Oxen

The Oxen are both working animals and a measure of the village’s agricultural future: where Edmund Jordan imagines fields given over to sheep, Walter Thirsk puts a pair of Oxen to the plow and sows winter wheat. Their dependable strength belongs to a communal farming life built around sowing, harvesting, and the uncertain yield of the land. In the final fieldwork, they carry that practice forward in a modest but deliberate act of resistance.

Place in the Village Economy

The village keeps a team of four Oxen, which are allowed to graze on fallow fields and the commons. Their work is sporadic, and between tasks they rest and feed, bothered chiefly by flies. Their value is measured partly in the life they are spared: so long as they remain strong enough to work, they are not slaughtered for beef or leather, and their horns, bones, and hooves are not turned into cups, bobbins, toys, dice, or glue. The account presents their relative ease of life not as freedom from human use, but as a customary arrangement in which their usefulness allows them to live until natural death.

Their place in the farming cycle is inseparable from the village’s labor. The harvest depends on shared effort, while the work of plowing and sowing makes another harvest possible. In the village’s account of a wool economy, by contrast, Oxen would give way to looms: people would shepherd rather than plow and shear rather than reap. That imagined change is presented as a promise of easier work, but its concealed cost is the loss of the crop-growing life the animals enable. The shift from Oxen to sheep therefore marks more than a change in livestock; it threatens the sequence of work through which the community produces its own food.

Temperament and Practical Value

When Thirsk goes looking for the team to begin plowing, he finds only two of the four. They are the smallest pair, with white patches on their snouts and pink ears; their mottled, donkey-gray bodies blend into the undergrowth. The other two have gone with neighboring families who have left the village, first to draw their carts of household goods and perhaps later to be traded at another village. Their absence registers the breakdown of communal life in practical terms: the animals that remain must do the work with a reduced team.

Thirsk describes Oxen as pliable, patient, and steady. Unlike horses, they do not anticipate draft work and protest at the sight of a saddle or riding boots; an Ox does not seem to object even when the moment comes to pull. Their winter keep is also cheaper than a horse’s. These qualities make them suited to the constrained work ahead, although the shortage of animals and workers still limits what can be done. Thirsk leads the pair to the tool barn, where they graze on weeds by the door while he prepares the plow.

The Plowing in the Barley Field

The Oxen’s decisive appearance comes when Thirsk sets out to mark the soil before winter. With only two animals and two pairs of human hands, the lighter swing plow would be too difficult to manage and would not cut a sufficiently deep furrow. Thirsk instead finds the wheeled plow, whose wheels support the beam. Young Beldam, who has come from the pillory to help, understands the work and assists with assembling the implement. The pair of Oxen and the two men then set off across the harvested barley field.

The scale of the effort makes its limits plain. Under ordinary conditions, plowing the field would take twelve days, even with four Oxen and twenty strong men taking turns. Thirsk and Young Beldam intend to work for one day, making only a narrow scar: down the length of the field and back. Thirsk points toward a tapered oak above the dell as their headland, a steady mark for keeping the first furrow straight. The Oxen take the line as they begin to pull, opening the soil and raising a ridge between the furrows.

Young Beldam handles the plow while Thirsk leads the Oxen, urges them on, and frees the wheels when mud clogs them. The work is slow and physical, but its shared demands draw the men into a wordless fellowship: Young Beldam whistles as they cross the field, while Thirsk talks. The Oxen are not merely scenery for that companionship. Their pull makes the human labor possible, and their measured pace gives the field a new line to read after the harvest has erased the crop.

Winter Wheat and the Meaning of the Team

After the plow is cleaned and put away, Thirsk sends Young Beldam aside and scatters selected winter wheat seed by hand over the turned strip. The Oxen have completed their part, and he lets them roam. His sowing follows the plowing in the proper agricultural order, even though he cannot wait for the soil to mellow as good practice would advise. He intends the narrow planting as a countryman’s answer to Edmund Jordan and the proposed sheep economy; in his view, the coming spring must still be defended.

The scene gives the Oxen’s practical labor a larger significance without making them responsible for the decision. They do not choose the village’s future, but the work they make possible contradicts the idea that the plow has become unnecessary. Against a projected conversion from crops to pasture, the team helps leave a furrow and seed in the earth. The field is small in comparison with the labor normally required to turn it, yet its line and its sowing preserve the possibility of another crop.