188 THE SHEEP. 



period of their introduction is unknown ; but it probably took 

 place pretty late in the last century, with the appropriation 

 of the commons, and the extension of tillage in a degree suf- 

 ficient to supply artificial food to a larger kind of animal. A 

 traditionary belief has always existed in the country, that 

 the modern race is not the original one of the Cotswold 

 Wolds ; but no intelligible account can be obtained from any 

 one now living of the time or manner of its introduction. It 

 was probably derived from the upper part of Oxfordshire, or 

 from Warwickshire, the ancient breed of which it seems in 

 some respects to have resembled ; and the change may have 

 been chiefly produced by crossing. Mr Marshall and some 

 intelligent writers, indeed, have believed that the Cotswold 

 Sheep have always been a Long-woolled breed, and have 

 cited, in support of this opinion, the absence of any information 

 to be obtained in the district itself regarding the supposed 

 change of breeds. But we know how quickly the memory of 

 such events is effaced, and that changes as great as that in 

 the Cotswold Sheep have occurred in all parts of the king- 

 dom, without our having the means of obtaining any account 

 of them after the lapse of a short period. It would be op- 

 posed to all that we know of the natural history of the Sheep, 

 to suppose that a tract of country so recently cultivated and 

 enclosed as the Cotswold Hills, could have maintained on its 

 natural herbage one of the largest races of Sheep in England, 

 and communicated to it the property of growing long wool. 

 Such a race, we must suppose, was indigenous to the plains, 

 and has merely taken the place of an older breed, in a man- 

 ner similar to that which has been continually occurring 

 during the last fifty years over a great part of the British 

 Islands. 



But the Long-woolled Sheep of the Cotswold hills have 

 themselves undergone an important change within a period 

 comparatively recent. They were formerly of greater bulk 

 of body and coarser forms, and are said to have borne a greater 

 weight of wool than they now yield. But about sixty years 



