[anonymouskimmer]

> (how many people engaged in stockbreeding were actually writing books anyway?)

Yeah, I was thinking that a lot of this knowledge would have been kept secret as proprietary trade information.

[taion]

Or less kept secret than not written down, especially before the early modern period, especially outside of things like war horses, just based on who was engaged in that activity.

In fact a quick glance at the Wikipedia page for medieval horse breeding shows documentation for quite deliberate, centralized, and successful operations quite far back! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages