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The Demesne Cattle Herds on the Peterborough Abbey Estate

The Demography of the Estate Cattle Herd

For the years 1300-01, 1307-08, and 1309-10 there are account rolls preserved for each of the twenty-three manors of the Peterborough Abbey estate, excepting Cottingham and Great Easton in 1300-01. The first decade of the fourteenth century registered a high point of seigneurial high farming.^[1] The English medieval population was at its peak. The Great Famine of 1315-17 lay in the future. Inflation and demand for wool exports exerted their most acute influences on agrarian lords.

Over the first decade of the fourteenth century Peterborough Abbey herded over twelve hundred cattle. This chapter explores the economic aspects of husbanding such a cattle herd.^[2] It examines the demography of the estate herd and then links its developmental cycle to the Abbey's strategies for producing, consuming, and exchanging traction, meat, milk, hides, and tallow.^[3]

The accountants of the Abbey used seven categories to describe the subgroups of the estate cattle-herd: bull, oxen, cows, older bullocks and heifers (called 3-4-year-olds in the tables), younger bullocks and heifers (called 2-3-year-olds in the tables), yearlings, and calves. Table 21 (see appendix 4 for detailed statistics) summarizes the statistics for the estate cattle-herd in the early fourteenth century. Figure 9 illustrates the proportions of each subgroup in the estate herd. Oxen constituted about one-third and cows one fifth of the estate herd. Each of the four manorial groupings on the estate herded cattle-herds identical in proportional representation of bulls, oxen, cows, and juvenile and immature cattle described in figure 9. The

herd described by figure 9 thus typifies a seigneurial cattle herd of the high-farming period.

The coefficients of variation in table 21 show, however, that different subgroups varied in their presence on individual manors. Not all manorial cattle herds contained the typical proportion of subgroups already identified. The Abbey's manors specialized in husbanding different subgroups of the herd to ensure the smooth reproduction of the estate herd. One type of manorial cattle herd, a microcosm of the estate herd, did husband subgroups according to the typical proportions of the estate herd. The home manor of Boroughbury managed such a herd. The Abbey maintained the same mix of subgroups in the

Fig. 9.
The composition of the cattle herd on the estate of Peterborough Abbey
in the early fourteenth century.

Boroughbury cattle herd for over a century.^[4] Only in the later fourteenth century, after the Black Death, did the composition of the herd begin to change. Such a typical herd, with few cows and younger cattle, guaranteed only minimal replacement of that manorial herd. To ensure reproduction of the estate herd, the Abbey had to rely on breeding manors, namely the home manor of Eye and the western manor of Kettering, to husband herds with proportionately fewer oxen and higher numbers of cows and young animals. A third type of manorial herd found on the estate kept no cows at all or so few that the manor had to rely on breeding manors or purchase to stock its oxen. Such manorial herds were essentially nonreproductive, or "zero-growth" herds.

The annual cycle of herd management in 1307-08 (figs. 10 and 11) on the manors of Eye and Castor illustrates the different breeding and equilibrium strategies found in manorial herds. The circles show the number of the different subgroups. Arrows within the boxes show the dynamic stocking cycle of the manorial herd. Over the annual manorial cycle, young calves would stock yearlings, yearlings would stock 2-3-year-olds, and the 3-4-year-olds would join the mature cohorts of oxen, cows, or bulls. The arrows pointing into the box illustrate the "external inputs," especially the transfer of cattle from other manors into a subgroup of the manor herd. Eighteen oxen from another manor were added to the twenty-eight oxen of the Castor herd. Arrows pointing out of the box illustrate "output" from the manorial herd. For instance, Castor butchered three of its oxen in 1307-08. Eye and Kettering were the only manors on the estate that year where cows outnumbered oxen, and, therefore, younger animals were more prominent on the two manors. At Castor only two 3-4-year-olds stocked its oxen and cows. Not surprisingly, then, eighteen oxen from another manor were transferred to stock Castor's oxen. Eye, which kept a much larger herd of young stock, supplied oxen to other manors. In figure 9 the arrows show that it sent six oxen to Werrington, whence, according to the accounts, they were sent to Walton, a manor that kept only oxen. As a breeding manor, Eye also kept a much higher proportion of young females. Of its forty-one 3-4-year-olds ready for stocking into mature cohorts, eighteen were heifers and only twelve were bullocks. The sex of the ten 3-4-year-olds butchered is not known. Given the proportions of males to females in the herd, one suspects that the cattlemen at Eye had butchered young bullocks,

