Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 288

The majority of British pigs are intensively reared white hybrids living indoors in large units. This book is not concerned with them, although it recognizes their existence. It is about the sort of pigs, mostly belonging to traditional breeds, more likely to be found on smallholdings or in farm parks, and is presumably aimed at visitors who want to know more about the pigs they have seen, or smallholders interested in the origin of their pigs. This is not an insignificant number of people, since 46 per cent of all herds had less than ten pigs in 2005, but it is only a small proportion – 3.1 per cent in 2005 – of the national pig herd.

After an opening chapter on the traditional role of the pig (which includes the only picture that this reviewer has ever seen of a pig being hand-milked), there is a discussion of the evolution of domesticated pigs in Britain, followed by chapters on individual breeds. These are divided into the coloured breeds, such as the Large Black, Saddleback, Berkshire, Tamworth, and Gloucester Old Spots among others, and the white breeds, such as the Large White, Middle White, Landrace, British Lop, and the now-extinct Lincolnshire Curly Coat. Most of the breeds covered in these chapters will be familiar to agricultural historians, but we might not be so well acquainted with what are called ‘new pigs’. These are covered in a third chapter and include the Jinhua and the repulsively wrinkled Meishan – both imports from China; the woolly-coated Hungarian Mangalitsa – probably related to the Lincolnshire Curly Coat; the Froxfield Pygmy – bred, unlike most pigs, to be small, because that is an advantage in the laboratories where they are most likely to be found; and the Pennywell miniature pig – also bred for small size because children prefer to pet small animals in the farm park in which it originated.

The main strength of this short book is in the illustrations, which are numerous and comprehensively captioned. Readers requiring a rapid identification of traditional breeds will also find it useful, but as an introduction to the history of the pig it fails to provide much detail or further reading. All the modern references are to the author’s own works, with no mention of Julian Wiseman’s A history of the British pig (1986) or Malcolmson and Mastoris’s The English pig: a history (1998). There is also one intriguing but unreferenced statement: the Berkshire breed is ‘said to have a good sense of humour’ (p.24). Is this, perhaps, an allegation arising from P.G.Wodehouse’s identification of Lord Emsworth’s prize sow, the Empress of Blandings, as a Berkshire? I think we should be told in a future edition.