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   Necessity for improving the live-stock of the country; sheep valued for their wool, cattle for power of draught or yield of milk; beef and mutton the growing need: Robert Bakewell the agricultural opportunist; his experiments with the Black Horse, the Leicester Longhorns, and the New Leicesters; rapid progress of stock-breeding: sacrifice of wool to mutton.

WITHOUT the aid of turnips the mere support of live-stock had been in winter and spring a difficult problem; to fatten sheep and cattle for the market was in many districts a practical impossibility. The introduction, therefore, of the field cultivation of roots, clover, and artificial grasses proved the pivot of agricultural progress. It enabled farmers to carry more numerous, bigger, and heavier stock; more stock gave more manure; more manure raised larger crops; larger crops supported still larger flocks and herds. Thus to the hopeful enthusiasts of the close of the eighteenth century the agricultural circle seemed capable of almost indefinite and always profitable expansion.

   But recent improvements in arable farming could not yield their full profits till the live-stock of the country was also improved. The necessary revolution in the breeding and rearing of stock was mainly the work of Robert Bakewell (1725-95), a Leicestershire farmer, living at Dishley, near Loughborough. Its results were even more remarkable than those which followed from the new methods of Tull and Townshend. Bakewell's improvements were also more immediately accepted by agriculturists. The slow adoption of improved practices in tillage was mainly due to caution; in some degree, also, it was due to the fact that the innovators were, if not amateurs, gentlemen-farmers.*

  * In 1756 or 1787 Mr. Pringle, a retired army surgeon, introduced the drilling of turnips on his estate near Coldstream. in Berwickshire. . His crops were superior to those of the neighbouring farmers. But none followed his example. In 1762 a farmer named William Dawson adopted the practice on his farm at Frogden in Roxburghshire. "No sooner did Mr. Dawson (an actual farmer) adopt the same system, than it was immediately followed, not only by several farmers in his vicinity, but by those very farmers adjoining Mr. Pringle, whose crops they had seen for ten or twelve years so much superior to their own" (General view of the Agriculture of the County of Northumberland, by J. Bailey and G. Culley, 3rd edition,1805, p.102).

On the other hand, the improved principles of stock-breeding were more readily accepted, not only because their superiority was at once manifest to the eye, but because they emanated from the practical brain of a professional farmer. Yet for open-field farmers they were of little value. As sheep and cattle increased in size and weight, and were bred for more speedy conversion into mutton and beef, they needed better and more abundant food than village farms could supply. Thus the improvements of Bakewell, like those of Tull and Townshend, added a new impulse to the progress of enclosures.

