We take cattle for granted. Beef accounts for a quarter of the meat eaten in the world. Our milk and dairy products are primarily from cows (half-and-half for our coffee, much of our cheese, butter, sour cream, and ice cream). Most of our leather comes from cows. We wouldn't know what do without them, even though most of us have few personal interactions with them.
Did medieval people have cows? Of course. But they were raised and treated differently than cows today, and there were no cows in the Americas before Christopher Columbus brought some on his second voyage (1493).
Cows are descended from the aurochs, a wild bovine that finished going extinct in the seventeenth century but had been very rare for centuries before then. The aurochs might be considered Eurasia's answer to the bison. It could reach six feet tall at the shoulder and had wicked horns. But the aurochs was domesticated into the cow around 10,000 years ago, probably roughly simultaneously in the Middle East (specifically what is now Turkey) and in South Asia (specifically what is now Pakistan). It became smaller, more mild-tempered, and stupider.
The generic term "cows" can either mean cattle of either sex (used this way in the term "cowboy") or else female cattle in particular. The feminine is the term used for the species as a whole. (Fun fact: The same is true of geese.)
Cattle change a landscape. They trample through the mud and eat all the grass. In the medieval Mediterranean region they were relatively uncommon, because sheep and goats did better in a dry landscape and could eat plants cows wouldn't touch. The Romans had mocked the Germanic peoples for preferring cows to goats when they showed up along the margins of the Roman Empire. But then they mocked the Germans for liking butter and for not speaking Latin.
Medieval cows were smaller than our cows today, which really can be enormous, as you'll know if you've had any personal interactions. Medieval cows were usually brown, not the black-and-white we often assume. Dairy cows did not produce milk year-round (or almost year-round) as they do now, which meant farmers were not slaves to their cows, who now require twice-daily milking.
Today most beef cattle are free-range for much of their lives, wandering around eating grass without much human supervisions, then rounded up, taken to livestock yards for fattening up (mostly on grain and corn), and slaughtered. Dairy cattle are kept in good sized herds, from twenty cows up to a couple of hundred. Medieval cows were mostly kept one-at-a-time, in close contact with their humans, as I have discussed earlier.
Medieval cattle were also very useful as draft animals. Oxen were used to pull carts and plows much more than horses, which are more flighty and more expensive to keep. (An ox is a male castrated as a calf, so it grows up with a bull's muscles but not a bull's aggression.) The ox transformed life in the Americas, giving the natives an animal that could be used to pull heavy loads, which they had never had before (for small loads, North American natives had used dogs, South Americans the llama—you can see this has serious limits).
© C. Dale Brittain 2026
For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.
