Byways in British Archaeology

An easy-going reader, with no taste for agricultural inquiries, might admire the above picturesque lines and then pass on, counting as a trifle what is really a most important feature of early social history—the use of the ox as a beast of draught. Let us pursue the question a little, for, although the spectacle described was apparently commonplace to the poet, yet, to us, a ploughing ox is undoubtedly a rarity. Some two or three teams in Sussex, perchance a similar number in Dorset, and, it may be, an odd team in the West Country, seem to complete the census of working oxen.

By means of personal investigations made in various counties, and by the collection of scattered particulars given in certain periodicals, I have endeavoured to determine at what dates the bullock was discarded as a draught animal. It may be well to give an epitome of the results, premising that what is now an exceptional occurrence was, at no remote period, the general rule, just as it is still the rule in the agricultural districts of Germany, Austria, and Southern France, not to speak of such distant lands as Cape Colony and Ceylon.

Commencing with the “county of broad acres,” we find that Arthur Young speaks of having seen many oxen in harness between York and Beverley in the year 1768. Waggons were drawn by two oxen and two horses; for tillage, oxen alone were deemed more serviceable[1244]. A little later, in 1788, Marshall gives a somewhat different testimony. Oxen were still preferred for drawing farm carriages and timber waggons along the roads in the Vale of Pickering, but not a single ox was left at field work[1245]. Near Whitby, however, bullocks were attached to the plough so late as 1826[1246], and for hauling stones from the quarry, in 1858[1247]. A single team was still engaged in quarry work in 1895[1248].

Coming to the neighbouring county of Lincoln, draught oxen were still employed near Brigg in 1853[1249], and five years later the writer’s father saw a plough-team in regular work at North (or Nun) Ormsby, near Louth. The particulars from the Midlands touch more recent times. For Stratford-on-Avon the last recorded year is 1895[1250]. A friend noticed a team at work near Oxford, in 1881, and I have a record from Helmdon (Northants), for 1902. At Hockliffe, near Luton, in Bedfordshire, oxen were constantly employed by an eccentric farmer who died so recently as 1909. The feature was, however, admittedly an anachronism: the farmer in question would not use machinery, and was, in other respects, a follower of old-world customs.

The West Country supplies records for the year 1895; in the Vale of Pewsey it is asserted that more ox-teams than horse-teams were seen at the plough in that year, though the ox was not used for road-work. In 1909 I could not find a single team; inquiries showed that the year 1897 or 1898 must have marked the change over, so that either there must have been an abrupt reversal of custom, or, more probably, the statement with respect to the year 1895 was incorrect. There, as in Dorset, red and white Herefords represented the breed most in favour[1251]. An eye-witness reports a team from East Ilsley (Berks.), for 1906. During the years 1887-8, I occasionally saw oxen ploughing on the Cotswolds, and, a few years previously, Devonshire farmers still chose bullocks for heavy land.

Labouring oxen were not uncommon in Hampshire and Dorsetshire about twenty years ago. Two oxen were yoked to the plough, while, to increase the speed, a horse was attached as leader. The case of Essex is peculiar. One is bound to believe that bullock labour was formerly as common in that county as elsewhere, nevertheless Arthur Young informs us that the Essex farmers of the eighteenth century ridiculed Lord Clare’s introduction of oxen to his estate at Braintree. It was only when the experiment resulted in a great saving of money as compared with the general expenditure on horse-labour that the example was reluctantly copied. Young says that the importation of the oxen from Gloucestershire, where Lord Clare had purchased them “with all their geers,” was “a stroke of agriculture most unusual in Essex.” On one occasion, a waggon drawn by horses became “sett” in the village. The horses were taken off, “and the oxen clapt too (sic), who to the amazement to the beholders, drew it out in triumph[1252].” One cannot help thinking that the popularity of horse-labour around Braintree was a chronological inversion, applicable only to a limited area. At whatever period introduced, working oxen remained in the Essex districts of Romford and Ilford until the year 1830[1253], and probably later. In the sister county of Kent, bullocks were worked near Tunbridge Wells until the year 1886[1254].