   Up to the middle of the eighteenth century sheep had been valued, agriculturally for their manure in the fold, commercially for their skins and, above all, for their wool. Wool was in fact the chief source of trading profit to English farmers. Other forms of agricultural produce were raised as much for home consumption as for sale. But the trade in raw or manufactured wool, both at home and abroad, had been for centuries the most important of English industries. To the golden fleece the carcase was sacrificed; the mutton as food was comparatively neglected. As wool-producing animals sheep were classified into short wools and long wools. Of these two classes, short-wooled sheep were by far the most numerous, and were scattered all over England. Small in frame, active, hardy, able to pick up a living on the scantiest food, patient of hunger, they were the sheep of open-field farmers; they were the breeds formed by centuries of far travelling, close feeding on scanty pasturage, and a starvation allowance of hay in winter. Such were the "heath-croppers" of Berkshire--small ill-shaped sheep which, however, produced "very sweet mutton." In some counties, as, for instance, Buckinghamshire, open-field farmers hired sheep, with or without a shepherd, for folding on their arable land. The flocks, hired from Bagshot Heath, were fed, partly on the commons, partly on the arable fallows, where they were folded every night from April to October. No money passed. The flockmaster was paid by the feed; the farmer by the folding. The one made his profit by the wool, the other by the manure. Sometimes small men who had rights of common, or had acquired them from commoners, drove their flocks from open-field to open-field, folding them on the fallow lands of the village farm and receiving from the occupiers of the fallows 1s. a week per score or leave to graze on the commons during some part of the winter. Nearly every breeding county in England had its local favourites, adapted to their environment of soil, climate, and geographical configuration. For fineness of wool, the Ryeland or Herefordshire sheep now held the first place in the manufacture of superfine broad-cloth, though in the fourteenth century the fleece of the Morfe Common sheep of Shropshire had commanded the highest prices. Sussex South Downs, inferior in size and shape to their present type, were also famed for the excellence of their soft, fire, curly wools. Dorsets, already prized for their early lambs, supplied Ilminster with the material for its second, or livery, cloths. West-country clothiers drew their supplies, partly from Wales, partly from the large, horned, and black-faced Wiltshires, from the Exmoors, Dartmoors, or Devonshire Notts, the Mendips of Somerset, the Dean Foresters of Gloucester, or the Ryelands of Herefordshire. The eastern counties had their native short-wooled Norfolk and Suffolk breeds. The North had its Cheviots, its Northumberland Muggs, its Lancashire Silverdales, its Cumberland Herdwicks, its Cheshire Delameres. Here and there, some local breed was especially famous for the quality of its mutton, like that of Banstead or of Bagshot in Surrey, of Portland in Dorsetshire if Clun Forest in Shropshire, or of the mountain sheep of Wale.. But, speaking generally, it was by their fleeces only that sheep were distinguished. The local varieties of short-wools differed widely from one another. In appearance the long-wools were more uniform in type; all were polled, whitefaced, and white-legged; all were large-framed, and, from more abundant food, heavier in carcase and in fleece; in all the wool was long, straight, and strong. Less widely distributed than the other class, they were also by far the least numerous. In the eighteenth century they probably did not exceed more than one-fourth of the total number of sheep in the country. But the superior weight of their fleeces made their produce more than one-third of the total clip. Among the long-wools the Cotswolds were, at this time, preeminent. Other varieties, better adapted to the special conditions of their respective counties, were the Lincolns, Leicesters, Devonshire Bamptons, and the Romney Marsh sheep of Kent.c

   With these different breeds, both short and long wools, there was abundant scope for experiment and improvement. Some effort had been made at the close of the seventeenth century, as has been already noticed, to improve the lustrous fleeces of Lincolns, and to remedy the bareness of their legs and bellies. But, from the grazier's point of view, no breeder had yet attempted to obtain a more profitable shape. If any care was shown in the selection of rams. and ewes, the choice was guided by fanciful points which possessed no practical value. Thus Wiltshire breeders demanded a horn which fell back so as to form a semicircle, beyond which the ear projected; Norfolk flockmasters valued the length and spiral form of the horn and the blackness of the face and legs; Dorsetshire shepherds staked everything on the horn projecting in front of the ear; champions of the South Downs condemned all alike, and made their grand objects a speckled face and leg and no horn at all.

   In cattle, again, no true standard of shape was recognised. Size was the only criterion of merit. "Nothing would please," wrote George Culley in 1786, "but Elephants or Giants." The qualities for which animals were valued were not propensity to fatten or early maturity, but their milking capacity or their power of draught. The pail and the plough set the standard; the butcher was ignored. Each breeding county, however, had its native varieties, classified into Middlehorns, prevailing in the South and West of England, in Wales and in Scotland; Long-horns, in the North-west of England and the Midlands; and Short-horns, in the North-east, Yorkshire, and Durham.

