In this episode of the podcast Writing Excuses, Howard Tayler says he heard from a documentary called Filthy Cities that only way to get beef to the nobles of 13th Century London was to march cows in the town and murder the cows. Is this true? If so, what's the historical background of this?
Here's the exact wording of what Tayler said:
I watched a documentary… A series of documentaries, I think it was called Filthy Cities. It was talking about, I think, 13th century London...They described how the royalty, king and queen and company… Beef! All about the beef. The nobility moved nearby. They also wanted beef. The way to get the beef was to march it across the bridge and murder it in town. The streets flowed with blood and cow entrails and filth. That’s not the London you think of when you are thinking of these banquets...That whole discussion, I realized that our predilection for beef only survives because we’ve got refrigeration and fast transportation.
Thank you in advance!
EDIT: in title, it should be march cows in the town and murder them...
I'm not 100% clear from your question what you're asking.
Animals were not regularly slaughtered for food literally in the middle of busy London streets. It's true that the slaughter of animals was designed to be a semi-public spectacle in the medieval period – largely to allow customers to see the quality of the animals they were about to eat. But hygiene, and, perhaps more importantly, smell mandated that measures be taken for the disposal of offal. By the 14th century, the Honourable Company of Butchers was charged with setting standards for the slaughtering of animals, and after 1371 London's butchers were forbidden from disposing of blood and entrails in the streets, and many eventually based themselves on a jetty known as "Butcher's Bridge," which enabled them to dump offal directly into the Thames.
It's true that illicit disposal of animal waste was a problem in the London of the 13th century, and later; in 1371, Edward III addressed a letter to the sheriffs and mayor complaining that
certain city butchers, ignoring the ordinance and proclamation, have subsequently slaughtered large animals within the city anddumped the blood and entrails in various places near Holborn Bridge and elsewhere in the suburbs, and as a result of that abomination and the stenches which infect the air, sickness and other maladies have befallen our officers and other residents and visitors
but the actual slaughter was done inside the premises of the butchers concerned.
If, however, you're asking whether cattle were brought to London and slaughtered inside the city for consumption by the inhabitants, rather than meat being brought into the city for sale, then you're correct. Before the advent of refrigeration in the 19th century, this was the only effective way of ensuring that the meat sold in London would be relatively fresh.
Indeed, it's still possible to trace the impact of the trade in cattle on a map of London. The problems of maintaining droving routes that made it possible to bring large quantities of cattle into town and through to Smithfield Market, in the east of the growing city, were so acute by the middle of the 18th century that a new east-west road was driven across the northern part of city in order to avoid the need to take the animals through the congested city centre. This droving route allowed cattle from Hertfordshire to reach Smithfield and a new market site at Copenhagen Fields, in what is now Islington, via what was in effect the city's first ever by-pass. The "New Road", as it was called, still exists today as a major artery conveying six lanes of traffic into and out of London from the north and west. Today it's called the Euston Road, and as well as still being usually the fastest way to cross the city by car, it is home to four major railway stations bringing commuters in from the north and east (Marylebone, Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross), as well as to the British Library.