Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 360

Arthur McGregor – who describes himself as an archaeologist by training, who worked with animal finds, and as a boy grew up on a livestock farm – was a senior curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He has expertise in the culture of collecting and experience in working with material culture. All of this experience is brought to bear in what turns out to be a book of considerable scope. It is meant to be a lightweight text aimed at the general reader; he apologizes in the introduction for the lack of footnotes and sets out to simply tell the story of human-animal interaction in Britain from 1066 to 1914–18. However, there is more to the book than this might suggest. This is a very well-researched popular history indeed, as demonstrated by its lengthy bibliography: it is a popular history with complexity and depth.

Recognizing its multidisciplinarity, McGregor has set out to write an accessible account that draws on the subject matter, though not the theory, of the emerging field of animal studies. As suggested in its title, Animal encounters covers all the possible facets of human-animal interaction, for the period. It tackles the use of animals for sport, food, and power, and its chapters are largely thematic, apart from the first, which is entitled ‘The ubiquitous horse’. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach allows McGregor to address topics normally confined to one or another subset of history; for example, with a nod to environmental history he considers the impact of cold winters to be just as significant for animals as their experience of human handling, as well as for humans themselves in the form of famine caused by short growing seasons and wet summers. The very broad sweep of time selected also allows him to see patterns emerging beyond the normal ranges of periodization, so that we see how rabbits, which were once fit for kings, being scarce and husbanded in warrens, eventually, by the nineteenth century, become poor man’s meat as their numbers grew.

The book does not privilege its animal subjects. As noted, it is about the uses to which they have been put by humans and the relationship between humans and animals, rather than the animals in and of themselves. However, within each chapter, a very wide range of animals are represented; apart from horses and rabbits, the list includes pigeons, deer, badgers, cockerels, falcons, mules and donkeys, bees, fish, swans, and farmed animals, as seen in agricultural, pastoral, proto-industrial and urban contexts. Agriculture is treated as significant for its impact on the domesticates discussed – oxen, Longhorns, sheep etc. – but also on wild populations of other animals, such as migrating birds. In the process of capturing such a diverse set of narrative over such a broad sweep of time, we might expect human history to fall by the wayside, but this too is present in the form of drovers, breeders, and park keepers, not just kings. And, the human, agricultural history is astute and well informed.

Beautifully illustrated, this is a rich text that penetrates its subject with deceptive ease. In it our own story is reflected back to us through the lens of the animals that we have worked with, both kindly and unkindly, since the Norman Conquest. This is a truly mesmerizing account.