Luxury Animals and Selective Breeding

This week, selective breeding appears to be invading my life. On Thursday, I received a catalog from Heifer International, a charity that does great work giving animals to the international poor to improve their diet and economic circumstances. Part of the program is that the gift of a goat/cow/sheep will create a self-replicating cycle of improvement as the animals give birth and the new animals are given or sold to other poor families. So imagine my surprise when Heifer asked me to send them $120 so they could send two female goats to a family in need.

This reminded me of a scene from The King and I, the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. The King of Siam decides to send a pair of male elephants to America to help President Lincoln win the Civil War. When Anna, a British schoolteacher, suggests that perhaps two male elephants would not provide Lincoln an army of elephants, the king agrees and decides to send two female elephants.

In the modern world, these are amusing errors. However, they represent a belief that modern people should understand the basics of breeding. Looking at our recent readings, I was surprised how suddenly modern-style selective breeding made an appearance. Walter of Henley, for example, barely gives any advice on how animals should be bred. Although he acknowledges pigs and sheep should be “sorted”, he gives no advice on how to pick out the better stock or how they could be induced to breed and produce better offspring ¹. This is in context of relatively extensive discussions on the proper feeding, housing, and weaning of animals (particularly cattle). This distinction is particularly pronounced in the case of cattle, where Walter makes no mention of good breeding. Furthermore, he seems to be sure that oxen and horses must be bought, rather than taken from one’s own flock ². Given his apparently large stock of cattle, why would Walter buy oxen unless he didn’t believe high quality oxen and horses could be created by selective breeding?

This Country Life: Animals as Help and Hindrance to the Medieval Farmer

It is very hard to discover the way that medieval people actually used and experienced animals, as became clear in our class discussion. Obviously archaeological evidence and tax rolls can give us evidence of the animals that were present, help us approximate their value, and suggest the manner in which they were used. But it cannot give us solid answers, even about those questions, and certainly cannot reveal much at all about human interactions with animals or the ways humans processed those interactions. For this we need supplementary information.

There are two main types of sources which we have not approached but which provide more evidence for the ways in which people used animals during daily farm life in the Middle Ages. These are literature and art. Although these were largely created for a rich audience, many pieces of literature and also artwork such as illuminated psalters, contain descriptions and images of medieval peasants going about their daily lives. Through these we can get some sense of what actual farming looked like.

Through examining the Luttrell Psalter, the Très Riches Heures, and the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from the Cantebury Tales, I would like to make several observations about both medieval farming practice and the broader relationship between humans and animals in the Middle Ages. This will include a further look at using oxen and horses on the farm, as well as a glimpse of something not captured in tax rolls, the natural predator. Through this discussion I would like to advance a very modest claim: Medieval people, although well-versed in using animals in their farm work, had a complicated relationship with the natural world because of the unpredictability of nature and the dangers posed by many animals.

To Beef or not to Beef?

I think I’m going to do something slightly less formal for my post than has been done previously.

It seems to me that one of the main problems that we’ve had so far in talking about the ways that animals are classified or identified is the vocabulary we use. We struggle to find ways to express exactly what we mean. Often we carry over connotative meaning without intending to. The English language still carries with it some built-in distinctions that are left over from Medieval ways of talking about animals.

Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, most people in England were speaking a variation of either Old English or Old Norse. The OE word for cow is cú. Not much of a surprise there. Cow is one of those words that has come down to us through the Indo-Germanic roots of our language and hasn’t changed much in the last 2,000 years. Pigga is another word that probably looks pretty familiar, along with cicen (chicken), scéap (sheep), and déor (deer). All of these words are Germanic in origin, and the main difference between the way they are now and the way they were 1,000 years ago is the spelling. All of them, with the exception of deer, refer to domesticated animals, and they all played an integral role in the agricultural societies of northern Europe during the Middle Ages.

Animal Utility in the Salic Law

The Salic Law (or the Law of the Salian Franks)¹ was written and revised multiple times between ca. 500 and 798 by a number of different people and groups from both Frankish and Roman perspectives. It is an extremely complicated source for historians for a number of reasons. It is impossible to say exactly how it was perceived by the people who created it, much less how or even whether it was used by them. It is impossible to tell exactly what it means in some parts because it is impossible to tell what was meant by some of the words used in it, most notably the Malberg glosses but also some of the Latin terms. It is also impossible to tell exactly how severe the monetary punishments it prescribed were since we do not have an adequate sense of the economy of the time or the exact value of the fines either objectively or in relation to the wealth of the average Frank. Given these and other issues it should be used carefully, especially when attempting to draw conclusions about Frankish society. However, the law can be examined internally in order to reveal its own sometimes fractured logic and used tentatively to draw conclusions about the ways in which its creators organized their world. Whatever its dangers it remains an excellent source dealing with animals in northern Europe during its time period. I would like to briefly suggest some of the main conclusions about the use of animals that can be drawn from it.