I

The functioning of early modern European societies was to a large extent dependent on the productive performances of both humans and animals. Recent scholarship on early modern work and work relations has highlighted how men, women, and children devoted most of their time to carrying out subsistence-oriented tasks, and that – as a way of risk spreading – they were active in different economic sectors simultaneously. Beyond means of subsistence, performing work was constitutive to people’s social identities.Footnote ¹ In parallel, both economic and animal historians have highlighted how early modern society and economy also depended on animal power, and particularly horse power. Horses provided a wide range of physical labour that was needed for agricultural production, for transportation of food, goods, and firewood on land, as well as for warfare.Footnote ² Due to their availability and flexibility in usage, horses were the preferred working animal for ordinary people.Footnote ³

Most of the subsistence-oriented activities people performed required that they were physically healthy and capable to different degrees, making health and ability a prerequisite for the ways that they made a living, as well as for their identities. Similarly, for horses to be put to productive use, they had to be healthy and capable. Yet, the extent to which this prerequisite for both humans and horses influenced people’s notions of health and ability across this species barrier is overlooked in research. We do not know what notions of human or equine physiology people performing physical work and working with horses embraced, departing from the way they needed their own bodies for the performance of specific tasks and depended on horses for the performance of others.

The aim of this article is thus to investigate how ordinary people understood human and equine bodies to function physiologically, with a particular focus on notions of health and ability. I will uncover what cross-species notions of bodily health and ability people embraced in their everyday lives, so as to be able to explore what ontological assumptions about bodies across this species barrier they held. Then, as Andrew Flack and Alice Would have recently argued, approaching questions of bodily health and ability across the species barrier in a given society can give valuable insights into how people understood themselves in relation to other beings.Footnote ⁴ This will be done by using the available wealth of early modern Swedish legal sources, as they represent this phenomenon from below. This way of studying humans and horses alongside one another is, moreover, a way of stimulating conversations between various fields of early modern scholarship – patient history, history of veterinary medicine, human–animal history, as well as disability history – which have rarely entered into conversations with one another.

Despite calls for applying one-health-perspectives historically, early modern histories of human and animal bodies in sickness and in health have been studied separately from one another.Footnote ⁵ A survey of the literature makes one common denominator evident, in that early modern notions of physiology for both humans and other-than-humans are largely derived from the ancient Galenic framework. According to this stance, living bodies were generally understood to be composed of the four elements and to function with regards to the ways that the four corresponding humours related to each other individually within bodies.Footnote ⁶ Yet, as studies of medical practice and patients’ experiences have shown, this humoral framework was not a closed off system, but dynamic since it could easily be combined with both Paracelsian ideas and magically inspired ways of interpreting illness. As such, diseases could be made sense of as ontological entities, which had entered the body and from which it needed cleansing.Footnote ⁷ In part as a consequence of its elasticity, eclectic versions of humoralism continued to be the dominant popular explanation of physiology among the broader strata of early modern European society, even after it was gradually challenged within professional medicine by the rise of the Cartesian mechanism from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.Footnote ⁸ Then, following new ways of dissecting both human and animal bodies – but also of relating living bodies to the workings of windmills and pumps – bodies became conceptualized as bounded entities, understood to be made up of distinct and functional parts working mechanically.Footnote ⁹

That histories of human and veterinary medicine largely make sense of human and equine bodies in humoral terms until they became akin to machines is to some extent a consequence of the empirical focus on medical sources. Most studies are based on sources representing diagnoses and treatments of diseases, such as medical and veterinary manuals, health advice literature, and correspondence between patients and doctors. Ways of understanding how bodies function, which were rooted in people’s everyday experiences of performing physical work and working with horses, can be expected to have been played down or bypassed in these accounts. Similar remarks have been made by Olivia Weisser in her study of the various ways in which people in early modern England could account for themselves as ill or injured depending on context. She shows that poor people tended to tone down Galenic notions of illness and instead present themselves as victims of different accidents, when a similar strategic shift away from lifestyle choices to the hazards of work was meaningful.Footnote ¹⁰

Arguments similar to Weisser’s recur in recent works by disability historians. From studying early modern petitions for relief of physically impaired persons, David Turner and Angela Schattner, among others, have highlighted how ordinary people’s dependence on their bodies for purposes of subsistence made non-medical frameworks meaningful for interpreting bodily change. Schattner, for example, shows how epilepsy made it hard for people to carry on working as soldiers, bakers, or roofers, since this condition made them particularly prone to hurting themselves by being burned or falling down from roofs.Footnote ¹¹ Clearly, for historians seeking to uncover accounts of physiological or physical change rooted in the everyday working lives of people, it is worthwhile to approach the subject through sources that are not obviously filtered by a medical understanding of the body, but in which more mundane and practical features surface. Yet, disability history’s dependence on sources framed within the context of attitudes towards the deserving poor entail a particular bias towards vulnerability, and tend to overlook what notions of bodies people embraced in general. And disability history has, of course, left out working animals; in fact, there is no equivalent to this kind of social history of illness and impairment from an animal historian perspective, as veterinary history has not paid attention to the perspective of people working alongside horses.Footnote ¹²