Figs. 10 and 11.
Annual cycle of cattle breeding at the manor of Castor (10), where only minimal breeding of
oxen occurred, in contrast with the annual cycle at Eye, a breeding manor (11). The number
in the circles show the different numbers of subgroups of the cattle herd present on each of
the manors. The arrows show how the number of subgroups increased or declined through
butchery, mortality, intermanorial transfer, stocking, sale, or purchase over the annual cycle
of 1307-08.

superfluous to stocking levels of oxen. At Castor, where few cows produced hardly enough stock to maintan the manorial plough oxen, young animals were rarely butchered. The annual butchery rate for young cattle at Eye was much higher; presumably young male calves were also butchered to maintain the high female-sex ratio desired for this breeding manor.

The differences in the composition of the cattle herds and the

annual cycle of reproduction, stocking, and butchery at Castor and Eye are striking; yet each manor cultivated demesnes of the same size in the early fourteenth century, and each planted wheat, dredge, and oats in similar proportions.^[5] The similarities of their cereal husbandry camouflage real differences in their respective pastoral economies.

Breeding manors, such as Eye, ensured against the reproductive failure on manors with few cows, such as Castor. They also made manorial herds without cows possible elsewhere on the estate. The Abbey used intermanorial transfers to and from breeding manors to correct shortages and surplus of cattle on the estate. The Abbey could also buy cattle on the market. It chose between intermanorial transfers and market purchases depending on the distance of manors from the Abbey. Each strategy produced its own demographic rates for mortality, butchery, and stocking from within the herd.

Figure 12 illustrates how the annual rates of intermanorial transfers, stocking, buying, selling, butchery, and mortality of cattle varied across zones of the estate. The core manors include those within eight miles of the Abbey; the semiperipheral, those between eight and twenty-five miles; and the peripheral manors, those located more than twenty-five miles from the Abbey.^[6] The details of intermanorial transfer of cattle from manor to manor are set out in tables 22 and 23. Of all the groups of the cattle herd, the Abbey moved its oxen around the manors most frequently and in the greatest numbers. The greatest number of intermanorial transfers occurred on the home manors of the estate. On the manors of western Northamptonshire fewer transfers of cattle occurred, and Kettering served as the conduit for many of the transfers. Transfers of cattle on the manors of the northern grouping accounted for less than 3 percent of all exchanges.

The Abbey's buying and selling of cattle reversed the pattern just described for intermanorial transfers of cattle. The Abbey bought and sold the most stock at the periphery of the estate where it adjusted manorial herds most infrequently through intermanorial transfer (fig. 12). The Abbey thus used the market differently depending on manorial location. By combining complementary strategies of intermanorial transfer of stock and market sales and purchases, the Abbey conserved the capacity of its estate herd to reproduce itself biologically.

The biological reproduction of the herd also depended on the annual rates at which the Abbey stocked 3-4-year-olds to mature

Fig. 12.
Vital rates of the estate cattle herd. The concentric rings of the circle represent the home
manors (innermost circle), the semi-peripheral manors (middle circle), and the peripheral
manors (outermost circle) of the estate. The conventions indicate whether or not the rates
of butchery, purchases, intermanorial transfer, stocking of younger cattle into mature
cohorts (oxen, cows, bulls), mortality, and sales were similar or different across the different
zones of the estate. The arrows indicate the direction of difference; for instance, the rate of
butchery, which differed across the three zones of the estate, increased among manorial
cattle herds with proximity to the Abbey.

groups of bulls, oxen, and cows. Butchery and sale of young animals obviously influenced stocking rates too. Everywhere on its estate the Abbey stocked adult groups with young cattle at the same annual rate (fig. 12). When it culled cattle for meat, its choices varied according to manorial location. It butchered the most cattle on its home manors. As distance from the Abbey increased, the Abbey preferred to sell old stock rather than butcher it. Butchery proved to be a highly efficient way for the Abbey to remove older and infertile animals from its herd.

On the peripheral manors, where the Abbey butchered its cattle comparatively infrequently, the mortality rate for cattle was highest. Presumably manorial reeves culled cattle less rigorously on the peripheral manors, where stock often died before market sale.

Patterns of intermanorial transfer and butchery sales illustrate that the Peterborough cattle herd formed one large reproducing herd constituted by a network of manorial herds. The Abbey practiced its different strategies of herd management depending on the geographical location of its manor. The Abbey thus produced its own economic geography for cattle husbandry. Annual fertility and mortality, vital rates not fully controllable by the Abbey, dictated constraints within which the Abbey had to manage its herding strategies.

