by Brian Fagan
Compact Packers
Farmers and working country people owned relatively few riding horses, given the expense involved. Some kept a solitary beast that carried the farmer’s wife to market or hefted packs and panniers with everything from corn to firewood. Owning one widened one’s horizons beyond the narrow compass of village homestead. An owner could ride more than forty-eight to sixty-four kilometers (thirty to forty miles) a day, and merchants served customers over a wider area. Most farm horses hauled loads, towed plows, and worked the harvest. They also drove machinery that drained mines, operated mills, and hauled goods from ports and rivers to landlocked towns and villages. The numbers of riding horses rose irregularly until the eighteenth century, when 86 percent of one parish at the edge of eastern England’s Fens owned horses and rode them regularly. This reflected a rising standard of living among rural householders.
By the sixteenth century, English horses were, for the most part, smaller beasts, with Irish and Scottish mounts being much preferred, the latter being “fast knit and strongly made for to endure travaile.”2 Most working horses were compact and well proportioned, used for long journeys such as those of the seventeenth-century antiquarian William Camden, who surveyed Britain’s past from horseback. From Camden’s day up to the 1700s, Britain ran on small pack ponies.
Small, compact packhorses carried relatively small loads, but they were ideal for rough terrain, on hills, and under the muddy conditions that bedeviled every highway. They cost less to feed and were cheaper than larger beasts. As with donkey caravans, individual animals could be added or subtracted on the road. They were also faster than larger draft horses hauling carts, but were more expensive per kilometer in cargo cost than the larger animals and their wagons. Packhorse trains carried all manner of goods to London and were commonplace until the eighteenth century, when toll roads led to highway improvements and better conditions for draft horses. The transportation method of choice was still, of course, water, where bulk loads could be floated long distances. Land carriage was much more expensive. The price of coal, for example, doubled every sixteen kilometers (ten miles) overland, so there were obvious commercial advantages to mines operating close to waterways. Much coal traveled in small two-wheeled carts or in horse panniers.
Small towns with strategic positions on major rivers became important commercial hubs. Lechlade, on the Upper Thames, handled cloth and cheese from Gloucester and other towns. A major cheese market in the town attracted as many as 140 to 200 wagons, and numerous loads carried in on horseback. Horses also towed barges from riverbanks against current and prevailing winds, precursors to the horse-hauled canal barges that proliferated during the Industrial Revolution. Some coalfields constructed wooden wagon ways that allowed operators to move much larger tonnages to distribution points, ports, and riverbanks some kilometers from the pithead.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an ever-broadening range of commodities and goods traveled by road, among them cartloads of corn for town markets. More than a century earlier, William Camden had observed of the corn market at Warminster, in southern England, that “it is scarce credible what quantities of corn are each week carried hither and presently sold.”3 Textiles were also a major overland cargo, both as finished cloth and unfinished material. The volume of carrier traffic was such that, as early as 1600, there were regular services from London to York and other northern cities. Road hauling became a major, if hazardous, business, especially because of highwaymen. Long-distance carriers responded by traveling in convoys.
Packhorses were small but strong, usually geldings, which were easier to control. In the final analysis, they were, in economic terms, a more refined version of the donkey and mule, rare in England until the eighteenth century. Two-wheeled carts were the vehicle of choice for carriers with much scarcer, large draft horses, although four-wheeled wagons spread gradually through England after the mid-sixteenth century. Four-wheelers required larger beasts, also used for plowing. An ideal animal “wyll stoupe to his worke, and lay sure holde of the grounde with his feet and stoutelye pull at a pinch.”4
Meanwhile, Monarchs and the Nobility . . .
The court, wealthy aristocracy, and the upper classes lived in another equine world. They routinely traveled from place to place on fine steeds. Unlike working people, who worked with animals for a livelihood, the nobility regarded good horsemanship as the attribute of a gentleman, ownership as a mark of social status. Such owners admired and cherished their mounts.
The elite often owned dozens of horses. When King Henry VIII died in 1547, he maintained more than a thousand horses at vast expense, in stables around his domains, looked after by a small army of grooms, blacksmiths, and horse masters. He encouraged the breeding of larger animals on big estates. The nobility followed his example. Books on horsemanship proliferated. Groups of landowners used one another’s stallions to inseminate their mares. Practical breeding experience passed from owner to owner and became more selective. “Breed few but choice,” adjured a Warwickshire horse breeder. Henry VIII had encouraged the practice of importing foreign stock for cross-breeding purposes. Strong Flemish mares enhanced English draft horses. (Draft horses pulled loads and plowed.) In 1572 alone, English owners imported more than four hundred brood mares from the Dutch. Coursers (fast horses, often war horses) from the Kingdom of Naples made excellent parade horses. Light Andalusian Ginetes (light Arabians), with ancestry in Moorish and Berber beasts, made ideal general riding horses and were widely used by cavalry.