A productive way of studying how early modern people understood both human and equine bodies to work and function from the perspective of their working with them is then, I argue, to approach the subject from a task-oriented perspective in the vein of anthropologist Tim Ingold. Accordingly, in this study, humans and horses are understood as bodily beings which engage with one another and the world they live in by being oriented towards different tasks. Tasks, in turn, are understood as practical operations carried out by more or less skilled agents as part of their everyday lives.Footnote ¹³ Social by definition, tasks can be expected to forge specific ontologies of bodies, in terms of historical ways of experiencing and understanding bodies to function. Then, as archaeologists John Robb and Oliver Harris argue, ‘which ontologies come into play at any moment depends on the context in which people find themselves’.Footnote ¹⁴

In order to access the perspective of the broader strata of society, the present study is based on some 300 court cases and 70 petitions for relief from various parts of Sweden, both rural and urban, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which human and equine bodies in relation to health and ability are described. Court minutes are particularly rewarding for the purposes of this study. Firstly, since ordinary people took an active part in the business of the courts in early modern Sweden (as well as in the other Nordic countries), either as litigants, accused, or witnesses. Not only serious crimes were investigated in court, but everyday conflicts were negotiated and settled there. As people made use of the courts for various purposes, they have been characterized as a kind of social arena which were internalized in the everyday lives of local communities.Footnote ¹⁵ Secondly, statements in court have the benefit of keeping within the scope of an understanding of the world that the informer shares with his or her peers.Footnote ¹⁶ As such, they can give insights into notions of health and ability which were rooted in people’s everyday experiences, rather than adjusted to a particular medical framework or the rhetorics of supplication.

More specifically, the source sample is based on investigations of magical assault or healing of people and horses, breaches of contracts between masters and servants, disputed purchases of horses, and conflicts over rented horses. As a complement, petitions for relief and a few cases of violent assault are included. Combining court cases of various crimes this way entails source critical problems, since both human and equine bodies are presented as ill or incapable for quite different reasons. However, this is also an advantage, in that the sources consequently inform on human and equine bodies from different perspectives: as ailing, injured, and incapable, but also as adapting to illness and injuries. It is as such that they make it possible to uncover how people made sense of human and equine ailments and injuries in relation to abilities to perform work-oriented tasks. This way, a task-oriented view on early modern human and equine bodies can be uncovered.

II

In general, when men and women accounted for themselves or others in court as ill, they characterized illnesses in terms of physical deficiencies, such as weakness and impotence, which made them unable to perform different tasks or duties. It could be that they were not able to appear in court or, as was more often the case, that they were unable to perform various subsistence-oriented activities.Footnote ¹⁷ It was thus the consequences of being ill that were put centre-stage in illness narratives in court. Margareta Pehrsdotter’s account of a sudden onset of illness following a magical assault, which she reported in court in Rättvik in 1663, is informative in this regard. Margareta accused a cunning woman called Håll Karin of having cast a magical spell on her. In her testimony, Margareta explained how she realized that she had become ill. She recounted that she had sensed ‘as if someone had held her in a grip so that she could not move and only barely cry for help’.Footnote ¹⁸ She thus made sense of this disease as an entity, in ways similar to contemporary German patients in their correspondence with doctors.Footnote ¹⁹ But she furthermore specified that this had made her unable to move ‘a single one of her limbs’, and had left her unable to carry out the tasks expected of her as a matron.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, as the maid Anna Larsdotter accused Olof Ersson Swan of having made her ill by way of a magical spell, she specified that her illness had restricted her in moving her fingers the way she used to be able to. This reduced her work capacity, which two members of her household attested to. In confirming Anna’s statement, they put her current state of being in contrast to her usual way of being ‘industrious in her work’.Footnote ²¹ In this context, people who were particularly knowledgeable concerning human health – such as medical experts or barber surgeons – were not called upon to guarantee the veracity of a person’s claims about being ill. Instead, people who could be in the know about a person’s diminished work capacity following ill health – such as members of one’s household or one’s neighbours – were called upon to verify this. By doing this, they also vouched for the honour of that person, as ability to work was connected to a person’s social standing.Footnote ²² This way of relating experiences of illness to restricted mobility and capacity for work was in no way restricted to illness accounts in investigations into magical assault, but also recurs in cases of breaches of contracts. For instance, in 1732 a man named Anders (no surname in the court minutes) was summoned to appear before court in the town of Västerås. He had shortly before been employed to work as a servant for madame Anna Wessman, but on finding that he was too ill to perform the tasks expected of him, in particular for driving timber, Anna sought to have their contract nullified in court. A witness corroborated Anders’s inability to work, in describing him as so emaciated that he could ‘neither walk fast nor run’.Footnote ²³ Being immobile was to be ill.