Annual mortality rates varied for subgroups in the estate herd.^[7] The rates lowered with increasing age. For the three accounting years the overall mean mortality rate for oxen was 4.3 percent. Cows died at only a slightly higher rate of 5.2 percent. Only calves died at an average rate (10.4 percent) significantly higher than any of the other subgroups. The mortality rates of the Abbey's cattle herd have interesting economic implications. A 10 percent mortality rate is common with intensive cattle husbandry.^[8] Annual death rates of over 15 percent begin to affect the viability of herd management. The Abbey thus enjoyed comparatively low mortality rates for its cattle herd in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Annual mortality rates necessarily influence selection of cattle for butchery. The similar mortality rates among the subgroups, with the exception of calves, meant that the Abbey could cull at will among the subgroups, if it so chose. It is therefore instructive to examine what economic decisions the Abbey made in selecting subgroups for butchery.

Over the first decade of the fourteenth century the Abbey butchered the subgroups of its herds at the following rates: oxen, 8 percent; cows, 12 percent; immatures, 14 percent; calves, 15 percent. To judge from the three accounting years, the overall butchery rates for oxen, cows, and immatures did not differ significantly.^[9] The Abbey did, however, butcher its calves at a significantly higher rate than its oxen. Between mortality and butchery the Peterborough cattle herd lost more calves than it did mature animals.

The annual rates at which cows reproduced calves help to determine herd growth and are therefore crucial to herd management. The overall infertility rate for the estate herd, to judge from the three

accounting years, was 28.6 percent.^[10] A little more than a quarter of the cows mated did not produce calves. The infertility rate is inflated, however, since it includes young heifers which the Abbey had just stocked among cows, usually without mating them. The mean stocking rate for heifers at this time was 14.3 percent. Without the heifers, the infertility rate for cows was a respectable 14.4 percent. Medieval farmers had high expectations for breeding. In his treatise on estate management, Walter of Henley expected that cows should bear calves at yearly intervals.^[11] With a forty-week gestation period for calves and an interval of at least three to four weeks from calving to first heat, cows had only three mating opportunities per year to maintain yearly production of a calf. The high reproductive rate indicates the Abbey's successful and intensive management of cattle breeding.

The Abbey of Peterborough managed its cattle herd as a reproductive unit. It maintained its adult beasts through stocking from its immature animals bred by estate cows. Some of the Abbey's manors specialized in breeding cattle, others maintained zero-growth herds by simply replacing their oxen, the critical members of the estate herd. Depending on the geographical position of the manor in the estate, the Abbey relied on different economic strategies for the maintenance of its cattle herd. The Abbey's practice of buying and selling cattle more actively on the manors of the northern grouping distinguished the cattle herd of the peripheral manors from those of the core of the estate. On the more distant northern manors it made more sense to sell stock than to herd them into the Abbey for slaughter and consumption. In contrast, the Abbey involved itself least in buying and selling cattle on its core manors. It relied on the technique of intermanorial transfer of stock to adjust the composition of the manorial herds of the core. It also butchered and consumed the cattle of its core manors at a much higher rate than at the semiperiphery or periphery of the estate. It can be said that the demography of the cattle herd at the periphery was more market-involved and monetized and at the core more consumption-oriented.

By using the market selectively and relying on breeding manors that ensured reproduction of the estate herd, the Abbey resisted the full market penetration of its cattle herding. Its selective use of the market becomes more evident when one considers the Abbey's production and consumption of the products of its cattle herd.

The Consumption and Production of the Products of the Cattle Herd

The cattle herd of the estate provided the Abbey with traction, meat, milk, hides, and tallow. The demography of the estate herd indicates that the production of oxen to draw ploughs shaped the basic contours of its demography. The number of oxen continued to correlate with the acreage sown on the estate, even though cows had increased relative to the number of oxen between the twelfth and the fourteenth century.^[12] To what extent did the Abbey also rely on its cattle herd for the production of dairy products and meat?

Profits accrued from sale of stock show to what extent the Abbey relied on the production of meat and tallow for income. Figures for selling cattle on the estate in the early fourteenth century are set out in table 24. When comparing income from sales to outlay for purchases of stock, we find that the Abbey actually spent more money on the net purchase of cattle stock in 1300-01 and 1307-08 than it made on sales.

