Bred from oriental junglefowl which originated in India, Burma and South-East Asia. Over the years, selective breeding has vastly altered its form and colours, ranging from white to black with many variations in-between. Known as roosters in North America and Australia, the female of the species is the hen.
As urban society has spread and farming practices have changed, the waking of the whole community by a farmyard cockerel who crows at first light has all but ceased to exist. But not so long ago, when country dwellers had no watches or clocks, the farm worker’s day literally began at cockcrow. This use of cockerels as alarm clocks seems to have been universal in countries where they had been domesticated. In Abyssinia, for example, the Coptic Church used cockerels to rouse local villagers to worship.
Cockerels are associated with many different aspects of folklore, from augury to popular legend, and many of the ideas and stories about them go back to very early times. In Greece, for example, where the bird was first introduced around 700 BC, it became linked with several of the gods: it was dedicated to Apollo, the sun god, as people believed that its crowing heralded the sunrise and its red comb symbolized the sun; it was also sacred to Hermes, the winged messenger; and it was associated with Ares, the god of war, perhaps because of its reputation for vigilance and valour (one was even reputed to have put a lion to flight).
One story about Ares and a cockerel, however, casts the cockerel in a less flattering light. It tells how Ares planned to spend the night with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and ordered a cockerel to keep watch for Aphrodite’s husband, Hephaestus (the blacksmith god). Unfortunately, the bird fell asleep, and when Hephaestus came home unexpectedly he caught the couple together. Deciding to embarrass rather than punish them, Hephaestus bound them to the couch on which they lay and called the other gods to come and see how ridiculous they looked.
Perhaps because they have been so closely associated with vigilance, cockerels are often linked to augury and divination. The Greeks invented a method of forecasting in which grains of corn marked with letters of the alphabet were fed to cockerels. The order in which the birds pecked at them was carefully noted and used to make predictions. A more simplified version of this method was recorded in Roman times: unmarked grain was fed to a group of hens, known as sacred chickens, and if they fed so eagerly that some spilt from their beaks it was considered a good omen. So important were the predictions of sacred chickens that the Roman army carried a cage of the birds with it wherever it went, and even appointed an official sacred-chicken keeper, known as the pullarius.
In De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), Cicero tells a salutary tale about the great Roman general Publius Claudius (d. 249/246 BC), who foolishly disregarded the importance of these sacred birds:
Shall we remain unimpressed by the tale of the presumptuous conduct of Publius Claudius in the first Punic war, who, when the sacred chickens, on being let out of the coop, refused to feed, ordered them to be plunged into the water, that they might, as he said, drink, since they would not eat? He only ridiculed the gods in jest, but the mockery cost him many a tear (for his fleet was utterly routed), and brought a great disaster upon the Roman people.
Central and North European pagan beliefs link the cockerel with both the corn god and fertility. In Britain, the cockerel not only formed part of the harvest celebrations, but was also used in a number of the fertility ceremonies that took place at the time of the sowing of the crops. These tended to cluster around Shrove Tuesday and generally involved some sort of sacrifice. One example was ‘Cockshies’, when a cockerel was tied to a pole so that men could throw stones at it, rather like at a coconut shy. Whoever killed the bird was allowed to keep the carcass. The same rite was practised in France, while in Transylvania the cockerel would be cut up and mixed with the seed corn destined for the following year’s harvest. An even crueller ritual was one where a cockerel was buried in the ground with only its head protruding. As the harvesters cut the last stalks of corn, the cockerel’s head would be cut off.
As well as being linked with the harvest, the cockerel was also closely associated with medicine and healing, often being employed in rather bizarre rituals. For example, in Transylvania when a woman left her house for the first time after having a baby, a cockerel (or a hen, if the newborn child was a girl) would be cut in half and the two sections nailed to the doorpost. The idea was that magic properties from the bird would pass to the new mother and help her to regain her health and strength.
Many different species of birds were thought to carry stones with magical properties. Here are just a few:
The beneficial properties of the cockerel were noted by the Roman writer and naturalist Pliny the Elder. He suggested that stewing and eating red cockerel would provide protection against wild beasts and also grant extra strength. In a similar fashion, during the Middle Ages, a brew called ‘Cock Ale’, prepared from a boiled red cockerel and strong ale, was thought to make people stronger.
Many ancient pagan beliefs and customs were adopted and then adapted by Christians, often resulting in a strange amalgam of Christian and pagan rites. A good example of just such a meeting of cultures could once be found at Llandegla in Wales, where a well near the church was thought to have magic properties. Sufferers from ‘falling sickness’ (epilepsy) would bathe in the well, then walk round it three times while reciting the Lord’s prayer, before throwing in some money. Following this, a cockerel or a hen (depending on the sex of the sufferer) would be carried ceremoniously round the church and the well. Finally, the patient would take the bird and spend the night lying beneath the altar. At the end of the night, it was thought that the sickness would be transferred to the bird, and as recently as 1850 an onlooker reported that he had seen birds ‘staggering about’ after the ritual.
Another belief that certainly persisted until the nineteenth century was that to bury a cockerel under a church, or indeed any building, was a guaranteed way to ward off evil. But of course the cockerel’s main connection with Christianity comes from the New Testament account of Jesus’s crucifixion. The Gospel writers record that at the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that his closest disciple, Peter, would deny him three times before cockcrow. Peter duly did so, and, on the third occasion, as Luke records:
And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.
And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.
The weathervanes that can often be found on church towers and spires were traditionally made in the form of a cockerel to serve as a reminder to all believers that they must not deny their God.
The cockerel plays a significant role in traditional Islamic tales about Muhammad’s mir’aj, his travels through the seven heavens. It was said that he met a huge cockerel during his journey whose duty it was to wake every living creature with the exception of man. Muhammad was told that when this cockerel ceased to crow, the world would come to an end. There is an Arab saying that Allah will always listen to those who pray for pardon, to those who read the Koran, and to the cockerel, whose chant is divine melody.
The flood legend, inextricably linked for many in Judaeo-Christian cultures to the story of Noah and his ark, exists in various guises all over the world, and in Upper Burma the Singpho people tell a version in which cockerels play an important part. When the deluge came, a man named Pawpaw Nan-chaung and his sister Chang-hko saved themselves by building a large boat. They took with them nine cockerels and nine needles, which they threw overboard day after day to see if the waters had abated. On the ninth day, the cockerel was heard to crow and the needle was heard to hit the bottom, and so Pawpaw Nan-chaung and Chang-hko knew they would be able to find dry land.
Two rather strange beliefs used to exist in Scotland. One of these said that if a cockerel reached the age of thirteen it would lay an egg from which would hatch a cockatrice, a mythical creature which breathed fire and could cause harm merely by its glance. Cockatrices, also known as basilisks, feature in many medieval bestiaries, and it was frequently recorded that the weasel was the only animal that could harm them. The other Scottish belief was that if a cockerel crowed during the night, the owner should at once get up and feel the bird’s feet. If they felt cold, a death would soon occur, but if they were warm then good news was on the way. In both the West Country and Essex it was thought that should a cockerel crow at midnight, then the angel of death was flying over the house and death would soon come to someone inside it.