> <<When it came to horses around our way in the 17th century, it seems that these were more like the Range Rover or the Ferrari of their times. Only the more wealthy had them and particularly those for riding were highly valued and mostly mares.>> > > Well, that's true as far as riding horses goes, but in fact peasant-owned draught horses, used for ploughing, harrowing, carting etc, were common in most medieval villages, and very common by the early modern period. In the early medieval period oxen were the most common draught animals in most parts of England, but they were gradually replaced by horses, a process that was largely completed in most parts of the country by the 17th century (and much earlier in some parts - the Chilterns, for example, were using all-horse teams as early as the 14th and 15th centuries. > 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. Gordon Barlow