Modern domestic cattle originated during the Stone Age from the aurochs, in the Fertile Crescent. Although they remained in Europe until they became extinct in the seventeenth century, aurochs were never domesticated, and few farmers would have known of their existence.

Cattle go under a bewildering variety of English names: cows are females, usually kept for their milk; an ox, plural oxen, can be a generic term for both males and females, or applied more strictly to castrated males commonly used for drawing carts and ploughs; bulls are males used for breeding; steers are young males, often castrated and reared for their meat; finally, bullocks were originally young males, but are now assumed to have been castrated.

Cattle have been bred and raised as draught animals, often seeing wider use than horses, particularly when power is required rather than speed, for their meat, milk and hide. As herbivores, their dung also makes good fertiliser.

One of Paulus Potter’s last paintings, Cows Grazing at a Farm from 1653, shows half a dozen cattle, typical for many small farms of the time, including those primarily working a sheep-corn system for cereal production.

Just as sheep were associated more with arable farming, cattle were often grazed on land unsuitable for crops, including open woodlands, as shown in Rosa Bonheur’s A Herdsman with his Flock from 1852. In some areas, particularly before the enclosures of the eighteenth century and later, these small herds grazed on common land that was shared by locals or all-comers.

Until the advent of the milking machine in the early twentieth century, milking of all domestic animals used as sources of milk could only be performed by hand, wherever the animals might be. Most cows were milked where they were grazing, and for much of the year that required the milkmaid (this being almost exclusively the task of women) to start work in the fields at first light.

Adriaen van de Velde’s undated Milkmaid with Cow and Goats in Front of a Barn is a farmyard delight, with the cow being milked looking directly at the viewer.

Jean-François Millet’s Woman Milking a Cow (1854-60) shows one of this secret army of milkmaids working on location as usual.

Alfred Roll’s full length portrait of Manda Lamétrie, Farmer from 1887 is a Naturalist depiction of a working woman farmer who has just milked the cow behind her. Although she’s far too clean and tidy, it’s of historical interest in that her pail is modern and manufactured from metal.

In the harsher winters of northern Europe, cattle were usually brought in to shelter from the worst of the weather, which would otherwise reduce the milk yield of cows. This allowed the milkmaid to share their shelter.

Gerard ter Borch put the milkmaid and her cow at the centre of this painting, A Maid Milking a Cow in a Barn from about 1652-54. As was universal at that time, milk was collected in a wooden bucket that would have been scrubbed thoroughly before use, but fell far short of modern standards of hygiene.

Cow’s milk wasn’t bottled until the end of the nineteenth century, when processing such as pasteurisation was also introduced. Until then, milk sold in towns and cities often came fresh from the cow.

George Morland’s painting of St. James’s Park from 1788-90 shows a military family together in what’s now a central London park, but was at that time still quite rural, with a cow being milked at the left. This appears to have been a common sight until well into the nineteenth century.

Milk was also transformed into foods such as cheese, as a means of preserving its nutritional value long after the milk would have become sour and inedible. Small-scale cheese production has been widespread throughout the world since long before historical records began. Processing methods have been varied, resulting in innumerable local varieties of cheese that are distinctive of their areas of origin. Milk has also been processed into curds, butter, cream and yogurt.

One great benefit of milking cows was exposure to cowpox, a mild viral illness that provided immunity against its mutilating and often deadly relative smallpox. In 1796, the British physician Edward Jenner made the association between the two diseases, leading to the introduction of vaccination using cowpox virus, and the eventual eradication of smallpox in 1980, long after the eradication of the milkmaids who had made it all possible.

Constant Troyon’s Oxen Going to Work from 1855 shows teams of oxen being driven off to be hitched up to carts or ploughs in draught.

From the end of the Middle Ages, farms started to specialise in breeding cattle for their meat. Across Europe, tracks and later roads developed for crews of itinerant drovers to drive herds to market, where they were sold for slaughter, to yield beef, and their hides were processed into leather.

