Definition
In historical English law, great cattle refers to all beasts of burden and draft or large domesticated animals — essentially all livestock except sheep and yearlings. The term appears in older common law texts concerned with trespass, damage feasant, distress, and property rights in animals. Its primary function is classificatory: it draws a boundary between large animals (cattle, horses, oxen, swine, and similar beasts) and the excepted categories of sheep and yearlings, with different legal rules sometimes attaching to each class.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Cattle" in modern English refers specifically to domesticated bovines — cows, bulls, and steers raised for meat or dairy.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's uses "cattle" more broadly to encompass livestock generally, including horses, though noting a narrowing trend toward bovines in common speech.
The legal meaning of "great cattle" is broader than either modern or historical common usage suggests. A researcher encountering the term in old pleadings or writs should not assume it is limited to bovines. Under the historical legal definition, horses, oxen, and swine could all qualify as great cattle. The distinction from sheep and yearlings carried practical legal consequences — for instance, in actions for trespass by straying animals — and cannot be resolved by reference to the ordinary meaning of "cattle" alone.
Common Confusion
"Great cattle" is occasionally read as a merely emphatic or informal phrase (large cattle, as opposed to small cattle or poultry), but it is a term of art with a specific exclusion built in. The exclusion of sheep and yearlings is not intuitive from the words themselves and is easily missed. Researchers should also note that "small cattle" appears as a correlative term of art in some older sources, typically encompassing sheep, goats, and similar smaller livestock — a further reason not to treat "great" as simply descriptive of size.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a narrow historical term with no modern statutory survival. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in:
Pre-nineteenth century English common law materials — treatises on trespass, distress, and damage feasant, where the classification of an animal as great cattle or otherwise could affect the remedy or procedure available.
Old pleadings and writs — where the category of animal trespassing or distrained had to be correctly identified. Misreading "great cattle" as a synonym for "livestock generally" could lead a researcher to misunderstand the scope of a historical claim or defense.
Early American materials borrowing English common law forms — colonial and early republic pleading practice sometimes carried these categories forward, though they faded quickly once American legislatures addressed livestock trespass directly.
The term has no meaningful jurisdictional life today. It is a research artifact rather than operative law. Its value is interpretive: correctly reading what a historical document meant when it named "great cattle" as the subject of a trespass or distress action.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in complete agreement, both citing the same authority — 2 Rolle, 173 — and reproducing identical language: "all manner of beasts except sheep and yearlings." The uniformity across sources reflects the term's settled, bounded meaning in the historical common law tradition. Neither source elaborates on why sheep and yearlings were excluded from the category, and the underlying rationale in Rolle's Abridgement is not explained in the dictionary entries themselves. Researchers wanting the reasoning behind the distinction should consult the original Rolle citation directly. No significant divergence or evolution appears across the historical dictionaries surveyed; this was a stable, if narrow, term of art.
Jurisdictional Note
Great cattle as a legal category was absorbed into English common law from early medieval practice. American jurisdictions never codified the distinction, and it was effectively displaced by nineteenth-century livestock trespass statutes that used plain-language descriptions of animals rather than inherited common law classifications.