Because of this proclivity they are valuable companions in moorland regeneration projects where coarse grasses have to be controlled to allow heather to regenerate. The point here is that these older breeds, better adapted through long survival to live on poor vegetation, are often the only way mankind can obtain anything of value from otherwise unproductive land. They are great survivors in places where other grazing animals would not last a week. If it is possible in the pastoral world to get something for nothing, breeds like this offer the best chance of doing so.
They can live all year round on what vegetation they can pull, and even scratch through a foot of snow to get to it. They are long-lived, often producing ten or more crops of lambs compared with half that number in the improved breeds. And their flesh tastes rather like game, well-flavoured, lower in saturated fat than the modern meat breeds, and although the carcase is small compared with modern sheep, smaller portions satisfy the appetite.
One of these types is the Manx national sheep, the Loghtan, lugh dhoan, which in Manx Gaelic means ‘mouse-brown’. Its wool is actually moorit (chocolate brown) and not much like the colour of any mouse I’ve ever seen. Extravagantly horned and slow-growing, these sheep had been naturalised on the Isle of Man for many centuries, but by the 1950s they had dwindled to only about 100 animals. Unlike smaller islands where breeds survived because they were by-passed by the agricultural revolution, the Isle of Man is big enough for its farmers to run serious commercial enterprises and the backward local sheep did not fit in with this. No farmer who wanted to be taken seriously would have considered keeping the Manx, or any other primitive breed.
But all things come round again if they are not destroyed in the meantime. So when in the late 1980s George Steriopulos saw these animals in the auction mart he wondered why nobody wanted them. He bought some, and with his wife, Diana, has followed in the footsteps of Jack Quine, a Manxman, who almost singlehandedly kept the breed going through the lean 1960s and 1970s. The Steriopuloses have spent three decades farming the Loghtan back from the edge of extinction on the Isle of Man, building up to a flock of about 1,000.
During the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic they were so concerned that the breed might be wiped out that they kept part of their flock in isolation on the Calf of Man. Then in 2008 they obtained European Union Protected Designated Origin status (appellation contrôlée), which puts the breed in the same category as Parma ham, Stilton cheese and Champagne. Progressive farmers are wrong to be contemptuous of their local sheep. They are not only a Manx symbol, depicted on their coins, but their unique characteristics make them a paying proposition on poor land, giving them a value over and above the blandly conformist modern breeds that everyone else keeps.
Some breeders have been so enamoured of the qualities of the ancient breeds that for aesthetic reasons, combined with a veneer of practical justification, they have created their own vanity version. In the early 1900s Sir Jock Buchanan-Jardine bred the Castlemilk Moorit from a cross between a Shetland, a Manx Loghtan and the wild Mouflon. He wanted it to grace his parkland in Dumfriesshire and also to provide woollen clothing for his estate workers. The Mouflon gives it its distinctive white markings on its underbelly, rump, lower jaw, knees and inside lower legs and round the eyes. After Sir Jock died the flock was only saved from extinction by the redoubtable Joe Henson, founder member of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, who at the dispersal sale in 1970 bought a ram and nine ewes. From those ewes the current few hundred have been bred and this unique modern manifestation of an ancient breed was saved. The moorit colour is recessive, so the first cross with any other breed nearly always produces wool of the same colour as the dominant crossing breed. It is also naturally short-tailed with long legs which make it a very elegant mover across the ground.
But the enigmatic Jacob is different from the other primitive breeds and its origins remain tantalisingly obscure. Its fine bones, slender body and lean carcase, even its tendency to grow multiple horns, set it firmly within the primitive camp. The gene for multiple horns is linked to a condition called split-eyelid. In its mild form the upper eyelid has a v-shaped nick in it, and at its worst the eyelid is divided into two, causing considerable irritation and distress. But the Jacob has remained aloof from the evolutionary links and changes that have affected other primitive breeds and has kept itself as a pure, direct link with the ancient world, unchanged since its creation, some would say since The Creation. As with the world’s other domestic sheep, its most likely birthplace is the Levant, where a piebald sheep existed more than 3,000 years ago, known as Jacob’s sheep and whose origin is explained in the Book of Genesis (30: 31–43).
