Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes , livre ebook
260
pages
English
Ebooks
2018
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260
pages
English
Ebooks
2018
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
15 septembre 2018
EAN13
9781501715105
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
What was the life of a cow in early modern England like? What would it be like to milk that same cow, day-in, day-out, for over a decade? How did people feel about and toward the animals that they worked with, tended, and often killed? With these questions, Erica Fudge begins her investigation into a lost aspect of early modern life: the importance of the day-to-day relationships between humans and the animals with whom they worked. Such animals are and always have been, Fudge reminds us, more than simply stock; they are sentient beings with whom one must negotiate. It is the nature, meaning, and value of these negotiations that this study attempts to recover.By focusing on interactions between people and their livestock, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes restores animals to the central place they once had in the domestic worlds of early modern England. In addition, the book uses human relationships with animals-as revealed through agricultural manuals, literary sources, and a unique dataset of over four thousand wills-to rethink what quick cattle meant to a predominantly rural population and how relationships with them changed as more and more people moved to the city. Offering a fuller understanding of both human and animal life in this period, Fudge innovatively expands the scope of early modern studies and how we think about the role that animals played in past cultures more broadly.
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Publié par
Date de parution
15 septembre 2018
EAN13
9781501715105
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
QUICK CATTLE AND DYING WISHES
QUICKCATTLEANDDYING WISHES PEOPL E AND T HE I R n ANI MAL S I N E ARLY MODE RN E NGL AND
E r i c a F u d g e
CORNELLUNIVERSITYPRESSIthaca and London
Copyright © 2018 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.
First published 2018 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Fudge, Erica, author. Title: Quick cattle and dying wishes : people and their animals in early modern England / Erica Fudge. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017048071 (print) | LCCN 2017051601 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501715099 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501715105 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501715075 | ISBN 9781501715075 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501715082 (pbk. ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Humananimal relationships—England— History—17th century. | Domestic animals—England— History—17th century. | Wills—England—History— 17th century. | England—Social life and customs— 17th century. Classification: LCC QL85 (ebook) | LCC QL85 .F83 2018 (print) | DDC 591.942—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048071
Cover illustration: A woman milking a cow. Woodcut from theOrtus Sanitatis, published by Jacob Meydenbach (Mainz, 1491). Courtesy Wellcome Library, London.
Co nt e nt s
Preface: Looking for Animals in Early Modern England: A Note on the Evidencevii Acknowledgmentsxv
Introduction: Goldelocks and the Three Bequests1. Counting Chickens in Early Modern Essex: Writing Animals into Early Modern Wills2. The Fuller Will and the Agricultural Worlds of People and Animals3. Named Partners and Other Rugs: Animals as CoWorkers in Early Modern England4. Other Worldly Matter: The Immaterial Value of Quick Cattle5. Less than Kind: The Transient Animals of Early Modern LondonAfterword: Bovine Nostalgia
Bibliography of Primary Sources225 Index231
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162 206
P r e f a c e
LookingforAnimalsinEarlyModernEngland: A Note on the Evidence
Agriculturalanimalswereaconstantpresencein the lives of a large number of people in early modern England, and it is the relationships formed between those people and their animals are the focus of this book. Despite their being commonplace, however, there is a difficulty: little evidence exists about the nature and quality of those relationships or the lives of either the animals or those who worked with them. Not only were many of the people who worked most closely with animals illiterate, the utterly prosaic nature of the facetoface encounters between humans and livestock also meant they were rarely written down: what happened without thinking perhaps passed without recording. Husbandry manuals and early animal health care texts offer some insight, but even these are lim ited in the perspectives they offer. By their nature, husbandry manuals and animal health care texts are generic: they do not deal with actual facetoface encounters between individual humans and specific animals that made up so constant a part of early modern life for so many, and it is the ordinary and the particular that are the focus here. Perhaps paradoxically, it seems that when what is ordinary is interrupted, the everyday comes most fully into view, and for this reason, I have used wills, documents that mark the ultimate interrup tion of the norm—death—as key sources in what follows. At the heart of this book is a dataset of 4,444 wills from the Essex Record Office (ERO). This dataset (which I refer to as the large ERO dataset) cov ers the period 1 January 1620 to 31 December 1634 and includes wills from 1 residents of Essex.These wills come from five different classifications in the ERO archives: 2,275 wills classified as ABW are from the Commissary
1. I have changed the beginning of a year throughout from the old start date of 25 March to the modern date of 1 January for the sake of simplicity. Thus, a document originally dated, say, 16 Feb ruary 1627 is represented here as 16 February 1628.