Sidney Richard Percy’s On the Road to Loch Turret, Crieff (1868) shows a few cattle watering close to this drover’s road near the market town of Crieff in Scotland. Cattle were driven here from rough grazing to the north, and some were sold in Crieff to be driven south through England to the pastures of Norfolk, where they were fattened before walking onward to London, to become roast beef for diners there. Few Londoners would have realised how many hundreds of miles their dinner had walked to reach its plate.

Next week I’ll look at the second favourite food of cattle, hay.

Despite their popularity as crops for millennia, cereals require preparation into more palatable form before they can form the mainstay of most diets, as one of the staple sources of carbohydrates, as they were across Europe before the popularisation of the potato after 1750. Wheat and rye were most commonly crushed into flour in mills, then that was baked into bread.

Early manual milling was replaced during classical times by mills driven by a range of natural power, including animals, wind and water. In 1786, the first steam-powered grain mill opened for business in London, although wind and water were to remain dominant in many rural districts until well into the twentieth century.

Windmills developed during the Middle Ages, and by 1500 were widespread across many parts of Europe. Although their design evolved and improved into the nineteenth century, their common principle is to expose rotating sails to wind, and transfer that rotating force to one of a pair of large millstones, within which the grain or grist is ground into flour.

Rembrandt painted few non-narrative landscapes, but among them is his dramatic view of The Mill (1645-48) seen in the rich rays of twilight. This is a post mill, whose wooden top was turned into the wind to set its sails turning. It’s sited on a small hill giving it the greatest exposure to wind.

The great masters of Dutch landscape art like Jacob van Ruisdael must have painted many hundreds of windmills, of which one of the best-known is this view of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede from about 1670. This small town, now a city, is on the bank of the River Rhine, an ideal location for delivering sacks of grain by barge, and shipping the resulting sacks of flour. This should have kept this tower mill as busy as the wind allowed, and its owner prosperous.

The British topographic painter John Varley painted this close-up view of the well-known Red House Mill, Battersea, Surrey, with its good access by barge and proximity to the city of London. This is a wooden smock mill, a design pioneered by the Dutch in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Palmer’s Summer Storm near Pulborough, Sussex from about 1851 refers to Dutch landscape painting, but in a very Kentish context. A storm is seen approaching the rolling countryside near Pulborough, now in West Sussex, in the south-east of England. On the left, in the middle distance, a small bridge leads across to a hamlet set around a prominent windmill, whose blades are blurred as they’re driven by the wind. Beyond that mill are fields of ripening cereal.

Some windmills used their power to cut wood in sawmills, and others raised water, tasks also powered by water in watermills. These were of even more ancient origin, devised by combining waterwheels with toothed gears in the couple of centuries before the Christian era.

The Old Water Mill from 1790 is one of British painter George Morland’s finest landscapes, and shows a small undershot watermill deep in the English countryside.

A contemporary of Morland, James Ward wasn’t shy of showing the increasing dereliction in the troubled British countryside at this time. An Overshot Mill (1802-1807) shows a rickety overshot watermill used for the grinding of grain. Its fabric is in dire need of repairs, and the thatchers are already making a start on its roof.

John Constable’s contrasting view of Parham Mill, Gillingham from about 1826 shows an undershot watermill near the town of Gillingham in Dorset, visited by the artist during the early 1820s. Also known as Parham’s Mill and later Purns Mill, it burned to the ground in 1825.

When the German-American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt was painting in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1855 he made this idyllic view of A Rustic Mill which is clearly overshot, being fed along a wooden aqueduct. In contrast to many of the other paintings of mills from this period, this appears in an excellent state of repair and prosperous.

Nikolai Astrup’s Going to the Mill from about 1900-05 is a complete essay on watermills, pictured in perfect rainy milling weather, with the streams in spate during the autumn/fall. A mill race, running down its wooden channel, feeds a small undershot paddle in the centre, used to turn a millstone for sharpening knives and tools. Water flow to that is regulated by the simple valve upstream, currently in the off position, and shedding the water to either side. The man and his son are taking a sack of grain up to another mill, possibly the small shed seen in the centre distance, to grind flour for the family’s baking.

That completes my pictorial account of cereals in arable farming prior to mechanisation, from plowing the soil to milling the grain into flour. Pure arable farming was unusual, though, and the companions to fields of cereals were often sheep, the subject of next week’s article.