Jacob had toiled, without wages, for his uncle (and father-in-law) Laban, for fourteen long years, for love for his wife Rachel (‘ewe’). He agreed to continue in Laban’s service on condition that he would be allowed to keep as his share of Laban’s flock every ‘speckled and spotted’ sheep. These are described as the ‘sportings of nature’, unusual and spontaneous variations from its regular production. There cannot have been many of these as otherwise the acquisitive Laban would not have agreed. Jacob took these sheep ‘three days’ journey distant’, to keep them separate from Laban’s flock, and continued to shepherd the rest of Laban’s sheep, which were of a uniform colour – probably brown or black.
Then Jacob did something that in ancient times accorded with the commonly held mystical belief that whatever the female is looking upon at the moment of conception will affect the nature of her offspring. He took some fresh saplings and ‘pilled white strakes in them’ – exposed in streaks the white pith beneath the bark. Then he set these sticks up at the watering troughs where Laban’s sheep mated when they came to drink. From these matings a few of the ewes produced speckled and ringstraked (streaked in rings) lambs. Then at their next conception Jacob ‘set the ewes’ faces towards the ringstraked’ so that they might produce more of the same. Jacob only chose the stronger animals to breed his speckled flock from, so that gradually his speckled and spotted sheep became dominant in the flock, leaving Laban with the weaker pure black or brown ones.
Laban was none too pleased by Jacob’s crafty behaviour and he tried to limit the kind of sheep that Jacob could have, first to speckled, but when the coloured lambs that were born next year were all speckled, to ringstraked lambs, but of course the next crop of coloured lambs turned out to be ringstraked. And so, over time, Jacob acquired all Laban’s sheep as they gradually became multi-coloured. Then by selecting those sheep with more white in their fleeces, Jacob’s sheep gradually became white. So that by the time of King David (as told in Psalm 147) their fleeces are compared to snow; and in the Song of Solomon he sings of his mistress’s teeth being like a flock of sheep just come up from the washing.
But the Jacob sheep that has come down to us is still spotted and piebald, whereas through divine favour Jacob’s flocks lost their multi-coloured fleeces and became pure white. The breed was not called the Jacob in England until the twentieth century, before which it was known as the ‘Spanish sheep’. One long-established flock in Warwickshire, the Charlecote, claims a Portuguese origin, but it is unclear whether the evidence of importation (in a letter from 1756) refers to the then existing flock or to an addition to it. There are numerous eighteenth-century references to four-horned piebald sheep grazing gentlemen’s parks: Robert Bakewell was well aware of them because he wrote to Arthur Young in 1791 asking if he could procure some of ‘the four-horned kind … called Spanish …’
Jacobs are yet another breed supposed to have swum ashore from a Spanish galleon in 1588. But the English used the word Spanish to describe anything foreign, exotic or dubious: Spanish influenza, Spanish practices, Spanish juice (liquorice) Spanish fly (the aphrodisiac), and so on. Spanish is used to indicate foreignness, often in a grudgingly admiring way. These were gentlemen’s sheep, and commercial farmers would be disdainful of their being kept as ornaments with no concern for profit. To their gentle owners they were living lawn mowers
that bred their own replacements and needed no fuel. But to a working farmer they were (and still are) little better than goats, and ‘a damned nuisance’. It is most remarkable that they have resisted ‘improvement’ by crossing with any of the breeds that have come in and out of vogue over the last two or three centuries. There is something rather magnificent about this, which I was too young to appreciate all those years ago, when I lost my temper with my neighbour’s silly sheep.
2
THE ROMANS AND THE WOOL BREEDS
If wool growing is your business, beware of barbed vegetation, goose grass and star-thistle: avoid too rich grazing: choose from the start, a flock both white and soft of fleece.
