The Animal Face of Early Modern England

Imbodied and Imbruted

In Creaturely Poetics Anat Pick asks us to think about what she terms the ‘corporeal reality of living bodies’ and the idea of vulnerability (2011: 3). ‘Animals’, she writes, ‘have traditionally been perceived as pure necessity, material bodies pitted against human mindfulness and soulfulness. And yet there is nothing specifically “animal” about the susceptibility of mind and body alike to earthly forces’ (2011: 4). For her, the creature, a term meaning both human and animal beings, is ‘first and foremost a living body – material, temporal, and vulnerable’. And she argues that this emphasis on vulnerability offers ‘a fundamental challenge to liberal humanism’ (2011: 5).

The human that emerges in Pick’s work is no longer founded on reason or on the assertion (the dominion) of that reason over the natural world, rather it is vulnerable, embodied. The ideal of the dominion of mankind that Pick moves away from (and it was mankind back then) was given a particular and influential form by Francis Bacon, the ‘father of modern science’ in the early 17th century. He saw human power and human knowledge as inseparable, and emphasized the importance of dominion over the natural world in the gaining of that knowledge, arguing that increased understanding of and so control over nature might come to perform the Adamic task of allowing humans to ‘call creatures by their true names’ (1963 [1604]: 222). In this discourse objectifying animals reinstated a lost human dominion, a dominion that was figured as Edenic and was thus humanity’s God-given right.

In place of this position of authority, Pick situates the human among animals – with capabilities that surpass those of other animals in some areas, of course, but still as just another animal. A similar argument has been proposed by Wolfe, and the embodiment of the human that he wants to place at the centre of discussion leads him to propose the importance of attending to the ‘shared environment’ in which different ‘forms of embodiment’ – human, animal, technological – sometimes converge (2010: xxiv). What is significant for Wolfe’s, as later for Pick’s, posthumanist human is not its distinction from, superiority to, and control of animals. Rather, this human is recognized as embodied like an animal and as engaged, not in instrumental relationships that reduce animals to objects, but in a ‘constitutive dependency’ with them (Wolfe, 2010: xxvi).

The idea of the embodiment of the human that Pick and Wolfe focus on is not only a posthumanist conception but exists in humanist ideas too. It is just that in this early context it has a very different meaning. In his 1634 A Masque at Ludlow Castle, for example, John Milton also saw humans as embodied, but the creatures that he so presented were not engaged in a new politics of inter-relationality, they were intemperate drunks who had given in to their so-called lower appetites and chosen a life of bodily pleasure and excess over one of temperate rationality:

But when lust

By unchaste looks, loose gestures and foul talk,

But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,

Lets in defilement to the inward parts,

The soul grows clotted by contagion,

Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose

The divine property of her first being.

(1988 [1634]: lines 463–469)

A concept of the face not wholly dissimilar to Milton’s continues to have a significant place in current discussions of humans and animals. To offer one key example: in order to begin to outline ‘the dance of relating’ (Haraway, 2008: 25), the wonderfully physical metaphor that she uses for human-animal interrelatedness, Donna Haraway turns to construct an opposition between orthodox empirical scientific practice (that child of Francis Bacon) and the possibility of inter-specific co-habitation that offers a shift away from the concept of animals as passive recipients of human labels. She does this by reading primatologist Barbara Smuts’ discussion of how she (Smuts) had to change her own behaviour in order to engage with the animals she was studying in the mid-1970s. Smuts tells of how she began her observation of baboons by taking up the position conventional science suggested: she had, in Haraway’s words, ‘been advised to be as neutral as possible … like a rock  … so that eventually the baboons would go on about their business in nature as if data-collecting humankind were not present’. But this method was problematic: ‘The question was not’, Haraway writes, ‘Are the baboons social subjects? but, Is the human being? Not, Do the baboons have “face”? but, Do people?’ (2008: 23–4) It was only when Smuts adjusted her behaviour and began to respond to the baboons as a baboon that she was able to gain the animals’ trust and so engage with them. Smuts looks from the baboons’ point of view at their shared encounter (something that is impossible within Baconian scientific practice in which an animal can never look back) and writes that she shifted from being ‘an object that elicited a unilateral response (unavoidable), to being recognized as a subject with whom they could communicate’ (cited in Haraway, 2008: 24–5). Haraway says of this moment: ‘In the philosopher’s idiom, the human being acquired a face’ (2008: 25).

