Pigs in the Flesh and Fisc: An Early Medieval Ecology

Abstract

We are accustomed to think of livestock as commodities, and to an extent this mirrors early medieval attitudes, too. But the Merovingians and their subjects also saw that the animals they raised, pigs most of all, were not simply instrumental to human economies. They were capable of interfering with the physical and social environments through which they moved and were moved. Pigs were not the only nonhuman force that humans identified as consequential to their own interests, but pigs struck them as especially ingenious. These animals in particular inspired their owners and caretakers to notice the unusual properties of certain kinds of property, and in order to use pigs profitably, humans accommodated them without ever completely mastering them.

The most surprising result of this accommodation was that pigs had a demonstrable effect on Merovingian economic culture — on the way that the crown and its subjects evaluated resources and formally and informally manipulated them. Because policymakers were alert to pigs’ dexterous approach to powerful and unpredictable environments, they handled not only pigs but also taxes, coinage, land, and political investments with a similar flexibility: they deliberately adjusted their fiscal strategies, and their definitions of profit itself, in response to particular circumstances. It is the argument of this essay that this early medieval society developed a practice and ethics of economic administration that should be characterized as ecological, and that an important influence upon that development was the ubiquitous, instructive pig.