Fine horses were powerful statements. King James I told his son Prince Henry, “It becometh a Prince better than any other man to be a fair and good horseman.” A rider who handled a “great horse” effortlessly and gracefully “importeth a majestie and drede to inferior persons beholding him aboue the common course of other men.”5 Powerful horses were an integral part of carefully stage-managed appearances by monarchs and important nobles. When Henry VIII rode to greet Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, he headed a procession of 5,704 people and 3,224 horses. The flaunted power and wealth failed to outdo Francis I, who rode a magnificent bay at the head of his similarly impressive retinue. Portraits of monarchs and nobles depicted them astride great horses, dressed for war. In 1633, Van Dyck painted King Charles I astride a Spanish Ginete, in full armor. His old riding master by his side gazes at him in awe.
Horses served as diplomatic currency as well. King Henry VIII, while allied to France, obtained draft animals from Flanders in the Low Countries, a region controlled by Spain. The king delighted in gifts of fine horses, especially from Italian princes, whose studs used high-quality brood mares and stallions from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Diplomatic gifts between monarchs continued, always for the benefit of only a few. Landowners, who used foreign horses for breeding purposes, paid big money for them. The quality of native English horses improved markedly as a result. Most people purchased their mounts at horse fairs, while the gentry tended to buy much more expensive horses from one another, from people who were friends of equivalent social status, or through agents.
By the seventeenth century, imposing stables served as wings to large country houses, said to look “like so many gentlemen’s seats.”6 Just the cost of feeding pampered beasts was enormous, preferably with some upland pasture close at hand. The ultimate prestige mounts were Eastern horses, widely admired for their strength and beauty. Increasing numbers of them arrived in England during the early seventeenth century. The diarist John Evelyn admired three Oriental horses in London’s Hyde Park in December 1784. One bay, valued at five hundred guineas, was “in all regards beautifull and proportion’d to admiration.” The three horses “trotted like does, as if they did not feele the Ground.”7 Prominent artists painted the beautiful Arabian, which became an equine icon. Arabians were lively yet gentle beasts that responded well to kindness. So they received the best of quarters. The progeny of such imported horses and local stock gave rise to the thoroughbr
eds that defined English horseracing, where humans and equines worked together in perfect harmony. The aristocracy spent enormous sums of money on their cherished racehorses, while millions of commoners lived in grinding poverty.
But horses, however valuable, were a depreciating asset. When once-cherished mounts grew old and infirm, few wealthy owners put them out to grass to end their days in comfort. They usually discarded them when they could no longer fulfill their role in life. By the end of their often-long lives, they were worthless in a country that abhorred horse meat on the dinner table. Old or worn-out beasts were worth a few shillings for their hides and as dog meat. Many became meat for foxhounds. Wrote John Flavel, a preacher, in 1669, “By such cruel usage, they have been destroyed and cast into a ditch for dog’s meat.”8 Perhaps this sentiment is the origin of the common expression “going to the dogs.” In a moment, at the whim of its master, a cherished mount became disposable, impersonal flesh for other beasts.
Have We Dominion over Beasts?
One should not be surprised at this in a devout age when Christian doctrine governed the ways people treated animals. The Scriptures gave humans the right to rule over animals that were made by God for humans. The Bible’s teachings were set down long before the Romans relied heavily on working animals for food and transporting loads. People may have liked individual animals in their possession, but they were considered, ultimately, either food or unpaid labor. The abundance of working animals seemed to strengthen assumptions that beasts served people. Many believed there was a natural instinct in some animals to obey humanity. Wrote the Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughes in 1643, “Sometimes you may see a little child driving before him a hundred oxen . . . as he pleaseth; it showeth that God hath preserved somewhat of man’s dominion over the creatures.”9 A physician, George Cheyne, even proclaimed in 1705 that God had made horse manure smell sweet knowing that people would spend much time among their steeds. Every animal had its purpose, Cheyne wrote—fearsome beasts to serve as “our schoolmasters,” apes and parrots to entertain. Even horseflies were God’s way of taxing human ingenuity in dealing with them. The Creator’s design was utter perfection; the animal kingdom was part of his grand blueprint.
Nevertheless, established doctrine changed perceptibly over the centuries. By the eighteenth century, many thinkers argued that domestication was good for animals: Cattle and sheep were better off because they were protected from predators. Butchering animals was an act of kindness that prevented beasts from suffering in old age and provided food for “a more noble animal.” Beasts had no reason, no divine authority, and thus had no rights. The Sixth Commandment, which forbade murder, applied, of course, to humans alone, not to animals. Traditional Christian theological opinion had no truck with the gentler attitudes toward animals and nature associated with Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Christianity was an anthropocentric faith that tended to ignore those parts of the Gospel that spoke of human responsibilities to care for animals, implying that they were part of God’s covenant. Thus, an unbridgeable gap separated animals and humans.
