulls of Assyria and Babylon, the zoomorphic Egyptian gods Apis and Osiris, the sacred cow of the Argyens and the Chinese, the Gaulish god Tarvos-Triganos, Mithras and the bull-headed Minotaur.
While the Athenians sacrificed a garlanded ox for the festival of the Bosphonia, according to Pliny and Hippias of Elis the Sophist (author of a work on animals) a certain Phyges was condemned to death for killing the ox that drew his plough.
The ancient Germanic tribes thought so highly of their livestock that, according to Tacitus, a girl’s dowry was paid in cattle rather than gold.
The custom of calculating a dowry in head of cattle is still current all over Africa, and the agricultural and planning departments of the new African republics have great difficulty in persuading pastoral tribes, particularly the Peuhls, not to let their four footed capital stand idle, since cattle may be hoarded for nothing but the pleasure of counting them, in countries where protein deficiency is endemic and there is little trade with the outside world.
The giant Masai tribesmen of East Africa, rather than killing the long-horned cattle they inherited from the Egyptians, drink their blood, drawing it from the neck with a hollow dart or collecting it to be mixed with porridge of cereals.
It is tempting to regard the custom of parading a fatted ox at carnival mid-Lent festivities in Western Europe, common from the twelfth century until the 1930s, as a revival of ancient cults.
The ox was always decked with ribbons, flowers, rosettes, and sometimes even gilded. Such carnivals were a happy celebration of a brief respite from the abstinence of Lent, and were held right in the middle of the Lenten season, on the twentieth day before Easter. It has also been suggested that the word ‘carnival’ itself comes from an imaginary expression ‘carne n’avale’ (‘eat no flesh’), while Italian speakers have incorrectly connected it with vale (‘farewell meat’), but in fact it is from Latin 'caro', 'carnis', flesh, and 'levare', to remove, as in the medieval Latin terms carnelevarium, carnelevamen, signifying ‘the putting away of flesh’. In the Catalan language, the word for carnival was carnes toetes (‘meat removed’), which became carnistoltes.
However, the fatted ox should be regarded simply as the living emblem of the corporation of butchers.
At carnival time, a brief but glorious period of feasting, the providers of meat had a place of honour and took advantage of the general atmosphere of jollity to parade their masterpiece, the finest and fattest of oxen, by way of advertising. All records were beaten in Paris in 1846 by a vast animal named Dagobert and weighing almost two tonnes.
The tradition of the parade of the fatted ox at carnival time in Western European countries is one of those rare folk customs which are solely urban.In medieval Paris, the procession left the slaughter-houses outside the walls of the city (where they used to stand on the quays of the Right Bank) to visit the provosts, aldermen and chief magistrates of the city’s parlement (judicial assembly).
These officials awaited it in state, in all the glory of their red robes – red being the colour of blood and of power, and also, as it happens, the colour of the robes of the magistrates who performed the sacrificial rites of classical times.
But leaving aside such coincidences, the significance of which had been entirely forgotten, the only sacred part of the custom was the visit paid by the animal in its finery to a church generally belonging to the local corporation.
The bishops did not particularly appreciate the honour. In Provence, in the village of Barjols in the Haut-Var, the feast of Les Tripettes is still celebrated in memory of the providential arrival of an ox (no doubt escaped from a monastery) on St Marcel’s day during a thirteenth-century famine.
Was this the same St Marcel, or Marceau, Bishop of Paris in the fourth century, who saved the capital from a mad bull and is the patron saint of forage merchants? The ox of Les Tripettes, a proud beast surrounded by cowherds from the Camargue, whence it has been brought with all due solemnity, attends Mass before being slaughtered.
It is roasted outside the church, while the Provençal farandole is danced (the priest used to join the dancing himself), and then everyone falls to feasting. The animal’s offal used to be distributed is escoulau e à la paurido, ‘to the students [of Aix] and to the poor’, who were often one and the same.
In Paris a slice of the fatted carnival ox used to find its way to the King’s plate, and closer to our own times to that of the head of state. The trade of butchery, with access to meat supplies, has always been one of importance in society.
The business of butchers – indeed, why not call it an art, as the medieval Italians did? – was organized and controlled from very ancient times, although we tend to think back no further than the Middle Ages, which provide the best or at least the most highly coloured illustration.
The Romans, whose society in general was highly organized, distinguished boarii, butchers, from suarii, pork butchers, and pecuarii, vendors of poultry and game.
