This article, written in collaboration with zooarchaeologist Richard Thomas (University of Leicester), outlines some of the ways in which human care for domestic animals might be traced in the early modern period. Looking at printed husbandry manuals, wills and bone remains, it shows the contradiction inherent in animal care in the period: animals were both individualised and simply commodities for use

Fudge, Erica

Thomas, Richard

English

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Strathprints Institutional RepositoryFudge, Erica and Thomas, Richard (2012) Visiting your troops of cattle. History Today, 62 (12). pp.37-41. ISSN 0018-2753Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde.Copyright c© and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authorsand/or other copyright owners. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for anyprofitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (http://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or study, educational, ornot-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to Strathprints administrator:mailto:strathprints@strath.ac.ukhttp://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/Animals, Books and Boneswww.historytoday.com December 2012 | HistoryToday 37Erica Fudge and Richard Thomas explore relationships between people and their domesticanimals in early modern England and how new types of archaeological evidence are sheddingfresh light on one of the most important aspects of life in this period.Visiting Your Troopsof CattleIn early modern England one relationship wasvital to the economic and dietary wellbeing ofmost families: that between people and theiranimals. Indeed local and national economicstability was reliant on the presence of horses, cows,sheep, pigs and poultry. This dependence can bemeasured in terms of the need for a large amount ofmeat in the diet of those who worked the land; thedemand for raw materials, such as hides, bones andfats, for craft and industry; the importance of animalmanure to the fertility of the soil; and the necessarypower of animals to move goods and support agricul-ture through the pulling of equipment, such asploughs and harrows. The period 1500-1700 also marks a watershed inthe nature of farming in England. It witnessed adecline in the number of smallholdings, the emer-gence of large farms and a consequent growth in herdsize, as well as increasing specialisation and commer-cialisation of husbandry. Arguably it is over this timethat the system of intensive agriculture emerged that isfamiliar in much of the West today. For this reason thestudy of animal care has a particular resonance.However, while economic and agricultural histo-rians have explored the general shifts in human-live-stock husbandry, the close connections betweenhumans and animals have received almost no atten-tion. One area where it is possible to gain an insightinto such relationships is in the matter of animalhealthcare and wellbeing. The moments when therelationship shifts from the normal to the fraught –such as when a healthy animal ceases to be able tofulfil its role in the domestic economy – provideparticular insight into people’s attitudes to theirbeasts. Yet in the period of early modern agriculture,when many of those working with animals did not, orcould not, document their practices, the study of live-stock care requires an imaginative approach toresearch to build the fullest possible picture. As weshall see here different types of evidence – books, willsand bones – offer different clues about human/animalrelationships. Husbandry manuals by their nature areaddressed to a general readership and provide an ideaof a wide-ranging, indirect engagement with animals;wills reveal people’s direct relationships with specificFrontispiece to The Epitome of the Whole Art of Husbandryby Joseph Blagrave, publishedin 1675, which offered comprehensive information on managing a farm, good agriculturalpractice and the care of oxen, horses, cattle, sheep and swine, identifying their diseasesand supplying remedies.Animals, Books and Bones38 HistoryToday | December 2012 www.historytoday.comanimals; while bone remains unearthed duringarchaeological excavations are evidence of the animalsthemselves. These can reveal both general trends andinsight into the lives of individual beasts. If any sheep be scabbedThe historian Louise Hill Curth has shown how earlymodern animal healthcare regimes can be found in arange of texts: in almanacs, household manuals andspecialist works. Many of the techniques outlined inthese are likely to be products of an oral culture inwhich knowledge was passed on through practice,eventually finding its way into print. For example,John Crawshey, author of The Countrymans Instructor(1636), emphasises that ‘it is not scholarship thatbrought me to the knowledge of what I profess’, but‘my own experience’ and the ‘testimony of you mygood friends’. Other ideas in the period were drawnfrom rediscovered classical scholarship on agriculture,including works by Columella and Virgil. Hands-on experience plays a key role in these earlyprinted texts, as evident in John Fitzherbert’s 1523Book of Husbandry, in which he offers a range of prac-tical advice, including to the sheep farmer. He beginsby outlining how to spot a problem: ‘If any sheep bescabbed, the shepherd may perceive it by the biting,rubbing, or scratching with his horn, and mostcommonly the wool will rise, and be thin or bare inthat place.’ The remedy Fitzherbert offers for suchscabs is ‘tar’, a substance made of oil and goose orcapon grease, which should be rubbed onto the scab.An alternative, cheaper remedy is given to ‘salve poormen’s sheep’. This is made from a mixture of easilyavailable plants – ‘broom, crops, leaves, blossoms’ –which should be chopped up, boiled in 20 gallons ofwater and then added to 2lbs of ‘sheep suet molten ... abottle of old piss, and as much brine made with salt’.This should then be strained through a cloth. Fitzher-bert adds: ‘if your sheep be new clipped, make [thesalve] luke-warm, and then wash your sheep there-with’. The mixture would also, apparently, rid thesheep of lice and cure temporary blindness.Fitzherbert also offers advice on plants that arepoisonous, pastures that are bad for animal health andon ‘hunger-rot ... the worst rot that can be’. The speci-ficity and detail of his advice is clear, but this seems toget lost in some of the later animal manuals in whichthe reader is expected to recognise symptoms ofdisease and use a book simply to look up a cure. So inThe first Book of Cattell (1596) Leonard Mascall lists anumber of reasons for ‘swelling’ in cows: because of‘abundance of blood’, the eating of a ‘Tine-worm’ and‘costiveness’ (constipation). For each cause a differentcure is recommended: the first begins with chasing thecow up and down and then pricking its tongue; thesecond involves feeding the animal urine mixed withsalt; the last also suggests chasing the animal up anddown, which if that fails to bring about a bowel move-ment should be followed by manual excavation of thedung. No explanation is given as to how to determinethe cause of the swelling or to differentiate the symp-toms in order to administer the right cure. It seemsthat this early advice is addressed to those withexisting knowledge, information that is frequently leftunstated. These books represent the beginnings of a printedsystematisation of animal healthcare. But who theywere aimed at, when a majority of those who workedwith beasts remained illiterate, is unclear: there was norecognised animal care profession until the late 18thcentury when the first veterinary colleges were estab-lished across Europe. John Crawshey’s ‘good friends’most probably passed on their knowledge verbally, butwhether they could read their own words in print wecannot know. My red pied bullockIf the issue of literacy is a problem in terms of thereadership of the healthcare manuals it is less so whenwills are considered, as such documents were oftenJohn Fitzherbert’s Boke ofHusbandrywas firstpublished in 1523, repro-ducing on its titlepage awoodcut of a pair of oxenyoked to a plough.This little pig ...Illustration to the openingchapter of The Countryman’s Jewel or The Government of cattel, a 17th-century edition ofLeonard Mascall’s three-volume guide tohusbandry.Animals, Books and Boneswww.historytoday.comwritten by a scribe on behalf of the testator. Whenmentioned in wills animals are present, of course, asvaluable goods and are often represented in thesimplest terms, merely revealing that they were ownedby the testator: ‘my two cows’, ‘my six sheep’ etc. Some-times a little more description is included. Forexample wills dating from the early 17th century inthe Essex Record Office contain references to ‘my baynag’, ‘my red bullock’, ‘my black cow’, ‘one little hog’,‘my red pied bullock with a star in the forehead’. Occasionally more detail is given revealing a muchstronger sense of the relationship between a testatorand his animals. Thus the 1620 will of the yeomanChristopher Fuller from West Bergholt in Essexincludes the following bequests:Item I give unto Christopher Fuller my oldest son all myteam of horses with my cart, wheels, plough and chains,horse harnesses both for cart and plough and cart ropes,Item I give more unto him my branded cow, my littleblack northern cow and my cow called Shaler, one heiferof a year old one weanell calf, my best sow with her pigsand two shots [young pigs] ... I give unto William Fullermy younger son my old great branded cow, 2 year oldsteers, one heifer of a year old, two weanell calves, a sowwith pigs and two shots ... I give unto Alice my daughtermy great black northern cow and one heifer that came ofmy little northern cow, one weanell cow calf The clarity of the descriptions of more than 25animals in Fuller’s will reveals two things: his atten-tiveness to his livestock and his desire to ensure thatspecific animals are given to the right people. Theseanimals are commodities but they are also individu-alised. Both their economic value and the personal rela-tionships between humans and animals would haveencouraged owners to attend to their physical care. Thisis underscored, perhaps, in Leonard Mascall advice: ‘Yemust often oversee and visit your troops of cattle,against any infirmity, that may daily hap.’ The ability tospot a problem with an animal early on, such as a lameor a stoop, could be a matter of life or death. As WilliamPoole noted in 1650 it was especially necessary ‘for thepoorer sort of people, who having but one beast, theloss thereof to them, is more than the loss of many to arich man’. The age of animals might indicate a long workinglife but also that they had been well cared for. Thus in1632 when the widow Johan Ward of Earls Colne inEssex left her grandson Francis ‘two young sheep andan old sheep with two lambs’, she was also testifying tosuccessful management of her animals. In this periodsheep were valued for their wool rather than theirmeat and so could live for eight years or more. Deathbefore this time was a result of lack of care. In thiscontext the appearance of a cough would occasion aswift response. The fear of losing an animal and the labour thatmight be taken to avoid it is hinted at in the 1625 willof Roger Hull of Great Maplestead. Hull bequeathedtwo named horses – Clubb and Jack – a bullock, ‘mynorthern cow’, ‘my old cow’ and, finally, ‘my cow withthe one eye’. Mascall cautioned that the ‘eye of a beastis tender and is a principal member, and soon may behurt diverse ways’. These might include by ‘pinkeye’,toxin poisoning, vitamin A deficiency or by accident.Whatever the cause it is certain that Roger Hull’sone-eyed cow must have received careful attentionDecember 2012 | HistoryToday 39The 16th-century BradfordTable Carpet shows scenesof English rural life and theeveryday interactionsbetween man and animal.  www.historytoday.com40 HistoryToday | December 2012Animals, Books and Boneseither throughout its life or in response to a partic-ular injury. The animal’s presence in the will marksits value to Hull and so is itself a record of its care.Cover him well with earthAnimal bones are among the most common archaeo-logical finds and their study can help explain manyways in which people and animals interacted in thepast. Most excavated bones represent the rubbish leftbehind from butchery and food consumption (thebulk of the meat consumed in the early modernperiod came from cattle, sheep and to a lesser extentpigs and poultry). But careful analysis can also shedlight on husbandry regimes, disease and injury.However the study of pathology in dry bone speci-mens is not easy as many diseases and injuries onlyaffect soft tissues so do not leave a trace. With theexception of acute trauma, such as bone breakage, it isusually only long-standing (chronic) diseases andinjuries that affect the skeleton, because in cases wherethe animal’s immune system overcomes the disease orthe animal dies fairly rapidly the skeleton is unaffected.Additionally, animal bones found on archaeologicalsites are typically fragmentary (partly because theyoften represent butchered remains), making it almostimpossible to determine whether bones come from thesame animal. This is a problem for establishing factsabout health because the diagnosis of disease relies notonly upon the appearance of pathologies, but alsoupon their location in the body. Despite these difficul-ties certain diseases and injuries appear with someregularity in bones and these provide a direct insightinto the ways in which people were managing theiranimals. For example – for many regions of Englandcattle provided the primary source of traction power.Because an ox did not evolve to pull agricultural equip-ment such activities would place stress on its skeleton,which would result in bone alterations visible toarchaeologists. Analysis of cattle foot-bones at somesites shows a decline of stress indicators, which mayreflect a decrease in their use for traction and thegrowing tendency to slaughter such animals at anearlier age for meat. Yet such remains could also indi-cate a simultaneous improvement in the healthcare oftraction animals.Occasionally we find the remains of skeletons ofanimals with clear evidence of systemic bone infec-tion. An example is provided by a partial lambskeleton from a site in Cambridgeshire, buried in adiscrete pit. Such a practice echoes the advice of earlymodern writers like Mascall, who urged the rapiddisposal of infected animals to prevent the spread ofcontagion to healthy beasts: The remedies are, ye shall flay the beast that is so dead,and bury him in a deep pit, and cover him well withearth, that no dogs can come to the carrion. For so manybeasts as do smell