This story shows how the face remains a marker of ethical status in contemporary thinking, it’s just that here animals as well as humans are possessed of what might be termed faced-ness. But readers of Haraway’s When Species Meet are not introduced to this idea via Milton, rather they are expected to recognize its source as being the work of Emanuel Levinas and his denial of a face, and so the status of the other, to animals. For Haraway, to meet in a dance of relating is to meet face-to-face with the other, who can be animal, human, or – to use her broadest formulation – companion species.

Levinas has come under scrutiny in another key contemporary work that takes as its focus inter-species relations. The core image in the first chapter of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am is of the philosopher contemplating why he feels ashamed at being observed ‘frontally naked, face to face’, by a cat (2008: 4) – despite Aristotle’s claim in Rhetoric that ‘no one feels shame before small children or animals’ (1952: 631). And Derrida’s discussion of the possibility of an animal’s possession of a face – that it is a being capable of a response and not just a reaction – continues into his engagement with Levinas in the book’s second chapter. Crucial for Derrida, as for Haraway – despite their differences – is Levinas’s failure to extend a place to animals in his ethical framework. Derrida writes that in Levinas’s work, ‘It is only afterwards, by means of an analogical transposition, that we become sensitive to animal suffering’ (2008: 108). Levinas’s engagement with animals is always anthropomorphizing them, never addressing them as animals, and in so doing it is, as Tom Tyler describes anthropomorphism, ‘committed to thinking humanity first’ (2009: 23). In this, Derrida argues, Levinas’s work continues to be profoundly anthropocentric and humanist (2008: 113), despite ‘all the differences that might separate [him] from Descartes and from Kant on the question of the subject, of ethics, and of the person’ (2008: 106). This prompts Derrida to see Levinas as ‘putting the animal outside of the ethical circuit’ in that he fails even to recognize the animal as an other (2008: 107).

The philosophical lineage that Derrida provides for Levinas here – Kant and Descartes – reflects a well-established history of the idea of human distinction from the animal in the modern age: of, in fact, humanism. In this history, humans are ends and never means; they are thinking beings. I have added two more names to this lineage – Bacon and Milton – but Descartes remains the poster-boy for current representations of humanist ideas in his relegation of the animal to the status of an automaton, a being capable of acting in the world but only by virtue of its instincts and bodily mechanism. Unlike animals – which Descartes says are like clocks which tell the time but have no conception of time – humans have reason. The body, for Descartes, is simply the machine a human lives in. In Discourse on the Method (1637) he wrote:

I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this ‘I’ – that is, the soul by which I am what I am – is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist. (1985 [1637]: 1: 127)

Here is the significance of Descartes for humanism. While they shared a dualistic vision of the world, Descartes departed from Milton (and so many others who shared the ideas Milton voiced at the time) in that he refused the possibility of slippage – from human to herd, from faced to faceless being. In place he posited the absolute distinction of humans from animals. The Cartesian ‘I’ is never embodied, it is simply housed in a body and transcends the limitations of the flesh. For Descartes, the animal is absolutely different – never one of us.

Despite the central place that Descartes holds in humanist thinking, however, it is worth noting that his ideas were challenged at the moment of their publication. And one challenge, I suggest, offers us a glimpse of the problem I am tracing in the assessment of the past in much current posthumanist work. William Cavendish, aristocrat in exile, and instructor of equine ballet, challenged Descartes’s argument about animal lack of capacity to think in the mid 17th century, using his experience as a horse trainer as evidence:

A horse must be wrought upon more by proper and frequent lessons, than by the heels, that he may know, and even think upon what he ought to do. If he does not think (as the famous philosopher DESCARTES affirms of all beasts) it would be impossible to teach him what he should do. But by the hope of reward, and fear of punishment; when he has been rewarded or punished, he thinks of it, and retains it in his memory (for memory is thought) and forms a judgment by what is past of what is to come (which again is thought); insomuch that he obeys his rider not only for fear of correction, but also in hopes of being cherish’d. But these are things so well known to a complete horseman, that it is needless to say more on this subject. (1743 [1657/8]: 12)

