ABSTRACT
Pigs were an ordinary part of the American urban landscape. Pigs wandered the streets of early New York City, just as they have wandered the streets of many pre-industrial cities, "prowling in grunting ferocity". Harriet’s lawyers conceded that keeping pigs in the city might produce some “few and slight inconveniences". Charles Rosenberg suggests that the end of New York street pig keeping came during the infamous cholera epidemic of 1849. Harriet’s lawyers and other defenders of pig keepers may have largely fantasized their vision of poor families dependent on hogs. A generation of distinguished works of social history have demonstrated the extent to which claims of custom formed both the property and the political practice of poor and laboring classes in early modem England and America. Analytic categories were easily overwhelmed by the descriptive uses to which the term “custom” might be put in legal practice.
