Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 314

This excellent book explores the multifaceted relationships that existed between early modern people and their animals. It draws on a large dataset of 4,444 wills from the residents of Essex, and on a second comparative dataset of 2,013 wills from London and Middlesex, which cover the period 1620 to 1634. This extensive body of research (which is supplemented by a range of other primary source materials) allows Fudge to push far beyond standard accounts of the economic relations that tied humans and animals together, and to probe the nature and quality of their everyday coexistence. The frequency and mundane nature of these interactions are examined in colourful detail, with the characters of the testators and of animals fleshed out wherever possible. Fudge is clear from the outset about the interdisciplinary nature of her research, which draws on insights from history and the field of animal studies. Those interested in environmental history, new materialism, early modern material culture and economic history will also find rich pickings in this lively and beautifully written volume.

In chapter 1, Fudge sets herself the tricky task of explaining why specific animal bequests appear in so few of the wills she examines. Just over ten per cent of them feature such bequests, and Fudge herself notes that the naming of animals was an ‘exceptionally rare’ occurrence. In rationalizing the relative silence of these sources about the pervasive presence of animals in the lives of Essex residents, Fudge takes us into very interesting methodological terrain. Fudge reflects on the ‘messy’ nature of the will-making process and reminds us that these complex documents often reflected the complex temporalities (and precariousness) of early modern life. Important questions are posed about the legal, social and spiritual function of wills, and the deliberately cautious and generalized nature of their provisions and language. These were often, Fudge suggests, a response to precariousness. Fudge also prompts us to think twice about seemingly familiar terminology in early modern wills and inventories. She highlights, for example, the blurred boundaries between ‘cattel’ and ‘chattel’, which did not always fall neatly into distinct categories of livestock and inanimate goods. The potentially capacious category of ‘appurtenances’, she suggests, might easily apply to everything on, and associated with the land that was bequeathed in so many wills. This might include, of course, the livestock that grazed on it, which in turn points to the implicit inclusion of many more animals in wills than is visible at first sight. Fudge also identifies what she terms ‘collecting phrases’, which may well have incorporated livestock but without direct mention of them.

In chapter 2, we encounter the will of the yeoman Christopher Fuller as Fudge focuses in on those testators who ‘attempted specificity’ when it came to the bequest of animals in their possession. Fuller’s will included more than 20 animals and he listed his cows by name. His will, Fudge suggests, offers important insights into the everyday nature of human reliance on animals, which was critical to a family’s wellbeing. Here, she is in search of the affectivity that may have characterized interactions between people and their livestock. Fudge assesses the relevance of Bernard E. Rollin’s concept of the ‘social contract’ for her period. This was a contract that tied humans and animals together in bonds of mutual reciprocity, but that always had the ‘shadow of slaughter’ lurking in the background. Fudge offers an interesting perspective on how early modern moral law may have shaped the regimes of care that seventeenth-century animals experienced, and she is careful to distinguish the affective attachments of humans to animals according to particular species, their care regimes, and the length of their cohabitation.

Naming practices are the focus of chapter 3. Fudge persuasively argues that the 0.3 per cent of wills in the Essex dataset that include named animals is not a reflection of ‘reality’, but of the recognition that wills were principally for the transaction of business, not for displays of emotional attachment. Equally convincing is her insistence that the practice of naming was not simply a functional labelling exercise, but the attribution of individuality and a signal of attachment. It is no surprise to discover that names were usually reserved for those animals with which humans lived longest, and with which they had the most frequent bodily interactions.

The spiritual associations of domestic animals are placed under the microscope in chapter 4. The ‘value’ of animals is here extended beyond their well-established ‘material utility’ as sources of economic productivity and nutrition. The care of bees and lambs, Fudge suggests, offered religious and moral lessons – and opportunities for self-reflection – as well as being essential for the extraction of useful, saleable materials such as honey, wax, and wool. A particular brand of Protestantism is prioritized here, and it would be interesting to see if, and in what ways, different confessional groups perceived the soteriological function of their animals. The ‘feelings’ that Fudge discerns in this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, might have benefited from a more purposeful engagement with the history of emotions field, but this chapter nevertheless remains suggestive and engaging.

The book’s final chapter compares the Essex records with wills from London and Middlesex. A very different set of relationships are traced between people and their livestock, with the emerging urban sprawl of London seemingly fostering a more transient, short-term and violent species of encounter that lacked the ‘kindness’ of pastoral relations beyond the city walls. Early evidence of the commercialization of dairying is just one reason that Fudge identifies as a contributing factor to the shifting perception of livestock (and especially cows) as ‘technology’ rather than ‘co-workers’. The book’s afterword engages directly with the ethical challenges that frame many of Fudge’s research questions, and that relate to the degraded status of livestock in the mechanized world of agricultural production. She is successful, I think, in uncovering a ‘lost way of thinking’ about the relationships between humans and their animals in the seventeenth century, born of a society and a culture in which these two species were deeply entangled and interdependent throughout their respective lifecycles. The animals depicted here were recognized and treated as active and sentient ‘partners’ in the human life course, even though their own life course lay in the hands of their human owners. Fudge does not suggest that these relations are recoverable in the modern age. Instead, the value of her history lies in opening a dialogue with past agricultural practices that might well have important ethical implications for the present.