Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  Medieval monarchs commonly used bezoars. The emperor Rudolf II of Prague wore numerous stones as an amulet against his chronic melancholia. He had a bezoar made into a drinking cup mounted in enamel and gold and studded with rubies and emeralds. They were valued as a purgative, and even thought to protect against the plague. Napoleon Bonaparte was sent bezoars during his confinement on St Helena. Had he not thrown them into the fire, he might not have succumbed to the arsenic that is said killed him. Elizabeth I took their protective powers seriously. She wore rings inset with bezoars and immersed one in her cup before she drank. Some rulers kept a stone set in a gold filigree case on a chain around their neck, to be ever available to suspend in their wine.

  The stones remained popular until the empirical spirit of the Enlightenment caused people to question their efficacy. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré famously doubted their protective properties, and in 1575 took the opportunity to carry out a gruesome experiment. A cook at the king’s court was caught stealing silver and sentenced to hang. Paré offered him the alternative of taking poison with the protection of a bezoar, and if he survived, his life would be spared. The poor man died in agony seven hours later.

  Although news of the unfortunate experiment somewhat dented their popularity, that was not the last word on bezoars’ curative properties. Modern research has shown that when immersed in an arsenical solution, a bezoar will absorb the toxic compounds arsenate and arsenite. So the Arabs were half right. Bezoars are effective against arsenic, which was the poison most likely to be used against a medieval monarch, but not as the cure-all claimed for them.

  Bezoars are still highly prized in Eastern, particularly Chinese, medicine and as curiosities in the West. One recently changed hands in London for £29,000, although it was beautifully set in gold with a gold chain. And of course, Harry Potter saved Ron Weasley’s life by pushing a bezoar down his throat when he was poisoned by drinking oak-matured mead intended for Professor Dumbledore.

  If we are ever tempted to overlook the central place occupied by cattle in human society, we only have to bring to mind the billion or so people in India who claim the cow to be sacred. Hindus believe that all creatures have a soul, but particularly the cow, which God created as the first creature immediately after mankind. Therefore killing one would be no less sinful than killing a human being. In the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, written between 300 BC and AD 300, the transition from hunter-gathering to settled farming is mythologized: ‘Once when there was a great famine King Prithu took up his bow and arrow and pursued the earth to force her to yield nourishment for his people. The earth took the form of a cow and begged him to spare her life; she then allowed him to milk her for all that the people needed.’ Gandhi used this image of the earth cow for the ideal of an Indian nation sustaining her people.

  The Hindu taboo against eating beef is tied up with social status. The higher the caste, the greater the food restrictions and the more starkly its members are differentiated from other castes and faiths. Rather reminiscent of the Western concern with ‘clean eating’ and the recent upsurge in veganism, it is tied up with female purity, docility and generosity – the cow gives her milk from her own body without stint – and the milk’s purity and healthfulness give those who consume it a higher moral value than those who are less discriminating in their diet.

  In the last few years, the cow’s sacredness to Hindus has also become a rallying point around which growing nationalism and hostility to Muslims and other minority religions is coalescing. Hundreds, even thousands of ‘cow vigilante groups’ have formed all over India, nominally to protect cows from being harmed, but actually as a powerful symbol of popular resistance, given form in Hindu nationalism, to increasing state domination of Indian custom and society, and what is seen as creeping Islamization. They are also claiming to enforce the cow protection laws that are in force in almost all of India’s states. Breach of these is punished with some severity. For example, in Gujarat, life imprisonment and a large fine is imposed for killing a cow. And in 2015, again in Gujarat, lower-caste Hindus were punished by flogging for skinning a dead cow. This started street protests and led to the resignation of the state’s chief minister.

  The groups, mostly young men, are often armed and act as vigilantes, attacking Muslims whom they suspect of harming cattle, smuggling them for slaughter or otherwise dealing with their carcases. This is part of the Hindutva movement (‘Hinduness’), which started in 1923 and has widespread support among the Hindu population and the tacit encouragement of a large section of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Reuters reported in June 2017 that 28 people had been killed and 124 injured in 63 attacks since 2010 in ‘cow-related violence’. The scale of the attacks is described as ‘unprecedented’. In June 2017, a popular Hindu preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, said that anyone who ate beef should be publicly hanged. One Hindu animal rights activist claimed that the slaughter of cows was directly responsible for global warming because it released ‘EPW’ – emotional pain waves. After September 2014, the government banned the slaughter of buffaloes, in a move that struck a blow against the Muslim-run beef industry.

  It is a particularly Indian response to religious differences for the modern nation to coalesce around their ancient reverence for the cow, a potent religious and nationalistic symbol capable of arousing deep emotion. It is also a powerful acknowledgement of the central place that cattle still have in human life in India, which would be unthinkable without the cow.

