Visiting Your Troops of Cattle

2021

Simple Summary The population of medieval England (AD 400–1400) was largely employed in farming-related activities. Cattle were crucial as providers of power as well as milk, meat, and hides and were valued economically and socially. From the mid-seventh century, cattle husbandry increasingly relied on draught cattle for arable production and agricultural tasks such as ploughing, hauling, and carting. Analysis of cattle bones from archaeological sites permits the reconstruction of herd demographics and assessment of the use of cattle for traction through analysis of age and sex profiles, and the presence and severity of pathological and sub-pathological changes to the lower limb bones of cattle. When combined with ethnographic studies and historical documents, it is possible to perceive how attitudes to cattle have changed over time. By integrating multiple lines of evidence (archaeological, ethnographic, and historical), this study reveals how the value of cattle changed over time ...

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2018

Although many historians have extensively discussed the agricultural history of England between the Late Middle Ages and the Modern Era, this period of crucial changes has received less attention by archaeologists. In this paper, zooarchaeological evidence dated between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period is analysed to investigate changes in animal husbandry during the 'long' sixteenth century. The size and shape of the main domestic animals (cattle, sheep, pig and chicken) is explored through biometrical data and discussed in line with evidence of taxonomic frequencies, ageing and sex ratios. Data from 12 sites with relevant chronologies and located in different areas of the country are considered. The results show that, although a remarkable size increase of animals occurred in England throughout the post-medieval period, much of this improvement occurred as early as the sixteenth century. The nature and causes of such improvement are discussed, with the aim of understanding the development of Early Modern farming and the foundations of the so-called Agricultural Revolution.

Theory, Culture and Society, 2013

This article is both a work of historical reconstruction and a theoretical intervention. It looks at some influential contemporary accounts of human-animal relations and outlines a body of ideas from the 17th century that challenges what is presented as representative of the past in posthumanist thinking. Indeed, this article argues that this alternative past is much more in keeping with the shifts that posthumanist ideas mark in their departure from humanism. Taking a journey through ways of thinking that will, perhaps, be unfamiliar, the revised vision of human-animal relations outlined here emerges not from a history of philosophy but from an archival study of people’s relationships with and understandings of their livestock in early modern England. At stake are conceptions of who we are and who we might have been, and the relation between those two, and the livestock on 17th-century smallholdings are our guides.

Dogs, buffalo, elephants, and birds were tamed in India between 6000 and 4500 BC. There are several examples of cattle husbandry in India dating back to the Rigvedic period (1500-1000 B.C), and the Aryans placed a strong focus on the preservation of cows. As the Vedic culture advanced and fresh literary works appeared, we learned about animal diseases and their treatments from the Atharvaveda. When Buddhism first appeared in India, its followers placed a strong focus on nonviolence as Buddha himself was a great defender of all the species of animals and birds. Ashoka the Great built the first known animal hospital in the history of the world. The present-day Veterinary Council of India adopted its insignia, the sculpture of a bull and a part of the text from the edicts of emperor Asoka. From ancient to medieval times cattle husbandry and animal keeping have a very extensive history. This study attempts to examine the characteristics of animal keeping, their diseases and knowledge of animal breeding as experienced in the Persian treatise written in the medieval period.

Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2019

Although many historians have extensively discussed the agricultural history of England between the Late Middle Ages and the Modern Era, this period of crucial changes has received less attention by archaeologists. In this paper, zooarchaeological evidence dated between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period is analysed to investigate changes in animal husbandry during the 'long' sixteenth century. The size and shape of the main domestic animals (cattle, sheep, pig and chicken) is explored through biometrical data and discussed in line with evidence of taxonomic frequencies, ageing and sex ratios. Data from 12 sites with relevant chronologies and located in different areas of the country are considered. The results show that, although a remarkable size increase of animals occurred in England throughout the post-medieval period, much of this improvement occurred as early as the sixteenth century. The nature and causes of such improvement are discussed, with the aim of understanding the development of Early Modern farming and the foundations of the so-called Agricultural Revolution.

As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different aspect of animal reproduction: desire. Spurred by changing meat markets in out-of-season lamb and expanding property structures that created sex-segregated herds, shepherds, farmers, and agricultural writers worked to provoke the seasonally dependent desires of ewes by feeding them aphrodisiac foods, changing the ways that sex was staged, and creating landscapes of “artificial” grass timed to help ewes escape the constraints of the seasons. Their efforts draw our attention to a broader range of bodily experts, from physicians, to professional feeders, to Linnaean botanists, who were interested in the ways that landscapes could be made to shape bodies. The essay suggests that these forms of environmental control, which still undergird capitalist farming, have left significant modern traces on both knowledge and landscapes and offer a rich and relatively untapped source of bodily knowledge.

2005

The determination of exploitation patterns of animals by past cultures is one of the unequivocal functions of zooarchaeology (Zimmerman Holt 1996). The domestication of Bos primigenius is certainly one of the most significant animal exploitations to have occurred in human history, and can be considered one of the defining moments in prehistoric man’s taming of nature (Davis & Dent 1966: 65-66); this statement is made without the intention of detracting from other advances in agricultural development or animal husbandry. However, it would be a mistake not to recognise the significance of cattle domestication as being of paramount importance to the establishment of a sustained meat supply for early human societies and throughout history.

Social History of Medicine, 2017

Non-academically trained practitioners of early modern veterinary medicine are still commonly described in decidedly unflattering terms; their practices often conceived of as folkloristic or otherwise static and unchanging. This article examines a group of such veterinary practitioners in the county of Flanders, known as cow masters. It argues that the medicine they practised was theoretically sophisticated and in line with contemporary mainstream medicine, while they made use of a variety of newly available chemical and exotic remedies. It is postulated that these newer remedies augmented the market for specialised practitioners, which has important implications for the history of medicine as a whole.

cite from the published version.