Joanna here, talking chicken history, with special attention to chickens in the Regency.
By this I mean historical eating chickens rather than show chickens or fighting chickens or pet chickens, though I imagine some Regency folks kept chickens and became very fond of them. I will talk about pet chickens later.
Not everyone agrees chickens are pet material.
Look in the eye of a chicken and you’ll know. It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creature in this world. Werner Herzog
In the Regency -- in most times and places -- chickens were “women’s livestock,” a minor and cozily domestic part of the farm economy, kept by the woman of the house for “egg money,” fed thriftily with scraps and garden bugs and free-range foraging.
I don't know about everywhere, but in the US in the C20 the money a woman made from her chickens was hers to spend as she would.
“Chickens consumed a lot of garden waste. For example, if you’d finished picking all the peas, then you pulled up the vines and fed them to the chickens. When you had a biscuit that didn’t rise properly or bread with mold, you threw it into the farmyard. Chickens love bugs and are omnivorous, so they eat meat and, sometimes, eat each other. They also love mice.”
Elaine Shirley, Colonial Williamsburg
Chicken coops have probably existed as long as chickens, the birds not being notably good at defending themselves against predators of the night. The Roman writer Columella in the first century advises that “chicken coops should face southeast and lie adjacent to the kitchen, as smoke is beneficial for the animals” and "poultry never thrive so well as in warmth and smoke."
We can therefore happily and accurately imagine our Regency heroine (who is hiding on her old nurse's farm to escape her evil guardian,) feeding the chickens and shooing them into their coop for the night, safe from foxes.
Random chicken fact:
Most chicken owners will tell you that hens with red/brown earlobes lay brown eggs and those with white earlobes produce white eggs. This is a useful rule of thumb but there are exceptions.
John Lloyd & John Mitchinson, QI, The Telegraph
The chickens I have known most intimately have been West African chickens. They roost in trees at night. You’d drive home after dark and there they’d all be, big loaf-sized shapes up in the branches of the trees.
If strangers come into the chicken run, the big, vicious, brightly colored roosters attack, going for your face. They used to scare me to the death.
Historically, the meat of the chicken has been secondary to the egg value. Farm women sold plump capons and scrawny old hens for a nice price. Hens graced the farm table in the cold autumn when forage got scarce and egg-laying stopped. And unlucky chickens might be served up on special occasions. (i.e. “We’ll kill the Old Red Rooster when she comes,” which is enough to make anyone nervous about visitors, frankly, chicken or not.)
But a good layer or good brooder was too valuable to eat.
Worth noting here that eggs were seasonal too. One reason we eat eggs for Passover and for Easter is that they’re -- Yeah! -- available again in the spring and so welcome. We take so much for granted in modern times.
Geese and turkeys were the meat birds. Premium food. Rich man’s fare.
Couple of reasons for this. For one thing, they had considerably more meat on them than the Regency chicken.
A modern Buff Orpington, (which comes to mind because of Dorothy Sayers — I think it’s Busman’s Honeymoon,) weighs in at 7 or 8 pounds. A common chicken of the Regency period, the Dominique, would be 5 or 6 pounds in its modern iteration. Smaller, most likely, in the Regency when its food supply would be somewhat more precarious.
But geese and turkeys were also more marketable.
Let us consider the annual autumn March of the Geese (or turkeys.) From the late Sixteenth Century onward, flock by flock, a couple hundred at a time, geese and turkeys walked from farms in Norfolk to Leadenhall Market in London.
In the Regency period this might have been 100,000 to 200,000 birds in all, sauntering by easy stages to London, nibbling wasteland and stubble as they went.
Daunting historical tidbit: the turkeys wore little leather boots and the somewhat-less-cooperative geese waddled along with feet dipped in tar and then sand for protection from the rigors of the road.
Dipping the feet of outraged, full-grown geese into melted tar is another of the many farm tasks I would not have enjoyed.
So turkeys and geese were raised for the London meat market. Chickens weren't. When I imagine the difficulties of walking mass flocks of chickens all the way to London, my mind boggles.
More chicken history ...
Chickens thundered out of the East, India or China, a few millennia BCE. The root ancestors were a couple sorts of bright-colored East Asian jungle fowl.
Being hardy, prolific, adaptable, and tasty, chickens spread in all directions. They hit southern Europe somewhat after 1000 BCE. We see them in Greece before 800 BCE.
Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.
Themistocles, general, 5th century BCE, seeing roosters by the side of the road being mutually murderous. He approved.
The Romans used chickens for oracles, both when flying and when feeding. The hen gave a favourable omen when appearing from the left, like the crow and the owl.
Cic., de Div. ii.26, via the wiki
May all your hens fly in from the left.
Maybe chickens arrived in England in shipboard coops with Phoenician tin traders. Maybe they squawked their way unhappily amid the sheep and pigs and small children of early invaders from across the Channel.
But when the Romans got there in 55 AD, they were greeted by chickens. Julius Caesar, in De Bello Gallico, remarked, "The Britons consider it contrary to divine law to eat the hare, the chicken, or the goose. They raise these, however, for their own amusement and pleasure."
Did Caesar get it right? Were chickens exotic oddities? Fighting birds? Useful for predicting the future? Pets?
Someday aliens may wonder why we keep cats since we don't eat them.
All this leads to the question of pet chickens.
Would Gallus gallus domesticusan be to your taste if you were picking an unusual pet companion
and you could ignore practicalities of all kinds?
Thursday Next had a dodo. (got THAT one wrong.)
I kinda like fancy fish.
What about you?