Also Erica Fudge suggests that in early modern England, unlike today, there were strong and obvious links between animals and meat: the body of the animal was left as intact as possible during preparation because people liked to know what kind of animal they were eating. She points out all kinds of anxieties about pies because you couldn’t be sure what was in them.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there was a cultural gulf between Londoners and rural people as the environment, and social and economic structures were so different (far more different than the chalk and cheese country which David Underdown suggested produced two rival cultures in the countryside). I tend to be suspicious of suggestions that in a particular period most people never went more than 10 miles from home (not least because the period varies according to what it’s being contrasted with! Some people say railways changed everything, other the First World War etc). If it was true in the seventeenth century the economy as we know it wouldn’t have been able to function. But that doesn’t mean that people weren’t insular. I’m quite prepared to believe that there were strong local and regional variations in culture which survived travel and mixing with non-local people. I’m not really going anywhere with this. The cow thing has just sparked off lots of random thoughts…

If you are interested in following up the “townie” stereotype you might want to look at an article by Tony Wrigley in Past and Present in which he argues there was a qualitative difference in the way Londoners behaved and appeared to that of people from elsewhere in England. Various others works have taken Wrigley’s ideas and considered them. But it would be interesting to know how much contact Robert Harley had with London - was he a member of one of the Inns of Court? Did his family spend time in London? etc