Folding is confining sheep to successive portions of the open fields with movable fences, so that as they graze across the land, their manure is spread evenly over the whole area. This kind of winter grazing (which was really just scavenging) was called shack. The shack period lasted until the spring ploughing – usually 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation or Lady Day (which is the Spring Equinox and a quarter day). The owner of a fold–course had the exclusive right (which was almost an obligation) to graze his sheep over certain parts of the open fields and keep them there all winter. Folding provided the vital manure for the next corn crop – usually rye or barley because the soils were too poor to grow wheat. This was the only way the light soils could be made productive before the introduction of turnips hastened the enclosure of large parts of the heath sheep-walks and ancient open fields.
As the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution gathered pace, increasing pressure arose from progressive opinion to abandon the Norfolk breed, but the conservative, traditional Norfolk farmers resisted changing a system that had worked for centuries. Nathaniel Kent expressed their misgivings in his General View of the Agriculture of Norfolk (1796). Sceptical of attempts to introduce the New Leicester to the heaths of the county, he emphasised that a century earlier much of Norfolk had been bleak unproductive country, where ‘full half of it was rabbit-warrens and sheep walks; the sheep [Norfolk] are as natural to the soil as the rabbits, being hardy in their nature, and of an agile construction, so as to move over a great deal of space with little labour’.
It should not be forgotten, advised Kent, that it was the Norfolk sheep that were the backbone of the fold–course system ‘as they fetched their sustenance from a considerable distance, and answered penning as well as any sheep whatever’. He cautioned the improvers not to abandon the Norfolk in favour of the New Leicester or the Lincoln and to ‘treat without due reverence what their forefathers and ancient custom have fashioned’. He predicted, quite rightly, that the fold–courses would fail if they were to swap the Norfolk for any new breed of sheep.
William Marshall was equally suspicious of change. Writing in 1787 in his Rural Economy of Norfolk he acknowledged the deficiency in the Norfolk as a meat-sheep, but advocated improvement by selective breeding within the breed rather than its wholesale replacement by ‘the introduction of strange breeds, nine-tenths of which would starve upon the barren sheep-walks and heaths where the native breed thrives’. He warned that it was not worth losing what had been gained over centuries of adaptation to its native soil, for ‘a better chine’ (the peak of the shoulder and the backbone). He suggested that if the Norfolk farmers would only pay more attention to their sheep’s carcase than the colour of their faces, much could be achieved without introducing breeds from counties with a different environment. Marshall praised the breed for its prolificacy, recording that one breeder he knew got nine lambs from three Norfolk ewes in 1781, and his ewes seldom had fewer than two lambs each. And it was generally acknowledged that ‘no better mutton could be put upon a table’.
But what the supporters of the old Norfolk did not foresee was that the ancient open-field farming was doomed by enclosure and the future lay not in tinkering with a communal village agriculture, but in the radical creation of large commercial farms run by business-minded farmers. The old Norfolk and the old farming, largely unchanged for a thousand years, were about to be swept away by powerful progressive forces and spirits such as Thomas Coke and Arthur Young, neither of whom had any time for the open-field farming which they thought failed to put the land to its most productive use. They were quite right that the open land of Norfolk could be more profitably cultivated if those that Young called ‘the Goths and Vandals of open-field farmers were to die out and allow complete change to take place’.
So because the Norfolk stood in the way of progress, all its former virtues were turned into defects: its robust, lean, rangy frame became a tendency to be difficult to fatten; its acknowledged instinct for foraging made it a ‘voracious feeder’; its independence gave it ‘an unquiet disposition’ and made it intractable; its long legs and agility were criticised as making it look more like a deer than a sheep and gave it ‘an uncouth appearance’. It did not matter that these characteristics had been a great advantage on its native heaths and commons. Arthur Young described the breed as ‘contemptible’ and ‘one of the usual wretched sorts found in England on poor soils’, a sentiment echoed by Coke, who never missed an opportunity to vent his apparent hatred of the Norfolk breed. Annually from 1790 to 1821 Coke held his legendary Sheep Shearings, to which he invited a host of eminent guests and his tenants. He used these gatherings to parade his innovations, proclaim his faith in agricultural progress, give the audience the benefit of his opinions and, not least, to make it clear to his tenants how he expected them to farm his land.
In his speech at the 1809 Sheep Shearing, Coke reminded his guests that ‘the present institution had been formed for the chief purpose of eradicating the Norfolk breed of sheep, the most worthless race of animals that ever existed’. Coke put his tenants under considerable pressure to follow his prescription, and reminded his guests that he had ‘done everything in [his] power to extirpate the Norfolk sheep …’ He proclaimed that he had
with great difficulty induced most of his tenants to change their flock and they had found a great advantage in so doing; a few of them still retained their old prejudices, but this [he] would plainly tell them, that if they could afford to keep such an unprofitable breed of sheep upon their farms as the Norfolks were, it would fully justify [him] in raising their rents at the expiration of their leases.
At his Shearing in 1805, having given cups worth ten guineas as prizes for various categories of Leicester and Southdown sheep, Coke offered a cup worth fifty guineas ‘for the best ram of the Norfolk breed, provided it is deemed a good one’. He must have been pretty confident that his little joke would not backfire because in 1806 two Norfolk rams were entered, but the judges, not surprisingly, did not think either of them warranted the prize. This whole escapade does not do Coke much credit. It is not clear who the judges were in 1806, but in 1804 the great John Ellman himself and Lord Somerville (a noted Southdown devotee) had been appointed to judge the Southdowns. It is highly unlikely that any judge appointed by Coke, knowing his strong prejudice and being imbued with the spirit of the times, would have been brave or independent (or contrary) enough to see any merit in the Norfolk. Any Norfolks entered into the competition would have stood as much chance of getting a fair judging as a Russian aristocrat before a Bolshevik revolutionary tribunal.
It can’t have been easy for his tenants to resist this kind of pressure. Coke was the largest landowner in Norfolk, who famously declared, when he came into his huge estate at the age of twenty-two, that he had ‘the King of Denmark as [his] nearest neighbour’. His detestation of the Norfolk breed was all of a piece with his Whiggish drive for progress and profit, which went with his support for enclosure of the commons and open fields and the abolition of the fold–course system. He was right commercially – between 1776 and 1816, during his tenure at Holkham, he increased his rent roll from £2,200 to £20,000 a year – but the price was that many hundreds of thousands of country people lost forever their connection with the land.
Neither were the progressives always right in their enthusiasms. Coke’s attempt to breed out the Norfolks by crossing them with the New Leicester did not succeed as he had expected, but he persevered far longer than most of his competitors. Although he had roundly denounced the Norfolk, he was ‘equally convinced that the Norfolk mutton for his own table is the nicer of the two’. Coke somewhat cynically promoted the New Leicester because he believed in agricultural progress and sought profit, but although he thought its ‘insipid fat meat’ good enough for the labouring population, he himself would not eat it, preferring the superior lean gamey meat of the Old Norfolk.
Arthur Young claimed he was the first to import Southdowns into Norfolk, and thro
ugh an accidental mating by his Southdown ram with a little flock of Norfolk ewes ‘belonging to a tenant’ he produced ‘an entirely different breed from all the rest’. He recorded this in 1791 in Volume 15 of Annals of Agriculture. But it is hard to believe that Young alone should be credited with the cross-breeding that set the Norfolk on the road to its transformation into the Suffolk. Young was a shameless self-publicist and gifted writer, but a hopeless practical farmer who lost money on the three farms he rented early in his life, before he found his literary and proselytising vocation. New ideas hardly ever occur to one person in isolation and it is more likely that Young was one of many Norfolk farmers who mated their imported Southdown rams with Norfolk ewes and discovered it produced a pleasing result.