The ancient Egyptians, who also had a well-developed administrative system, did not leave the butchery trade to chance either.
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a remarkable polychrome terracotta model showing farming activities from the tomb of Maken-Kwetre, a rich dignitary of the Eleventh Dynasty, and dating from the second millennium BC.
It was probably included because the dead man had interests in the meat trade. A great many other tombs contained frescoes showing butchers at work. Still in connection with the cartouches of the Egyptian butchers’ corporation – for they had formed themselves into a body – the name of some great lady, frequently a Queen Mother, is often found mentioned as ‘guardian of the corporation’.
Queen Hete-Phere, mother of Cheops, was so proud of the title that it was carved on her throne. And I must not forget the cuneiform tablet of the seventeenth century bc with the famous Code of the Amorite king Hammurabi II, regulating the sale of livestock, like everything else which was eaten or drunk in Babylon.
Even before that, no doubt there were laws of solidarity regulating the trade, and no less respected for not being written down.
Among the oldest evidences of butchery – large-scale but methodical – are the elephant left partly dissected on the Tornabalba archeological site in Spain 300,000 years ago, and a mammoth whWhich was stuck in the mud and cut up on the spot at Clovis in New Mexico in the eleventh millennium, on a day when no fasting was surely observed. This was the work of amateurs, of course.
The first master butcher whom we know to have made the business his trade remains anonymous, but he kept a small shop in Jordan 8500 years ago. At the Beddha site, shops were grouped in threes in a number of alcoves on the ground floor of houses built of stone blocks.
One of these shops contained rough knives of dressed stone, and such a pile of bones, so expertly jointed, that archeologists think the owner of the place must have been a specialist. Until he was abruptly interrupted in his trade, he must have been cutting up meat for his fellow citizens: the meat of goats and sheep similar to those whose small hooves have left their marks on the mud paving of another village of the same period at Ganj Darah in Western Iran.
Did that particular flock end up as chops? Very likely, but we shall never know just how, or who did the butchery. All we have is that brief but lasting record of swift movement from one unknown place to another. The word butcher, like French boucher, from which the English version comes, and old Italian beccaïo, dates only from the thirteenth century as a term denoting the person who prepared and cut up any kind of meat.
Previously it meant a specialist in goat’s meat, often salted because it was tough; in modern jargon the goat might be said to have been restructured to meet market demand. This etymology for the word ‘butcher’ in itself shows how low the consumption of beef was in the Middle Ages. Previously the French word maiselier, masselier or macellier, from Italian macellaïo, a term which never came into English, was used for the person who slaughtered and cut up creatures of any species as required, and who often kept a kind of cheap tavern. Then the word disappeared, its function being divided between butchers on one hand and innkeepers on the other. Each quarter of Paris had many large butcher’s shops even before the time of Philippe II (who reigned 1180–1223, and under whom the capital expanded) and their owners were soon prominent in the parlement and the prévôté (provostry, a kind of police headquarters).
They even had letters patent of nobility, so to speak, since Hugues Capet, first of the Capétien dynasty of French kings, was descended from Robert the Strong, a soldier of fortune who distinguished himself against the Normans and is thought to have come from a Saxon family of meat traders brought to Gaul by Charlemagne.
None the less, in 1844, when the fashion for all things medieval was at its height, Henry Marvaille and Paul Fauquemont wrote a very popular four-act drama entitled Aubry le Boucher which was produced at the Théâtre Beaumarchais. ‘The action’, states the text, ‘takes place in Paris in 1418 (sic). For the music, apply to M. Osay, orchestral conductor at the theatre.’ In the popular English oral tradition of ballad and folk song in the genuine late medieval period, butchers figure several times, usually as strong men and prosperous citizens.
Religious communities owned butcher’s shops: among them were the Templars who owned one in the rue Braque in Paris from the twelfth century onwards.
The abbey of Saint-Germain-Saint-Denis sold meat as well as its own wine from the time of its foundation. In 1274, the prior, Dom Gherardt, had 16 new shops built in the rue de la Boucherie, near the present-day place Saint-Michel.
The Ménagier de Paris, a treatise of morals and domestic economy written around 1393 by a well-to-do citizen of Paris for the edification of his young wife, contains a list of the city’s butchers at the time and their delivery services.
