The Great Birds

Readers of PPC will remember the trilogy of essays by Joop Witteveen on 'Swans, Cranes and Herons' which appeared in PPC 24, 25 and 26. Joop Witteveen now tells us that, when he set about assembling material for those articles, he assumed that he need not deal with peacocks. The fact that they were eaten in mediaeval times was common knowledge, whereas fewer people knew about the consumption of swans, cranes and herons. The likelihood of unearthing significant new information about peacocks seemed correspondingly less. However, in the course of his work he discovered that the peacock was part of a close-knit quartet with the three other great birds, a quartet in which it ranked first. At festival banquets in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it would have been inconceivable not to serve peacock. So he decided to write a fourth essay, devoted to 'this bird with its beautiful colours', of which the first (general and historical) part appears here. The second instalment, a survey of how peacocks were prepared in various European countries, is to follow; as is a final essay in which he will explore the reasons for the decline in appreciation of all these great birds. Since the present essay is a continuation of the earlier three, the reference numbers in it follow on from them.