<<I am just reading about the latter years of the Civil War (1645+), when both parties regularly replaced horses killed in combat, by scouring the neighbourhoods they marched through. For work-horses, that would be - hardly cavalry steeds, I assume. How that practice must have added to the workloads of the farmers! Did they go back to oxen, for the duration? Well, they must have done, unless they pulled the ploughs themselves.>> An interesting question, Gordon. It's a bit later than my period, so I thought I'd put it to Prof Pete Edwards at Roehampton University, who knows a bit about these things, having recently published books on The Horse Trade in Tudor and Stuart England and on equiping the Civil War armies (Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars, 1638-52). He said that he hadn't ever explored the question directly, but that from a priori reasoning one would think it quite possible that as horses were being taken away by the army the farmers had to resort to oxen. At Oxford the Royalist Council of War decided to get rid of their draught oxen in March 1644, reckoning they were not as useful as horses in the draught - a decision which would have meant fewer horses but more oxen available to local farmers. The problem is that it wouldn't necessarily have been that easy to change over to oxen suddenly. Horses and oxen were used for different purposes, ate different foods, were trained differently, made use of at the end of their working lives in different ways (ie were integrated into local economies in terms of crops grown, the process of training and selling on &c). At the very least mixed farming areas would have to lay down more land to grass and buy oxen in, perhaps from distant sources, a dangerous business (and if there weren't enough available it would have taken a while to breed them - though they could be used for draught at a younger age than horses). All in all he thinks that farmers probably did convert back to oxen in some places but that it depended on local circumstances, traditions and availability. Matt

Thanks to you, and to your friend, Matt: a fine answer. It has been kind of Judith not to pull the plug on this discussion which - off-topic as it may have been, largely - is very much in line with the Rootsweb ethos! Probably most (all?) of us on this List had ancestors affected by this war of marauding armies living by foraging (read: robbing). Let me close with a final extract from Wedgwood's book: "The very poor were not those who suffered most [during the long war]. Those who suffered most were the yeomen and small tradesmen - the weavers of the West Riding with all their mechanism of sale and distribution dislocated, the cattle-drovers of North Wales and the Herefordshire marches, the sheep-farmers of the Wiltshire Downs, the hardworking yeomen up and down the country whose horses had been confiscated, whose cattle and sheep had been driven off." Gordon > <<I am just reading about the latter years of the Civil War (1645+), when both parties regularly replaced horses killed in combat, by scouring the neighbourhoods they marched through. How that practice must have added to the workloads of the farmers! Did they go back to oxen, for the duration? Well, they must have done, unless they pulled the ploughs themselves.>> > > > >An interesting question, Gordon. It's a bit later than my period, so I thought I'd put it to Prof Pete Edwards at Roehampton University, who knows a bit about these things, having recently published books on The Horse Trade in Tudor and Stuart England and on equiping the Civil War armies (Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars, 1638-52). > > He said that he hadn't ever explored the question directly, but that from a priori reasoning one would think it quite possible that as horses were being taken away by the army the farmers had to resort to oxen. At Oxford the Royalist Council of War decided to get rid of their draught oxen in March 1644, reckoning they were not as useful as horses in the draught - a decision which would have meant fewer horses but more oxen available to local farmers. > > The problem is that it wouldn't necessarily have been that easy to change over to oxen suddenly. Horses and oxen were used for different purposes, ate different foods, were trained differently, made use of at the end of their working lives in different ways (ie were integrated into local economies in terms of crops grown, the process of training and selling on &c). At the very least mixed farming areas would have to lay down more land to grass and buy oxen in, perhaps from distant sources, a dangerous business (and if there weren't enough available it would have taken a while to breed them - though they could be used for draught at a younger age than horses). > > All in all he thinks that farmers probably did convert back to oxen in some places but that it depended on local circumstances, traditions and availability. > > Matt > > ______________________________