People only rarely made use of established medical terms when accounting for illness in court. This could indicate that many diseases lacked established names or that, for various reasons, it was superfluous to name them in the context of the court proceedings. As already mentioned, Weisser has observed a tendency to downplay medical notions of illness in petitions of the poor in early modern England, since what mattered for the afflicted seeking relief was to be accepted as impaired persons deserving support.Footnote ²⁴ The rationale behind petitioning for support and laying information in court was, however, somewhat different, which is why another way of interpreting this way of making sense of illness becomes possible. It could simply be that the consequences of being ill – being incapable of functioning, moving, and performing as normal – was at the core of the understanding of illness studied here. Strictly medical terms could then be invoked when the consequences of being ill were implied, as was the case with occasional references to fever and epilepsy (‘falling disease’).Footnote ²⁵ The terms themselves signalled that the persons afflicted were unable to perform as usual.

A similar task-oriented understanding of illness surfaces in cases in which horses are described as sick. Labelling specific diseases from which horses suffered with established names was equally rare in the studied contexts. But there were exceptions to this, most notably as some cases make references to the ‘horse disease’.Footnote ²⁶ This referred to the rinderpest that regularly plagued Sweden throughout the early modern period, causing both cows and horses to fall ill and die.Footnote ²⁷ Other names for diseases appear in cases of magical healing of horses, such as ‘flutorm’ and ‘fång’. They were typically used to describe horses that were stiff in their muscles and joints.Footnote ²⁸ ‘Flutorm’ literally meant ‘floating snake’, and designating this specific disease this way was grounded in how it manifested itself in the sick horse’s body: in hardened glands and tumours under its skin, making it look as if a snake was under its skin and hindering the animal from moving.Footnote ²⁹ Similar to how Margareta Pehrsdotter made sense of the onset of her illness as a paralysing subjugation of her body, horses could also be understood to be suppressed by disease entities which prevented them from moving their limbs the way they used to. Thus, for horses, too, being immobile meant being ill.

Along these lines, people in court generally described horses as ill when they appeared weak and emaciated.Footnote ³⁰ An accusation of careless handling of a rented horse, which was brought before court in Västerås in 1725, informs more on this tendency. Crofter Anders Olsson had rented a horse from farrier Samuel Gråberg, and was accused of having returned it in bad shape. Anders denied this, and to shed light on the matter, the court summoned several people in the local community with knowledge of the particular horse during the time Anders had used it. One of the witnesses, Jeremiah Olsson, testified that as he had seen the horse grazing in the summer, he had noticed that he appeared emaciated. He had observed that the horse had laid down to rest, and had then been unable to get up on his feet without help. Added to this, Jeremiah had noticed that the horse had not been able to eat on his own. Another witness, Anders Ersson, corroborated that the horse had been weakened and had been lying down for about eight days. He had also noticed that Anders Olsson had had to lead the horse into town, instead of riding on it.Footnote ³¹ All in all, the men testifying to Samuel’s advantage corroborated his allegation. From their testimonies, we can conclude that they equated illness with weakness, lack of appetite, and restrained mobility.

The source sample, moreover, contains ample evidence of how men who were experienced in working alongside horses had quite subtle and varied ways of picking up on signs of them being emaciated and ill if they ceased to be oriented towards their tasks, in ways similar to how Hill Curth suggests that one could expect the case to have been.Footnote ³² The lengthy case against peasant Lars Larsson i Västerboda, who was accused of magical assault on several horses before court in Bälinge in 1748, informs on a particular way of looking attentively at horses for signs of ailing health and diminished ability. Several men in the local community brought charges against Lars. One of them, Anders Andersson i Ärke, stated that he had noticed that one of his horses had shown signs of deteriorating health, as he was using it for ploughing. Suddenly, this horse had folded its ears and appeared tired.Footnote ³³ Olof Matsson testified that a couple of his horses had one day closed their ears and appeared completely powerless, and he added that from then on they had not been able to perform any tasks at all.Footnote ³⁴ Similarly, Lars Eriksson complained that four of his horses had become tired, lost their appetite, and had consequently not been able to ‘do any work’.Footnote ³⁵

Physical weakness, lack of appetite, and an ensuing inability to perform could apparently be signs of ill health among horses. But since individual horses differed from one another, the meanings of such signs were not clear-cut. To early modern veterinarians, it was therefore important to have insights into the biography of individual animals, primarily to be able to tell how they had previously responded to different medical treatments.Footnote ³⁶ By contrast, in the everyday context studied here, in which treatments were not centre-stage, it was important to establish what individual behavioural pattern particular horses deviated from, in order to know whether particular behaviours or states of being were signs of illness or instead expressions of their character. In such cases, those who were most experienced in working alongside particular horses were best suited for drawing a line between symptoms and character traits, and called upon to give statements in court.