   The Middle-horns in the South and West of England were red cattle of a uniform type; the North Devons, nimble and free of movement, were unrivalled in the yoke; the Herefords, not yet bred with white faces, were heavier animals which fattened to a greater weight; the Sussex breed came midway in size between the two. None of the three were remarkable for the quantity of their milk. Other middle-horned breeds were the black Pembrokes, like their Cornish relatives, excellent for the small farmer, and the Red Glamorgans, which in the eighteenth century were highly esteemed as an all-round breed. Every year thousands of the black Angleseys were swum across the Menai Straits to the mainland. Scotland had its West Highlanders; its Ayrshires, second to none as milkers; its Galloways and its Anguses, originally middle-horned but now becoming polled, which were driven southwards to the October and November fairs of Norfolk and Suffolk to be fattened for the London markets. On these imported Galloways were founded the Norfolk breed of polled cattle, and the Suffolk Duns once famous all over England for their milking qualities. The North-west of England and the Midlands were occupied by the Long-horns. Of these the most celebrated were the Lancashires, or Cravens, so called from their home in the corner of the West Riding of Yorkshire which borders on Lancashire and Westmoreland. To this breed some attention had, as is noticed in the Legacie, been paid in the seventeenth century. To the same stock belonged the brindled or grizzled Staffordshires, valued, like the Cravens, for the dairy and for meat. The North of Lincolnshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire, and Durham were famous for the enormous size of their shorthorned cattle, which were extraordinary milkers. The Holderness breed, as it was called before its establishment on the banks of the Tees, were "more like an ill-made black horse than an ox or cow:" The cattle were badly shaped, long-bodied, bulky in the coarser points, small in the prime parts. But they satisfied the taste of the eighteenth century grazier, because their gigantic frames offered plenty of bone on which to lay flesh. They were undoubtedly a breed of foreign origin. Tradition relates that, towards the end of the seventeenth century, a bull and some cows were introduced into the Holderness district from the Low Countries. But the introduction must have been of an earlier date. Lawson in his New Orchard (1618) says "The goodnesse of the soile in Howle, or Hollow-, derness in Yorkshire is well knowne to all that know the River Humber and the huge bulkes of their Cattell there." It is probably to this introduction of foreign blood that Child alludes in his Letter in Hartlib's Legacie (1651), when he says that little attention was paid to breeding except in the northwestern and north-eastern counties. To the same stock belonged the "long-legged short-horn'd Cow of the Dutch breed," which Mortimer (1707) selected as the best breed for milking. Probably, also, the famous "Lincolnshire Os" was one of these Holderness Dutch-crossed animals. This beast was exhibited, as the Advertisement sets out, "with great satisfaction, at the University of Cambridge," in the reign of Queen Anne. He was "Nineteen Hands High, and Four Yards Long from his Face to his Rump. The like Beast for Bigness was never seen in the World before. Vivat Regina!"

   Stock-breeding, as applied to both cattle and sheep, was the haphazard union of nobody's son with everybody's daughter. On open-field farms parish bulls were only selected for the quality in which Mr. Shandy's pet, so strenuously denounced by Obadiah, was alleged to be wanting. When prizes were offered for the longest legs, it is not surprising that all over the country were scattered tall, raw-boned, wall-sided cattle, and lean, leggy, unthrifty sheep. Our ancestors, however, were not unwise in their generation. Length of leg was necessary, when animals had to traverse miry lanes and "foundrous" highways, and roam for miles in search of food. Size of bone served the ox in good stead when he had to draw a heavy plough through stiff soil. But a time was rapidly approaching when beef and mutton were to be more necessary than power of draught or fineness of wool. Bakewell was the agricultural opportunist who saw the impending change, and knew how it should be met. By providing meat for the million, he contributed as much to the wealth of the country as Arkwright or Watt. There is some foundation for the statement that many monuments have been reared in Westminster Abbey to the memory of men who less deserved the honour than Robert Bakewell.

   Cart-horses also shared Bakewell's attention. Before his day principles of breeding had been little studied except in the interests of sport. In the reign of Richard II. the principal breeding counties had been Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire. Men in armour needed big weight-carrying horses. But in the fifteenth century, horses, like the rest of English live-stock, seem to have dwindled in size. The legislature was alarmed; Henry VIII. attempted to improve their height by the importation of the best foreign breeds, and by sumptuary laws which prescribed the number and height of the horses that were to be kept by various classes of his subjects. Elizabeth's introduction of coaches created a new need; if the invention of gunpowder and the disuse of armour displaced the "great horse" in war, he found a new place between the shafts. Shakespeare's plays illustrate some of the changes which approximated the Stewart standard of horse-flesh to modern ideals. The courser, which in time of war had endured "the shock of wrathful iron arms," and in peace was the "foot-cloth " horse, and three times stumbled under Lord Hastings, gives place to the "prince of palfreys" who "trots the air" and makes the earth sing as he touches it with his elastic tread. As highways improved, travellers journeyed more easily and more often. The ambling roadster, whose artificial gait was comparatively easy, was supplanted by the hack; the coach-horse and the waggon-horse began to dispute the monopoly of the lumbering "great horse" and the pack-horse. Sport was also adapting itself to the changing conditions of society. Racing and hunting became fashionable. Though Shakespeare had heard