The notes added by the Ménagier’s nineteenth-century French editor, Baron Jérôme Pichon, are also of great interest: he tells us that there were 19 butchers in the Grande Boucherie, which stood on the site of the present Théâtre du Châtelet, and that ‘the origin of this establishment went back to the time of the Roman occupation. Ownership of the shops, and the right to become a master butcher after the age of seven years. Arab doctor Albucacis. and a day’ (!) was the exclusive right of the male members of a small number of families.
These ‘male family members were bound to exercise their fathers’ profession themselves, or at least to give the business financial support.’In the sixteenth century many descendants of these old and industrious families had risen to quite elevated positions, and had given up the butcher’s trade.
However, the rich butchers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would not have occupied themselves personally with every detail of their businesses.
Many had employees responsible for the actual cutting up and selling of the meat, while the master butchers themselves merely dealt on a large scale and through brokers in the livestock trade destined to feed the people of Paris.
If we are to believe the Ménagier and his nineteenth-century French editor, ‘the sum of all the butcheries of Paris weekly, without counting the households of the King and the Queen and our other lords of France’ came to 3080 sheep, 514 oxen, 600 pigs and about 300 calves (there follow details of the tastes of the court, a subject of great interest to good citizens then as now).
These figures are quite high when one considers that the average population of Paris for that period is assessed at 100,000. At Carpentras in Provence, a town which became and remained prosperous because of the unprecedented boom caused by the luxury of the papal court at Avignon next door, we know that consumption per head rose in 1473 to 26 kilos of butcher’s meat, especially mutton – more than in the time of Mistral, the late nineteenth-century Provençal poet! And one must always bear in mind those fast days when no meat was eaten.
In 1637 Paris had half a million inhabitants. The annual provision of butcher’s meat for a population which had increased fivefold during the three and a half centuries separating Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain from the Ménagier of Paris was368,000 sheep and lambs, 67,800 calves – and 40,000 oxen. Dietary habits had certainly changed, and fasting was not observed so strictly or over such long periods.
Although the common people were to see their purchasing power decline sharply between the reigns of François I and Louis XIV, ‘meat, in ever greater demand, was to lead to great market tensions between limited supply and expanding demand.’
The consumption of butcher’s meat was always an urban phenomenon. Country dwellers, whether day laborers, farmers or the minor gentry, could not afford to eat their livestock even if they owned it themselves. Edifying tales are full of poor people obliged to sell their cow or even their goat in times of need – and if the animal did end up in the cooking pot that meant it was not even saleable.
People of means, or at least those who wanted to give that impression, lived in towns. Like white bread, roast meat symbolized social success in the time of Louis XIV. ‘To be fat and pot-bellied would be the mark of success for several centuries to come.’
From the Middle Ages to the French Revolution, and in practice up to the Third Republic proclaimed in 1870, the great majority of the dominant classes of clergy(except for the clerics of the medieval abbeys, and they were not the real beneficiaries of the system), nobility and bourgeoisie lived in towns.
If rich men did happen to own a flock or so in the country, they sold their livestock to butchers and bought meat ready cut up, unlike their own game, of which they were proud, and which was both easier to transport and not supposed to be eaten very fresh. In the Régence these prosperous people made up only one-fifth of the entire population of France, but they accounted for a great part of the butchers’ turnover. As for the lower classes of towns people, when they left the country they adopted typically urban dietary habits. Whenever the countryside was depopulated on a large-scale (through invasions, climatic disasters, epidemics, etc.) demand for meat in the towns rose (as well as demand for salt fish), inevitably leading to the paradoxical situation described above: limited supply and expanding demand.
On the eve of the French Revolution ‘the rich cities of Paris and Geneva were devouring huge quantities of meat (meat consumption in those two cities reached modern heights: 60 to 80 kilos a year per person, as against only 20 to 30 kilos a year for the average inhabitant of Caen) . . . Caen saw the fat oxen of the Bessin region set off for Paris, and kept the tough and skinny beasts for itself.’
The bigger, more middle-class and more commercial the city, the larger were sales of meat. Yesterday as today, the middlemen were the people who really profited from supplying foodstuffs, as we shall see when we come to the black market. The high officer of the Crown who supervised the royal kitchens of the King of France – a post held by the famous Guillaume Tirel, called Taillevent, author of the Viandier – had a right to ‘take five sous from every person selling cooked or raw meat in the kingdom’ at the beginning of each reign, not a ruinous tax on the butchers’ corporations of that kingdom, who were already doing very well on the whole, although they were naturally inclined to complain. The probate on one of the butcher’s shops by the gates of Paris in 1383 gives us a picture of riches to make crowned heads green with envy.
