CHAPTER XVII
GALICIA’S LIVESTOCK
The pig market—Pigs in every family—Laws relating to pigs and goats—Poultry—Oxen—The ancient plough—Gallegan carts—The music of the cartwheels—Excellent milk—No dairy farms—Horses—Wolves—Foxes—Bears—Hares—Rabbits—Owls and bats—Musk-rats—Wild cats—Partridges—Pheasants—Pigeons—Facts about sardines—Neither a mackerel nor a herring—Dried cod—Trade between Norway and Spain—A heated controversy—The Lamprey—The turbot—The oyster—Eels—Cod—Salmon—Red mullet—Trout
ONE of the most entertaining sights in Santiago is its weekly pig market in the Alameda. Every Thursday morning, women and boys may be seen wending their way thither, each with a young pig in their arms, or—if it is too big to carry—on a string. Every pig so conveyed is a member of some peasant family; it has grown up amongst the children, and often slept in the same room. By eleven o’clock most of the pigs have arrived, and the space allotted to them presents a lively spectacle: a fearful squeaking and squealing prevails. Proud mother pigs stand surrounded by enormous litters. I photographed a group of thirty little squeakers, all wedged tightly together back to back, and then measured a parent pig with my umbrella. Gallegan pigs are not well bred; their legs are far too long, the backs of several were exactly the height of my umbrella, they were like plants that had run to seed, not fat and round like the English commodity. The Gallegan pig is a melancholy example of the crass ignorance of the peasants; they invariably kill off those that would make the best breeders, and vice versa. English pigs have, however, been occasionally imported. On the road to Coruña I once pointed to a group of pigs, and asked the woman to whom they belonged what she called them. “Cerdos,” she replied; “but in your country you call them Chinas.” She knew something about English pigs, and the word she had got hold of was our word “Chine,” and corresponded to “porker.” On another occasion I happened to make a remark to the municipal architect on Santiago’s wealth of pigs.
“This abundance of pigs is a peculiarity of Santiago,” was the reply. “You will find it nowhere else; they live amongst us, even in our best streets; there are two pigs living now in a family on the second floor in the principal street in the town close to our finest shops; a thin partition is all that separates them at night from the children’s bedroom. Our streets are full of pigs; it is dreadful.”
On my mentioning the matter to my hostess, she replied, “Yes, it is quite true; but we have other animals besides pigs—on the second floor of the house you can see from your window there are two young goats being brought up as members of the family.”
But pigs and goats must have been plentiful in the town of Orense as far back as the first decade of the sixteenth century, for one of that city’s most erudite archæologists tells us that among the By-Laws of Orense in the year 1509 he has found the following:—
“That pigs shall not walk in the streets, and that those which are found doing so shall be given to the poor, and their owners be fined.
“That no one shall keep a female pig in his house, nor in the city. That no one shall feed any pig in the streets, and that any one may put to death on the spot persons so doing.
“That no person shall keep sheep or goats in the city. Persons found guilty shall be exposed to the vengeance of the public in the picota or pelouryno of the city.”[216]
The churches of villages and small towns are carefully surrounded by walls or fences, enclosing sometimes a churchyard and sometimes merely a small plot of grass; and, in order that the pigs of the neighbourhood may not enter that enclosed space by the gate, a trench is kept open in front of the gate, a kind of diminutive moat about five feet in depth. On first noticing this arrangement I put it down to quite another cause, and thought that the “drains were up,” but after a time I began to consider the phenomenon more closely, as it seemed incredible that “drains” could explain the presence of so many open trenches. “It is a custom peculiar to Galicia,” explained a lady resident, “because of the pigs.” A pig would never jump a trench.