Accordingly, lack of appetite was not necessarily a sign of illness, but could be explained with reference to the fact that a particular horse simply was a fussy eater, as becomes clear in a case of a disputed purchase of a horse investigated in court in Lillhärdal in 1686. Anders Olsson sued Anders Halfwarsson for having sold him a horse which barely ate and was thus powerless. Several witnesses from the local community were heard, among them Kjell Olsson, who had owned the horse some years back. According to him, the horse in question should not be deemed ill, despite its weakness and lack of appetite. Instead, he maintained that all in all, the horse was ‘capable and only picky’.Footnote ³⁷ Conversely, deviating behaviours which at first sight could be interpreted as character traits rather than signs of illness could be explained with reference to previous illnesses. At the winter session of the court in Lit in 1691, Peder Olofsson sought to cancel his purchase of a horse from Anders Wallman after he had found that it ate very little and behaved in an unruly manner. Contrary to how Peder wanted and expected the horse to behave, it tended to rear and throw him off, which made collaboration difficult. Anders admitted that Peder’s description of the horse’s characteristic was accurate, but he explained that it was probably a consequence of the horse having suffered from an unidentified illness a few years back (and which he himself had tried to cure it of). To this, he added that since the horse in question was still young, its unruly behaviour should diminish with time, provided that Peder made an effort to ‘domesticate him and rid him of his bad habits’.Footnote ³⁸ Clearly, behavioural deviations among horses needed not be signs of them being ill, as they had individual characteristics, which, in some cases, could be corrected through proper training. And importantly, people who knew a disputed horse best – most often those who had most experience of working alongside them – were best placed to determine what was to be defined as signs of illness or injury, or merely as expressions of character. In this practical context, knowledge about equine physiology was not based on a general conception of how horses as a species functioned, but on how particular horses tended to be, behave, and function.

III

The identified stress on bodily health and capacity for both humans’ and horses’ abilities to perform tasks is key to understanding why people made no clear-cut differences between illness and injury when accounting for physical change in the everyday. In fact, both terms could be invoked for describing various states of being in which human and equine bodies differed from their normal or usual ways of being, moving, and functioning. The terms could either be used interchangeably, or people could make use of the key word ‘incapacitated’ (in Swedish: ofärdig). The concept ofärdig is a negation of färdig, that is, of being able to fare or move. In early modern Swedish, it could either be used to refer to a person or an animal lacking one or several of his or her bodily abilities, or to an object that was out of order and hence of less or no use.Footnote ³⁹ When used to describe working bodies across the species barrier studied here, these two meanings of the concept were merged.

The case of peasant Olof Bengtsson against an older woman named Elin (no surname is stated in the minutes), brought before court in Asker in 1645, is illustrative of the blurring of lines between illness and injury. Olof accused Elin of having cast a spell on his horse, which had made the horse unruly and resulted in him falling off it. From falling, his arm was broken and he became, as he stated, ‘incapacitated’. Since the hearings against Elin were lengthy, Olof was asked to repeat his case in court. But the second time he was heard, Olof described his incapacitated condition in another way. Now he maintained that, from falling off the horse, he had come to suffer from a sickness, which had gradually spread inside him and subjugated more and more parts of his body, including his arm.Footnote ⁴⁰ To Olof, falling from a horse and injuring his arm was more or less the same as becoming ill from a disease entity; the crux of the matter was that his arm was not functioning. Along the same lines, when Nils Andersson disputed his recent buying of a horse from Olof Nilsson in 1757, he designated the horse as ‘incapacitated’ after he had found it to be suffering from some ‘incurable disease’ in its legs, which manifested itself in the horse behaving erratically and barely being able to move its legs. When the horse occasionally did move its legs, it did so in a restless way, which in any event made collaboration difficult.Footnote ⁴¹ As was the case with Olof’s arm, what mattered was that the horse was unable to move its legs and thus function as it was supposed to.

