U_Stormcrow
Crossing the Road
And didn't live long. People like to romanticize the past, but forget that nobody expected a chicken to live past a couple of years. Males were eaten straight away, except for the 1 designated flock rooster, and the females were cycled out regularly past their prime. Whatever nutritional deficiencies they had, didn't have time to develop into full blown problems, because by year 2 the hen was soup. I know this because I've lived it. We had a fresh round of chicks every spring on the farm. When they came into lay, they replaced the old layers, and the old layers were eaten or frozen before their second winter (to avoid feeding freeloaders during the slow winter period). Every year, for generations, that's just how things were done. Nobody cared what the chickens ate, because they just had to live and lay for about a year and a half before being butchered for meat to feed the family.
If you want to get more than that out of your chickens, you'll need to invest more, too.
I'm largely living this now, by choice. But with the addition of good commercial feed. Its one of the reasons I'm less concerned about the calcium content of my mix on my roosters - most will be on the table before they develop gross clinical signs of too much calcium, and my constant culling ensures I have a pretty decent handle on how my flock is doing, nutritionally - because I can see the organs, touch the meat, get a sense of the fat levels, bone structure, etc in ways that are very hard (impossible for me) to do with any sort of external inspection.
If I wanted, I could inspect tail feathers for other signs of stress, once the birds aren't using them. That's "a bit much", even for me.
and on that happy thought - I need to cull some.