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“Looks like cow cooking there”
Although its not the best sounding line, I really wanted to include one of my fave linguistic facts! Basically cow, sheep, pig etc are all Old English words, yet beef, mutton and pork are all French words. This division between the animal as animal and animal as food was because after 1066, when the French-speaking Normans invaded Britain, they replaced the aristocracy. Therefore, anyone who was fancy enough to be eating cow, sheep, pig etc spoke French, while the conquered English were the ones farming. There’s your fun fact of the day!
Also cows have got a surprisingly interesting history in Anglo-Saxon England! They were very much a luxury, high status noble meal, and before money were the main way of storing wealth. Some of the earliest signs of kings is centred around cattle, and having huge corrals to store so many. Also, there’s another theory that they were sort of similar to horses which were eaten a bunch in the pagan period, probably — thing is horses are ~magic~… probably. Their ashes are found mixed in with human cremations, which some people have thought is a sort of reflection of beliefs in shape-shifting as you move from life to death. Also, when the church came over and established itself, they were surprisingly lax about letting people carry on pagan beliefs… apart from two. In Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus’ Penitentials, there’s a penance for putting a child in the roof or in an oven to cure them of an illness, and one against eating horse meat. Plus you find people buried with horses, and even, at Oakington, one woman buried with a cow which seems to have been killed for her funeral. So yeah! Big hoofed creatures have got some cool shit going on with them