Coke’s campaign notwithstanding, Norfolk farmers did not sell their Norfolk flocks wholesale. Rather they preferred the prudent course of crossing them with either a Leicester or a Southdown, until, by 1842, Professor Low wrote in his Domestic Animals of the British Isles that the ‘perfectly pure Norfolk breed [had become] rare’, something Low seems to have regretted because he said ‘no finer lambs are brought to the English markets …’ than the first cross with a Southdown or a Leicester. And the remarkable vigour of that first cross could never be repeated once the pure Norfolk had gone. Gradually over the next decade or so nearly all the flocks in Norfolk and Suffolk became black-faced crosses between a Norfolk ewe and either a Southdown or a Leicester ram. The Southdown was preferred for the first cross with the Norfolk, and the Leicester ram was then mated with the progeny to produce butchers’ lambs.
By the 1850s there were practically no pure Norfolk ewes left. The first cross obtained its hardihood, milkiness, prolificacy and tough constitution from the old Norfolk, its carcase quality from the Southdown, and early maturity, good feeding characteristics and heavy fleece from the second cross with the Leicester. This crossing had laid a strong foundation for the Suffolk, which by the end of the decade was well on its way to becoming a distinct breed. An effective breed society was formed in 1886 and by 1900 it had eclipsed the Southdown and by 1930 there were few Southdowns left in East Anglia.
The Suffolk Sheep Society set rigorous standards for their breed in which each sheep was given points for different attributes that could total 100 for the hypothetically perfect sheep. Feet and legs were very important – the hind legs to be ‘well filled with mutton’ and the back ‘long and level and well-covered with meat and muscle’. The fleece was to be of ‘close, fine and lustrous fibre’ but, as befits a meat-sheep, it was only awarded a maximum of 10 out of the 100 points. There could be no doubt what this new breed was intended for.
Between 1900 and 1960 the Suffolk spread rapidly from its East Anglian origins across the British Isles and into the wider world and became the single most successful meat-producing breed on the planet. And despite the growing popularity of the Texel during the last few decades, it has retained its dominance, being particularly popular with breeders in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In fact the breed society headquarters is at Ballymena in Co. Antrim.
The highest price ever paid for a Suffolk sheep was in 2011 at Stirling, when a buyer from North Wales bought a ram lamb, born on 3 January 2011, for 90,000 guineas. The date of birth is significant because breeders try to have their lambs born as early as possible in the year of registration to give them the best start in life. The same buyer sold ten ram lambs at the sale for £55,000, so he didn’t have to find that much to make up the difference. He described the ram as the ‘most correct sheep’ he had ever seen. Another ram lamb went for a big price to a Belgian scrap metal merchant who is a dedicated breeder of Suffolks and predicts a bright future for them. This is despite the modern favourites, the Texel and the Beltex, being native to the Low Countries.
Breeders have not been able to do away with the Suffolk’s inclination to grow horns, inherited from its Norfolk mother. It is common for 10 per cent of lambs in pedigree flocks to have slight traces of horn and 20 per cent is not unknown, although only a tiny and diminishing proportion actually does grow horns. Most growths remain as scurs, incipient horns that never develop beyond scaly patches in the places where the horns would have grown from. Those few that form small horns are dealt with by breeders before allowing the animal to be seen in the sale- or show-ring. Horns seem to be one of those secondary genetic characteristics that are hard to eradicate without losing some other valuable or desirable characteristic such as the skin colour, prolificacy and maternal qualities they get from their Norfolk ancestor.
The inheritance of horns is closely connected with sex: large horns are dominant in the male and recessive in the female. This means that to breed a polled ram both his parents must be polled. But a horned ram could have inherited the gene for horns from one parent (or both) and a recessive gene for polling from the other. But a horned ewe must be pure horned on both sides; if she has inherited a polled gene from one parent she will be polled, because hornlessness is dominant in ewes. But she may have a recessive gene for horns which might only come out in her offspring.
But growing horns is a harmless inconvenience compared with the serious physiological defect that the Norfolk passed on to its descendants, and until recently had proved impossible to eradicate. This was an inherited susceptibility to scrapie. Scrapie has been recorded as a lethal disease of sheep and goats for over 300 years and doubtless has been endemic for as long as mankind has kept sheep. The disease is often recorded as devastating flocks of Norfolks on the Cambridgeshire heaths in the eighteenth century. In 1793 at Dalham, on the Suffolk/Cambridge border, a whole flock of Norfolks either died from the disease or had to be slaughtered. It was so serious and frightening that farmers were unwilling even to talk about the disease, and if their flock was affected, they would hardly admit it.
