Until the advent of steam and later the internal combustion engine, the fortunes of man and beast were intimately and essentially bound together. Animals played a variety of fundamental roles in a range of human work and leisure activities such as transport, agriculture, industry, warfare, sport and recreation. Their importance to human progress has become increasingly hard to grasp for our largely urbanized society, from which the animal world has become ever more remote.
Animal Encounters draws on the author’s lifetime interest in the fields of art history, topographical literature, archaeology, history and archaeozoology to provide an overview of the evolving relations between the human and animal populations of the British Isles over the past one thousand years.
In this very readable, instructive and well-illustrated narrative, Arthur MacGregor explores the animal kingdom from bees to horses, and the range of human activities, from pigeon-breeding to bear-baiting, that show how interdependent the animal-human relationship has been throughout history. Animal Encounters will have a broad appeal, aimed at all those with sympathy for and an interest in the animal world.
Arthur MacGregor is a former archaeologist and was Senior Curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is a founding editor of the Journal of the History of Collections and the author of Bone, Antler, Ivory and Horn (1985), Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (2007) and Animal Encounters (Reaktion, 2012).
Preface
Introduction: Human Engagement with the Animal World
Environmental change: conditioning and consequences
Animals as currency
Insularity and interpenetration
Urbanization and industrialization
Cruelty, compassion and domestic pets
Plenitude
1. Ubiquitous Horse
A horse-driven society
The horse population
Horsegear and stables
Saddle horses
Horses for Crown and country
The carrying trade and the post
Coaches and coach-horses
The horse in the industrial age
Horses for sport and leisure
Mules and donkeys
2. The Art of Venery and its Adjuncts
The hunt: privilege and exclusion since 1066
The chase in the medieval period
Hunting under the Tudors and Stuarts
Early hunting literature
Of hounds and horses
The personnel of the hunt
Weapons of the hunt
Beasts of the forest, the chase and the warren
Hawks and falcons
Cormorants
3. Urban and Rural Sports and Pastimes
Persecution and protection of urban and rural animals
The baiting of bulls, bears and other animals
Badger-digging and badger-baiting
Deer and hare coursing
Cocks and cockfighting
Homing and racing pigeons
Wildfowling and bird-catching
Fishing with trap and line
4. The Living Larder
Provisioning the larder
Doves or pigeons
Husbandry and exploitation of swans
Poultry
Fish-ponds
Rabbits
Bees and bee-keeping
5. Animals on the Farm
Conservative and radical practice in the countryside
Ox versus horse
Wagons and ploughs
Eighteenth-century improvers
Recording the age of improvement
Animals on display
Animal by-products
Cattle
Sheep
Goats
Pigs
Horses
Donkeys and mules
Epilogue
Bibliography and References
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Acts of Parliament
Index