The Intimate Bond (28 page)
Authors: Brian Fagan
Lattimore found that the caravans traveled between sixteen and forty kilometers (ten and twenty-five miles) a day, moving at the walking speed of the pullers. The distance depended on the topography, weather, and availability of water supplies. Chinese caravans were slower than Mongol ones, who had the advantage of being able to draw on fresh camels from their herds close at hand. Lattimore reveled in the life: “I had been getting used to breaking camp at anytime of the night, eating anything that came handy, and sleeping where I could lie down.” He also had the priceless gift of sensing landscapes in all their subtlety. “A good Mongol can tell at once whether a camel comes from a
nutak
, a homeland or orbit of migration, that is a little too hot in summer for the preference of a camel, or whether a cow was bred in high alpine pastures, on a wide, rather sandy plain or in the deep green pasture of a well-watered valley.”
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Over many centuries, camel nomads acquired subtle ecological knowledge about their environment and the animals they managed. Lattimore learned of this from older men, who could recognize “the smell” of the earth of a road or region when traveling at night. They could dismount, take up a handful of earth, sniff it, and say, “No, this is not our road, which should go in that other direction.”
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They knew their roads, even at night, and their relationships to patches of soil and vegetation.
The caravan masters and their pullers used a rich vocabulary to describe their landscapes and the animals they used. The age, color, and individual characteristics of a camel or, for that matter, a horse could be recited by Mongols with uncanny precision. There was, and still is, a lexicon for different kinds of hills, for ridges, plains, bodies of water, streams and springs. Oral directions guide travelers from one of these often-inconspicuous landmarks to the next, across landscapes that have few obvious features. The same landmarks had sacred geography,
marked by stone cairns known as
obas
, landscapes defined by watersheds and not valleys, because grazing grounds are defined that way.
Thus it was that desert caravans, wherever their locations, used subtle indicators to make their way across barren landscapes. Those who handled the caravans read the heavenly bodies to navigate their way, just as Pacific canoe skippers used the same kind of knowledge when out of sight of land. The comparisons with traditional sailors are irresistible: a deep conservatism in behavior, an intimate knowledge of the environment and its moods, encyclopedic knowledge of grazing and water supplies in remote, little-traveled terrain. Camels truly were the ships of the desert, but instead of wind and current, they responded to their human guides. The beasts carried the loads; the humans led them to graze and water. This simple partnership, born of a pragmatic need for survival, has endured for at least two thousand years.
If the donkey began the globalizing caravan trade on a large scale, the camel extended it, helping to bring the riches of Africa and Asia to Europe and beyond. That the camel trade survives today, even in the age of automobiles and cargo planes, shows how well adapted this partnership is to the extreme conditions of remote desert transport.
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Western England, late winter 1380. The file of packhorses plods steadily through the endless rain, heads down, hooves splashing in the mud of the narrow trackway. Stout ropes hold large bundles of grain on their backs, and laden panniers hang from their flanks. The packers walk ahead along the meandering lane, saying little, huddled in their leather cloaks in the wet. Dripping trees press on the defile that leads to a constricted masonry bridge across a fast-moving stream. A young man leads the way. The patient animals follow in single file between the low parapets that stand clear of their loads. This is an easy crossing compared with the more common timber bridges that would be lethally slippery on this dank, wintery day. The smell of wood smoke, barking dogs, a church bell tolling for a dead woman. The packers turn their beasts into a courtyard and unload them. They pile the bundles of grain in a nearby barn, ready for market day on the morrow.
No one living in the small market town would have looked twice at the weary pony train. Like everyone else, whether artisan, farmer, or merchant, its inhabitants depended heavily on animals for food, clothing, and transportation, especially on the ox, the sheep, and the horse. One estimate has it that, with their animals, medieval Europeans had five times the motor power of Chinese civilization of the day.
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Figure 14.1
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Pack horses transporting timber in Northumberland, northern England, c. 1812. SSPL/GettyImages.
Warhorses were the most valuable animals in medieval Europe, a society where agriculture and feudalism supported mounted warriors. The owner of a trained warhorse was an individual of status, defined by myths of chivalrous warfare, of devotion shared by knight and steed. Theirs was a very different world from that of the working horse, which, by the twelfth century, had taken over most plowing in France from the much slower oxen. The shift occurred later in England, where plowmen deliberately went slowly while plowing under feudal obligation to landowners.
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The changeover involved significant innovations in nonchoking collar harnesses and nailed horseshoes, essential in the damp climate of Northern Europe. The adoption of the three-field rotation system also made the changeover easier. This allowed farmers to produce oats and other forage for their animals as well as rye. Horses worked faster than oxen; moved well on steeper, stonier ground; and could handle all manner of tasks, from plowing and harrowing to hauling loads. But they were more expensive to feed and maintain and had no value at the end of their working lives, unlike oxen, which could be fattened and sold for
food. At first, oxen pulled the heavier loads, but over time, horse breeders developed bigger, stronger creatures, capable of handling greater weights. Equines were especially useful on larger farms and on the lighter chalk soils of southern England. Where there was plenty of lush pasture and heavier soils, oxen prevailed, while horses merely hauled carts and did the harrowing. Meanwhile, cattle and sheep provided flesh, leather, and wool. The insatiable demand for fine English wool in Europe led to meadows replacing plowed land in many places. This made economic sense. A few herdsmen could manage large numbers of sheep at a fraction of the labor involved in cereal cultivation. Wool provided no less than 5 percent of the English Crown's revenue by the mid-fourteenth century. Everyone in England ate mutton, but not horse meat, especially as influential people considered horses they had ridden both noble and too close to humans for either clerics or lords to consume. It was almost as if their prized mounts were human.