  But it would be similarly unthinkable in Europe or America, or anywhere else in the world, whether we in the urban West recognize it or not. For cows are not just utilitarian providers of flesh and milk; they are creatures that are enfolded in our very existence. There is hardly an aspect of human life that is not touched by our association with cattle, or enriched by the gifts they give us. Until the last century, throughout all recorded time, the patient cow is the one animal we could not have done without. It has been with us from the beginning; it was there at the birth of Christ; it is entwined in our myths and folklore. For wherever we have journeyed through our long history, always at our side has been the long-suffering ox, plodding doggedly on.

  The black one, last as usual, swings her head

  And coils a black tongue round a grass-tuft. I

  Watch her soft weight come down, her split feet spread.

  In front, the others swing and slouch; they roll

  Their great Greek eyes and breathe out milky gusts

  From muzzles black and shiny as wet coal.

  The collie trots, bored, at my heels, then plops

  Into the ditch. The sea makes a tired sound

  That’s always stopping though it never stops.

  A haycart squats prick-eared against the sky.

  Hay breath and milk breath. Far out in the West

  The wrecked sun founders though its colours fly.

  The collie’s bored. There’s nothing to control …

  The black cow is two native carriers

  Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole.

  Norman MacCaig, ‘Fetching Cows’

  Glossary

  acre: 4,840 square yards and the amount of land a man and an ox could plough in a day. Acres were traditionally 220 yards, the length an average ox could pull without stopping, by 22 yards, a chain and width needed to turn a team of oxen along the headland and bring them back into work.

  aftermath: see foggage.

  beeves: synonymous with steers – cattle (castrated if males) being reared for meat.

  belted: see colour-sided.

  Blue Grey: the first-cross hybrid between a Galloway cow and a Cumberland White Shorthorn bull.

  broken-coated: synonymous with rough-coated, meaning having a coarse waterproof outer coat.

  byre: northern word for cow-house.

  carucate: the amount of land tillable by a team of eight oxen in a season. Equal to 8 oxgangs and 4 virgates – usually 120 acres. See hide.

  chain: unit of leng
th of 22 yards, equal to four rods of 5½ yards.

  colour-sided: white colouring that makes the animal look as if a sheet has been thrown over its back, particularly in the now extinct Sheeted Somerset and the Dutch Lakenvelder. Similar to belting in the Galloway.

  dewlap: the pendulous flap of skin and flesh that hangs below the lower jaw or neck and ‘laps the dew’.

  dun: a café au lait colour.

  etterlin: Scottish word for a year-old heifer in calf.

  fat beast: a beast whose body has fully matured so that its bones and muscles have grown to their fullest extent and it has laid down fat either between the tissues or as a covering over the body. See finishing.

  finching: a characteristic white marking that runs from the belly to the dewlap and on to the head, then along the spine and tail. Particularly noticeable in the Gloucester and Hereford, and also in the animals in the cave paintings at Lascaux. finishing: the stage at which the animal begins to add fat to the foundation of bone, offal and lean meat or muscle it has previously built up, in that order.

  foggage: the fresh green regrowth after a crop of grass has been mown for hay. Aftermath is the regrowth after a crop of grass has been taken for silage.

  freemartin: the female of a pair of male and female twin calves that is almost invariably barren, and is kept as a cow free for fattening; from the Scottish ‘mart’ meaning a fattened ox.

  furlong: 10 chains or 220 yards, and the length of a furrow – a ‘furrow long’. Eight furlongs equal a mile, which is 1,760 yards and 1,000 Roman paces. A Roman pace was two of our paces because they counted the left and the right pace together as one.

  genetically modified crop (G.M.): crop grown with seed that has been genetically modified to have a particular characteristic, usually resistance to herbicide.

  genotype: the complete heritable genetic identity of an individual; also refers to a particular gene or set of genes that determine one of its characteristics.

  haplogroup: a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor.

  haplotype: a group of genes in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent.

  headland: that part of a field left unploughed at both ends of a furlong where the ox team was turned. The headland was left to the last and ploughed round and round rather than up and down.

  heriot: OE heregeat (‘war gear’). Originally a death duty in medieval England by which a nobleman’s accoutrements of warfare – horses, swords, shields – had to be returned to his lord who had provided them. Later, when noblemen provided their own equipment, it was transmuted into a money payment. It then became the right of a superior lord to take his tenant’s best beast upon his death in return for his heirs being allowed to remain in occupation of his land. Heriot survived into the twentieth century and sometimes touched the great and the good. Lord Rothschild held a copyhold estate under the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, as his superior lords. They had the right at his death to claim as a heriot his best beast, which, in the case of so distinguished a racing man as Rothschild, might have been worth £20,000 or more. Heriot was abolished in England in 1922. See carucate.

  hide: 4 virgates or yardlands, about 120 acres, and the amount of land that would support a family. It varied according to the quality of the land.

  humus: the accumulated decayed organic matter in soil that gives it fertility.

  hybrid vigour or heterosis: the effect of the first crossing of two pure breeds, which combines and enhances the best characteristics of each parent and subordinates their less desirable ones in an animal that is superior to both its parents. Every time the cross is made it produces an animal with the same characteristics so long as both parents have been bred pure for long enough. Most enhanced agricultural production around the world depends on hybridization: poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruit and so on.

