Wellmann Imre szerk.: A Magyar Mezőgazdasági Múzeum Közleményei 1971-1972 (Budapest, 1973)
Fenton, Alexander: Early yoke types in Britain
EARLY YOKE TYPES IN BRITAIN ALEXANDER FENTON (Edinburgh, United Kingdom) Only a few years ago I thought that Great Britain had little to offer on the subject of yokes for draught purposes. In most parts of the country yokes went out of use during the late eighteenth —early nineteenth century, and the surviving evidence is confined to documentary references, and to examples in museum collections. It is now only possible to study the subject in Britain as a historical phenomenon. Nevertheless, more and more material has come to light, and the first results, covering the last 200 years, have been published in JACOBEIT and KRAMARíKs book on Rinder anschirrung. 1 This volume, along with another recent volume by M. JEAN-BRUNHES DELAMARRE 2 , has added a great deal to our knowledge of yokes in the last two centuries. It is still necessary, however, to assemble and take a close look at material for the earlier centuries. In this connection, Britain has a great deal to offer. Thirteen yokes of a variety of forms have been found in Scotland and Ireland, mostly in peat bogs. None has so far come to light in England. Only a small part of this material has been published, although it is of outstanding importance for the study of early transport and draught. This present note aims at bringing it together for the first time as a preliminary report, with provisional diagrams. A fuller study will be published later. The most striking feature is that no single one of these thirteen yokes, in spite of the variety of forms, parallels the withers yokes that alone are known in Britain from the medieval period until the nineteenth century A.D. Most of the withers yokes are double bow yokes, and the ubiquity of this form, running well back into the Middle Ages, presents a striking contrast with the range of types from the earlier period. It will be necessary to look at the early British yokes in a wide European context in order to interpret their significance, before attempting to pin-point the period at which they were replaced by the doublebow withers yoke. Previous writers on yokes have divided them into two broad groups, withers yokes that lie around the neck and against the shoulders of the draught animal, and head or horn yokes, attached in front of or behind the horns of the animal. For the latter, care had to be taken by the maker to ensure a 1FENTON, A. Draught Oxen in Britain. In: JACOBEIT, W. and KRAMARÍK, J. edd. Rinderanschirrung. Nârodopisny Vëstnik Ceskoslovensky III —IV. 1968—1969. 2 JEAN-BRUNHES DELAMARRE, M. Géographie et ethnologie de l'attelage au joug en France du XVII<* siècle à nos jours. Uherské Hradisté 1969.