              "of riding wagers,
When horses have been nimbler than the sands
That run i' the clock's behalf."

and was aware that "switch and spur" were plied in a "wildgoose chase" on the Cotswold Hills, he knew nothing of the modern race-course. Races, then, were trials rather of endurance than of speed. Nor was pace much needed in Tudor hunting; a "good continuer," or, as we might say, a good stayer, was more necessary. In coursing the hare, only the greyhounds must be fleeter than "poor Wat." The red deer was followed by hounds "slow of pursuit" and by men armed with leaping-poles, except on those rare occasions when the great hart was hunted "at force." At hawkings, unless the long-winged peregrine flew down wind, horsemen were not pushed to the gallop; the short-winged goshawk exacted from his pursuers no turn of speed. But as agriculture advanced, the red deer's covert was destroyed, and his extermination demanded as an inveterate foe to the crops. So, too, the sport of falconry was doomed, when hedgerows and enclosures displaced the broad expanse of open-fields, and the partridge no longer cowered in the stubble by the edge of the turf-balk under the tinkling bells of the "towering" falcon. Another beast of the chase and other means of capture were needed. Shakespeare stood on "no quillets how to slay" a fox with snares and gins. But the fox was no foe to crops; hedgerows only added zest to his pursuit; the new sport satisfied the new conditions, and demanded the production of the modern hunter.

   The seventeenth century saw some of the conditions created which have developed the various types in horses of today. James I. reduced racing to rules; Charles I. established races at Newmarket; Oliver Cromwell kept his stud; Charles II. introduced the "Royal Mares." Changes in the art of war demanded a lighter and more active cavalry. Foxhunting had become a passion with the country gentry. Coaches travelled more rapidly. Oxen were less used on the farm. During the same century, foreign breeds were extensively imported. Arabs were favourites of James I. But the authority of the Duke of Newcastle, who disliked the breed, was paramount in matters of horse-flesh. Barbs, or Turks were preferred till the Godolphin and Darley Arabians proved worthy rivals to the Byerly Turk. Other breeds were largely imported from Naples, Sardinia, Spain, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Flanders, and Libya. So great was the admixture of blood, that Bradley, writing in 1727, thinks the true-bred English horse hardly exists, "unless we may account the Horses to be such that are bred wild in some of our Forests and among the Mountains." Horses intended for "the Course, the Chase, War or Travel" were already carefully studied. But horses for farm use were as yet despised. De Grey in The Complete Horseman and Expert Ferrier, 1684, speaks with contempt of horses for the cart, the plough. the pack-saddle, and Bradley ignores them altogether.

   It was with the heavy Black-horse of the Midland counties that Bakewell conducted his experiments. The breed had long been known, and had doubtless helped to supply mounts to mediaeval knights. Early in the eighteenth century the breed had been improved by the importation of six Zealand mares. But the long back and long thick hairy legs were still characteristic. Defoe speaks of the Leicestershire horse as the "largest in England, being generally the great black Coach-Horses and Dray-Horses, of which so great a Number are continually brought up to London." Bakewell's object was to correct the type to that which was best suited 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 luxuriance 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, Bakewell was barely twenty when he began his experiments in stock-breeding. He succeeded to the sole management 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 complexion, 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 Bakewell's 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 in his Farmers Tour through the East of England (1771), vol. i. p. 118. Round the hall of his house were arranged skeletons of his most celebrated animals; from the walls hung joints, preserved in pickle, which illustrated such points as smallness of bone or thickness of fat. As there was no inn in the village, he seems to have kept open house for his visitors. He was never married. In his kitchen he entertained Russian princes, French and German royal dukes, British peers, and sightseers of every degree. Yet he never altered the routine of his daily life. "Breakfast at eight; dinner at one; supper at nine; bed at eleven o'clock; at half-past ten, let who would be there, he knocked out his last pipe." Very large sums of money passed through his hands. Yet, if the entry in the Gentleman's Magazine of November, 1776, refers to him, he was bankrupt in 1776, and so lavish was his hospitality that he is said to have died in poverty .

