Cattle clubs, insurance and plague in the mid-nineteenth century

This article surveys the history of cattle insurance in the middle of the nineteenth century, primarily in Cheshire, describing the mixture of generally short-lived national and local insurance companies, and the cattle associations and cow clubs, which both preceded and replaced the earliest commercial policies. All of them had to face the impact of epidemics of pleuro-pneumonia and rinderpest in the 1860s, which caused most of them to collapse. It looks in greater detail at one of the few enduring schemes whose records have survived, which operated on the estates of the Marquis of Cholmondeley.