Compact Packers
Farmers and working country people owned relatively few riding horses, given the expense involved. Some kept a solitary beast that carried the farmer's wife to market or hefted packs and panniers with everything from corn to firewood. Owning one widened one's horizons beyond the narrow compass of village homestead. An owner could ride more than forty-eight to sixty-four kilometers (thirty to forty miles) a day, and merchants served customers over a wider area. Most farm horses hauled loads, towed plows, and worked the harvest. They also drove machinery that drained mines, operated mills, and hauled goods from ports and rivers to landlocked towns and villages. The numbers of riding horses rose irregularly until the eighteenth century, when 86 percent of one parish at the edge of eastern England's Fens owned horses and rode them regularly. This reflected a rising standard of living among rural householders.
By the sixteenth century, English horses were, for the most part, smaller beasts, with Irish and Scottish mounts being much preferred, the latter being “fast knit and strongly made for to endure travaile.”
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Most working horses were compact and well proportioned, used for long
journeys such as those of the seventeenth-century antiquarian William Camden, who surveyed Britain's past from horseback. From Camden's day up to the 1700s, Britain ran on small pack ponies.
Small, compact packhorses carried relatively small loads, but they were ideal for rough terrain, on hills, and under the muddy conditions that bedeviled every highway. They cost less to feed and were cheaper than larger beasts. As with donkey caravans, individual animals could be added or subtracted on the road. They were also faster than larger draft horses hauling carts, but were more expensive per kilometer in cargo cost than the larger animals and their wagons. Packhorse trains carried all manner of goods to London and were commonplace until the eighteenth century, when toll roads led to highway improvements and better conditions for draft horses. The transportation method of choice was still, of course, water, where bulk loads could be floated long distances. Land carriage was much more expensive. The price of coal, for example, doubled every sixteen kilometers (ten miles) overland, so there were obvious commercial advantages to mines operating close to waterways. Much coal traveled in small two-wheeled carts or in horse panniers.
Small towns with strategic positions on major rivers became important commercial hubs. Lechlade, on the Upper Thames, handled cloth and cheese from Gloucester and other towns. A major cheese market in the town attracted as many as 140 to 200 wagons, and numerous loads carried in on horseback. Horses also towed barges from riverbanks against current and prevailing winds, precursors to the horse-hauled canal barges that proliferated during the Industrial Revolution. Some coalfields constructed wooden wagon ways that allowed operators to move much larger tonnages to distribution points, ports, and riverbanks some kilometers from the pithead.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an ever-broadening range of commodities and goods traveled by road, among them cartloads of corn for town markets. More than a century earlier, William Camden had observed of the corn market at Warminster, in southern England, that “it is scarce credible what quantities of corn are each week carried hither and presently sold.”
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Textiles were also a major overland cargo, both as finished cloth and unfinished material. The volume of
carrier traffic was such that, as early as 1600, there were regular services from London to York and other northern cities. Road hauling became a major, if hazardous, business, especially because of highwaymen. Long-distance carriers responded by traveling in convoys.
Packhorses were small but strong, usually geldings, which were easier to control. In the final analysis, they were, in economic terms, a more refined version of the donkey and mule, rare in England until the eighteenth century. Two-wheeled carts were the vehicle of choice for carriers with much scarcer, large draft horses, although four-wheeled wagons spread gradually through England after the mid-sixteenth century. Four-wheelers required larger beasts, also used for plowing. An ideal animal “wyll stoupe to his worke, and lay sure holde of the grounde with his feet and stoutelye pull at a pinch.”
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Meanwhile, Monarchs and the Nobility . . .
The court, wealthy aristocracy, and the upper classes lived in another equine world. They routinely traveled from place to place on fine steeds. Unlike working people, who worked with animals for a livelihood, the nobility regarded good horsemanship as the attribute of a gentleman, ownership as a mark of social status. Such owners admired and cherished their mounts.
The elite often owned dozens of horses. When King Henry VIII died in 1547, he maintained more than a thousand horses at vast expense, in stables around his domains, looked after by a small army of grooms, blacksmiths, and horse masters. He encouraged the breeding of larger animals on big estates. The nobility followed his example. Books on horsemanship proliferated. Groups of landowners used one another's stallions to inseminate their mares. Practical breeding experience passed from owner to owner and became more selective. “Breed few but choice,” adjured a Warwickshire horse breeder. Henry VIII had encouraged the practice of importing foreign stock for cross-breeding purposes. Strong Flemish mares enhanced English draft horses. (Draft horses pulled loads and plowed.) In 1572 alone, English owners imported more than four hundred brood mares from the Dutch. Coursers (fast horses, often
war horses) from the Kingdom of Naples made excellent parade horses. Light Andalusian Ginetes (light Arabians), with ancestry in Moorish and Berber beasts, made ideal general riding horses and were widely used by cavalry.
Fine horses were powerful statements. King James I told his son Prince Henry, “It becometh a Prince better than any other man to be a fair and good horseman.” A rider who handled a “great horse” effortlessly and gracefully “importeth a majestie and drede to inferior persons beholding him aboue the common course of other men.”
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Powerful horses were an integral part of carefully stage-managed appearances by monarchs and important nobles. When Henry VIII rode to greet Francis I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, he headed a procession of 5,704 people and 3,224 horses. The flaunted power and wealth failed to outdo Francis I, who rode a magnificent bay at the head of his similarly impressive retinue. Portraits of monarchs and nobles depicted them astride great horses, dressed for war. In 1633, Van Dyck painted King Charles I astride a Spanish Ginete, in full armor. His old riding master by his side gazes at him in awe.