Essential to the success of arable farming was the part played by draught animals. Plough teams consisting of oxen and/or horses prepared the land for sowing and helped to suppress weeds. Carthorses and oxen, primarily the former, were responsible for the haulage of crops from field to granary and granary to market. Cows produced milk and, more importantly, the bullocks needed to replace ageing oxen in the plough teams. Swine contributed saleable porkers and bacon for the larder. All livestock depended, in large part, upon the success of the annual harvest for their provender, a dependence which they shared with the famuli alongside whom they laboured. This chapter explains the part played by livestock in the mixed agricultural economy of the former Templar estates in Lincolnshire. However, because of their particular economic importance and different management system, sheep are dealt with separately in Chapter 5.

Plough teams

Ploughing in the early fourteenth century was, as it is today, one of the defining activities of arable farming. The division of arable land into that which was sown with winter grain, that which was spring-sown, and that which was fallow meant that the ploughing period was extended and therefore more manageable. Bennett says that following the autumn ploughing for wheat, ploughs were ‘busy again soon after Christmas’ to enable oats and peas to be sown before Easter. Ploughing was not merely necessary as the precursor to sowing crops, it was also a means of maintaining fertility and controlling weeds, and this further extended the ploughing season. In its guidance to the manor steward, the Seneschaucy recommended that ‘each plough team ought by right to plough 180 acres in the year, that is to say, sixty acres for winter seed and sixty acres for summer corn and sixty acres for fallow’. On that basis, the steward could estimate how many plough teams were required on his manor and budget accordingly.

The number of ploughmen per plough team

In most cases there were two ploughmen to a plough team; one ploughman would control the plough and the other, listed in the accounts either as a ploughman or as a driver, would encourage the beasts using a goad. The Willoughton account ending at 29 March 1309 included in the expenses the wages of six ploughmen (carucar) and six drivers (fugator), two men to each of the six plough teams.