Numerous depictions of killing and butchering pigs appear in W. European art of the 15th and 16th centuries, often as symbols of November or December in books of hours. Midwinter, when the weather was cold, was the season to kill pigs and preserve hams, bacon, sausages, and salt pork. This was the habit in much of Europe.
The poor had two general objectives in keeping pigs. The first was to rear, economically, an animal which they would kill to provide meat for the household. The second was to sell some of the meat and use the money to buy another pig and perpetuate the cycle. ‘There is no savings bank for a labourer like a pig,’ observed Samuel Sidney (Youatt, 1860), who expounded his theory of cottage pig-keeping thus: a piglet, bought for a sovereign in early summer and fed on household waste, which, when it reached adult size, was supplemented with potatoes, grains, or buttermilk to aid fattening, was killed at Christmas. ‘The hams he can sell to buy another pig, and the rest will remain for his own consumption, without seeming to have cost anything.’
