Hi there!
How are you? Hope in pink condition…
I am in charge of a wonderfully interesting book about racial oppression and the invention of race… There are scores of references to cultural practices or realities of 17th-Century Angloamerican continental colonies which are far removed from any of my knowledges.
This is one:



"With one exception, the first use found [of the term "free Negro" in court records] was in a record of hog marks dated 29 April 1699 (“Cattle and Hog Marks, 1665–1707,” pages which somehow got inserted at the back of Northampton County Records, 1651–54, Virginia State Archives, Richmond"

What's that? The act of marking the hogs with a hot poke, as we see with cattle in the films…? A "territory" (mark) of hogs? An ensemble of signs in the soil, trees, etc. that reveal the presence of wild hogs in a rural area?

I simply do not know what to do with those hog marks, to be honest. I am sure you can explain it to mem as you have always done…  

Thanks a lot in advance

CM

I think they almost certainly are, just as you suggest, marks to identify the ownership of stock animals, which would be particularly important with pigs as they were often left to forage in commonly-owned woods and pastures alongside those owned by other villagers. Moreover I believe the law in colonial North America was the reverse of that in England: in the colonies all crop fields were required to be fenced to keep foraging stock out; while back in England domesticated animals were obliged to be fenced in, so that they didn't wander into arable fields. Pigs, unlike cattle, were never usually branded with a hot iron as their skin is too thin and sensitive. These days pigs are usually marked by tattoos or by plastic ear tags but I think in the past they were often marked by having a certain number of notches or holes clipped into their ears and sometimes with tassles of coloured wool tied through these holes. In England it was quite common to have these ownership marks - whether brand-marks on cattle, ear-clip mark on sheep and pigs, or notch-marks on the bills of geese and swans etc - recorded in local court records, simply to register ownership as an aid in the return of any lost stock or to find those liable if the wandering stock had caused damage.

I see. It now seems perfectly logical… And it's good to know about the frailty of the skin of these animals. I thank you a lot for your help, Meles meles.

Take care,

CM

You, or the author you're citing, might be victims of the dreaded microfilm transposition plague that affects all unwitting historians from time to time. The county records of Virginia were all archived on microfiche and made available to researchers back in the 1970s, and in recent times these fiche records have been scanned to make digital versions, leading to some interesting - if misleading - results.

Cattle and Hog markets have been a matter of record for Virginia counties since colonial times. These days the markets are licensed from Richmond and still allocated to individual counties, the Rockingham market (now a county fair) still the largest one in the state, with Fredericksburg Cattle, Hog and Poultry market a close second. The producers, sales, prices and auction activity from these markets are still dutifully recorded and submitted to the state as part of that license agreement.

MM could be absolutely correct about marking the swine - whatever about when they're being raised it certainly makes sense too when they turn up in the market to have them marked in some way. However I have a feeling if you ask to look at the transcript of the Northampton County Records from the period in question (which you can do by mailing the Archive people and paying a small fee) the solution to the mystery might well be just a humble typo.

So markets and not marks? Please take into account there are two occorrences of Hog Marks in the same text, one in the records and the other in the article title… You're maybe right, but my author is writing in the 70s (he first published his "Invention of race" back in 1994, but that was a 20 years effort…).

Thanks a lot anyway. I'll keep eye opened…

Try reading 70s fiche, as your author also had to.

Too much for a humble piecework translator with no time to spare… But thanks anyway nordmann.