It is to the county of Sussex, however, that we must look for the lingering exploitation of ox-labour. During the summer of 1908, remembering what I had witnessed about twenty years previously, I made careful inquiries about the disuse of working-oxen by Sussex farmers. The result proved that two teams at least were still under the yoke, one at Housedean Farm, Falmer, and the other, which I did not actually see, at Itford Farm, near Rodmell, a few miles North of Newhaven. The latter team has now been disbanded. In February, 1910, Dr W. Heneage Legge, of Ringmer, informed me that teams could still be seen daily near Brighton. Later, in August of that year, I found a single team retained—for sentimental reasons, probably—at Exceat New Barn, near West Dean. The Falmer cattle are black, long-horned animals, apparently of Welsh breed. The old Sussex red cattle are no longer employed. The oxen are not shod at the present day, though it is but a few years since the custom was abandoned. This is a point to which we shall return. At Pyecombe and Pangdean, bullocks were last worked, and shod, about eight years since. “A few years ago,” was the answer given at Saddlescombe, and again at Sompting. At Steyning, the blacksmith had not shod oxen for twenty years, nor had his brother craftsman of Ditchling treated bullocks for a decade or more. Here the details may stop; it is perhaps well that they should be given, as an aid to the future historian.

But what of the past? For it is practically certain that from the earliest historical times onwards to the eighteenth century the ox was pre-eminently, nay, almost entirely, the beast which was yoked to cart, plough, and harrow. There were, it is true, some exceptions, to be noted in a moment. The old illuminated manuscripts show pictures of oxen only, and the famous embroidery known as the Bayeux “tapestry” furnishes similar evidence. The animals there shown as attached to the plough, whether they represent oxen, horses, or asses, are very different from the finely drawn horses exhibited throughout the rest of the tapestry[1255]. Until the eighth century, as was stated in Chapter X., the horse was often used for food, and it was likewise kept for the saddle. Thus we may say that, while the hunter, the warrior, and the pilgrim claimed the horse for riding, the husbandman in the field was content to use the ox for draught.

The language of Domesday Book corroborates the testimony of the early manuscripts. In general, the records of that remarkable survey indicate that a painstaking assessment was taken of farming stock. The terms used in the minute inventories are extremely suggestive. The amount of land which an ox could till is called an “oxgang” or “bovata” (Lat. bos, bovis = an ox + ata). A bovata, originally “one ox’s worth,” was half a “jugum,” “a pair’s worth” (Lat. jugum = a yoke), and a quarter of a carucata (post-classical Latin, car(r)uca = a four-wheeled carriage; cf. root quatuor, whence the word was later applied to a plough, possibly because it was drawn by four oxen, or, by extension, two yoke of oxen, four abreast)[1256]. Recollections of early Mediaeval literature will emphasize the truth of our proposition. In the “Vision of William, concerning Piers the Plowman” (c. A.D. 1377), it was doubtless an ox-team which ploughed the “half-acre.” Again, in the writings of Bartholomew Anglicus (cir. A.D. 1260), there is a description of the duties of Bubulcus, the ox-herd. “He feedeth and nourisheth oxen, and bringeth them to leas and home again; and bindeth their feet with a langhaldes [M. E. langelen = to bind together; langel, lanzel = a rope or hopple] and spanells [= fetters; cf. Germ. Spannseil = a tether] and nigheth and cloggeth them while they be in pasture and leas, and yoketh and maketh them draw at the plough: and pricketh the slow with a goad, and maketh them draw even.