Scrapie is one of those maladies that make us realise how little we really understand the causes of disease. Called scrapie because one of the symptoms is that affected sheep scrape themselves against anything they can find to scratch an apparently insatiable itch, it was not until 1982 that anybody had any scientifically based theory of just how the extreme nervous degeneration, which always ended in the affected sheep’s death, was caused or transmitted. It was clear that some breeds were more susceptible than others, particularly black-faced breeds. It was unknown in North America until 1947, when the Americans blamed the importation of Suffolk sheep from Britain. There has never been a recorded case in New Zealand and only one in Australia in 1952, when four of a group of ten Suffolks from Britain showed symptoms. The whole group was rapidly slaughtered as well as every sheep that had been in contact with them, the land the sheep had grazed was ploughed up and the farm was isolated for a year. Scrapie has never been seen again in Australia. There are diseases in other ruminants with similar symptoms – BSE in cattle (‘mad cow disease’), a wasting disease in deer and a degenerative nervous disorder in cats and mink. But each is specific to its own species and not believed to be transmissible across them. All these diseases are now collectively referred to as ‘transmissible spongiform encephalopathy’ (TSE).
Sheep do not usually show symptoms of scrapie until they are about two years old. At first they appear nervous and a little jumpier than usual, sometimes they persistently smack their lips and flick their tongue. One tell-tale symptom in Swaledales is the gradual appearance of a straight parting in the hair on the skull between the horns, sometimes extending into the wool on the back of the head. Gradually the fleece becomes dull and matted and ceases to grow. Then they begin the scraping against any solid object – gate posts or convenient rocks – and gradually become unable to feed because the itching and twitching give them no respite. Eventually, in the terminal stages, affected animals have falling fits, lose the use of their legs and eventually become paralysed and die of starvation or bloat.
Once the first symptoms are spotted the kindest thing is to have the animal slaughtered because there is no cure. None of the theories about its causes and trans
mission could fully explain them and, as a result, it caused a similar disquiet amongst sheep breeders as the plague or cholera did to our forebears. The impetus for research came with the ‘mad cow’ scare in the 1980s, when it was feared that cattle had contracted BSE by being fed offal from sheep that had scrapie and that the disease had ‘jumped species’ and been transmitted to humans in the form of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). This had similar symptoms to ordinary CJD, which had been known, since at least 1900, to affect humans. There were even reports from three French zoos that apes had been infected with BSE.
The upshot of all this was that the public was stirred into an almost hysterical frenzy by the prediction that huge numbers of people had been unwittingly infected by vCJD and the world was incubating a silent epidemic that would cause untold deaths decades into the future because of its long incubation period. BSE in cattle was thought not to show itself before the animals were thirty months old. Animal-slaughtering regulations were modified to require that no beef cattle older than thirty months could be eaten and no processed animal waste fed to farm livestock. This removed, at a stroke, the source of cheap protein that had made up a large part of concentrated animal feedingstuffs fed to poultry, pigs and dairy cattle. This deficit could only be made up by importing huge quantities of soya bean meal, mostly from South America, to supply our intensive livestock industries. We now depend on these enormous imports to maintain production at the high levels required to supply the domestic market.
The balance of scientific opinion accepts the work of Stanley Prusiner from the University of California, on the cause and transmission of all TSEs. In 1982 he discovered tiny proteins on the cells of the nervous system, spleen and lymph nodes, much smaller than viruses, bacteria, or fungi, and entirely different from any other known organism. They appeared not to have any nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) and so they could not reproduce themselves in the same way as other organisms. He called this protein a prion (a contraction of ‘proteinaceous infectious particle’), and gave it the code PrP. He found that in animals with TSE these prions had become deformed, or ‘folded’. And he concluded that a deformed prion was the cause of all neuro-degenerative diseases, including scrapie.
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