I think it was in his first series, Connections, that science history popularizer James Burke claimed that one minor and underappreciated triumph of the Middle Ages was the invention of the Horse Collar, which allowed horses to pull heavy loads without cutting off their windpipe (which is what happened, apparently, when you used tackle designed for oxen on a horse). Since the horses were (he claimed) stronger and better than oxen, this allowed more efficient plowing of the fields, and the amount of acreage a family could plant on increased.
But waitaminnit – for thousands of years Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and everyone else had been using horses to draw chariots. Surely those consitute heavy loads. They had no problem pulling them without choking themselves. I don’t buy that the loads were not as significant or that the angles were different. Did Burke blow it here? Or was he (as so often happens) calling a rediscovery of the Middle Ages a “discovery”, and all those chariot guys were actually using a version of horsecollar all along?
Chariots were on wheels. The horse collar allowed horses to plow fields, which took more pulling (check the difference between pulling a cart and dragging a plot through the dirt). The collar allowed one person and a horse to cultivate much more ground, increasing food production. (Oxen were used before, but they were slower than a horse and couldn’t cover as much ground.)
Fromthis statuette and this cite it looks as if The Romans used some sort of band around the horse’s ribcage that was held in place by a strap around the lower neck. Then a yoke connected to the chest band tied the two horses of a team together. The yoke supported and pulled on the wagon or chariot tongue.
In the modern harness two heavy straps known as traces, one on each side of the collar connect it to a straight bar known as a singletree with each horse being connected to one of those. The singletrees are pin connected to each end of a doubletree, or evener bar, which is pin connected at its center to the base of the wagon tongue. This pin connected arrangement assures that the horses will equally share the load. A yoke spans between the bottoms of the team’s collars and this supports the wagon tongue.
Yeah – but chariots get stuck in mud and have to be pulled out. Multiple horses pull carts and can be harnessed to pull a plow if more traction is needed. So why is the horse collar better or needed?
The collar arrangement seems to me to be superior to the Roman method in that it does a better job of distributing the load on the horse’s shoulders and chest. It’s not perfect, though. The horses’ shoulders, chest and withers chafed badly even to the point of being raw in the spring before calluses developed.
Oh yes. The doubletree is also known as a whiffletree.
The old grey mare she
S** on the wiffletree
S*** on the wiffletree
S*** on the wiffletree…*
I’d always heard that oxen were stronger and had more endurance than horses. I’ve read that in the Old West people tended to use oxen on their westward migration, and that Wells Fargo employed a number of ‘bullwhackers’ for their cargo shipments. Did Burke make a mistake? Or am I mis-remembering what I’ve read? Or is there a reason why a horse would be better for field cultivation than an ox, but not as good as an ox for hauling heavy loads long distances?
Because the advantage, as I said, was not in improving transportation; it was in improving agriculture – most importantly the number of acres a single farmer was able to cultivate.
A stuck chariot means you pull hard for a few minutes to release it. Plowing a field means you are pulling even harder for hours.
Prior to the invention, farmers did use oxen. Oxen are stronger, but much slower. You usually needed two oxen and, of course, they were useless for breeding*, so you’d have to replace them as they aged or died.
A horse with a collar could plow 50% more ground than a team of oxen in the same amount of time. So you could keep a single animal and do 50% more work – lower feed cost . A second horse would allow for breeding (to breed an ox, you’d need a bull and a cow and hope the offspring was male), or you could work something out with your neighbor who owned a mare: one foal for you, the second foal for him.
By being able to plow more ground, farmers could produce more food. More food, the more available to trade (since there’d be enough to feed himself). The more food traded, the more opportunities for trade overall.
Jerry Pournelle uses this as a minor plot element in King David’s Spaceship. A character explains that a horse without a collar can do five times as much work as a man. However, a horse also eats five times as much as a man. But a horse with a proper collar can do ten times as much work as a man while still only eating five times as much… and suddenly slavery becomes economically unviable.
Half of that may be correct. We’ve already discussed what the Romans used to pull chariots, seemingly not horse collars. However, a lot of sources list the horse collar as a Chinese invention, 3rd and 4th centuries AD. It showed up in Europe some time between the 6th and 8th centuries.
Re pioneers and oxen - pulling power or endurance wasn’t the factor that caused them to prefer oxen for the journey west. Oxen are much hardier and able to tolerate adverse conditions that would kill your horses. They had to make it across alkali deserts at places. An ox team stood a much better chance of coming out alive at the other side.
I’ve read that in the Old West people tended to use oxen on their westward migration, and that Wells Fargo employed a number of ‘bullwhackers’ for their cargo shipments. Did Burke make a mistake? Or am I mis-remembering what I’ve read? Or is there a reason why a horse would be better for field cultivation than an ox, but not as good as an ox for hauling heavy loads long distances?