The use of Haraway’s phrase here is not a joke but is making a serious point, in that I want to emphasize the existence of a relationship between Cavendish and Haraway and those other late-20th- and early-21st-century theorists of human-animal inter-relationality. Key to the work of Pick, Wolfe, Haraway and Derrida – despite all that separates them – is their emphasis on the lived rather than the thought. Their ideas emerge out of a focus on the shared embodiedness of humans and animals; on the lived – danced – relations between the species; and on a moment in a bathroom when a cat – a real cat – stops a philosopher in his tracks. It is odd, in this context, I think, that these contemporary assessments of human-animal relations should take Descartes’s centrality in the history of philosophy as equating to his centrality in history, and present the past as a place where humanist ideas ruled and where our current anthropocentric philosophical orthodoxy was gaining a new form. To put it simply, it is strange that we should constantly be offered the history of philosophy as where the past can be found in works that emphasize the significance of lived relations over philosophical idea(l)s: as Derrida has written, sometimes philosophy is the ‘calculated forgetting’ of the animal as a being capable of a response (2008: 11).

The representation of humanism as all that the past contains would seem to be another way in which animal responsiveness is overlooked. There are occasions, of course – as in Gilbert Simondon’s brief introduction to the history of animal psychology or Daniel Heller-Roazen’s Archaeology of a Sensation (the subtitle of his study of the history of the concept of sentience) – where the focus on intellectual debates is necessary as it is the philosophical shifts that are being analysed. But scholarly works are not the only place wherein people engaged in considering and representing human-animal relations in the past and, indeed, such ideas represent only a very elite discourse, well outside of the reach of the majority illiterate population of the early to mid 17th century. And, as Cavendish’s response shows, even a highly literate aristocrat, when he puts his working relationship with animals before, or rather as having a place in, his engagement with intellectual debates, can offer a pragmatic check to Descartes. If we are to turn (as so much current work does) to contemplate the lived relationship with animals rather than the abstract debates about them it would surely be sensible to ground such discussions in a understanding that reflects this interest and so look to trace a social rather than a philosophical history; to see if there isn’t another lineage we can place ourselves within as we think about how we live now.

What follows is an attempt to offer a preliminary sketch of what such a conception of the past might look like. The materials discussed are distinct from the works of Bacon, Milton and Descartes and the many other writers who posited the animal as irrational and the human as rational and superior in the 17th century. These materials offer a glimpse into the worlds of people who were working with actual animals. Indeed, many of the texts that form the basis of the following discussion were not, like philosophical treatises, printed; and those that were conveyed ideas which ‘originated in the oral culture’, as Louise Hill Curth has written of early animal healthcare manuals (2010: 101). Many whose voices can be heard in what follows were illiterate, and their ideas can be traced in what are, predominantly, manuscript legal sources: that is, in documents like wills and depositions that were written by other hands, but that record their voices. There is no doubt that the legal requirements of such documents dictated some of their contents, but that does not mean that they do not also contain attitudes from a world beyond the universities. That is not to say that all the ideas that follow come from a society beyond books – Ralph Josselin, a clergyman and schoolmaster with a smallholding, recorded his life (with people and animals) in a spiritual diary for almost 70 years. The men and women whose worlds we will be attending to here, then, are linked not by their social status so much as by their position in relation to animals. They are people who were daily looking into the faces of working animals and finding there beings looking back at them who were individuals who were forming relationships with them. But these animals were also objects and symbols. And it is that also that offers us another way of conceptualizing the past, and of understanding how it might not only provide a foundation for, but also a challenge to, some of the ideas that are being articulated in posthumanist thinking.

The Closeness of Cattle

In his philosophically orthodox representation of the beastly herd as a group of de-individualized – you might say defaced – beings we should recognize Milton as working within a discourse that was wholly distinct from the world of many of those who lived with and worked with animals. In fact, the statistics gathered by the social historian Alan Everitt in the 1960s show that in eastern England between 1610 and 1640 a herd would have had a very different meaning from that in Milton’s Masque. In a world in which only 6 per cent of peasant labourers (workers who made up between one quarter and one third of the population) had six or more cattle (84% had two or less) (1967: 398), a herd was small, a fact that reveals not only the economic status of these labourers but also the potential for their relationship with their animals to be a close one for many: one or two cows would be known in a way that a big herd could not be. Add to this the time that workers spent with their animals and familiarity becomes, I would argue, inevitable: according to Virginia DeJohn Anderson, the ‘ideal husbandman’ (that is, the social group above the peasant labourer, likely to own a few more animals) might spend ‘far more time each day with his livestock than with his wife and children – as much as fourteen of seventeen waking hours’ (2004: 85).