As Baron Pichon points out in his notes to the Ménagier de Paris: ‘In view of an inventory of wealth so vast for its time, is it surprising that all historians of the fifteenth century emphasize the powerful influence of these master butchers?
This upper class of Paris butchers, prominent among whom was the famous Etienne Marcel (proprietor of what we would call a ‘holding’ in modern terms, combining the meat trade, goldsmith’s work and banking), was not a unique phenomenon.
Every city and large town had to reckon with its butchers’ corporation. The Ghent Corporation was one of the most prosperous, and some dynasties were in the business for 500 years.
Also legendary was the buxom beauty of the Ghent butchers’ women, from whose ranks the Emperor Charles V chose his favourites.In certain towns, for instance Poitiers,14 which had 23 butchers in the fifteenth century (more than it can boast now), there was no corporation, but a métier juré, or ‘sworn trade’: the butchers showed their solidarity by taking an oath in chorus before the local lord.
Sworn guards’ controlled the market, and no one could sell meat unless he was ‘under oath to the butchery’ of a butcher’s family. As a hygienic precaution – for animals were slaughtered on the premises and the refuse and scraps thrown straight out of doors, much to the benefit of stray pigs, flies and rats – butchers were originally banned from setting up ‘within the city’ because theirs was inhonesta mercimonia (a vile trade).
But gradually they came inside the walls. Old town plans show us primitive suburbs marked with such names as rue de la Bucherie, or de la Boucherie.
The expansion of town centres and the new lay-out of their precincts brought the butchers into the heart of urban areas without their even having to move house.
Every butcher had a single bench on which he offered his meat for sale ‘from sunrise to sunset’; trading by torchlight or candlelight was forbidden for fear of fraudulent dealing.
In general, animals were procured in the immediate vicinity of a town, and certain people, taking their cue from the usurers, did not shrink from extortion or delaying payment until it suited them.
There was also considerable trading at the big stock-breeding centres, following the annual rhythm of the big fairs such as the one held at Beaucaire.
The butchers owned grazing, privately or communally, where their beasts waited for the moment of slaughter. Some of the richest set up as entrepreneurs in the stockbreeding business on a large scale themselves, either near towns or in remote rural areas.
Thus, towards the beginning of the fifteenth century, at a time of abundance and good demography, the people of Arles were still protesting against the scarcity and expense of butcher’s meat. The mazels or butchers of the big Jewish communities were suspected of fixing the market with the complicity of the Christian butchers who had come to an ‘understanding’ among themselves. The affair almost turned into a pogrom.
In fact the big livestock dealers, members of those business families of Marseilles and Aix who would be ennobled later, such as the Forbins,15were taking the line of least resistance by making Jewish agents their intermediaries and above all their bankers in the markets of Arles, Carpentras and Manosque. Among them were Pierre d’Arles and Giraud Paul, already rich men of property. All this may have favoured kosher butchery to the detriment of the ordinary kind (in Poitou no excommunicated butcher was allowed ‘to sell flesh’: observe the sacred character of meat, and above all the influence of the Church).
Besides speculating in fresh and salted meat, leather, skins, wool and tallow, the Forbins and their colleagues, forming themselves into associations, owned shares invast flocks of sheep which they entrusted to nourrigiers, middlemen whose business it was to employ shepherds to take the animals to the mountain pastures.
The hiring of these pastures was also up to the nourrigiers. In winter thousands upon thousands of animals took up their quarters in the Crau region or on the banks of the Huveaune near Marseilles.
But the meat of these sheep, whose seasonal journeys are reminiscent of episodes in the works of the French rural novelist Jean Giono, proved so profitable when exported to the north of France, even to Flanders and the Empire, that country people were sometimes reluctant to let their near neighbours living in the local towns have it.
Particularly in summer, therefore, the butchers reared small flocks living permanently near the town fortifications, and this practice sometimes led to conflict with the ourtoulaïers or market gardeners. Nothing is ever simple.
The people of Marseilles, as we can tell from the registers of tolls on goods to be consumed within the city, had to go as far as Saint-Flour for their provisions in 1498.
Even today the supermarkets of Marseilles offer their customers frozen lamb from the Antipodes and beef from Argentina, items similarly found in the meat cabinets of British supermarkets alongside the native Scotch beef and Welsh and English lamb.
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By Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat in: 'The History of Food'- Wiley-Blackwell, 1994 p.104-112 as The History of Meat- Fat Oxen and Prosperous Butchers'. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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