Much less is known about animal husbandry of medieval England than about its arable agriculture, and what is known is mostly confined to the sheep flocks and vaccaries on the lords' demesnes. Current ideas about the village animals and about the contribution they made to peasant budgets are little more than inferences from what historians happen to know about demesne livestock or about farming practices of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. They bear no relation to medieval facts for the simple reason that no facts or figures have so far been established.

Needless to say our sources are to blame. Being predominantly manorial they do not touch upon the possessions of the villagers except at points at which they affect the lord's rights or income. We may be told about dues for herbage or agistment; about pannage of pigs; about the villagers' payments for the right to fold animals on their own land; or about fines imposed upon them for transgressions on lords' pastures. Some of these payments are often customary and conventionalized, but even where they happen to represent real and fluctuating annual impositions they invariably relate to some, but by no means all, the animals in a village, and leave us in the dark about the size or distribution of village flocks and herds in their entirety.

The darkness, however, is not wholly impenetrable.