Pruebas

Regional patterns of demesne horse ownership can be examined more closely by dividing our main sample into five geographical regions: East Anglia, the north, the south and south-west and the Thames basin.¹²⁸ Some striking differences in the makeup of demesne horse stocks are immediately apparent; table 1 illustrates the regional variation in horse ownership. The sample is broken down into individual horse categories across the five regions. The final row combines the categories of affer and stott into a single plough-horse category¹²⁹ for ease of comparison.

¹²⁸ The regions are defined as follows: East Anglia: Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Norfolk, Suffolk; The Thames Basin: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex, Oxfordshire and Surrey; The South and South-west: Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex, Wiltshire; The Midlands: Cheshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire; The North: Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire. Dividing the country into such regions involves some judgment calls.

For example, Essex could easily (and often is) considered part of East Anglia; however it was economically more closely tied to London and the Home Counties and has been included in the Thames Basin region here.

¹²⁹ This distinction is made while noting that not all affers and stotts were strictly plough animals.

See pg. 8, n.18.

Map 2.2: Regional Distribution of Manorial Account Sample

Legend Manors East Anglia The North Midlands Thames Basin South and South West

Table 2.1: Regional Distribution of Horse Types

East Anglia Midlands North

South and

South-west Thames Basin National

No. of

Source: manorial account database.

Many regions had a dominant type of horse which comprised a clear

majority. On a national level, affers and stotts were the most common type of horse kept by demesnes. The 1488 animals (1069 affers and 419 stotts) comprised 56.2 percent of all the horses in our sample. Regionally, however, there was significant variation in the numbers of these animals (most frequently employed as plough-horses), ranging from only 18.9 percent in the North to over 70 percent in East Anglia. Affers and stotts were almost as numerous in the Thames Basin region, comprising there 68.8 percent of all horses in that region. These proportions correlate broadly with those areas of the country which had embraced horse

ploughing most thoroughly. The north and midlands regions stand out in our sample as having significantly fewer affers and stotts, and this is best explained by the predominance of ox ploughing which persevered in those regions into the fourteenth century.¹³⁰ In the only regions which stocked both types of horses, East Anglia and the Thames Basin, proportions of stotts and affers were polarized. Stotts were more common in the former region, accounting for more than half of all working horses, and less than a quarter in the latter.

However, the distinction between the two was largely nominal. John Langdon has argued that there was little difference between stotts and affers, with

‘stott’ simply being an alternative term for the same type of horse.¹³¹ Our data supports Langdon’s view, as of the 251 demesnes in our sample which stocked stotts or affers, none stocked both types of horse. In Cambridgeshire, two manors stocked affers, the Earl of Lincoln’s manor of Grantesete and the Crowland Abbey manor of Oakington, while the other two Cambridgeshire manors in our sample, Ditton Valence and Kennet, kept stotts. In the case of the earldom of Lincoln, whose

¹³⁰ See Langdon, Horses, Oxen, 110-111.

¹³¹ Ibid., 296-7.

manors were spread across much of England, from Lancashire in the North to Dorset in the South as well as the aforementioned East Anglian manor, the custom was to use the term of affer for all of its plough and multi-purpose horses, no matter what local custom prevailed. Both stotts and affers could also be found in Suffolk, though the distribution was skewed towards the former term. The same trend holds for all of East Anglia, as only seven manors in the region listed affers while forty-one recorded stotts. The opposite was true for the Thames Basin, where affers were the

predominant animal. Here fifty-three demesnes stocked affers and only fifteen kept stotts. The distinction was seemingly one of nomenclature, the decision about categorical title seemingly down to institutional custom or perhaps even managerial or scribal preference; stotts and affers were the same beast. When considered together as a single category, the proportions are very similar, as affers and stotts comprised 72.9 percent of all horses in East Anglia and 68.8 percent in the Thames Basin.

The North stands out for having a much higher proportion of young horses (pullani) than any other region, and this could be indicative of more active horse breeding in that part of the country. However, given the small size of our northern, sample we cannot be too sure of the significance of this particular finding, especially as many of these young horses came from a single place. The high proportion of young horses was bolstered by sixty-two young runcini kept at the Earl of Lincoln’s stud farm in Ightenhill in Lancashire.¹³² The stud farm also inflated the proportion of mares in the region. While these riding horses were not likely to ever work on the demesne, they were still an important part of the earl’s manorial enterprise, in that he

¹³² If the seven runcini foals are removed the total number of young horses falls to sixty-seven from 129, or from 52.4 percent to 27.2 percent.

devoted finite resources to the production of riding horses.¹³³ Looking at the estate’s pastoral enterprise, Atkin has argued that the Lincoln estate was “geared towards a cash economy”.¹³⁴ However, the accounts for Ightenhill do not record any of these riding horses being sold in 1295-6, so the horse stud farm was seemingly not a for-profit enterprise in the same way that the estate’s vaccaries were.¹³⁵