When thinking of the way farming has evolved, it’s easy to assume that it all started with people tilling the land with hand-tools, and from those primitive methods we moved on to using working horses, and finally we invented tractors with which to till the land. But this evolutionary ladder completely misses out one huge rung in the history of farming, namely the use of oxen. Oxen are beasts of burden that people have used for thousands of years, and which people still use today in developing countries. In Britain, oxen were used for a far longer period in history than horses, yet these beasts of burden are largely forgotten, and the part that they played in agriculture has almost become lost in the mists of time.
You may have heard of King Henry VIII and his six wives. What people generally don’t know about Henry is that, in 1535, he banned the breeding of ponies, as he wished to encourage the breeding of horses, in particular horses that were big and strong enough for farm work and were capable of carrying a large man into battle. The fact that this law came into existence tells us that large, heavy horses were
