Fig. 92. Ox-yoke (Sussex). Reliquary, XI. p. 222. Dimensions: length 5 ft; thickness 4´´; depth 6´´. The loops (ox-bows), which are of ash, are about 1½ inches thick.
Fig. 93. Ox-yoke (c. A.D. 1800), Gayton-le-Wold, Lincolnshire. Now in the Museum of the Louth Antiq. and Nat. Soc. The material is ash. Length 51½´´; breadth 6´´; depth 4½´´. Ropes, or chains, passing through the vertical holes, appear to have served as ox-bows.
yoke[1279]. One of these yokes lay outside the blacksmith’s shop at Rodmell, when I visited the village in 1910. Through the kindness of Dr W. Heneage Legge, I am enabled to give an illustration of a Sussex ox-yoke ([Fig. 92]). A Lincolnshire specimen, over a century old, now in the Museum at Louth, is shown for the sake of comparison ([Fig. 93]). In Fitzherbert’s time (A.D. 1534) the hoops were known as ox-bows. It would appear, from a casual remark made by Rham, that the yoke was sometimes fixed across the horns[1280]. We may note, by parenthesis, that the team sometimes carried bells; one of these was discovered under the ruins of the tower of Ringmer church (Sussex). The tower fell at some period between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is supposed that oxen had been employed to remove the fallen stones[1281].
Fig. 94. Old Sussex plough and rake, in use about 150 years ago, at Rodmell, near Lewes. Now in the Castle grounds at Lewes.