Paper -a:
The transhumance of swine (i.e. their seasonal movement to and from wood pastures set a considerable distance away from estate centres) has been understood as a defining feature of the economic geographies of woodland areas in Anglo-Saxon. This paper will draw upon interdisciplinary research into the situation that prevailed in the Weald forest of South-East England from the 5th-13th centuries. It will advance a new model describing an annual cycle of earlier medieval pig husbandry, of which the transhumant grazing of pigs in Wealden wood pastures was one element of a complex and in some ways unexpectedly sophisticated system.
Paper -b:
The paper investigates what kind of regulations there were for hunting in medieval Swedish legal texts. Hunting was an important livelihood especially in the peripheral parts of the Swedish kingdom, because game animals meant extra food in the daily diet, and selling fur provided income. The purpose of the paper is twofold: to look at the legal regulations of hunting as a reflection of daily life, and to consider what kind of interests the crown and society had for regulation.
Paper -c:
There appears to have been a universal tendency among early civilisations to attribute supernatural qualities to the most significant aspects of life (fertility, death, etc.). Equally, however, a degree of supernaturalism was assigned to the culture of nobility thus raising them above the masses. The hunt appears within medieval Welsh literature as possessing supernatural aspects. This paper shall examine these supernatural presentations of the hunt and discuss whether these are a remnant of archaic spirituality representative of the wild and natural virility of man and his ability to master nature to acquire food, or representative of the evolving status of hunting as an elite sport.
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