In accounts of incapacity, people generally stressed that specific parts of human or equine bodies were functioning to a lesser degree than usual, or that they were not functioning at all, which in turn made them of less or no use for performance. By and large, a kind of task-oriented functionality was stressed at the expense of suffering, as people focused on how being incapacitated in different body parts made them or their horses unable to work as usual. For instance, when peasant Peder Mårtensson Boman accused three men of having beaten him severely, he mentioned that following the assault, his head was injured to the extent that there was a hole in it. Yet, what he stressed in his testimony was that his right leg was injured, which was why he had become too incapacitated to work.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, as corporal Erich Quick petitioned for relief, he accounted for several physical impairments and illnesses he suffered from. Above all, however, he stressed that his right hand was incapacitated and made him unable to support himself.Footnote ⁴³ These testimonies speak to the importance of being able to walk and use one’s dominant hand and arm. But more importantly, they support the conclusion that the blurring of dividing lines between illness and injury were determined by the fact that, either way, the afflicted persons were disabled in their normal corporeality and mobility, so that they were hindered from using their bodies as usual in their work.

According to Turner, early modern disablement was more significant for men, as their work repertoires were more clearly defined than those of women.Footnote ⁴⁴ The empirical evidence complicates this claim; there are several examples of women relating their bodily incapacities to what tasks they could no longer carry out. For example, after being beaten by her former farmhand, Erich Ersson Wässman, Gertrud Jonsdotter testified in court that she had become injured in her right arm and shoulder, which had left her ‘incapacitated to perform any work’ expected of her as a matron.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, an ill maid who had both her hands not functioning could not carry on serving in households, but had grounds for parish relief, as a case from Stockholm makes clear.Footnote ⁴⁶ Since the maintenance of a household depended on the performance of all its members, disablement mattered for women as well.

What is more, since the subsistence of a household depended on the performance of horses, horses were also described as incapacitated when they were injured or ill so that they could no longer move their limbs as expected of them. Thus, peasant Anders Eriksson characterized his newly purchased horse as ‘incapacitated’, and therefore disputed his purchase of it, after he had noticed that it ‘could not stand on any of its feet’.Footnote ⁴⁷ For obvious practical reasons, horses’ feet were of great concern for people depending on them for purposes of carriage, transportation, and agriculture.Footnote ⁴⁸ Accordingly, in ways similar to how working people were presented as incapacitated following illnesses or injuries affecting different body parts, the term was constantly invoked in disputed purchases of horses, after buyers had found that their new horses had incapacitated feet, legs, thighs, or hips.Footnote ⁴⁹ Upon finding these deficiencies, the new owners specified that these horses could not perform the tasks expected of them: to plough, pull, or transport.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this context, Hill Curth’s claim that the early modern holistic approach to equine health held that diseases affected ‘every part of a living creature’ is not particularly apt.Footnote ⁵¹ Rather, the task-oriented way of conceptualizing equine bodies as incapacitated following illness or injury departed from specific body parts being out of function.

In early modern Europe, horses were required to perform throughout the year, but spring and autumn were their busy seasons.Footnote ⁵² From a task-oriented perspective, it is clear that the seasonal rhythms dictated by work procedures provided people with a meaningful way of fixing and measuring illness and incapacity in time, not only with regards to their horses, but also to themselves. It should come as no surprise that in many cases of disputed purchases of horses, allegations of horses suffering from undisclosed illnesses or injuries were brought before court some time after the purchase had taken place. This is, of course, a particular bias of this type of legal source, since purchases can only be disputed in retrospect. Yet, statements about how people had come to realize that their new horses were incapacitated add substance to the general argument about the way that notions of health and ability embraced by working people derived from cross-species collaboration. For instance, in the spring of 1685 in Hallen, peasant Mårten Rytter accused Erik Påhlsson Lapp of having sold him a foal which, according to Erik, was ‘healthy’, ‘capable’, and ‘without defects’. The purchase had taken place the previous autumn. During spring, however, Mårten had noticed that the foal was limping. A neighbour of his, Elias i Backa, was summoned to testify. Elias informed the court that he, too, had seen the foal limping, and specified that it had been disclosed around the time Mårten was sowing.Footnote ⁵³ It was, conversely, during harvest work that Erik Kjelsson realized that the horse he had bought from Mårten Hansson was incapacitated: as this horse was used for transporting hay, puss had started to pour out of its nose, which Erik interpreted as a sure sign of illness (and which he accused Mårten of having concealed).Footnote ⁵⁴ A similar way of measuring time of human incapacity recurs in cases of violent assault. For example, from having been beaten by Erik Jonsson, for whom he had previously served as farmhand, Peder Olofsson had been left ‘incapacitated for most of the year’.Footnote ⁵⁵ And in 1670, peasant Grels Jonsson sued his former maid Kerstin Jonsdotter on several accounts, including for Kerstin having beaten his wife (who is not referred to by name in the minutes). Kerstin had allegedly pushed her former mistress against a table, which had made one of her legs break and left her ill and incapacitated to work for three weeks. A neighbour of hers, Olof Kluck, attested to this. Olof added that he had seen her walk with a stick for a week or so.Footnote ⁵⁶ The temporality of illness for both humans and horses was understood in a task-oriented way, marked by the moment of onset or the time-span during which they were incapable of using specific body parts for purposes of work.

