Haute Cuisine
In 1066, as every English schoolboy knows, the Normans won the Battle of Hastings, and thereby conquered England. Along with their penchant for castles they also brought their language; Norman French. In the time-honored fashioned, to the victors went the spoils and the Normans were rewarded with land and villages. This left the Anglo-Saxon peasants almost literally out in the cold and greatly influenced the language of food. The livestock were tended to by the lower classes and as such kept their Germanic names, sheep, cows, bulls, and swine. Interestingly, the word cattle derives from the Norman chattel with the meaning of property as this was a means of gauging wealth. The Norman nobility eschewed the husbandry and confined themselves to the gourmandizing, thus we have pork (from porc), beef (from boeuf), and mutton (from mouton). Unfortunately the farmers couldn't afford such a diet and we still have the old Germanic words for the live animals. Venison derives from the Old French word for 'meat from large game' from the Latin venatus, to hunt; while deer is from the Germanic word for animal (not human), again because the nobility were the only ones allowed to hunt. Hen, chicken and fowl were all from Germanic words, maybe the peasants got to eat Buffalo wings? Poultry was from the Old French poulet, a young fowl and even now is used to describe the type of meat rather than a living entity. The word egg was originally a North England dialect word, probably brought over by the Danes or Vikings. Old English used the word eye, which is further confused by the fact that the Mercian and West Saxon word for eye was ege; which leaves us with the possibility that the Biblical saying is really an egg for an egg.