Cattle were primarily draft animals and only shifted to dairy and meat animals as the horse became the main draft animal. One of the big stories in the early Middle Ages was the shift in agriculture that allowed average farmers to grow enough food to support horses. While horses eat grass like cattle, they need the extra protein of other grains like oats, and that added significant cost. All cattle could pull a cart or a plow, but a castrated male, called an ox, was the main plowing animal. Oxen typically plowed in teams of eight, where possible.
Cattle had another advantage over horses, in that when they grew old, they could be eaten. By the time an ox has spent some years plowing and pulling a cart, his meat is going to be very tough. Still, there was no religious prohibition against eating them, as there was with horses. Cattle’s other parts made glue, fat for soap or candles, and leather. Until the murrain outbreaks of the 14th century, cattle had fewer diseases than horses, and they did not need shoes.
Three major innovations cleared the way for using horses for draft purposes. Horses’ hooves needed protection in cold and wet climates, but the increasing use of iron allowed for shoeing the horses. Oxen have a shoulder structure that easily carried the plow’s yoke, but horses do not. Romans had harnessed horses across the chest, but this restricted the horse’s ability to breathe when loads grew heavy. So the key innovation was the padded horse collar, made of leather stuffed with straw, that shifted weight-bearing to the horse’s shoulders, too.
The third major innovation was in agriculture. In the 9th and 10th centuries, European farmers began to farm their strips in a three-way rotation. When a strip was planted in oats or legumes in the spring, it could be harvested at summer’s end. It was then replanted in wheat and rye and later left fallow for a third season. In the 13th century, farmers began planting additionally in the fall, to get an extra crop out of the same strip. On average, it may have added up to as much as 50 percent more food. The soil, refreshed by nitrates from the legumes, grew more grain. When rotation included oats, this high-protein grain allowed horses to be kept through the winter and worked harder.
When farmers could use a horse to plow and pull a cart, cattle were freed to put their energy into milk production. Males were still castrated as oxen if not needed as bulls, but barn and field resources shifted to maintaining as many females as possible for milk. Once cattle became more valuable for their milk, they were given more food and began to grow larger. Eventually, they could be used routinely for beef, as well, but that tended to be outside the medieval period.
Horses could plow faster, once they could be adequately fed and safely harnessed. They pulled carts faster, too, so that farmers could take more loads of produce to town in a day. Farmers began to travel more, either riding or with carts, and they could additionally go to towns that were a bit farther away than their previous reach. The increasing use of horses powered the growth of towns and cities, since a larger city needs its food to come in from a larger radius. Increasing use of horses led, of course, to increasing numbers of horses, and different kinds of them too. We’ll come back to horses later, since they lead into topics of war and sports.