This Carcass breath'd

The Vanity of Female Pride: Being A True Relation of a Sow that Pig’d Seven Monstrous Pigs, at Highworth in Wiltshire, on Tuesday the Ninth of June 1691, all with High Top-Knots, one having the Face of a Woman, Four Ears, Four Tails and Eight Legs; the other Six being shaped much after the same Monstrous manner. London: Printed by G.C. at the Blue Ball in Thames-street, 1691.

The early modern population loved stories of freak births, both “true” and more obviously satirical, like this one. Most of these rested on the notion that things that women saw while pregnant could influence how their baby turned out (blaming mothers for the faults of their children has forever been a popular pastime…).

This text suggests that the sow, at the moment of conception, saw the maid tricked out in all the most frivolous female fashions of the day, thus resulting in piglets resembling ‘monstrous females’.