Reject any ram, however pure and white his wool, if the tongue beneath his moist palate is black, for he’ll breed lambs with black-spotted fleeces – Reject, and look around for another ram on the crowded sheep run.
With the lure of such snowy wool, Pan, god of Arcady, tricked the Moon …
Virgil, Georgics (3.355)
LOUISE FAIRBURN WAS MARRIED IN A WEDDING DRESS made from the fleece of one of her Lincoln Longwool sheep, the men wore waistcoats of the same wool and they dined on meat from one of her lambs. She invited the newspapers to write articles about her eye-catching wedding and they took photographs; in one, Louise is standing with her prizewinning ewe, Risby Olivia, high up on her land on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds; at her back the glorious panorama of the Trent valley stretches away to the west across the sweep of fertile fields where the multitudes of woolly sheep once grazed that made England rich.
One old Lincoln breeder with a Lincolnshire pedigree as long as his flock’s, with thirty generations of breeding behind it, was rather critical of people who fall in love with these admittedly endearing, woolly sheep, and are newcomers to sheep keeping who don’t really know how to manage them when things get difficult. He rather disparagingly referred to them as ‘ladies with a paddock’. So far Louise seems to be proving him wrong. And her masterly publicity coup for her little flock of Lincolns, and for the Lincoln breed in general, has done much to bring the Lincoln to public notice.
The Lincolnshire Wolds are so deserted and quiet now it is hard to imagine the wealth that once flowed into this county from all over Europe. Beginning with the Romans, and then growing to a flood throughout the Middle Ages, Lincolnshire produced some of the best wool in Europe, which made it one of the richest counties in England and paid for some of the finest medieval churches ever built in Christendom.
There are ten English Longwool breeds, now much diminished in importance from the glory days when their wool was the mainstay of the English Exchequer. The Leicester Long-wool was used by Robert Bakewell in the eighteenth century, to create a breed that bridged the change between medieval wool and modern meat production, and afterwards fell into oblivion. Four of its descendants, the Border Leicester, Wensleydale, Teeswater and Bluefaced Leicester, have matured into important crossing breeds. Two are moorland Longwools, the Whitefaced Dartmoor, which is the only Longwool breed in which the rams are horned, and its cousin the Dartmoor. Their neighbour the Devon and Cornwall Longwool produces the greatest amount of wool from each sheep of any Long-wool. The large Cotswold and its close relative the Lincoln are almost indistinguishable and have sunk into obscurity with no modern role other than perhaps to show us what a real Long-wool looks like.
A Lincoln sheep in full fleece is an impressive creature, stately, dignified and almost completely covered in long ringlets of fine wool that brush the ground on all sides. It vies with the Cotswold to produce just about the heaviest fleece of all the Longwool breeds, averaging about 14–16 lb from mature sheep, and from sheep at their first shearing about 26–7 lb. In 2005 a 27-month-old ram, at its second shearing, produced a fleece of 47.5 lb (over 22 kg). This is one of the heaviest and highest-quality fleeces produced by any sheep in Britain, or for that matter the world. Even their foreheads are covered in woolly locks that hang down over their eyes, with only their blue-white ears and noses poking out. The wool is the same quality all over their body, whereas with most other breeds it varies depending on which part it comes from – neck and belly wool being of poorer quality than the rest.
Although they are big sheep, like most of the old English breeds of domestic livestock, they are docile and easy to work with. But their docility can be their undoing. If they are packed too tightly in a wagon or enclosed space, and one goes down, it will suffocate. They just seem to lose the will to live, and quietly accept their fate. They are fine converters into wool and flesh of grass and the residues from crops, such as sugar beet pulp and linseed cake (the residue from linen manufacture). Long adaptation to the fens of their native county has also given them excellent feet, with strong resistance to foot rot – an essential attribute for heavy sheep on soft ground. Lincoln lambs are born covered in ‘yolk’ – a thick yellow sticky protective covering of lanolin – which is a secondary characteristic that indicates fine breeding and a gene for good wool.
