Pigeon towers: The rise and fall of a 17th-century status symbol (2015)

My grandparents had a two-story pigeonnier attached to their old house in the Charente countryside. It was quite dilapidated, but my grandfather still kept pigeons there up until he was no longer mobile in the early 1990s. He&#x27;d occasionally catch a couple for the family to eat for lunch. He took me up there a few times to watch him feed his flock, which I always thought was neat. (Less neat was when he served a pigeon with a hurt wing that my cousin and I were trying to nurse back to health!)<p>After he died the pigeons moved on. Eventually his children sold the place, but it took a long time to do that. I went up to the pigeonnier one final time before the place was sold: no one had been there in 15 years, the stairs were missing some rungs and I wondered if the rotten floor of the top floor would hold my weight. The only resident that remained was a lone bat who was probably surprised to see a human up there. Would have been nice if the next owners restored it, maybe even converted it into a living space. But it was likely slated to be demolished.<p>I&#x27;ve always liked pigeons.

&gt; This Elizabethan convenience food, however, was not available to all. “Dovecotes for the time were a badge of the elite,” says John Verburg, a dovecote devotee and self-styled “Jane Goodall of pigeons.” During the reign of Elizabeth I, a pigeon tower was a privilege reserved only for feudal lords. And this law was enforced: Cooke wrote of a case in England in 1577 in which a “tenant who had erected a dovecote on a royal manor was ordered by the Court of Exchequer to demolish it.”<p>This is actually how a lot of manorial&#x2F;serf institutions worked. You weren&#x27;t allowed to build anything unapproved that might compete with the services &quot;offered&quot; by the local lord. In many places, building an <i>oven</i> was illegal as it would undercut the dues the lord would be paid for using his.<p>Most pigeons were probably sold to the local peasants, and the rules were about enforcing state monopoly.

&gt; that dovecotes were in a great measure doomed when first the turnip and the swede were introduced to British agriculture, early in the eighteenth century,<p>Unless I&#x27;m missing something, turnips were in the UK since the early middle ages. I know the argument is that they pulled up turnips and swedes for winter storage, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s true. Pulling up root vegetables is hard fucking work.<p>I&#x27;m going to call bollocks on that reasoning. Around the 17th century people made the change from using oxen just for pulling to horses. Which meant cows were more for eating than ever before.<p>Plus you&#x27;d have sheep, pigs, rabbit, fish, deer, and chickens for winter protein.

First time I became aware of dovecotes was on a trip to Egypt, when we were trying to figure out what the weirdly shaped buildings were. Here&#x27;s another Atlas Obscura article about them:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;places&#x2F;gahmr-delta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.atlasobscura.com&#x2F;places&#x2F;gahmr-delta</a><p>Closer photo:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thumbs.dreamstime.com&#x2F;z&#x2F;traditional-egyptian-dovecote-made-clay-pigeon-house-egypt-traditional-egyptian-dovecote-made-clay-pigeon-house-egypt-241077168.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thumbs.dreamstime.com&#x2F;z&#x2F;traditional-egyptian-dovecot...</a>

TIL the etymology of my favorite IMAP server&#x27;s name <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dovecot.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dovecot.org&#x2F;</a>

Other fallen status symbols that come to mind, although lower costs were the reason over better alternatives.<p>Aluminum before better material science dropped the price. Dishes, utensils, the cap on the Washington Monument.<p>Pineapples before Dole setup plantations.<p>Gelatin had two phases: before refrigeration, it needed hours of work in the kitchen. Then the status came from electrification and owning a refrigerator.

The pigeonhole principle makes more sense after looking at the interior picture here.

&gt; At the time, root vegetables had not yet arrived in Britain, meaning that in winter, farmers could not rely on their usual crops to feed livestock such as pigs and cows. They were therefore bereft of beef and bacon, and turned to alternative sources of meat.<p>What the heck is going on in these two sentences.<p>First, I suspect they meant to say that potatoes hadn&#x27;t yet arrived. Turnips, for example, go back for over a thousand years.<p>Second, is the implication they couldn&#x27;t keep any livestock over winter because of a lack of root vegetables? Because what about barley? Or silage?<p>Makes you start to question the rest of the article.

Why weren&#x27;t commoners allowed to build dovecotes? Did they think the carrying capacity of the land was limited to what the lords could eat? Would pigeons see other dovecotes and decide to roost there instead of the lord&#x27;s?

Something that I don&#x27;t see noted within the comments is that the purpose wasn&#x27;t to eat pigeon but to eat squab.<p><i>In culinary terminology, squab is an immature domestic pigeon, typically under four weeks old, or its meat. Some authors describe it as tasting like dark chicken.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Squab" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Squab</a><p>[Edit]<p>Another note about pigeons: they feed their young milk produced from a gland inside the upper throat: crop milk.<p><i>Pigeon&#x27;s milk begins to be produced a couple of days before the eggs are due to hatch. The parents may cease to eat at this point in order to be able to provide the squabs (baby pigeons and doves) with milk uncontaminated by seeds, which the very young squabs would be unable to digest. The baby squabs are fed on pure crop milk for the first week or so of life, or about 10-14 days. After this the parents begin to introduce a proportion of adult food, softened by spending time in the moist conditions of the adult crop, into the mix fed to the squabs, until by the end of the second week they are being fed entirely on softened adult food.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crop_milk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crop_milk</a>

Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Ontario has a dovecote built in the 1830s; they were still a status symbol in the colonies in the 19th century.<p>Visiting this estate a few years ago sent me down the rabbit hole, reading about pigeon towers around the world.

Wouldn&#x27;t the pigeons avoid the tower after noticing that humans came by periodically to catch them? It seems weird that they&#x27;d voluntarily live in such a dangerous home.

So much stuff in San Diego is named after Palomar which is the Spanish word for dovecots. It&#x27;s difficult trying to find some modern analogue for what those even are. It&#x27;s not like they&#x27;re birdhouses that we&#x27;re familiar with. Maybe the past just had a lot more pigeons than we do now. I always find it striking in India when you arrive at some intersection with like 600 pigeons (favorite Hindi word kabootar) eating snacks the locals provide them.

Pigeon towers seem to be making a comeback in India (and apparently they were found in ancient Persia too).<p>I was visiting India last year and came across a colorful tower, about 60 feet tall and teeming with pigeons. There the aim is to provide housing and support for pigeons, and not to use them as a source of food. Many people believe feeding birds is &quot;good karma&quot; and having a pigeon tower allows one to have a ready supply of birds to feed.

This reminds of another recent post on old European structures that were used as status symbols:<p>Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40453716">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40453716</a>

So fascinating! TIL that: 1. People farmed pigeons in the 17th century, which makes me wonder at what point chickens were introduced. 2. England and France seemingly have no native root vegetables to plant for winter.

Minced squab with pine nuts is a delightful and delicious dish when done properly.

Now the “goat towers” in “ Goat Simulator 3” make more sense.