And pleaseth them with whistling and with song, to make them bear the yoke with the better will for liking of melody of the voice.” The oxen not only “ear” (= plough) the ground, but thresh the corn by treading: Bartholomew also speaks of their use in “treading the flour[1257].” The trivial round of the ox-herd’s labours may be completed from an Old English dialogue of the eleventh century, in which the garthman is made to say: “I stand over [the oxen], waking against thieves: and then again in the early morning I betake them, well filled and watered, to the plowman[1258].” A like story is told in the anonymous “Seneschaucie,” or “The Office of Seneschal” (temp. Edw. I.), wherein it is stated that ox-herds must sleep with their oxen to guard them[1259]. If we pass by a few centuries, we get, in a passage from Shakespeare, an allusion to the traffic in draught oxen at the great fairs of England. Shallow inquires of Silence, “How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair[1260]?” And moving forward again, we have Robert Burns singing thus:

In short, through all the centuries down to the middle of the eighteenth, it might have been affirmed, in the words which Richard Carew used of his own county of Cornwall: “For meate, draught, and plowing, Oxen; for carriage and riding, horses[1262].”

But there must have been exceptions, perhaps even a little more numerous than the foregoing paragraph would seem to imply. Fitzstephen, who, about the year A.D. 1174, wrote a short account of the city of London, describes a market at which one could buy all kinds of commodities, and he remarks, incidentally, “Stant ibi aptae aratris, trahis, et bigis equae” (There stand the mares, fit for the plough, the sledge, and the cart)[1263]. Letters written in A.D. 1222 to Ralph de Nevil, Bishop of Winchester, contain repeated requests for “mares to draw the carts” which were to convey marl to the fields[1264]. The employment of mares for draught is directly at variance with their early heathen allocation to the priestly body, one instance of which was given on p. 436 supra. This old usage does not, of course, imply that all mares were reserved for the priests: moreover, traditions respecting such animals were doubtless fading away. But to return to our subject: the evidence adduced is sufficient to prove that horses were partly employed in agriculture during the Norman and Plantagenet periods. Moreover, Walter de Henley, writing not later than A.D. 1250, advised the farmers of his day to plough with two oxen and two horses, “if the ground is not so stony that the oxen cannot help themselves with their feet” (si la tere ne seyt si perouse ke buefs ne se pussent eyder des pes)[1265]. As already noted, this plan was followed in Yorkshire, Hampshire, and Dorsetshire until modern times.

When all exceptions are allowed for, however, the broad fact remains, that the bullock was the main beast of draught during the earlier periods of English history. Even in the Yorkist and Lancastrian periods, horses, we are assured, were hardly ever used for field-work[1266]. They carried corn to the mill or the market on their backs[1267], and they served the packman on his journeys through the country. In the fields the ox was master.

Concerning the number of oxen which were grouped to form a team, usage has varied. The Domesday terms bearing on the subject have caused much controversy. Canon Isaac Taylor argued that eight oxen made up the team[1268]. This view is supported by Dr J. H. Round, and, to some extent, by Professor Vinogradoff and Professor Seebohm. The last-named authority believes that eight oxen, yoked four abreast, made up the full manorial plough-team at the time of Domesday, as well as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He admits, however, that the villains had apparently smaller ploughs, with about four oxen to the team (Fig. 89). He also cites records to show that, occasionally, the plough-team consisted of ten or twelve oxen. Mr W. de Gray Birch contends that the number was four, and that four bullocks were the equivalent of two horses[1269].

Fig. 89. Ploughing in the eleventh century. From MS. Anglo-Saxon Calendar, early eleventh century. (Strutt.) It will be observed that the team consists of four animals. Other illuminated manuscripts also tend to support Mr de Gray Birch’s theory.

