The Donkey in Human History by Peter Mitchell

Author:Peter Mitchell [Mitchell, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192538123
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2017-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Excavations at Montaillou have not yet delivered comparable insights into the animals its inhabitants kept, but other medieval sites are more informative. In most cases donkeys are present at very low levels. As one might expect, they are often most evident in lower status contexts: for example, at Auberoche in the Dordogne donkeys alone occur in the village, but at the nearby castle horses are also present.51 Here, donkeys may have been kept for the same varied purposes recorded at Montaillou, but other faunas suggest additional uses. At the abbey of St Sigolène near Albi roughly 250 km to the southeast the few donkey remains found consist exclusively of bodily extremities (mostly radii, plus some metapodials, phalanges, and calcanea). This bias—and the cut-marks on two of the metapodials—suggests that their hides were removed for producing leather, presumably once they were too old for transport or ploughing, a pattern we have already noted in much earlier stages of the donkey’s association with people.52 The same interpretation has been advanced elsewhere, for example at the tenth-/eleventh-century site of Andone further north (where a rich metallurgical assemblage confirms the shoeing of donkeys and mules, as well as horses).53 A twelfth-/thirteenth-century settlement at La Barrera in southern Spain provides another instance. Here donkey remains (and what may also be those of a mule) occur in a pit thought to house the waste from leather production; a superficial cut-mark on the distal tibia of a foetal equid fits Andalucía’s medieval reputation as a centre of fine leather production.54

An earlier site from the opposite end of the Muslim Mediterranean gives a more poignant insight into the closeness of the relationship between medieval households and their livestock. Pella in northern Jordan was destroyed by an earthquake on 18 January 749. One of its houses trapped four people and several animals (including cows and mules/donkeys) on the ground floor. Their very presence—a result of the need for indoor winter shelter—underlines what is obvious from the house’s size, namely that this was a comparatively wealthy household. But it is the architectural detail that strikes home: the paving of the inner courtyard so that it could withstand continuous animal traffic; the open drain placed in a corner to make cleaning easier; and the feeding benches built into three rooms and the inner courtyard, plus the line of mangers in two more rooms (in one of which the donkeys/mules were found, one caught midway in the doorway as it tried to flee). A second building where two young men, seven camels, and a donkey were found may have been a commercial hostelry.55

A novel feature of some medieval faunas is the evidence they offer for human consumption of equid meat in general and of donkeys in particular. Romans had held a marked prejudice against this, doing so only in the direst of circumstances. The Church may have inherited this view, contributing to the well-known bans on horse consumption decreed by Popes Gregory III and Zachary in the mid-eighth century, though the fact

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