   In the treatment of live-stock for the butcher Bakewell's object was to breed animals which weighed heaviest in the best joints and most quickly repaid the cost of the food they consumed. He sought to discover the animal which was the best machine for turning food into money. "Small in size and great in value," or the Holkham toast of "Symmetry well covered," was the motto of his experiments. In his view the essentials were the valuable joints, and he swept away as non-essentials all the points on which fashion or prejudice had hitherto concentrated, such as head, neck, horn, leg, or colour. The points which he wished to develop and perpetuate were beauty combined with utility of form, quality of flesh, and propensity to fatness. To attain these objects he struck out a new line for himself. Crossing was then understood to mean the mixture of two alien breeds, one of which was relatively inferior. Bakewell adopted a different principle, because he regarded this form of crossing as an adulteration rather than as an improvement. He bred in-and-in, using not merely animals of the same native breed and line of descent, but of the same family. He thus secured the union of the finest specimens of the breed which he had chosen as the best, selected for the possession of the points which he wished to reproduce or strengthen.

   It was with sheep that Bakewell achieved his greatest success. When he began his stock-breeding experiments, he selected his sheep from the best animals in the neighbourhood, and a guinea, or even half a guinea, secured him his choice from the fold. The breed from which they were chosen were the Leicestershire or Warwickshire long wools. The "true old Warwickshire ram" is thus described by Marshall in 1789: "His frame large, and remarkably loose. His bone, throughout, heavy. His legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw feet. His chine, as well as his rump, as sharp as a hatchet. His skin might be said to rattle upon his ribs . . . like a skeleton wrapped in parchment." Even this animal was handsomer than a ram of the "true old Leicestershire sort," which Marshall saw in 1784. "A naturalist," he says, "would have found some difficulty in classing him; and, seeing him on a mountain, might have deemed him a nondescript; a something between a sheep and a goat." Out of these unpromising materials Bakewell succeeded in creating a new variety. His "new Leicesters" became the most profitable sheep for arable farmers. As by degrees the compactness of form, smallness of bone, fattening propensities, and early maturity were perpetuated, the breed was established, and for a time swept all competitors before them. While other breeds required three or four years to fit them for market, the New Leicesters were prepared in two. Those who tried the Dishley sheep found that they throve where others pined, that while alive they were the hardiest, and when dead the heaviest. In 1750 Bakewell let rams for the season at 16s. or 17s. 6d. apiece. In 1789 he let none under 20 guineas, and received 3000 guineas for the total of that season's letting. The New Leicesters were the first breed of sheep which were scientifically treated in England, and though they were less adapted for the southern, eastern, and northern counties, their supremacy on enclosed land in their own Midland districts was undisputed.

   Bakewell raised the New Leicesters to the highest perfection. But this was not all. His breed in weight of fleece could not compete with Lincolns, and was less suited to hills or mountains than for enclosed arable land. He had, however, shown the way in which other breeds might be improved; imitation was easy. In a less immediate sense he was the creator, not only of the New Leicesters, but of the improved Lincolns, South Downs and Cheviots. Before these breeds, fitted for the most fertile grasslands and plains as well as suited to hills and mountains, native races died away, like Red Indians before the civilised intruders. But gradually supporters rallied round other varieties. Bakewell's weapons were turned against himself. Native sheep of other districts, improved on his principles, began to hold their own, and, though on historical grounds precedence will always be given to the New Leicesters and the South Downs (improved by John Ellman of Glynde, 1753-1832), it may be questioned whether they have not been rivalled and surpassed by other breeds in the qualities for which they were once pre-eminent.