Were Animals Rational Beings?
Only a few voices defended animals, the most prominent among them being French statesman and writer Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who wrote of animals, “It is no great marvell if we understand them not: no more doe we the Cornish, the Welsh, or Irish.”10 They have a “full and perfect communication” and were no more “brutish” than humans. A flood of discussion about animals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revolved around three emerging trends; new generations of experimental science that involved vivisection, the increasing commodification of animals for food, especially for growing urban populations, and more widely available printed media.
Montaigne’s claim that animals were more rational than people contrasted with the views of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1660).11 This learned gentleman developed a doctrine, later called Cartesianism, with Spanish antecedents that proclaimed animals to be mere equipment, just like clocks, incapable of speech and reasoning, without minds or souls. Some of his followers even argued that animals did not feel pain. The howls of a beaten dog were merely external reflexes totally unconnected to any inner sensations. Cartesianism became a way of rationalizing how humans treated animals, especially the heinous practice of live vivisection, a regular event at London’s Royal Society during the 1660s. The watching fellows enjoyed the gruesome spectacle and verified the results. Such cruelty was entirely justified, in their minds, for humans were unique, separated from animals as heaven was distinct from earth. Wrote the eighteenth-century novelist and poet Oliver Goldsmith, “In the ascent from brutes to man, the line is strongly drawn, well marked, and impassable.”12
Even some human beings were considered beasts or near-beasts in an era when the exploration of distant lands was much in the news. The Tahitians of the South Pacific enjoyed brief popularity as noble savages living in a tropical paradise. Others, such as the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope, became the epitome of animal-like humans with “piggish” habits and an odor so powerful that one was said to be able to smell them from thirty paces—upwind. Closer to home, the insane seemed like people whose inner beast was emerging, while the treatment of the poor, of slaves, often resembled that accorded sheep. Only spurs and whips could restrain the common people, such as farmworkers or the urban poor. Breaking in a horse often seemed an appropriate analogy for educating the young. For people accustomed to the management of cattle, leadership appeared to resemble the task of a shepherd. Even the poorest farm laborers believed in the general principle of domination, for they could kick and curse their animals when insulted by their superiors.
Cruelty at Close Quarters
Domination and brutality went hand in hand in a world where everyone depended on animals for food, all manner of products, and for work. Subsistence farmers rarely kept their stock for sentimental reasons; cruelty was commonplace.13 Castration was routine, as it had been for thousands of years, making beasts easier to handle and reducing the amount of energy spent on sexual activity; it was also thought to make their meat fattier, healthier, and better tasting. There were even special measures for fattening beasts: shutting pigs in close quarters with one another and keeping cattle, lambs, and poultry in special dark houses for fattening. Some farmers even nailed the feet of geese to the floor, which was said to help them put on weight. Dogs often baited gelded cattle before slaughter, an ordeal said to thin the cattle’s blood and make their flesh tastier. Many towns even had ordinances making it compulsory to bait a bull before it was butchered. The slaughtering itself was inhumane. Butchers poleaxed cattle, and then killed them with a knife. Calves and many lambs died more slowly. First their necks were slit with a knife so that they bled copiously, which made their flesh white. The bleeding was then stopped, and the animal allowed to linger alive for a day or so. Farmers habitually bled pigs to death.
Ceremonies and rituals of all kinds were integral to the lives of hardworking commoners, an escape from the arduous routines and suffering of daily life.14 Many of these involved cruelty to animals and the use of animal imagery, including horns, which symbolized masculine virility. People whipped dogs on St. Luke’s Day and drowned strays purely for sport. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX proclaimed that the cat was a “diabolical creature.” Felines were suspect because many pagans cherished them, which meant that they were evil in the eyes of the Lord. Furthermore, they were seminocturnal, and somewhat mysterious. In low light, the reflective layer of cells behind their retinas made their eyes glow, so perhaps, inevitably, they became seen as demons. An association with witches soon followed: people who sold their souls to the devil, who gave them a feline familiar (demon), perhaps the source of their power. Many people believed this, so much so that many families gave up having cats for fear of being burned at the stake. Cats were stoned to death as demonic minions in league with heretics, pinned to posts at village festivals on saints’ days, and then killed
. In France, the monarch ordered sacks of live cats burned publically. An early Tudor school textbook bears a sentence for translation into Latin: “I hate cats.” Nevertheless, some people kept cats to keep down rodents, among them millers, fisherfolk, and merchants (see sidebar “The Cat That Urinated”). Many villagers raised young cats for their flesh and fur. An abandoned well excavated in Cambridge yielded the remains of seventy cats that had been killed and then skinned, apparently for their meat.
