Thomas More and the Anthonie Pigs

As a boy, Thomas More attended St. Anthony's school, one of the best grammar schools in London.  It was adjacent to St. Anthony's church and a hospital served by a religious order whose patron was St. Anthony. This was not St. Anthony of Padua but St. Anthony the Abbot whose feast day is today (January 17). He is the patron of pigs and swineherds and is often depicted with a pig as his emblem.

The St. Anthony Hospitallers went about with bells soliciting alms.  Pigs given into their care wore bells and were the only hogs permitted to run loose in London.  These Tantony pigs (Tantony being a contraction of St. Anthony) often followed persons carrying greens and persisted until they were given some to eat. Thus the term "Tantony pig" came to be applied to persons easily led about.

According to Peter Ackroyd's biography of St. Thomas More:

"The pupils of More's school were known as 'Anthonie pigs', because the figure of that saint was customarily accompanied by one of those animals; the pig was once a symbol of the devil, but it had now been domesticated and St. Anthony himself was the patron saint of hogs as well as butchers.  Little is known about London pigs in the 15th century except that they were smaller than the present variety, but the connection between them and the hospital brothers of St. Anthony's was well established.  Those pigs which were too unhealthy or unwholesome to be fit for market were taken from the Stocks and were slit in the ear as a sign of their inedibility; it was customary for the proctor of St. Anthony's to tie a bell around the necks of such animals before letting them roam among the refuse and dunghills of the London streets. . . . they were fed by hand, much as Londoners would feed the kites and ravens; they were, like the birds, consumers of noisome waste.  And so the proverb was soon current, 'Such an one will follow such an one, and whine as it were an Anthony pig', which duly became attached to the schoolboys themselves. . . . If the pigs grew fat and healthy on their London diet, they were taken up by the authorities of St. Anthony's in order to be cooked and eaten."

For further reading about the Tantony pigs, visit The History Girls.

Text:    Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (Anchor Books, 1999), unpaginated Kindle edition.

Image:    St. Anthony Abbot by Piero di Cosimo, ca. 1480.  From Wikimedia Commons.  In the public domain.