This included food, at least the food eaten by the new aristocracy. While the Anglo-Saxons called a certain species of ruminant sheep , the French called it mouton . Presumably, these transactions were generally between master and servant or, at best, customer and merchant. Hence, to this day, we speak of sheep when raising them on the farm but mutton when it is a commodity for sale or prepared for the table. By the way, mutton 's etymology is not known, though the Celtic languages possess cognates.
Sheep is of Teutonic origin.
Therefore, the cows which became food were called bouef , and that word eventually became beef . However, in this case, English chicken continued to be used to refer to the flesh of that bird in addition to poultry . Perhaps because chicken as food was more frequently available to the English-speaking lower classes than the other meats, as chicken is much less costly to raise and keep. While chickens may have been more easily obtained as food by the English lower classes than some other meats, pork had been a popular food throughout the British Isles for a very long time before the French arrived. One cannot discuss the word flitch without a passing mention of the Dunmow Flitch.