Oak trees and acorns

 It's October, and oak leaves are starting to turn brown.  You don't get the brilliant colors of autumn foliage with oaks that you get with maples, and oaks hold onto at least some of their leaves well into winter, but dry oak leaves blowing around the lawn are one of the signs of autumn.

Medieval Europe of course had oak trees, though not as big a variety as North America.  England indeed has only one kind of oak.  Both in Britain and on the Continent oaks were an important part of the economy.

Oaks grow fairly fast, at least when they're young, but they are a hardwood (unlike pines and other conifers), long lasting, straightforward to cut and shape.  Fine furniture and cabinets today are routinely made of oak.  Medieval buildings used oaks for timbers, as I've discussed earlier, such as the hundreds of oak trees used for the rafters of Notre Dame cathedral back in the twelfth century.

Unlike food crops, which are planted and harvested every year, oaks take decades to grow to full height and hence are not really "cultivated."  But you could still have a managed wood lot.  This became especially urgent as Europe's growing population required more fields cleared for wheat and other crops, with resulting disappearance of trees.  By the late twelfth century there were often restrictions on cutting trees in certain woods for fuel, saying that only dead, fallen branches could be gathered (and no, you couldn't help along a branch falling with judicious use of a saw).

But the acorn were at least as important as the wood.  Acorns are edible and were eaten by Native Americans, but they have to be soaked to get the tannin out and then cooked, and my guess is that they still wouldn't be that tasty (but then I've never tried).  They are of course a major food for squirrels and for some birds, such as bluejays, who indeed are partially responsible for spreading oak forests in North America, and acorn woodpeckers, who will make a number of holes in a downed log and stuff acorns in them to save for later.  (It's always a problem when acorn woodpeckers decide someone's house is a good "downed log" to use for the purpose.)
 

 

But the most important consumer of acorns in the Middle Ages was the pig.  Pigs were left to run more or less wild for most of the year, fattening up in the fall on acorns.  Indeed, one of the "chores" of October was to knock acorns out of the oak trees so that the pigs could eat them.  This was followed by the "work" of November, which was catching the nice fat pigs, butchering them, and eating as much pork as one could hold and smoking and salting the rest.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on farm animals and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!