The herds of such households are not anonymous – faceless – groupings; rather they are knowable and known. This is something emphasized in Anderson’s picture of life on enclosed farms (bigger holdings than Everitt records) where closeness remains key. She writes:

The number of animals … – a couple of dozen cows, half as many pigs, maybe a horse or two – was few enough that farmers could identify each beast by its face and sometimes its name, much as they might recognize members of their extended family. (2004: 90)

It is interesting to note that while dairy cows are given names, not all cattle were: the bullocks calved by Josselin’s cows, for example, are not named (or their names are not referred to in his diary) and were sold on within months of birth (1976: 279, 306). A similar representation of the naming and not naming of cattle can be found in a 1617 will from Hertfordshire. In this will the testator, Robert Jacob, a yeoman (the social group above the husbandman), bequeaths £100 and ‘one heifer the calf of a cow called Goldelocks’ to his daughter Ann (Essex Record Office [hereafter ERO], D/AMW 3/172). The heifer – a young female cow who has not yet calved – has been in the family for a shorter time than her named mother and is nameless. For both Josselin and Jacob longevity of contact, it seems, is the necessary context for naming because time breeds intimacy and knowledge. This is never naming in the Baconian sense – this is not labelling, objectifying: rather, it is an act of inclusion.

The long duration of the relationships between humans and some animals had another outcome as well. One early modern agricultural writer estimated that the useful life of a dairy cow could be over 15 years (Mascall, 1627: 53). If this is the case then the woman who worked in the dairy (women were usually in charge of this aspect of agricultural production in this period [see Overton, 1996: 41]) would come to know well the cows she milked every day, twice a day, for over a decade. An understanding of their habits and temperaments would form the basis of a successful relationship. Indeed, it is the woman’s knowledge that is the source of comedy in a ballad dating from 1629 in which the bickering spouses swap roles on the farm. The sixth verse records the husband’s failure in the dairy:

He went to milk one evening tide, A skittish cow on the wrong side, His pail was full of milk, God wot, She kicked and spilt it every jot, Besides she hit him a blow o’ the face, Which was scant whole in six weeks space. (Parker, 1629)

Key to this other vision, then, is a sense not of human power and distinction but of close attention, knowledge and inter-reliance; of people living alongside their animals. As well as this, for most people the dairy cows they lived and worked with over any length of time were valued as living creatures – they provided protein (milk), labour (oxen pulled the plough), profitable stuff for the market (calves) and fertilizer for arable land (dung). And in order to get this benefit from animals people had to work: one of the key tasks each year was to set aside enough fodder for the cattle to over-winter: Mark Overton has calculated that ‘perhaps as much as 20 per cent of arable production was consumed by livestock’ in this period (1996: 14). Without this provision, cattle would not be fed and would therefore not be productive. These animals were certainly consumed – even a named dairy cow was viewed as meat at the end of her profitable life – but they also themselves used up valuable human resources: in time, money and labour.

Because of their centrality to the family economy the well-being of these animals was vital. This requirement led to an inevitable close interest in their health. Writing of colts, but relevant to any domestic animal, Leonard Mascall proposed (in verse): ‘Thy horse once sick, defer no time, / his grief for to appease’. He goes on:

If thou doest mark of soreness most, Whereof they do proceed: Thou shalt find out that most do come, For lack of taking heed. (1587: 101)

But it is not just that cows were regarded as individuals. More specifically they were regarded as individuals not unlike the human members of the household, for not only were they named and individualized, Curth has shown that readers of early modern almanacs ‘were urged to follow a proper health regime, and to provide a similar one for their animals’ (2000: 76). A body, it seems, was a body – whether human or animal. And, indeed, sometimes the regime was exactly the same. In a 1631 text, The Widowes Treasvre, for example, the author writes: ‘The water which standeth in the hollows of beeches, doth perfectly cure the naughty scurf and wild tetters, or scabs of men, horses, kine [cows], or sheep, if they be washed therewithal’ (?Partridge, 1631: n.p.). An understanding of the bodily similarity of humans and animals was not limited to these hands-on texts, of course. Descartes, Milton, and Bacon knew that human and animal bodies were alike: the importance of vivisection to scientific developments in this period evidences this. Here in the field – on the ground – though, while all the parties were understood to have animal bodies, they were also all believed to have faces. Indeed, the link between the dance of relating and the possession of a face was made literal when the agricultural writer Gervase Markham wrote in 1616, ‘If you perceive your goats to droop, or look with sullen or sad countenances, it is an assured sign of sickness’ (1616: 119). Just as Barbara Smuts’ work in 1970s Tanzania shows, so here in 17th-century England all parties are – have to be – subjects in order for the conversation of agriculture to begin.

