Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200�1540 by Christopher Dyer;

Author:Christopher Dyer; [Dyer, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192586537
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Cattle

The number of cattle that could be kept by each yardland on the commons was supposedly limited by stints which allowed the tenant between four and nine. The largest number recorded was twelve. A cottager might have been able to keep a cow. Figures for the cattle owned by individuals are based on inventories or lists of possessions of felons or tenants who had gone absent. They show that more substantial tenants owned between four and twelve cattle. Poorer people, even occasionally someone without a tenancy of land, could own a cow. A village’s cattle, gathered together to graze in the care of the common herdsman, could reach a formidable total, so that sixty assembled on Lower Swell’s fields in 1401. In 1419 two herdsmen were required to supervise the 140 beasts at Charlton (Worcestershire). 26

Oxen, castrated males that had reached the age of three years, were the essential beasts of burden hauling ploughs, heavy wains, and harrows in the early thirteenth century, but mainly ploughs in subsequent centuries. The oxen were yoked in pairs, and a holding often owned only two or four of them. A remarkably generous stint at Moor (Worcestershire) in 1436 suggests that a yardland holding might have between six and eight oxen (and some ‘beasts’ as well). 27 Normally a plough needed a six- or eight-ox team, and they would be assembled by bringing together animals from at least two or three holdings. Most yardland and half-yardland holdings owned a plough (the wooden implement with iron fittings) and one, two or three oxen, and smaller holdings might also have one ox. In the late fourteenth-century a tenant with ‘a messuage and a croft’ and another having ‘two messuages and two crofts’ on the Winchcomb Abbey estate, and a quarter-yardlander and a holding with 6 acres at Cleeve Prior, each owned an ox. 28 Such holdings lacked a plough, so the smallholder’s ox became part of a composite team made up of animals from other tenants. The contributors would also share the labour, so the smallholder could act on a number of days as one of the two ploughmen. As part of the collective effort, he or she would be entitled to enough days’ ploughing to cultivate the few acres of the smallholding, though of course the plough team would spend the most time working on the larger holdings. Such arrangements are implied by the Brimpsfield survey of 1299 with which Chapter 3 began. It assumed (with optimism) that a half-yardland would own four oxen and a quarter-yardland two. It does not state that two, three, or four such tenants should pool their assets to create eight-ox teams, but this would have been the intention. The Brimpsfield document, reflecting the lord’s perspective, is only concerned with teams ploughing the lord’s demesne, but the same combination of plough beasts could have been applied to the cultivation of the tenants’ holdings (see ‘Farming and methods and techniques’ in Chapter 6). 29

The values put on peasant oxen suggests their quality.

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