For those working the land to grow crops, the start of the year was after the harvest was complete, when the first cooler days of autumn came in, before rain turned the fields and tracks to mud, and the winter’s frosts began. This was the time to start preparing arable fields for the growing season next year, with their first ploughing.

Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough that needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here.

Depending on the soil, weather and intended crop, this could be the first of more than five sessions with the plough, before the seed could be sown.

Pastures by rivers were often encouraged to flood during the winter, particularly in the month of February Fill Dyke as shown so well in Benjamin Williams Leader’s painting of country near Worcester in 1881. This both improved soil fertility and kept weeds at bay.

Jean-François Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier in two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. In the distance to the right are two horses drawing a spike harrow, used following ploughing to prepare the surface of the earth for seed.

Once the young plants were growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, a laborious and back-breaking task commonly assigned to women.

Jules Breton’s The Weeders from 1868 is set in the fields just outside his home village of Courrières, where these labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the moment the light becomes insufficient for them to work any longer.

Farmers with sheep or cattle usually timed the arrival of the lambs and calves for the spring, to give the young animals as much benefit as possible from the fine weather of the summer.

Rosa Bonheur’s Weaning the Calves (1879) is set in a glorious summer Alpine or Pyrenean landscape, with a dry stone herdsman’s hut at the left, where the menfolk lived while they were away from their families during the summer transhumance to upland grazing.

Anton Mauve’s Return of the Flock (1886-7) shows a small flock of unshorn ewes with young lambs, on the move in the late Spring or early summer.

In some cattle areas at least, once the Spring lambs and calves had been safely delivered into the care of their mothers, couples took the opportunity to get married, as confirmed by analyses of English parish registers. For those growing crops, though, there was little respite during the growing season, when fields had to be kept free of weeds before harvest.

By the end of the Spring or early summer, sheep and cattle were moved to summer grazing to allow the grass in hay meadows to grow ready for mowing during July or August, depending on the latitude and weather.

Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking shows women in Ukraine raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen.

Samuel Palmer’s Shearers from about 1833-35 shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, relieving these adult sheep of their fleece before the weather became too hot.

Meanwhile, the summer’s grain crop ripened and was ready for harvest.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 includes most of the outdoor stages from cutting the grain using scythes to transporting the harvest by cart for threshing.

Once the harvest was home, demands on the arable farmer eased, and some English parish records show a peak of marriages during the early autumn in areas predominantly farming sheep and grain. This was also the time for the harvest of fruit such as apples.

Camille Pissarro’s overtly Divisionist painting of Apple Picking, Éragny, was largely completed during the autumn of 1887.

This decisive phase of the year is shown well in Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadence of Autumn from 1905, here centred on the fruit harvest. Five women are shown in a frieze, against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand. They wear loose robes coloured in accordance with their phases in the season.

The landscape behind them contains a watermill and surrounding buildings. At the left, the trees are heavy with fruit and the fields either green or ripe corn. At the right, the trees are barren, and the landscape hilly and more wintry. Soft blue-white patches of mist are visible in the foreground on the right. The passing of the season, and the fruit harvest, progresses in time from the left to the right.

By that time, the first fields were being ploughed in preparation for the following year.

Before the nineteenth century, when many farms either concentrated on sheep and arable, or on the raising of cattle, their economies were contrasting. The arable farmer was committed to labour-intensive work and investment throughout the year, with any cash return occurring once the harvest had been sold. Livestock farmers had lower labour requirements for much of the year, with their peak demand during Spring calving, and could spread the sale of animals more evenly over the year, with more immediate returns on their investment. This also enabled those involved in livestock farming to have more free time to engage in crafts and other sidelines.

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.