The Divinity of Pigs

The working animal’s possession of a face did not stop it from also having a symbolic role in the 17th century, however. Its ‘personhood’ still allowed room for it to stand in for something other than itself. This is something that is made visible in Josselin’s diary. He records on 5 July 1650, for example, how he was

troubled with my hog’s breaking away on the Lord’s day morning, and having looked for him and not finding him, I observed still a vexation and trouble in all these things. And thinking God’s providence might bring him back to me, I was just then told that he was driven home from the green. (1976: 209)

But despite their transitory presence, pigs were attended to as meaningful beings. Josselin’s diary entry about the escapee hog, for example, is not only a record of the troublesome nature of the creature, it also serves as evidence of Josselin’s comprehension of what might otherwise be beyond human reach: God’s ordering of His universe. To put it bluntly, for Josselin the pig’s return is a marker of the presence of the divine in his life: ‘thinking God’s providence might bring him back to me, I was just then told that he was driven home from the green’. In this he is utterly orthodox. Writing in 1625, Henry King, the Bishop of London, for example, stated that ‘all creatures are but his tongue to speak him, and the mutest of them all is articulate, hath a peculiar language to utter Him’ (1627: 14). The Bible was understood to be the first book of God in this period, the natural world the second. In this context, even a troublesome hog could be a representation of the divine.

This articulation of the divine through an animal can be seen in many of the diary entries in which Josselin records his life with his livestock. On 19 August 1655, for example, there is more trouble with another pig:

The week past God good to me and mine in many outward mercies, God left a young hog of mine to be bitten by Burton’s dog, it might have been worse, they cut his ear and tail and threw him into the water. Lord preserve the poor creature if it bee thy good pleasure. Let no trouble then befall my family I humbly beg of thee. (1976: 351–2)

For Josselin, then, his animals are cared for as animals, and they evidence his relationship with God, and this is also the case when they are fertile. In April 1652 he records that ‘all my cows calved well through mercy, God was very good to me’ (1976: 276). The meaning is twofold: first, he is reminded by the fecundity of his livestock that he should praise God for His bounteousness. And second, he is reassured of his own good position in God’s eyes by this evidence of His merciful generosity to him. And, as one diary entry shows, there is no gap between the named, known animal and the being with spiritual meaning. ‘Brownebacke calved, the first of creatures that brought us young, God bless our stock’ (1976: 239).

In this conception of animals, then, they are taken as valuable investments in the family’s wellbeing (the pig is their protein for the winter; the calves will be sold at market). They are also evidence of God’s divine presence in their lives (they are blessed with and because they have fertile cattle). And they are recognized as individual beings – some of whom have names – which, while not equivalent to children, are certainly perceived to be sentient: ‘Lord preserve the poor creature’, Josselin writes, acknowledging even the nameless young hog’s suffering. In taking these roles the animals are given different functions: they are things of value; they are living symbols; and they are simply members of the household with whom humans share bodies, healthcare regimes and blessings. And all these states happen at the same time. Here, to possess a face does not simply mean that an animal becomes a member of the community, it allows for a level of complexity – symbolic, ethical, economic, religious – that is absent in the philosophies of Descartes, Milton and Bacon, where animals are figured, in different ways, as simply bodies without minds.

The Understanding of Sheep

Another equally complex sense of the perception of animals in this period can be traced in relationships with sheep. As with cows and pigs, the numbers of sheep owned by many in the first half of the 17th century was small. Peter J. Bowden suggests that a typical peasant would possess ‘two or three sheep … though the average figure in some areas was probably 20 to 30’ (1971: 1). And, like cows, most sheep were not kept for slaughter: they were valued for their wool, and so could live for eight or more years (1971: 21). Death before this time, Bowden writes, was a result of ‘poor condition or disease’ (1971: 4).