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viiiPREFACE
of the Bishop of London; 929 documents classified as ACW are from the Archdeaconry of Colchester; 855 documents classified as AEW are from the Archdeaconry of Essex; 351 wills classified as AMW are from the Arch deaconry of Middlesex (Essex and Hertfordshire Jurisdiction); 25 docu ments classified as APbW are from the Archbishop of Canterbury: Peculiar of Deanery of Bocking; and the smallest group of nine wills are classi fied APgW, from the Bishop of London: Peculiar of Good Easter. I have excluded all wills in the ERO in this period from testators from outside 2 Essex.Other wills which have been excluded from the dataset are dam aged or incomplete. This large ERO dataset offers data on a range of general issues—on place of residence, gender and occupation/status of testator, year (the probate date is used for this), whether the document is a formal written will or a nuncupative one (i.e., a transcription of a deathbed statement attested to 3 by witnesses),and whether it is signed or marked by the testator. In addi tion, the dataset records the nature of the bequests in each will, which I have classed under the broad headings of property (i.e., real estate), money, goods, and animals. IhaveconstructedafurtherdatasetfromthelargeEROdataset.Thissample of eightynine wills (which I refer to as the sample dataset) is made up of every fiftieth will from the large ERO dataset, which was ordered alphabetically by classification, and then numerically. More detail is offered by this dataset on issues such as the length of the documents, the kind and detail of the collecting phrase at the will’s end (discussed in chapter 1), who the executor was, and who the legatees. Inevitably, the book pays closest attention to wills that include specific animal bequests, by which I mean not only bequests of animals that are named or described in individual detail— “my red cow,” for example—but also in general terms such as “all my sheep” or “my cows.” In chapter 5, in addition to this archival data from Essex, I also introduce a comparative dataset of 2,013 wills from London and Middlesex from the Diocese of London, held in the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA) for
2. In the period of the dataset, the majority of excluded AMW wills were from Hertfordshire. Others were from Cambridgeshire, Hereford, Huntingdonshire, London, and Middlesex. 3. Throughout, when discussing individuals “writing” their wills, I am using the term to describe what was often the process of dictating the document’s content to a scribe. Nuncupative wills record a deathbed statement as heard by the witnesses (audience) and are described here as “spoken” by the testator to distinguish them.
LOOKI NG FOR ANI MALS I N EARLY MODERN ENGLAND ix
the same period. These wills (which I refer to as the LMA dataset) come from the classifications MS 9172/31 (1620) to MS 9172/42 (1634) (no wills from 1623 have survived in the archives) and includes 1,130 from testators who lived in the City of London and 883 from those in surrounding parishes in Middlesex. I excluded damaged and incomplete wills from this dataset as well as wills from outside London and Middlesex and wills by testators whose place of residence is not known. The wills in the LMA dataset offer basic data on the same range of general issues as those contained in the large ERO dataset. I read most of the ERO wills from their originals, but due to constraints of time and distance, I read scans of some wills on the ERO’s website, http://seax.essexcc.gov.uk (SEAX). I read all of the LMA wills from the originals, then used online scans on www.ancestry.co.uk (Ancestry) for final checking during the writing of the book (due, again, to issues of dis tance and access). In addition, I have constructed a very limited dataset of a small sample of wills from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC), which had juris diction over wills by testators who had property in more than one loca tion. This PCC dataset, which I mention briefly in chapter 5, is made up of 161 wills by testators who lived in Essex, London, and Middlesex that were made probate in 1627, the middle year of the larger datasets. I read scans of registered copies of these wills (that is, the official replicas made at the time) on Ancestry. The originals are held in the National Archive (NA), and I have used NA reference numbers to identify the wills I specifi cally refer to. AswellasusingwillsIhavealsolookedatothermanuscriptholdingsin the ERO, LMA and NA, including accounts and commonplace books. Records such as these afford another means by which some of the priorities of early modern people might be made available to us. In addition, I have used the parish registers that record baptisms, marriages, and burials in the period to track down, where possible, more details of the lives of testators and their legatees than are evident in wills. I read scans of these documents on SEAX and Ancestry. Where a detail is hard to decipher on an ERO scan, I have been able to look at the original. The scan quality is excellent, however, and I needed to do this very few times. Althoughthewillsarelimitedinwhattheyendeavortodo(theirinten tions are very clear and very narrow), they can offer glimpses of the interac tions between humans and animals that are otherwise invisible to history. But, at the same time, wills, as those who have used them before to study
