Why so many church steeples are topped by a rooster
The cockerel perched on countless church spires is a Bible reference. It recalls the rooster that crowed after Peter denied Jesus three times, and a ninth-century pope reportedly ordered one onto every steeple. Weather vanes themselves are far older, though: a Babylonian fable mentions people consulting one for the wind roughly 3,600 years ago.
Pope Gregory I, at the end of the sixth century, called the cockerel the fittest emblem of the faith because it belonged to Saint Peter. Leo IV put a weathercock on Old Saint Peter's in Rome in the 800s, and Nicholas I then required the bird on steeples everywhere. The Bayeux Tapestry even shows a man fixing one to Westminster Abbey. Not everyone accepts the tidy story: some see the bird as a symbol of clergy summoning people to prayer, and another theory traces it to a Gothic sun emblem. A few London churches broke ranks, with a key atop St Peter upon Cornhill and a gridiron for Saint Lawrence.
Other cultures had their own versions. Athens' Tower of the Winds, built around 50 BC, carried a bronze Triton that swung with the breeze above carvings of eight wind gods. Chinese military records from the Three Kingdoms era called the device five ounces, after the weight of its materials, and by the third century Chinese vanes took the form of birds. Vikings made gilded vanes for longships and later moved them onto churches. The oldest surviving rooster-shaped one, the Gallo di Ramperto, dates from 820 and sits in a museum in Brescia.
Reading one correctly takes care: in a decent wind, the arrowhead or beak points toward where the wind is coming from, not where it is going. The Admiralty in London once linked its rooftop vane to a dial in the boardroom so naval officers could check the wind mid-meeting, an early step toward today's remote-reading instruments that pair a vane with a speed gauge.
Size contests persist. Guinness credits a sherry advertisement in Jerez as the largest, while Whitehorse in Yukon mounts a retired DC-3 aircraft that swivels in a wind of just 5 knots and helps pilots judge conditions. The word has a political sting as well; Quebec's National Assembly banned calling a member a weather vane.
Source: Weather vane
