The Medieval Plough Team on Stage: Wordplay and Reality in the Towneley Mactacio Abel

The Medieval Plough Team on Stage: Wordplay and Reality in the Towneley Mactacio Abel Margaret Rogerson Tradition has it that in England the medieval plough was powered by an eight-animal team, sometimes comprised wholly of oxen and sometimes a mixture of oxen and horses. This tradition has behind it the formidable weight of the Domesday survey , which used the eight-ox team as its standard in assessing demesne livestock. When A. C. Cawley published his authoritative edition of the Wakefield Master's plays, he established what has become the traditional reading of the medieval English plough team for the fictional world of the stage.1 His interpretation of Mactacio Abel presents Cain, the niggardly ploughman who commits the first murder, ostentatiously driving a mixed team consisting of four oxen and four horses. Agricultural historians seem to have overlooked this reading of Cain's ploughing practice and, in so doing, have missed a clear endorsement in late medieval literature of the tradition of the Domesday eightanimal standard team.2 But traditions are not immune to challenge. There has long been a challenge to the concept of the universal use of an eightanimal team in real-life English farming, and it is the purpose of the present essay to challenge Cawley's stage plough team by reassessing the Mactacio Abel. If we place the Wakefield Master's use of wordplay against a backdrop of recent historical research and representations of plough teams in the art of the period, we can see that the team which the dramatist envisaged for the stage did not consist of eight beasts but was a more manageable twoanimal team, a horse called "Don" and a mare called "Molly." Even before Cawley published his edition of the play, the reality of the eight-animal team as the indisputable standard in medieval English farming was under question. H. G. Richardson, promoting the idea of smaller teams, invoked documentary evi182 Margaret Rogerson183 dence of, for example, a single mare working alone at the yoke and "an ox and a cow yoked together."3 Like many agricultural historians who have followed him, Richardson was intrigued by evidence for medieval plough teams of fewer than eight animals in contemporary literary and artistic endeavors.4Langland's Piers Plowman, where the labor of ploughing takes on the mystique of metaphor, has attracted well deserved attention. A symbolic team comprised of the four Evangelists is yoked to Piers' spiritual plough: Grace gaf Piers a teeme, foure grete Oxen. That oon was Luk, a large beest and a lowe chered, And Mark, and Mathew pe bridde, myghty beestes bo¡)e; And Ioyned to hem oon Iohan, moost gentil of alle, The pris neet of Piers plow, passynge all opere.5 The evidence of this four-ox team can, of course, be dismissed as a literary flourish: because there were only four evangelists and because the poet chose them as the oxen, the team was necessarily restricted. But we might feel equally justified in saying that the use of four-animal teams in real-life farming practice could have recommended the appropriateness of the Evangelists as the plough team to the poet. Langland extended his metaphor of the practical details of farming to include the four horses ("stotts"), SS. Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome, who follow the plough with two harrows, the Old and the New Testaments (Passus XIX, 11. 267-74). Although one horse seems to have been sufficient for harrowing in English farming, we should not assume that a two-horse team must be considered outlandish, as there are numerous pictorial examples of two horses harrowing in European manuscripts and early printed books.6 The use of two harrows could well be excessive, although it could be argued that they were necessary because of the extent of the fields under cultivation. While the fiction need not be a literal reflection of reality, we should not discount Langland's evidence as a mere flight of fancy and, in acknowledgment of his achievement as a poet, should be prepared to defend the accuracy of his metaphor. We must take a similar defensive approach to the unanimous support for smaller plough teams observed in medieval art. The...