IV

In their studies of disability in early modern England and Germany, Turner and Schattner point to the fact that disablement depended on specific circumstances as well as on gender and status, rather than on universal norms. This was the case because there was no category for disability comparable to a modern definition. Importantly, both also show that being disabled did not entail a whole-body redefinition of persons deemed to be impaired, but that it was made sense of as a matter of degrees.Footnote ⁵⁷ The same holds true for the Swedish cases studied here – for humans as well as for horses. Incapacity did not equate to a complete inability to perform tasks, but to inabilities to perform specific tasks for which specific body parts were required to be working. In other words, although the key term used for describing people and horses as unable to perform work for reasons of ill health or injury was based on a negation, within this negation there was room for certain yardsticks of ability and performance. These yardsticks illustrate the elasticity of being incapacitated in early modern Sweden, and how it was possible for people to adjust the productive uses of their bodies, and also – although to a lesser extent – of the uses made of horses.

It is particularly in legal disputes in which possible or expected performances of humans and horses were negotiated that yardsticks of ability come to the fore. With regards to men and women, these yardsticks often surface in cases of breaches of work contracts between masters and servants, in which servants had quit serving following illness or injury. In one such case, from Hammerdal in 1692, peasant Per Nilsson maintained that even though his former farmhand Elias Isaksson was ill, he did not think that he was ill to the extent that he was unable to help herding cattle.Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, peasant Hans Eriksson acknowledged that his maid Anna Nilsdotter was ill and that she thereby was not able to perform the tasks she used to, but he maintained that she at least should be able to pick hops.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was clearly possible for the task repertoires of people working in households to be adjusted to their changed physical abilities.Footnote ⁶⁰ This way, incapacity as inability to be of service could be brushed away.

Indeed, cases in which incapacities were disputed inform how people designated as incapacitated could be evaluated according to corresponding yardsticks of capability. In relation to them, people’s capacities for carrying out alternative tasks could be measured. They also speak to the relation between people’s abilities to work and their social identities, in the sense of people proving to be useful and honourable, despite not being able to work as usual. In 1698, for instance, peasant Peder Hindersson accused his former farmhand Johan Torstensson of having breached their work contract, since Johan had quit serving earlier than they had agreed. In his defence, Johan stated this was because of an injury to one of his legs, which had left him incapacitated and unable to carry out the tasks expected of him as a farmhand. Nevertheless, Johan stressed that he was still useful (and thus also honourable), by adding that after leaving Peder’s household he had taken up work in the workshop of shoemaker Sven Olsson.Footnote ⁶¹ Apparently, this particular line of work was possible to perform in light of his changed physical state. Similarly, as maid Elisabeth Erichsdotter was accused of having left the household of Hans Persson in advance, she defended herself with reference to how an injury in one of her knees had made her too incapacitated to stay on serving. She, too, added that she was still useful, in that she told the court that she currently stayed in the household of Petter Ryberg and learned sewing from his wife.Footnote ⁶² Evidently, people could adjust their strategies of subsistence in relation to the varied functioning of their bodies. Thus, rather than entailing ‘a shift from skilled to unskilled work’, as Turner suggests were the implications of physical impairment in early modernity, people who had to adjust to incapacity – and negotiate this in court – could make sense of this shift in terms of changed task-orientation.Footnote ⁶³

In early modern Sweden, as elsewhere in Europe, all people except children were legally required to work. Proof of a person’s inability to work was a requirement for poor relief, but also for a person being allowed to beg in the streets.Footnote ⁶⁴ Unsurprisingly, then, people seeking relief or defending themselves after being arrested for begging commonly presented themselves as incapacitated following one or more of their body parts being unable to function. Further, in the context of poor relief, yardsticks of capability were often invoked as people could be denied support if they were found able to be put to productive uses by adjusting their means of subsistence to their particular physical impairments. For example, in 1724 the twenty-three-year-old former maid Elisabeth Olofsdotter pleaded her case before the city magistrate in Stockholm. She had previously served in the household of a brandy distiller, and thereafter shortly supported herself by emptying latrines. Now, following an injury to her right leg, she claimed that she was too incapacitated to support herself. A barber surgeon, Israel Ekman, was summoned to examine Elisabeth, and he did find an uncurable wound on her right leg. Despite this, Ekman assessed that Elisabeth should be able to work with her hands, and as a result, the magistrate sentenced her to work at a house of correction.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, on being arrested for begging in the streets of Stockholm in 1736, former corporal Hindrich Hanson Buttenberg was heard in court and physically examined by a barber surgeon. He found Hindrich to be somewhat incapacitated in one knee, yet stated that his hands were ‘healthy and capable’, so he should be able to work as a street paver.Footnote ⁶⁶ As they were unable to move their legs, both Elisabeth and Hindrich were assigned work they could perform sitting down, for which they primarily required to use their hands. Their upper bodies could still be put to use.