The economic value of these animals can be traced in their presence in people’s wills. Sheep and lambs are a common bequest, especially to grandchildren and godchildren in this period (Houlbrooke, 1998: 142). Thus, John Savory, a labourer from Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex, states in his 1622 will:

I give & bequeath unto the two children of my son Steele, & to each of them a lamb, to be paid or given unto them immediately after my decease. Also I give unto each of the four children of my son John, a lamb a piece, when they shall accomplish the age of ten years old, a piece. (ERO, D/ACW 9/101)

This object status seems to be reiterated by the fact that there is no evidence that sheep were given individual names. But these animals were individualized in another way: the owner would be able to recognize on sight his own animals. Keith Thomas has argued that such recognition was central to maintaining rights of ownership over an animal (1984: 95), and this was especially important in a culture in which sheep were often ‘brought up upon the common’, as Peacock put it in his will: that is, they were put out to pasture in flocks that included animals belonging to different people. Such collective pasturing has implications for ownership. Thus a conception of recognition that was visible in relationships with cows is reiterated in a 1644 case of sheep-theft from the East Sussex Quarter Sessions. A deposition reads:

the said Langford being lame the said sheep was brought in unto him and he seeing her knew her to be the sheep of the said John Humphrey which he kept for him and the mark was newly altered, as likewise the lamb he believeth to be the same lamb that run away with this sheep. (East Sussex Record Office [hereafter ESRO], QR/E 67 [74])

Another reflection of people’s ability to individualize animals in a world of communal grazing can be traced in 1642 when Richard Pollington of Burwash in East Sussex was accused of deliberately slaughtering his neighbour John Noakes’ sheep ‘which he kept for him’. Pollington defended himself by arguing that ‘the sheep he standeth accused of … was his own sheep and that he bred it up, being a ewe sheep of darkish colour having a white face, one ear being cropped and the other whole and something whitish about the tail’. The description is placed alongside his claim that he had carefully directed his servant to ‘take special care that he did not kill none of John Noakes’ sheep’ (ESRO, QR/E 58 [88]). His painstaking identification of his own creature (and, by implication his and his servant’s ability to identify Noakes’ animals) forms his defence. Indeed, in the case in which Langford was called as a witness, the ‘officer’ who accompanied the owner and keeper of a stolen sheep in their search, was willing to depose that ‘he having kept the said sheep a year before … knew the sheep [they found] to be the said John Humphrey’s’ (ESRO, QR/E 67 [74]). Sheep can be moved among people, even as they retain their status as the owned property of just one person, and what this movement means is that recognition must go beyond the immediate economic relation of one owner and one owned animal. The face-to-face encounter with a sheep is one that takes in the whole local community; it is a social act.

But it is not only the sense that these animals are recognized by their human owners and keepers that emerges from available documentation. In this world sheep were not only objects they were also subjects in communion with humans: the animals themselves were also perceived to possess the ability to perform acts of identification. Thus, in a study of common grazing in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the mid-17th century (a practice also present in England [see Bowden, 1971: 18]), Susan M. Ouellette records how the whole town’s sheep were ‘gathered in a flock that was usually pastured and managed as a single group’ from April to November. Each day would begin with the animals being collected from their ‘houselots’ by the shepherd who was paid by the village collectively, and would end with the herd retracing ‘its steps, each animal docilely turning in at its home gate’ (1996: 360–1). Unlike Josselin’s pig, it seems, these sheep knew their own way home.

One humanist interpretation of such an event would be that a sheep was simply responding to the sensory prompt of the sight of a house, and that, on seeing it, instinctively (not rationally), knew it to be where she lived. A classical source for such an idea is the work of Seneca which proposed (as the English translation of 1614 has it) that ‘a horse remembereth himself of his way when he is set into the beginning of it: whilst he standeth in the stable he hath no remembrance thereof, although he hath trod it over many times’ (1614: 492). In this philosophy only reasonable humans can recollect – can bring something to mind in its absence; an animal can remember only with a sensory prompt. It is for this reason that Milton’s drunks ‘their … native home forget’.

It is worth wondering whether this philosophical assessment of the nature of memory is how the labourer, husbandman, yeoman, and even clergyman would have understood the actions of his livestock, and whether the woman of the household would have thought about the cow she milked each morning and evening in these terms. I would suggest that it was taken for granted by people who worked with them that an animal knew where it lived, the people it lived with, and the routine of its life, and that it could and would respond if that routine was upset. I would also argue that this understanding of the capacities of an animal provides additional evidence to support the claim for the belief in the animal’s possession of a face in this period. It was a member of the household because it, like the human members, knew its own home.

