Although the French could not legally consume horseflesh until 1811 (when they realized that eating horsemeat had saved many lives during the Napoleonic campaigns), they have long eaten goat, not just because they liked the pungent flavour of its flesh but because goats were able to survive weather and blights that killed less hardy animals. In the early Middle Ages in France, people who slaughtered goats and sold their flesh were known as bouchiers, having derived their name from the French word hoc, meaning hegoat; the original butchers, therefore, sold only goat-meat, although by the time the word was adopted into English in the late thirteenth century it had so widened its meaning that a butcher could, with impunity, whack almost any sort of animal over the head. The source of the French hoc, likely a Celtic word, also developed through a different route into the word buck, applied to a male deer. The French hoc also gave Old English its original name for the male goat, bocca, which was paired with the name for the female, gat. By the fourteenth century, however, gat, which had evolved into goat, had come to mean both sexes of the animal, thus prompting the use of personal names, specifically billy-goat and nanny-goat, to distinguish the two sexes. The name for the young of goats, kid, first appeared in English at the beginning of the thirteenth century but was probably adopted from Old Norse centuries earlier when the Vikings were plundering the coastal villages of England. Kid was first used as a slang name for children in the seventeenth century and attained wide acceptance by the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
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Although the French could not legally consume horseflesh until 1811 (when they realized that eating horsemeat had saved many lives during the Napoleonic campaigns), they have long eaten goat, not just because they liked the pungent flavour of its flesh but because goats were able to survive weather and blights that killed less hardy animals. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b"],"yoast_head":"\n