EXISTING BREEDS OF SHEEP 177 



the improved principles of stock-breeding were more readily 

 accepted, not only because their superiority was at once manifest 

 to the eye, but because they emanated from the practical brain of 

 a professional farmer. Yet for open-field farmers they were of 

 little value. As sheep and cattle increased in size and weight, and 

 were bred for more speedy conversion into mutton and beef, they 

 needed better and more abundant food than village farms could 

 supply. Thus the improvements of Bake well, Hke those of TuU 

 and Tqwnshend, added a new impulse to the progress of enclosures. 

 Up to the middle of the eighteenth century sheep had been 

 valued, agriculturally for their manure ia the fold, commercially 

 for their skins and, above all, for their wool. Wool Avas in fact 

 ■ the chief source of trading profit to Enghsh farmers. Other forms 

 of agricultural produce were raised as much for home consumption 

 as for sale. But the trade in raw or manufactured wool, both at 

 home and abroad, had been for centuries the most important of 

 Enghsh industries. To the golden fleece the carcase was sacrificed ; 

 the mutton as food w^as comparatively neglected. As wool-pro- 

 ducmg animals sheep were classified into short wools and long wools. 

 Of these two classes, short- wooled sheep were by far the most 

 numerous, and were scattered all over England. Small in frame, 

 active, hardy, able to pick up a hving on the scantiest food, patient 

 of hunger, they were the sheep of open-field farmers ; they were 

 the breeds formed by centuries of far travelhng, close feeding on 

 scanty pasturage, and a starvation allowance of hay in winter. 

 Such were the " heath-croppers " of Berkshire — small iU-shaped 

 sheep which, however, produced " very sweet mutton." In some 

 counties, as, for instance, Buckinghamshire, open-field farmers 

 hired sheep, with or without a shepherd, for folding on their arable 

 land. The flocks, hired from Bagshot Heath, were fed, partly on 

 the commons, partly on the arable fallows, where they were folded 

 every night from April to October. No money passed. The flock- 

 master was paid by the feed ; the farmer by the folding. The one 

 made his profit by the wool,\ the other by the manure. Sometimes 



were superior to those of the neighbouring farmers. But none followed his 

 example. In 1762 a farmer named WiUiam Dawson adopted the practice 

 on his farm at Frogden in Roxbm-ghshire. " No sooner did Mr. Dawson 

 (an actual farmer) adopt the same system, than it was immediately followed, 

 not only by several farmers in his vicinity, but by those very farmers adjoining 

 Mr. Pringle, whose crops they had seen for ten or twelve years so much superior 

 to their own " (General view of the Agriculture of the County of Northutnberland, 

 by J. Bailey and G. Culley, 3rd edition (1805), p. 102). 



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