A current parallel can be found in the anthropologist Rebecca Cassidy’s study of the Kyrgyz people and their relationships with their horses. She has taken film footage of groups of horses making their own way from the common pasture land on which they have spent their day to their own individual homes. In response to my question as to what the horse owners made of the horses’ self-directed return, Cassidy replied: ‘My own sense of the practice is that they would find it odd if I asked them how their horses knew where they were going, in the same way as it would be odd for me to ask how they found their own way “home”.’ She continues: ‘The relationship with animals kept on communal land is so different from the way we are accustomed to penning things in. By containing them and segregating them we make remarkable the things that animals do as a matter of course.’ ¹

Cassidy’s point about human comprehension of animal understanding and its relation to the way in which animals are kept shows us that the shift from common grazing to the private possession of land in the 17th century – in part due to the enclosure movement, but also to the beginning of a shift in farming practices from extensive to intensive in this period (see Campbell and Overton, 1993: 84) – might not only be a matter for politics and economics. Common grazing is also a matter for our understanding of animals. Just as the people whose animals were grazed in common had an additional reason to be able to recognize individual creatures (and ear and wool marks were often removed by thieves, as Langford knew), so the animals, like humans, had to – and were expected to – engage in acts of recognition. Indeed, we might adapt Vinciane Despret’s idea and see the common grazing of sheep as making ‘someone or something else capable of becoming interesting’ (2005: 363). It provided them with a context in which they could display their status as participants in the dance of relating.

And so here, the animal’s membership of the household is not simply displayed by the humans – in their naming, their creation of health regimes, and so on. This is not a return to a Baconian paradise. The animal’s place is also constructed through what might be perceived to be its own sense of attachment. It should be noted that I am not simply asserting that 17th-century sheep had a sense of belonging. What I am suggesting is that their actions would allow them to be interpreted as if they did, and to be responded to on those terms. The sense that a sheep had an idea of home, that a cow understood the routine of milking (and believed that a human also understood it), could have been interpreted by the people involved with these animals as a moment of mutual comprehension. And in this context, Josselin’s hog’s ‘breaking away’ might have been read not as a failure to understand the rules of recognition (akin to Smuts’ initial failure to respond to the baboons), but as a refusal to obey them. Naughtiness – being troublesome – is not the same as ignorance. This pig, perhaps, always had a face, but sometimes chose to turn away. In this he was, surely, a true member of the household.

Coda (The Tail)

Paying attention to the range of possible ways of reading livestock animals in early modern England – as fellow beings, as symbols of God’s presence, as recognizable individuals, as embodied like humans, as engaged in mutual acts of recognition – would upset the emphasis that is currently placed on the philosophical debates about animals (or rather too often, The Animal) in the period. It would help to return us to the real encounters of people with creatures of another species that is also the focus for Haraway, Derrida and others. These 17th-century cows, pigs and sheep are not viewed as simply irrational and embodied. They are not only to be understood as existing in opposition to the idealized vision of humans who are naming, knowing, dominion-possessing beings (Bacon); sober individualized beings (Milton); secure ‘I’s housed in a machine, but capable of persisting beyond it (Descartes). These early modern animals remind us that the past is a more complex place than humanist ideas propose, and that it offers us more possibilities than are currently visible when earlier times are relegated to places where philosophical debates were played out.

The complexity I am retrieving is nicely exemplified in one document from the period. The 1628 last testament of William Young, a weaver from Roydon in Essex, is unusual on two counts: it is a nuncupative will – that is, it is a will that is a record of an oral statement written down after the death of the testator – which is presented in the style of a conventional will. It is also unusual in that it includes an inventory of Young’s possessions on the reverse side of the paper on which the will is written (wills and inventories were conventionally separate documents, and very few separate inventories from Essex in the 1620s have survived). But its unusual nature might also offer us a glimpse of something that was utterly normal, something that I have been tracing in this article.