The Abbey exercised caution in marketing certain subgroups of its cattle herd. It never bought bullocks, heifers, or yearlings. Such an economic strategy emphasized the expectation that the estate herd should function as a self-contained reproductive unit. The Abbey separated subgroups most essential to stocking the Abbey's herd from market exchange. Nor did the Abbey sell off cows with calves. Depending on its strategies to maintain reproduction and its equilibrium of oxen and cereal acreage, it selectively sold off cows and calves separately.

The household of the Abbey also consumed beef. No analysis of its cattle marketing can fail to consider the consumption needs of the Abbey. The statistics for beef sent into the Abbey larder are presented in table 25 along with comparative figures for beef consumption available from other ecclesiastical estates. The Peterborough manors sent in sixty-four beasts to the Abbey in 1300-01, 129 in 1307-08, and 147 in 1309-10. The Abbey culled its beef evenly across all the subgroups of its herd excepting calves, which it butchered in slightly greater numbers than it did oxen. Such even culling stresses how the Abbey balanced consumption with a reproductive equilibrium in its demesne herd. The Abbey produced meat as a by-product of its estate herd.

Hides contributed comparatively little to the Abbey's income from secondary animal products (table 24). The Abbey sold hides skinned from cattle that had died on its manors. Most of the cattle sent into the Abbey household went in on the hoof. The Abbey undoubtedly marketed the hides from the cattle it slaughtered; however, it is not possible to track these sales without central householding accounts.^[13] If it did sell all the hides of its slaughtered cattle, it would have disposed of more hides than all its manors, which marketed only a few hides of dead cattle annually.

The Abbey devoted itself to the production of dairy products. It had increased the proportion of its cows to oxen over the thirteenth century. The bulk of dairy production on the estate occurred on the Abbey's breeding manors, where the ratio of cows to oxen was higher than average. A breakdown of dairy yields on each manor in the year 1307-08 appears in appendix 4. For the manor of Eve and the grange at Northolm near Eve nine accounts are available for the period 1300-1483. Those yields are presented in appendix 5. The study of yields is complicated by the fact that the Abbey occasionally milked its ewes on some manors.^[14] With only one exception, however, the yield of sheep milk was not separated from cow milk in the accounts. The table of yields thus indicates the manors for which there is evidence of sheep milking and calculates yields first for dairy cows and then for both cows and milking ewes on the manor.

The adjusted dairy yields ranged from thirty pounds (13.6 kg) to one hundred pounds (45.5 kg) per cow for the milking season of 1307-08. The mean for the estate was ninety-five pounds (43.2 kg) per cow. Surprisingly, dairying on a large scale at Eye, a manor set in the rich summer pasture of the fen, did not produce better dairy yields. The Abbey's largest dairy herd at Eye produced only average dairy yields of ninety-three pounds (42.3 kg) per cow.

The average dairy yields of the estate, equivalent to two-thirds of a gallon a day, or 100-130 gallons of milk during the summer milking season, met the expectations of the husbandry manuals of the thirteenth century:

And be it known that the dairy woman ought to make cheese from the first day of May until Michaelmas for twenty-two weeks; and each cow ought by right to yield during this time five and one half stone of cheese [69 lb. or 31.3 kg], and of butter in proportion— that is to say that for seven stone [87.5 lb. or 39.7 kg] of cheese one ought to have one stone [12.5 lb. or 5.7 kg] of butter.^[15]

At the turn of the nineteenth century, four hundred gallons of milk was considered an average yield.^[16] The medieval yields are similar to those produced among African pastoralists such as the Nuer, Dinka, and Boran.^[17]

The Abbey's cows yielded a total of 19,000 to 23,000 pounds of dairy produce annually during the first decade of the fourteenth century (table 26). The Abbey sold approximately one-half of the yield of its dairy herds. The manors sent in a third of the total yield of cheese and one quarter of the yield of butter into the Abbey for its consumption. Over half of the milk reserved from cheese production nourished lambs and calves. Dairy sales provided small change for the Abbey's purse compared to grain sales. In 1307-08 the proceeds of the Abbey's grain sales (2,580s .) were just short of five times greater than those of its dairy sales (535s .).