Fortunately, there are precise statements extant respecting the Mediaeval practice. In the Cartulary of Rievaulx Abbey (founded A.D. 1132) eight is given as the number of the full team or “draught”: “I[i]dem etiam monachi habebunt in eadem pastura quatuor carrucatas boum, unamquamque de viii bobus[1270].” A team of eight was also known on the high road, as we learn from the rhyming Life of St Cuthbert (c. A.D. 1450). We find the following description of the conveyance of a huge beam to Durham Abbey:

in the eighteenth century from eight to ten went to a plough. A trace of these large teams may be seen, he asserts, in the old crooked ridges visible on grass lands. The enormous length of the team, together with the use of unwieldy ploughs, necessitated the allowance of a vast width of head-row on which to turn (Fig. 90), hence there was a marked deflection or curvature of the furrow[1274]. The furrow, in fact, took the form of a flat reversed S[1275]. The Lincolnshire tradition says that only the tops of the ridges were cultivated, and that the oxen were attached to each end of a long pole, which stretched across the “land.” Thus yoked the animals walked along the grass in the furrow. How the ridges and furrows were originally formed we are not told. Rham says that the old-fashioned plough was drawn by six oxen, and that barely half an acre was turned in a summer’s

day[1276]. Youatt recommended two pair of oxen to a plough; he considered the ancient method of using four pair unnecessary[1277]. The modern Sussex team commonly, but not always (Fig. 91), consists of six or eight oxen. Eight was also the usual number in Northumberland. Something, of course, depended upon the mode of harnessing the animals. A case is recorded, in which a country clergyman, departing from the common practice of attaching bullocks to the plough by means of a yoke, adopted Arthur Young’s advice and used collars, with the result that five oxen, harnessed according to the latter mode, would do the work of eight in yokes (i.e. paired), with equal ease[1278]. The yoke which was used in Sussex until quite recent years was a curved wooden beam about 5 feet long, 4 inches thick, and 6 inches deep. Near the extremities were light oval hoops made of ash, about 1½ inches in thickness. These hoops passed round the necks of the oxen, and then went through the thickness of the

Fig. 93. Ox-yoke (c. A.D. 1800), Gayton-le-Wold, Lincolnshire. Now in the Museum of the Louth Antiq. and Nat. Soc. The material is ash. Length 51½´´; breadth 6´´; depth 4½´´. Ropes, or chains, passing through the vertical holes, appear to have served as ox-bows.

yoke[1279]. One of these yokes lay outside the blacksmith’s shop at Rodmell, when I visited the village in 1910. Through the kindness of Dr W. Heneage Legge, I am enabled to give an illustration of a Sussex ox-yoke (Fig. 92). A Lincolnshire specimen, over a century old, now in the Museum at Louth, is shown for the sake of comparison (Fig. 93). In Fitzherbert’s time (A.D. 1534) the hoops were known as ox-bows. It would appear, from a casual remark made by Rham, that the yoke was sometimes fixed across the horns[1280]. We may note, by parenthesis, that the team sometimes carried bells; one of these was discovered under the ruins of the tower of Ringmer church (Sussex). The tower fell at some period between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is supposed that oxen had been employed to remove the fallen stones[1281].

Of the various kinds of plough which have been in use for ox-labour, a treatise might be written. What surprises the student most, is the persistent crudeness of these implements down to a very late period. In the grounds of Lewes Castle there is to be seen a specimen of the old Sussex plough (Fig. 94). This dilapidated relic, which belongs to the authorities of the County Museum hard by, is probably a century and a half old, and originally came from Northease Farm, near Rodmell. The plough is 12 feet long, and its two wheels are each about 2 feet in diameter. The hubs and spokes are of wood, and are clumsily fixed to a narrow iron tire, which is circular in cross-section. This feature may be observed to-day in some of the ploughs of the neighbourhood, and the method of attachment of the spokes is nearly as primitive in the modern implements. The mouldboard of this cumbrous old plough is a semi-conical iron-plate, and the coulter—a cutting instrument, according to theory—is a heavy bar of wood with one edge a little narrowed. One may be sure that the Mediaeval plough was of still ruder design. The Saxon and Roman ploughs (Fig. 95), drawn by oxen, are of an extremely simple pattern.