Young’s will includes, apart from giving the soul to God and the body to the ground (a testamentary convention which emphasizes the human’s dual status), only three bequests: 40s to his unnamed sister; a heifer called Nan to his ‘nursegirl’ Katherine Anger; and ‘All the rest of [his] goods chattle, cattle & movables’ to his wife. The inventory, written in the same hand, gives the detail and monetary value of all those ‘goods chattle, cattle & movables’, and the list is typical of what is found in wills of the period: there is furniture, bedding, kitchen equipment, working tools, animals, money and clothing. Apart from the £20 in ‘ready money’, the animals – a mare, three ‘bease’ (cows), a bullock, a hog, three sheep, and 6s 8d worth of poultry – are the most valuable things in the will (ERO, D/AMW 2/125). And yet one of these animals has, it seems, two different meanings. In the will the heifer is the only animal, and it has a name and thus a distinct status. But, turn the sheet over, and Nan – we must assume – is simply a ‘bease’, and has the same status as the other two cows in Young’s household.

Nan’s dual classification should give us pause. The initial assumption that she has a unique status because she possesses a name is certainly plausible, but may not be correct. It is possible that Nan is named in the will not because she is a special animal but because she is a special bequest. That is, that the other cows listed in the inventory might also have names but their names are just not included because they would be well known to the will’s executrix, Young’s wife. She would know which animal was to be given to Katherine Anger because she would know which one was Nan. But alongside the naming (or rather on the other side of the page to the naming) is Nan’s status on the inventory where her individuality has apparently gone and she is just one among many valuable and valued objects.

What I think is happening here is a glimpse of the complexity that I have been outlining. The animals that people worked with and lived alongside in this period are simultaneously beings with individual status and nameless objects of purely economic value. Young’s will, in its unusual inclusion of both testament and inventory on one sheet of paper, shows us the distinction between the two, even as it shows us how inseparable they are. Indeed, you might say that instrumentality and individuality are as indivisible here as two sides of the same sheet of paper.

In this context, then, declaring that early modern animals had faces must not be read simply as a challenge to the idea – given dramatic expression by Milton – which claimed that animals lacked faces. Nor should it be interpreted as merely a declaration that many in this period lived so closely with their livestock that the engagement in a dance of relating was an inevitable part of any agricultural practice; nor that people simply believed that animals had individuality and thus an ethical status. Rather, I want to suggest that evidence reveals that in the first half of the 17th century recognizing that an animal had a face was central to owning and using that animal, and that – in a circular argument – the objectification of an animal actually emphasized its possession of a face. Whether in relation to the close observation required by the husbandman in order to maintain the health of his animals, or the need for identification because of the common grazing of sheep, recognition was necessary to a domestic wellbeing that, in turn, also relied on those animals themselves performing acts of recognition.

In this context Jacques Derrida’s statement that Levinas’s denial of a face to animals ‘is a matter of putting the animal outside of the ethical circuit’ is certainly a correct appraisal of Levinas’s assessment of animals. But Derrida’s statement must also be read as telling only part of what is a very modern story – a modern story (placed in a philosophical lineage which emphasizes absolute difference) which assumes a clear division between possession of a face and object status, and which thus reiterates a dualism that puts faces on one side of a boundary and bodies on the other. Stuck within Levinas’s discourse, perhaps, Derrida misses something: that there is another history that might be invoked that doesn’t focus on intellectual debates. But that is not all: crucially, he misses that this is a history that might complicate some of the assumptions that persist in posthumanist thought. Here, on the 17th-century smallholding, recognizing an animal’s face may not simply be an act of inclusion: asserting that an animal is an individual capable of reciprocal recognition does not only form the basis of an ethical framework in which all partners count. It can be, and was, simultaneously part of an instrumental relationship with animals that relied on a conception of shared bodiliness and a shared home.

Contemplating the animal face of early modern England, from the field rather than the library, reminds us just how messy and how complex human-animal relations can be. It also shows us that humanist philosophy is not all that there is in the past. We have been left another legacy by those who owned and tended the animals that we should value much more as it might offer us a view of our own species that is less isolated and dominant should we choose to claim it. In this context it seems a shame that those current ideas that advocate the importance of this particular animal over The Animal, of the embodiment of the human over the being bounded by reason, should persist in repeating a history that reiterates, and perhaps even re-naturalizes, the superiority of humanity. Perhaps if we locate ourselves within a lineage of people who were daily engaged in a dance of relating with animals who themselves knew the steps, and in which some of the moves were inclusive while others were instrumental, we might find another way of conceptualizing how we live today.