There were also as I understand it Pigs! I think they were kept in the rough woodland - rather as they still are in Southern Spain where you get the little black pigs that forage in the chestnut woods. Their ham is particularly good! Christopher Richards ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tompkins, M.L." <mllt1@leicester.ac.uk> To: <OLD-ENGLISH-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 10:06 AM Subject: RE: [OEL] Common vs Open > <<There were very few if any herds of cattle, nor with the exception of sheep, any livestock farming as such until after the enclosures. What few animals that were kept would have been grazed on their owners land or upon the common.>> > > Eve is absolutely right - there was plenty of livestock farming in open field regions before enclosure, and of both cattle and sheep. As always, the detailed picture varied from region to region, and from century to century, and clearly the numbers involved did rise sharply after enclosure (in those areas where enclosure was accompanied by conversion of arable to grassland - particularly common in Midlands counties such as north Bucks, Northants, Leics) but even before enclosure every farmer kept some sheep and cattle - their dung was an essential fertiliser without which the yield from the crops grown on the open field arable quickly diminished. > > They fed not only on areas of common pasture, but also on the fallow parts of the common fields and on the stubble of the cropped parts after they had been harvested (and even in the meadows at certain times). In later centuries, as the numbers of livestock rose and the pressure on grassland increased, it even became common for them to be grazed on the roadside verges. > > However many pre-enclosure open field farmers kept larger herds and flocks than were necessary just for fertilisation - ie they were raising or fattening some livestock solely in order to sell their meat or wool or hides, or for dairy farming. In the medieval period, and later in parishes with larger than normal areas of common pasture, this was done without disturbing the arable system in the open fields, but from about 1500 onwards in many places the necessary extra pasture was created by converting strips in the open fields into unfenced permanent grassland, called leys. > > In some areas, at some periods, the proportion of the open fields which had been taken out of arable farming and converted to grass became very large. For example, in Great Horwood in Bucks some 25-30% of the open fields had already been converted to grass by about 1610, and by the time it was enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1842 the proportion had risen to nearly half. (In both cases about half of the grass was in small closes, formed by enclosing small bits of the open fields, but the rest was in leys). > > (Oops, that was rather long - sorry, I've just been writing the chapter of my thesis in which I describe Great Horwood's landscape and agriculture and the changes they underwent, dealing with these very issues, and it all just poured out) > > > <<Sheep may have been more difficult as they can jump quite high. I don't know if it made the national news a few years ago but those putting fences along the M62 to keep sheep off the road held sheep-jumping trials to see how high the fences needed to be. The result was some fairly high fences. Cows and calves tend to barge their way through.>> > > > There was an amusing letter in the Times just a few days ago, describing someone's tribulations in trying to keep one particularly determined ewe out of their garden. The garden was separated from the sheep's pasture by a very high dry-stone wall and they couldn't figure out how it was getting in. Eventually they discovered that the sheep had learned to take a running jump and boost itself upwards by pushing off a couple of stones projecting from its side of the wall. > > > <<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. > > This was proved by a historian called John Langdon, in a book called 'Horses, Oxen and Technological Innovation: the Use of Draught Animals in English Farming from 1066 to 1500' (Cambridge, 1986). More detail on the varied proportions of horses and oxen in different parts of England at different periods in the middle ages than any non-academic reader could possibly ever want can be found in another more recent book, by Bruce Campbell called 'English Seigniorial Agriculture 1250-1450' (Cambridge, 2000). The latter book also provides much detail on pre-enclosure livestock farming, and indeed every other aspect of medieval farming you care to mention (you'll get the idea that it is a stupendously large and exhaustively detailed tome!) > > Matt Tompkins > Blaston, Leics > > > ==== OLD-ENGLISH Mailing List ==== > Going away for a while? > Don't forget to UNSUBSCRIBE! > OLD-ENGLISH-L-request@rootsweb.com > > >