thereof, are like to be infected with thesame disease.But the absence of particular pathologies is sometimesas revealing as those that are present. Healed long-bone fractures in domestic livestock are incrediblyrare. This may reflect the low chance of survival forsuch animals. Yet knowledge about fracture repairexisted, as Mascall reveals: To help any bone of a beast that is broken, ye must castand bind his legs, and then feel softly how the bones dolie, then shall ye cause that limb to be holden outstraight, and with your two hands, ye shall stroke softlyup and down, and then softly put each bone into hisright place again. Then in holding the limb straight, feelif all the said bones be well bolstered round about, andthen splinted thereon and well lapped, and let it soremain for the space of nine days.Driving animals toLondon’s Eastcheap Marketpast carcasses for sale,from A Caveatt for the Cittyof London, 1598.Monstrous Acts:Bestiality in EarlyModern EuropeErica Fudge explores a shift inattitudes towards bestiality inthe 16th century and how thisimpinged on wider issuesconcerning human status.www.historytoday.com/archiveFrom the Archivewww.historytoday.comThe absence of healed injuries in the archaeologicalremains strongly suggests that such animals wereslaughtered before healing could take place. As in thecase of the buried lamb, economic pragmatism andanimal care may have been closely entangled.But the archaeological record also shows thatanimals were not always well cared for. Defleshingmarks on the bones of some 15 horses dumped in aderelict cellar at Dudley Castle in the West Midlandssometime around 1700 indicate they had been knack-ered for their skins and their flesh recycled for dogfood. Many of these horse bones also displayedpathology. Advanced joint disease was common andwas included in bones of the hock (mid-leg) jointwhich had become so arthritic that they had fusedtogether (a condition known as spavin), which wouldhave rendered the animal lame. In one horse infectionhad set in within one of the lower leg bones, mostprobably following a traumatic injury to the overlyingskin. This infection had developed to such an extentthat the pressure of the pus had built up in the centreof the bone until it eventually erupted leading to anopen drain of infectious fluid through the leg. Of course, it is not always possible to tell frombones whether efforts were made to heal problems.But bone spavin is one condition for which attemptsto cure might potentially be visible on bone remainsand advice on cures appear frequently in early farriertexts. These usually involve the application of causticblisters (a corrosive substance) or mechanical meansto remove excessive bone growth. For example, in1687, G.L. recommended:Take a penknife and lay open the skin about the bonyexcrescence; and having a chisel or knife for thatpurpose, strike off or pare away the bone till you come asnear as may be to the quick; then having ready a plasterof bees-wax and verdigris well mixed by melting, bind iton, but so that it may not afflict the vein, and renew itevery other day for the space of a week.However, no such evidence exists on the horse bonesat Dudley Castle and the general impression gainedfrom these remains is of a group of horses that hadbeen worked exceptionally hard in life and thenexploited in death before being unceremoniouslydumped in an abandoned building. The picture emerging from this collaborativeapproach to understanding early modern human-animal relations is itself apparently contradictory.Animals were clearly individualised and they were alsoeconomically valuable assets. Yet these assets couldhave names or be worked with little consideration forthe health consequences resulting from their labourwhen those consequences did not interfere withproductivity.Animals, Books and BonesAbove: a horse metacarpalshowing two drainingsinuses, where pus gath-ered following an infection,and new bone formation.Right: the frontispiece to John Crawshey’s The Countryman’s Instructoridentifies parts of a horse’sbody and the diseaseslikely to afflict it.December 2012 | HistoryToday 41Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University ofStrathclyde; Richard Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology atthe University of Leicester.Further ReadingFor more articles on this subject visit www.historytoday.comJohn Baker and Don Brothwell, Animal Diseases in Archaeology(Academic Press, 1980).Louise Hill Curth, The Care of Brute Beasts: A Social and CulturalHistory of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England (Brill, 2010).Craig Muldrew, Food, Energy and the Creation of Industriousness:Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550-1780(Cambridge University Press, 2011).Terry O’Connor, The Archaeology of Animal Bones(Sutton Publishing, 2000). 

Visiting your troops of cattle

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