It cost the Abbey to maintain its cattle herd and dairies. The Abbey fattened its oxen before butchery with oats reaped from its demesnes. It employed dairymaids who received wages in a combination of cash

and grain. The salt, presses, and churns of the dairy were also an expense. The dairy house required maintenance and repair. The wages of the ploughmen on the estate can be considered an expense of cattle husbandry too, since the production of traction necessary to produce grain for consumption was a primary aim of its cattle herding. The Abbey also spent money on cattle stalls. These expenses can be added to upkeep as building costs.

Any effort to quantify costs of upkeep must stumble, since the market did not form the prices for all costs involved.^[18] The Abbey drew directly from its own resources, demesne grain, demesne labor, and so on, to meet expenses incurred in its cattle husbandry. The figures in table 27, which do cost all expenses and assign a market value to the meat and dairy produce directly consumed by the Abbey, must be treated with caution. When all items are costed with market prices, the expenses of maintaining the cattle herd matched the annual income in dairy sales and consumption. The Abbey would have realized no profit from its herd if it had not succeeded in limiting its involvement in the market as a consumer. Since it did succeed in containing much of the expense in its consumption sector, it gained some much-needed cash flow from the sale of dairy and other secondary animal products. The "break-even" economics of cattle management underlines again the Abbey's primary interest as a cattle herder in reproducing oxen to work the demesne arable. The Abbey above all conserved its expectation to consume from its estate and ate its own grain and dairy products. It selectively marketed secondary animal products to maintain some cash flow.

As a seigneurial lord the Abbey controlled the pastoral resources of its demesne. It could graze these resources with its own herds or sell them to its peasants. The choice involved decisions about the size of its own cattle herd and the trade-off in money it would receive from sales of pasture. The Abbey's income from sales of pastoral resources in the first decade of the fourteenth century is set out in table 28. The Abbey's sales of pastoral resources produced two to four times more income than its sales of cattle products. The Abbey's capacity to put so much pasture on the market indicates that it enjoyed some slack in matching its cattle herd to its pastoral resources. It chose to sell pastoral resources rather than expand the size of its herd to match its supply of pasture.

Each year the Abbey sold one-fifth of its total pastoral sales in the

"processed" form of hay and forage. The Abbey could afford to market hay, since it still collected mowing services from its peasants. The costs of producing hay would have doubled for the Abbey without the labor services of its peasants. The fact that the Abbey still consumed these labor services rendered the sale of its resources even more attractive.

The expectation of consumption shaped the management of the Abbey's cattle herd in the fourteenth century. The Abbey sought to protect its consumption of grain first. It maintained its herd of oxen to produce traction in the cereal sector. By expanding its dairy herd and marketing half of its dairy surplus, the Abbey made some cash to put toward meeting royal demands and other feudal costs. The Abbey's endowment of pastoral resources could have sustained a much larger herd on the estate, but the Abbey chose instead to sell its pastoral resources to the peasant sector for cash. Such strategies remind us of the difficulties of categorizing an estate as primarly arable or pastoral. The Abbey's endowment of pastoral resources did not automatically translate into bigger herds. With its emphasis on oxen, the Abbey behaved like a "typical" arable lord. It viewed much of its pastoral endowment as a source of cash sales rather than a resource calling for "maximization" of its own pastoral output.

The Abbey's strategies to ensure herd reproduction without the market and its selective use of medieval markets for sales and not for consumption have implications for the study of institutional changes and the emergence of agrarian capitalism in England. Such impli-

cations are worthy of broad outline in these concluding remarks. The Abbey carefully marked off its sphere of consumption and reproduction from the market, although it capably used the market to enhance such strategies when it chose. Such institutional behavior helps us to understand better the asymmetrical linkage of consumption and production in medieval regional economies and to appreciate more fully the undoing of such asymmetrical links over the fifteenth century. Recent research suggests that the market increasingly coordinated regional specialization of northern European livestock husbandry over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Different regions, such as Ireland and parts of Scandinavia, specialized in different stages of the herding cycle. By the early modern period in England, the market organized reproduction of livestock and different regions assumed specialized roles in the breeding, finishing, and marketing of livestock and livestock products.^[19] Changes in pastoral resource-use accompanied the reorganization of livestock husbandry in the early modern period. New relations of consumption to production unlinked rigid boundaries between permanent pasture and arable through the widespread practice of convertible husbandry or more extensive and regular fodder rotations interspersed with cereal rotations.^[20] The dissolution of the boundaries between pasture and arable together with the forging of new links between buying and selling in the late fifteenth century emerges as a locus of transformation in the medieval pastoral economy. This locus requires further study in future work.