184 STOCKBREEDER'S ART AND ROBERT BAKEWELL 



for draft. Strength and activity rather than height and weight 

 were his aim. In his hands the Black Horse developed a thick 

 short carcase on clean short legs. Marshall, who visited Dishley 

 in 1784, grows enthusiastic over " the grandeur and symmetry of 

 form " displayed in the stallion named K. "He was, in reality, 

 the fancied war-horse of the German painters ; who, in the luxuri- 

 ance of imagination, never perhaps excelled the grandeur of this 

 horse." The Midland horses were generally sold as two-year-olds 

 to the farmers of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, and 

 Wiltshire, who broke them into harness, worked them lightly on 

 the land, and sold them at five or six to London dealers. The 

 practice may account for some of the extravagant plough-teams, 

 which agricultural writers of the eighteenth century often notice 

 and condemn. 



Born in 1725, Bake well was barely twenty when he began his 

 experiments in stock-breeding. He succeeded to the sole manage- 

 ment of his father's farm in 1760. Ten years later, when Arthur 

 Young, armed with an introduction from the Marquis of Rockingham, 

 visited Dishley, Bakewell must have somewhat resembled the 

 typical English yeoman who figures on jugs of Staffordshire 

 pottery : "a tall, broad-shouldered, stout man of brown-red com- 

 plexion, clad in a loose brown coat, scarlet waistcoat, leather 

 breeches, and top-boots." Visitors from all parts of the world 

 assembled to see his farm his water-canals, his plough-team of 

 cows, his irrigated meadows on which mowers were busy from May 

 to Christmas, and, above all, his live-stock his famous black 

 stallion, his bull " Two-penny," and his ram " Two-pounder." All 

 who came were astonished at the results which they saw, at the 

 docility of the animals, at the kindness with which they were 

 treated. But, if they hoped to learn from BakewelTs lips the 

 principles which are now the axioms of stock-breeding, they went 

 away disappointed. He was a keen man of business. The secrets 

 of his success were jealously guarded, except from the old shepherd 

 to whom they were confided. So careful was he to keep the lead 

 in his own hands that he adopted the practice of only letting his 

 stallions, bulls, and rams by the season, and, when his best bred 

 sheep were past service and fatted and sold to the butcher, he is 

 said to have infected them with the rot in order to prevent their 

 use for breeding purposes. So reports Arthur Young. 1 Round 



1 Farmers Tour through the East of England (1771), vol. i. p. 118. 



