WHEN THE IMPROVEMENT BEGAN. 25 



were brave by instinct, warlike by necessity, enterprising by educa- 

 tion, rich by inheritance. Their estates were vast, and to their ear- 

 lier grants from the Crown, they added largely both by purchase and 

 marriage. They had the means to apply the agricultural improvements 

 of the generations through which they had passed, and no doubt 

 many of the heads of the family had the sagacity to adopt them. 

 Among those improvements none were more probable, as theirs was 

 eminently a grazing country, than that their attention had been turned 

 to their neat cattle. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the 

 title of Earl of Northumberland became extinct by the death of the 

 last male heir of the Percy family. The "proud Duke of Somerset," 

 as history records him, had married the daughter then representing 

 the Northumberland title and estates.* The issue of the marriage 

 was only a daughter, and she a Percy on the side of her mother. 

 This daughter married, Sir Hugh Smithson, 'and having children, 

 Sir Hugh, in the year 1766, was raised to the peerage, with the title 

 of Duke of Northumberland. "So fond was he of his Short-horns 

 that his peers quizzingly dubbed him 'the Yorkshire grazier.' He 

 was in the habit of weighing his cattle, and the food they ate, so as 

 to ascertain the improvement they made for the food consumed." 

 Sir Hugh's active life was about midway and later in the years of 

 the eighteenth century. 



A hundred years earlier than the time of Sir Hugh, there existed 

 fine stocks of Short-horn cattle in Durham and Yorkshire. " The 

 Aislabies, residents of Studley Park, had very fine cattle in the seven- 

 teenth century. f The Blacketts, of Newby Hall, in Northumberland, 



* An anecdote is thus related of the u proud Duke " : His Percy wife dying early, he was 

 again married to a lady of less rank in the peerage. The Duke being one day closely engaged in 

 his room, looking over some important papers, his wife stepped softly up behind and tapped him 

 familiarly on the shoulder. He suddenly turned around and with a severe expression exclaimed, 

 " Madam, your familiarity is altogether inopportune. Recollect that my first wife was a Percy ! " 



t In a letter to us from our brother, the late Richard L. Allen, of New York, (a warm admirer 

 of Short-horn cattle,) when in Yorkshire, Eng., August, 1869, he writes of a visit to Studley: 



" I spent a few hours at Studley Park, attracted thither by the ruins of Fountain's Abbey. Its 

 graceful, undulating and massive old trees ; one section of long, natural and now decaying oaks, 

 of great circumference, and low but wide-spreading tops ; another of immense beeches, which 

 are of a different species from ours, tall and very wide-spread, and with drooping branches, which 

 sometimes lie on the ground, fifty feet distant from the trunk ; and then a stately chestnut in full 

 bloom ; double rows of the lime and elm, almost as fine as the beeches, and many firs of stalwart 

 size, give to the park a great attraction. 



" I asked the guide if there was any herdsman who could tell me about the cattle, and he said 

 there was none. I presume the interest in the Short-horns on the estate died with Mr. Aislabie. 

 His father was originally a private country gentleman, who became Lord Chancellor, and inher- 

 ited the estate from the Mallorys, who owned it through several generations, his mother being 

 the last heir. His son, William, who was in Parliament sixty years, was the great improver of 



