#MEDIEVAL BUILDING GAMES ANIMAL SKIN#

In December, still fat from eating the autumn mast, some of them could then be butchered for their meat and bacon. For most of the Middle Ages, however, pigs were often not in the village at all, but herded communally on a fallow field or let out to graze in enclosed parts of the forest. In videogames, we find medieval pigs either rolling around in their pigsties or wandering the village streets. Even in the seventeenth century - long after the middle ages - domestic pigs retained some of these traits, as the drawing below from 1610 shows. In appearance, it was therefore not dissimilar to a boar with which it was often cross-bred.

Most notably, however, the medieval pig was not naked and pink at all, but covered in long dark hairs. It had an arched crested back and, unlike modern pigs, long curved tusks. Medieval iconography and animal remains found at archaeological sites indicate that the domesticated pig in the middle ages was a long-legged small creature with a long snout and a lean figure. Screenshot of 'A Plague Tale Innocence' What is wrong? That the medieval pig looked markedly different, however, is a well-established fact which can be verified from a plethora of evidence. Even a visual gem such as A Plague Tale Innocence, which is set in fourteenth-century France, has massive hogs hobbling around. We find this historical faux-pas in city building games like Foundation, survival games like Medieval Dynasty or role-playing games like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

#MEDIEVAL BUILDING GAMES ANIMAL SKIN#

In videogames, medieval pigs are generally modelled on their modern-day counterparts: as rotund furless animals with pink skin and stubby legs. In this article, I would like to talk about a part of the medieval dГ©cor that is consistently misrepresented in вЂњmedievalвЂќ videogames but rarely talked about: the depiction of our favourite barnyard animal, the domesticated pig. Understandably, videogames are no exception to this trend. Scholars have often remarked that pop-culture stereotypes regularly prevail over historical authenticity when it comes to depicting medieval life in modern entertainment media.

Medieval building games animal