Equine health and able-bodiedness could similarly be measured according to specific yardsticks of capability. To begin with, horses’ incapacities could be measured and quantified in degrees. Horses could be described as ‘limping a bit’ and ‘a bit lame’, implying that they could move their legs, even if only in a reduced way. Conversely, when they were described as ‘very incapacitated’ or ‘not fully recovered’, their mobility was severely reduced.Footnote ⁶⁷ Importantly, since equine health and ability were measurable, they were also negotiable. A couple of legal disputes about rented and recently purchased horses make this clear. For instance, before a court in Lit in 1688, Peder Olsson i Gewåg sued Bengt Olufsson for having sold him a horse which he, Peder, subsequently found to be ‘incapacitated in all its four feet’. In his defence, Bengt admitted that the particular horse was weak, tired, and somewhat stiffened in one of its feet, but he still maintained that overall the horse was ‘healthy and capable’.Footnote ⁶⁸ A witness summoned to testify in the case of widow Brita Jönsdotter against Erik Tårgutson, which was brought before court in Oviken in 1684, argued along the same lines. According to Brita, one of the horses belonging to Erik had bitten her horse, and left it injured and of less use to her, and she demanded compensation. A neighbour of Brita’s, Erik Nilsson, was summoned to testify, and his testimony nuanced her statement about the particular horse’s inabilities and reduced usefulness. According to him, the horse should be assessed as ‘for the most part capable’. Although one could not ‘fully ride it at a trot’, Erik maintained that it could still be used for transportation through the forest.Footnote ⁶⁹ Incapacity among horses was thus both a matter of what tasks they were supposed to be oriented towards, and what tasks they were still able to perform, despite being reduced in their mobility. Nevertheless, even though horses were the preferred working animal due to their flexibility, they were not as versatile as humans, not least since they were only useful for a few years.Footnote ⁷⁰ Their task-repertoires could only, as the cases referred to suggest, be slightly adjusted to their changed bodily dispositions.

Above all, yardsticks of equine capability were invoked in conflicts over rented horses, in particular when the expected abilities of humans to be attentive to the physical limits of horses were negotiated. Early modern relations between humans and their livestock were framed within what could be termed particular ethical imperatives. People owning and using animals for various purposes had to take their well-being into account.Footnote ⁷¹ In her study of early modern healthcare for horses, Hill Curth states that preventive measures were at the heart of this kind of care. The advice literature she studies primarily derives these measures from Galenic notions of naturals and non-naturals. More precisely, those tasked with taking care of horses were obliged to make sure that they were given sufficient food, water, and fresh air, but also that they were not overworked and were assigned warm places for rest.Footnote ⁷²

From the perspective of men using horses for purposes of performance, preventive measures entailed being sensitive and responsive to the physical limits of individual horses. A recurring theme in conflicts in court over rented horses was that they had been returned in bad shape, contrary to what had been agreed on in advance.Footnote ⁷³ Accusations of not having paid sufficient attention to the physical limits of horses – but instead having ridden them too hard – could be specified with references to a particular distance that they had had to cover without proper rest. For example, in 1668, Per Eriksson disputed Anders Thomsson, after Anders had rented a horse from Per, under agreement that he was going to ride it to a particular place. Contrary to their agreement, Anders had in the end taken it even further. In his testimony, Per emphasized that Anders should have known that this particular horse would not manage such a distance.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similar reproaches of not having taken a particular horse’s physical strength into account surface in allegations of users having loaded them with too heavy a cargo.Footnote ⁷⁵ Men working with horses were expected to have a certain feel for their physical limits of performance, and take this into account when riding and loading them.

