318 The Domestication of Animals in the Middle Ages. 



THE DOMESTICATION OE ANIMALS IN THE 



MIDDLE AGES. 



BY THOMAS WRIGHT, F.S.A. 



At a recent meeting of the Ethnological Society of London, 

 Mr. Francis Galton read an interesting paper on " The First 

 Step towards the Domestication of Animals/' in which he 

 brought together a considerable mass of evidence to show, on 

 the one hand, that many animals have a tendency to seek or 

 accept the society of man • while, on the other hand, man, 

 even in a low state of savage life, has a natural inclination to 

 take animals to his bosom, and make pets of them. This is 

 the result which appeared to me to be deduced from Mr. Gal- 

 ton's evidence, and. I think that he had established it satisfac- 

 torily, and that he had very fairly explained the general causes 

 for which one animal is found to be more easily domesticated 

 than another. Perhaps, all animals are capable of being 

 tamed to a certain degree, because mere instinct leads them all 

 to be conciliatory towards those from whom they receive food, 

 and they seem to have a natural readiness to place confidence 

 in man when they are habituated to see him, and have no in- 

 dividual experience of having received injury from him. But 

 it struck me that Mr. Galton had not sufficiently distinguished 

 the two descriptions of taming, breeding in a domestic state 

 and domesticating, and the two classes of animals which 

 come under the general term, those which have been only 

 known as tame animals and the companions of mankind 

 through all historic ages, and those which are domesticated 

 temporarily ; and he seemed to assume that the present condi- 

 tion of the former class, the sheep and the ox, for instance, 

 had arisen from original experiments in taming, made capri- 

 ciously by savages, in the course of which those animals which 

 only were fitted for permanent domesticity accepted their des- 

 tiny and changed their condition. It would thus be the result 

 of a sort of natural selection, a kind of Darwinian theory of the 

 origin and progress of domestication. I confess that to me 

 these two sorts of domestication seem to involve entirely dif- 

 ferent questions, neither of which do I propose to investigate 

 here, for it is the latter class only with which I am concerned, 

 and that only as it relates to one period, the middle ages of 

 Western Europe. 



There can be no doubt, I think, that man, and especially 

 the tenderer sex, has a natural love for the taming of animals, 

 and it is one of those feelings the universality of which we can 

 understand without much difficulty. The fact that a wild 



