IF THE VOCABULARY of medieval English is anything to go by, birds were a conspicuous and abundant presence in the lives of medieval people. In Old English alone, one might talk of a fughel-dæg ‘bird-day’; of being a fugel-bana ‘bird-killer’ gone fugelung ‘fowling’ with a fugel-net ‘bird-net’ somewhere fugel-wylle ‘abounding in birds’; or of a fugel-hælsere ‘bird-diviner’ observing fugel-cynn ‘birdkind’; or perhaps of feðer-cræt ‘feather-embroidering’ or a feðer-bed. Raucously and richly vocal, feathered and flying, birds impressed and enriched, sustained and enabled the bodily and cognitive experiences of daily living. As much as their mammalian fellows, birds were participants in rural and urban living in a time, as one historian goes so far as to say, in which ‘animals and humans shared space, food, famines, work, and weather conditions more intensely’ than any other historical age except human prehistory. As the Old English terms above suggest, birds were often of practical interest. The most proximate, everyday species were domestic poultry: chickens were an important and protected resource, enjoyed by almost every social stratum, and geese, a more labour-intensive poultry species, not only provided meat and eggs, but their feathers, plucked from living or dead birds, were a crucial resource for arrows and quills. Tamed birds of prey were highly prized among the nobility, nurtured and flown by falconers who knew intimately the birds’ idiosyncratic habits and moulting patterns. All these birds could occupy less prosaic roles, too. Raptors had powerful semiotic value as emblems on escutcheons, or through the projection of ‘shared’ courtly values in literary realms, and even the humble chicken could, in cockerel form, function as a symbol of Christian light and hope, or the hen feature as an encrypted marvel in an Old English riddle, or a reminder of God's divine wisdom in bestiary sources.

Recent interest in human-nonhuman relations has emphasised this eclecticism of animal meaning in pre-modern living, but particularly nonhuman physicality, reminding us that these creatures existed within a network of relations and interactions with human subjects who were well acquainted with the origins and husbandries of those natural sources that provided foods and technologies.