English wool growing, for manufacture, began when the Romans brought a longwoolled type of sheep into England at some time after they colonised Britain in 55 BC. These sheep almost certainly came from Italy and would have been so different from anything the native Celts kept that they must have seemed to them like mythical creatures, embodying all the grandeur that was Rome. More than twice the size of the Celts’ little animals, they had a pure white fleece that was four times heavier than that of the natives’ multi-coloured native sheep,
Although the Celts were considerable pastoralists, with large flocks of the type of sheep we met in the last chapter, they were essentially subsistence farmers and their sheep were mostly not kept for profit. Rather, as with all pastoral people, they were a store of energy to see them through the unproductive winter months. For unlike pigs and cattle, which need daily feeding through the winter, sheep can survive on extensive pasture. They are the most efficient extractors of energy from natural vegetation of all the ruminant animals, even goats and deer, and as long as they can fill their bellies they will live through most winters, even snowy ones, surviving on what often amounts to little more than dead grass.
By the time the Romans came, the land had already been extensively grazed over many centuries, probably millennia, by surprisingly large flocks of sheep; the tree cover would have disappeared from much of the uplands and the conquerors would have found a land ideally suited to sheep-rearing. For, in most years, the British Isles enjoys a happy combination of mild winters and cool summers, with no great climatic variation, so that there is usually grazing available throughout the year. In this, Britain, particularly England, is unique. Seasonal migration was largely unnecessary, and even where it was practised, in Wales and the Scottish Borders, it was over relatively short distances. But in many places in Europe, which are either too hot and dry in summer to grow grass or too cold and dry in winter, or both, transhumance was the only way the flocks could be sustained. This involved walking them twice a year, often over long distances, between the winter pastures in the lowlands and the summer pastures in the hills.
The Romans’ flocks had been selectively bred since at least the second century BC to produce high-quality white wool for the Empire. Columella, writing about AD 60, refers to three types of Roman wool-producing sheep: the best fleeces came from ‘tall sheep’ grazing rich flat country in Apulia; ‘square-built’ sheep came from harder hilly regions; and small sheep from the woods and mountains. The wool from these flocks provided the raw material for the considerable Florentine textile manufacture.
In England, the Romans’ wool flocks became concentrated largely around their principal centres of population: Lindum (Lincoln), Camulodunum (Colchester), Gloucester-shire around Cirencester, in Kent (Romney Marsh) and in the Midlands. As these places are still connected with the English Longwools, it is tempting to assume they are all descended from a common Roman ancestor. We do not know what the Roman sheep looked like because there are no illustrations befo
re the eighteenth century of sheep with the long, lustrous fleeces of the Longwools, which are so different from all our other breeds. Also, at some point, the Longwools must have acquired their lustre-wool, but we do not know when. It remains a mystery. Nevertheless, it is probably safe to assume that the Lincoln and all the other Longwools descend from those white-faced, polled ‘tall sheep’ from Apulia that Columella wrote about.
At first, much of the wool from the Roman sheep in England was exported to their factories in northern Gaul (Flanders), but by at least AD 50 they had established a manufactory at Winchester, making garments for the civilian population and the army. The finest English wool was much in demand from the highest ranks of Roman society, because it produced garments of the best quality, and the value of his garments proclaimed a Roman’s social status. Coarser wool went to make things like socks for the infantry to wear inside their hob-nailed marching sandals.
After the Romans left, the English wool trade did not disappear. English flocks continued to produce high-quality wool almost irrespective of who was the dominant power. There is a surviving letter written in 796, from Charlemagne to King Offa of Mercia, in which is mentioned the supply of English woollen cloaks, or it could be cloths – the document is not clear. The Saxons took a great interest in the growing and manufacture of English wool. Edward the Elder’s first wife, Egwina, was proudly described as a shepherd’s daughter, although she was really the daughter of a country gentleman, or a yeoman farmer, as opposed to a soldier. He was a ‘shepherd’ because those who were not devoted to the military life were employed in the life of the land, of which the most significant activity was the keeping of sheep.
Counting Sheep Page 4