In Chapter II of Animal Farm, soon after the animals drive out Mr Jones, the pigs reduce the principles of Animalism to seven commandments and Snowball paints them on the end wall of the big barn. These seven commandments would now be inscribed on the wall; they would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after.
By the last chapter a single commandment is left on the wall. Here are the commandments as first painted and each change the novel records, in Orwell's words, with links to the chapters.
1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.
Read the passage in Chapter II
The pigs move into the farmhouse and sleep in its beds. Clover asks Muriel to read her the Fourth Commandment:
‘It says, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets”’ she announced finally.
Curiously enough, Clover had not remembered that the Fourth Commandment mentioned sheets; but as it was there on the wall, it must have done so.
After the executions at the end of Chapter VII, when the animals who confessed to plotting with Snowball are put to death, Muriel reads the Sixth Commandment to Clover:
It ran: ‘No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.’ Somehow or other the last two words had slipped out of the animals’ memory.
The pigs find a case of whisky in the farmhouse cellars. One night the animals are woken by a crash under the wall of the commandments:
Squealer, temporarily stunned, was sprawling beside it, and near at hand there lay a lantern, a paintbrush and an overturned pot of white paint.
Actually the Commandment read: ‘No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.’
Years later Clover, whose sight is failing, asks Benjamin to read the wall to her:
There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL
THAN OTHERS.
The commandments on two legs, four legs and clothes are never reworded: by Chapter X they are simply gone from the wall with the rest, while the pigs walk on their hind legs, dress in Mr Jones's clothes and drink with the neighbouring farmers.
It was a pig walking on his hind legs.
...no, not even when the pigs took Mr Jones's clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on, Napoleon himself appearing in a black coat, ratcatcher breeches and leather leggings...
In Chapter III the stupider animals cannot learn the Seven Commandments by heart:
After much thought Snowball declared that the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’.
In Chapter X, after Squealer has kept the sheep apart for a week teaching them a new song, for which privacy was needed
, the pigs come out walking on their hind legs and the sheep burst out:
‘Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better! Four legs good, two legs better!’
Chapter by chapter: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X - or the whole novel on one page.
‘Animal Farm: A Fairy Story’: [Index]