Opinions have always differed as to the age when a bullock’s services are most valuable. A Sussex steward informed me that the age for commencing work was 4 years, and that the ox would continue to be of use for seven or eight years afterwards. Another account gave the starting age as 2½ years, and the working period from three to five years. Youatt cautiously remarks that the working life varies with the breed[1282]. The Yorkshire plan was to “break in” the animal at the age of 2 or 3 years, and work it till it was rising 6 years; but Marshall, while agreeing with the “harness age” just given, contends that the beast might be worked until it was from 15 to 20 years old, when it would be in its prime[1283]. He adduces this instance: “An ox which I worked several years in Surrey, might at 17 or 18 years old, have challenged, for strength, agility, and sagacity, the best bred cart-horse in the kingdom.”

It will prevent confusion if we pause to note that the terms “ox” and “bullock” are properly applied to castrated males of the species after the age of 4 years; up to that age the animals are known as “steers[1284],” or “stirks.” The distinction, however, need not be made in the present survey.

When the ox was no longer of service in the field, it was fattened, and, wherever the food was of a generous kind, the beef, we are assured, was not especially tough. “Besides,” as an old Sussex peasant once remarked to the writer, “we a’nt all on us got bad teeth, zur.” A more decided opinion was that of a Newhaven butcher, who averred that he always used to consider the beef of ploughing oxen a special dainty for the consumption of himself and friends[1285]. And in general, the countryfolk of old acted on the advice of the Hebrew proverb: “If the ox fall, whet your knife.” Worn-out oxen were doubtless a great boon. In Mediaeval England, fresh beef was consumed chiefly by the nobles and the wealthy corporations, and by them only during a few months of the year. Many bullocks were, indeed, killed and salted in November, when provender had become scarce, but these represented grass-fed cattle. It is estimated that only a very small proportion of the whole herd was fattened for the table[1286]. Sir Anthony, or as he was termed Maister Fitzherbert, who has already been cited, describes the position of the husbandman very ingenuously: “And if any sorance (= injury, sore, disease) come to an oxe, [and he] waxe old, broysed (= bruised) or blinde, for ii. s. he may be fedde, and thanne he is mannes meate, and as good or better then euer he was. And the horse, whan he dyethe, is but caryin[1287].” Horseflesh, in Fitzherbert’s day, had long been discarded as human food. (See supra, pp. 437-8.)

Among the reasons which led to the selection of the ox, rather than the horse, for dragging the plough or hauling sledges laden with farm produce, was the comparative cheapness of the keep of the former animal. During summer, the ox was mainly fed on grass, which was supplied by the common pasture. Winter found the poor beast living on a scanty diet of straw, with occasional meals of chaff. Therefore the yeoman who had only a few acres of land, with access to a waste or common, or the squire who possessed sufficient pasture to supplement his arable fields, discovered that bullocks formed the more economical team[1288]. Rogers estimates that the cost of keeping a horse between October 18th and May 3rd, during which term it could not graze, was nearly four times that of an ox[1289]. Again, beast for beast, the bullock was deemed to have proportionately a greater capacity for draught, that is, the strength of an ox was utilized to better advantage when the animal was put in traces, though for carrying burdens the horse was superior. The assumption seems always to have been that two oxen could, in the mean, drag as much as a good cart-horse. Though slow, the ox was surefooted, and on the old, undrained fallows it was invaluable, because its hoofs spread out as it tramped along. Not indeed that all breeds of this creature are invariably sluggish. The trotting bullocks of India are familiar to most folk, and Youatt relates that a British ox ran four miles on Lewes racecourse in sixteen minutes[1290].

Walter de Henley actually asserts that the ox is as quick at its work as the horse, but the context shows that this statement must be interpreted in a peculiar manner—he is comparing oxen with horses which are “pulled” by sullen, prejudiced workpeople. “Besides,” so runs the comment, “a plough of oxen will go as far in a year as a plough of horses, because the malice of ploughmen (la malyce des charuers) will not allow the plough [of horses] to go beyond their pace, no more [distance] than the plough of oxen (aler hors del pas nent ke la charue des buefs)[1291].”