Men using horses for the performance of tasks were also able to make such judgements. In fact, people accused of having overused horses this way could counter these allegations by accounting for how they had indeed taken particular horses’ physical limits or yardsticks of ability into account. In Snevringe in 1756, crofter Jan Nilson accused peasant Nils Andersson of having overworked a horse he had rented from him, after he had found it to be ill upon having it returned. Nils admitted that the horse had fallen ill while he used it. But in his defence, Nils stated that he had only used it for transporting an ordinary cargo up and down a hill, so he should not be blamed for its state of being. Witnesses were summoned to shed light on the matter. Erik Olsson, who had accompanied Nils as he was using Jan’s horse for transportation, testified that Nils had in fact become aware of the horse’s incapacity while riding it, as he had picked up that the horse had started to limp. Yet Erik also admitted that they had carried on for half a mile, and only then had he inspected the horse and found it to have puss under its feet.Footnote ⁷⁶ In ways similar to how people knew how to take note of more or less subtle behavioural changes against the backdrop of how particular working animals used to be and what they used to manage, people who worked closely with them were expected to know how to estimate their physical limits and be responsive to them. True, as Elaine Walker finds in her study of English noblemen’s horsemanship, a skilled early modern horse-rider needed to use subtle means for making horses co-operate.Footnote ⁷⁷ A skilled rider using horses for task-oriented purposes, evidently, also needed to know subtle ways of picking up on horses signalling that their physical limits were about to be stretched too far.

V

This article took its departure from the dependence on human and equine bodies to be healthy and capable in order to perform various tasks in early modern societies. From a task-oriented perspective – drawing on Ingold’s work – it set out to study what notions of human and equine health and ability ordinary people performing physical work and working with horses embraced, so as to shed light on what ontological assumptions people embraced about bodies across this species barrier. It focused on Sweden due to the wealth of legal sources representing the subject matter from the perspective of people supporting themselves as peasants, farmhands, maids, crofters, beggars, and others.

Across this specific species barrier, people generally made sense of both human and equine illness either in terms of physical weaknesses and impotence, or in terms of bodily subjugations by disease entities. In light of these disease entities, the findings support claims put forth in patient historical studies, which have highlighted that an ontological understanding of diseases co-existed with a humoral one (although this has not previously been identified for horses). By contrast, however, in the empirical sample people constantly stressed what the consequences of both weakness and subjugation of entities were, in terms of reduced work capacities. This emphasis was, moreover, found to explain the identified blurring of lines between illness and injury, as well as the general lack of people using medical terms for designating specific diseases. Then, what mattered for people was to stress that illness or injuries both for themselves and their horses above all entailed incapacity and hence diminished abilities to perform tasks. A social history of illness in early modernity for both human and other-than-human bodies should, clearly, be pursued in conversation with disability history.

Importantly, however, incapacity was not necessarily a complete bodily redefinition of either humans or horses, but often a partial one. As such, it was often assessed in relation to particular yardsticks of capability, in relation to which people’s and horses’ abilities to carry out alternative tasks were negotiated. People particularly could adjust their means of subsistence in light of them being partially incapacitated. This was only to a lesser extent the case for the uses they made of horses. Rather, equine yardsticks of capability were supposed to guide men’s interaction with horses for purposes of task-performance, as the yardsticks made these men sensitive to particular horses’ physical limits and take them into account when using them.

Medically trained experts only rarely appear in the source sample. More often, people from the local community were summoned in court to give statements about people’s and horses’ states of being incapacitated. With regards to incapacitated persons, this was a way of vouching for their honourability. As abilities to work were related to a person’s social standing, it was also meaningful for incapacitated persons to stress if they nevertheless were capable of performing some kind of work, and have other people confirm this. As for incapacitated horses, however, it was the men who were experienced in working with particular horses who at times served as informal experts, since they were particularly apt at telling whether a horse behaving out of the ordinary was the result of an illness or merely one of its character traits. Importantly, when giving information about illness and incapacity of themselves, other people, or horses, people did not depart from universal categories for human or equine bodies and how they should be expected to function physiologically. By contrast, they departed from how individual men, women, and horses used to be and were able to perform certain tasks.

As to the question of what ontological assumptions about human and equine bodies the identified understanding of health and ability rested upon, this was a framework stressing physiological similarities departing from how functioning body parts were needed for bodies to be mobile and oriented towards performing specific tasks. A capable body – be it human or equine – should consist of functioning body parts in order to be working as a whole, so as to be mobile and capable of being put to productive use. In essence, ordinary people’s accounts kept within an implicit framework of a task-oriented functionality.

By extension, then, the way bodies were understood to be functioning as consisting of body parts in movement perhaps suggests that an implicit and vague mechanistic framework for understanding physiological change was in place well before the rise of scientific mechanism as a scholarly paradigm. To be sure, the men and women giving statements in early modern Swedish courts regularly invoked magical frameworks for explaining bodily change in ways that scientific mechanisms would not allow. Yet, by making sense of incapacitated bodies as parts which needed to work for the body to work as a co-ordinated whole, they conceptualized these working bodies mechanically. And they did so because this was the most meaningful way of understanding working bodies across the species barrier. Historians seeking to uncover how Cartesian mechanism became the dominant way of explaining physiology from the seventeenth century onwards thus should take working people’s task-oriented perspectives on working bodies into account.