  linseed cake: the pressed residue after the linseed oil has been extracted from flax seed. The cake is used for cattle feed and contains valuable polyunsaturated fatty acids, which have considerable health-giving properties for both the animal and its human consumer.

  marbling: the fat that is accumulated within the muscles and tissues of an animal and makes the meat more succulent.

  moiled: a Celtic word meaning bare and used to describe polled, i.e. hornless, cattle.

  night-stance: a place where drovers rested and fed their cattle overnight.

  nook: a quarter of a hide – about 30 acres.

  oxgang: the amount of land that could be worked by one man with one ox in one season – usually 15 acres, but it depended on the lightness of the soil.

  peck: two gallons (see table of imperial measurements below).

  perch: a square rod, i.e. 30¼ square yards.

  phenotype: a description of an individual’s actual physical characteristics, such as eye and skin colour, also inherited characteristics, such as a propensity to certain diseases.

  poaching: describes the effect of grazing animals trampling or plunging land when it is wet and damaging the surface by leaving deep footprints in it.

  points: the dark (usually black or red) marking that appears mainly on the nose, ears, feet of some cattle notably the White Park.

  polled: hornless. A dominant genetic trait in cattle.

  prepotency: the quality that one parent has of impressing its offspring with recognizable and strongly heritable characteristics that seem to override the influence of the other parent.

  quarter: one of the four milking compartments of a cow’s udder with a teat attached. Also a quarter of a hundredweight (28 lb) and an eightieth of a ton.

  quey or quay: Scottish word for a heifer or a young cow that has not yet had a calf.

  rod: a unit of length equal to 5½ yards. It probably originated from the length of an ox goad, the long stick that the ploughboy carried to urge on the team and with which he measured the width of a piece of land to be ploughed, which was a chain of 22 yards (four rods), the length of a cricket wicket. Forty rods make a furlong.

  shambles: the place where animals were slaughtered.

  slow feeding: a late-maturing beast that eats more than others to gain the same weight.

  sock: white marking on one or more feet that resembles a sock.

  stall-feeding: fattening a beast by tying it in a stall and bringing all its food to it.

  store cattle: growing cattle that are not ready to be finished.

  suckler cow: a cow kept to rear her beef calf by suckling it.

  sward: the cover of herbage on a field.

  virgate: the amount of land tillable by two oxen in a season. Usually 30 acres, but it varied with the soil, and equal to a quarter of a hide. See nook.

  British imperial measures

  Capacity

  1 pint = 4 gills = 20 fluid ounces (0.568 litre)

  1 quart = 2 pints (1.136 litre)

  1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints (4.546 litre)

  1 peck = 2 gallons

  1 bushel = 4 pecks = 8 gallons

  Weight

  1 ounce (oz) = 16 drams

  1 pound (lb) = 16 oz (0.454 kg)

  1 stone = 14 lb

  1 quarter = 28 lb

  1 hundredweight (cwt) = 4 quarters = 112 lb

  1 ton = 20 cwt = 2,240 lb (1.016 tonne)

  Money (pre-February 1971)

  penny (d) = 4 farthings (d = Roman denarius)

  1 shilling (s.) = 12d

  1 crown = 5s.

  1 pound (£) = 4 crowns = 20s.

  1 guinea = 21s.

  Select Bibliography

  Whenever I stray, I find myself drawn back to William Youatt, whose great book Cattle (1834) is a treasure trove of information. The great man is not always right, but he is always a fascinating guide and chronicler of cattle and where they came from, between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the accession of Queen Victoria. Robert Trow-Smith’s two-volume history of British livestock is invaluable. His writing is a joy to read – a towering achievement, considering how du
ll his subject could be in the hands of anybody less of a master. I have found myself referring regularly to Two Hundred Years of British Farm Livestock by Professor Stephen Hall and Juliet Clutton-Brock, which contains in short chapters a deceptively comprehensive and knowledgeable account of British cattle breeds. Too little has been written on English farming, but for its general history the student could do worse than consult the masterly narrative of English Farming Past and Present by Rowland Prothero (later Lord Ernle).

  The following selection might be of interest to readers who wish to pursue some of the things this book touches on.

  Bahn, Paul G., and Vera B. Mutimer (eds), Chillingham: Its Cattle, Castle and Church, Fonthill Media Ltd, Stroud, 2016

  Bates, Cadwallader John, Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns: A Contribution to the History of Pure Durham Cattle, Robert Redpath, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1897

  Berry, Wendell, The Unsettling of America, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 1977

  Blatt, Harvey, America’s Food, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008

  Clutton-Brock, Juliet, A Natural History of Domestic Mammals, Cambridge University Press and British Museum (Natural History), London, 1987

  Colgrave, Hilda, St Cuthbert of Durham, G. Bailes & Sons, Durham, 1947

  Collis, John Stewart, The Worm Forgives the Plough, Charles Knight & Co., London & Tonbridge, 1973

  Dixon, H. H., Field and Fern (South) and Field and Fern (North), Vinton & Co. Ltd, London, 1865