Its legacy is that, in modern English, we often have words for the meats we eat that are different from those for the animals they come from – beef for cow, pork for pig and mutton for sheep. This isn’t out of delicacy – an attempt to conceal what docile creature’s slaughter any given lunch has necessitated. It’s because, in the middle ages, only rich people ate meat and, after the Norman Conquest, all the rich people spoke French. The French words for the animals – boeuf, porc, mouton – turned into the words for the foods, and the English words came to refer to the animals under the only
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