   In cattle-breeding Bakewell was less successful. It was his material not his system which failed. He endeavoured to found his typical race on the Lancashires or Craven Longhorns, which were the favourite cattle in Leicestershire, and, in his opinion, the best breed in England. He based his improvements on the labours of two of his predecessors. Sir Thomas Gresley of Drakelow, near Burton-on-Trent, began about 1720 the formation of a herd of Longhorns. On this Drakelow blood Webster of Canley, near Coventry, worked, and to his breed all the improved Longhorns traced their descent. Bakewell founded his experiments on a Westmoreland bull and two heifers from the Canley herd. To them he applied the same principles which he followed in sheep-breeding, and with great success. As graziers' stock, the breed was greatly improved. But as milkers, the new Longhorns were deteriorated by their increased propensity to fatness. In a county like Leicestershire, which depended not only on feeding stock but on dairy produce, this poverty of milking quality was a fatal objection. Even in his Longhorns Bakewell did not long retain the lead. It soon passed away from him to Fowler of Rollright, in Oxfordshire. But the breed itself was beaten by one which possessed superior natural qualities. Almost throughout England the Durham Shorthorns, founded on the Holderness and Teeswater cattle, jumped into the first place, as the best rent-payers, both as milkers and meat-producers. The Ketton herd of Charles Colling became to cattle-breeders what Bakewell's Dishley flock of New Leicesters were to sheep-masters. It was as necessary for a superior Shorthorn to claim descent from Colling's bull "Hubback" as for a race-horse to boast the blood of the Godolphin Arabian. From "Hubback" was descended the famous Durham ox, which travelled through England in a specially constructed carriage from 1801 to 1810, exhibiting to the eyes of thousands of farmers a truer standard of shape than any their ancestors had conceived, and convincing them by personal interviews of the excellence of the improved breed. The example was followed in many parts of the country. Other breeds, notably the Herefords and North Devons, were similarly improved. The formation of herds became a favourite pursuit of wealthy landlords. Flora MacIvor herself might have lived to see the day, when country gentlemen could become breeders of cattle, without being "boorish two-legged steers like Killancureit."

   Bakewell's success and the rapidly increasing demand for butcher's meat raised up a host of imitators. Breeders everywhere followed his example; his standard of excellence was gradually recognised. The foundation of the Smithfield Club in 1798 did much to promote the improvement of live-stock. Some idea of the effect produced may be gathered from the average weights of sheep and cattle sold at Smithfield Market in 1710 and in 1795. In 1710 the average weights for beeves was 370 lbs., for calves 50 lbs., for sheep 28 lbs., for lambs 18 lbs. In 1795 beeves had risen in average weight to 800 lbs., calves to 148 lbs., sheep to 80 lbs., lambs to 50 lbs. This enormous addition to the meat supply of the country, was due partly to the efforts of agriculturists like Tull, Townshend, Bakewell, and others, partly to the enclosure of open-fields and commons which their improvements encouraged. On open-fields and commons, owing mainly to the scarcity of winter keep, the livestock was dwarfed in size and weight. Even if the number of animals which might be grazed on the commons was regulated by custom, the stint was often so large that the pasture could only carry the smallest animals. Where the grazing rights were unlimited, as seems to have been not unusually the case in the eighteenth century, the herbage was necessarily, still more impoverished, and the size of the live-stock more stunted. On enclosed land, on the other hand, the introduction of turnip and clover husbandry doubled the number and weight of the stock which the land would carry, and the early maturity of the improved breeds enabled farmers to fatten them more expeditiously. But one of the consequences of this change in sheep-farming was not at first foreseen. The wool was sacrificed to the mutton. A large sheep paid better than a small. But as the size of the animal increased, its fleece grew heavier, and the staple longer. The supply of fine fleeces from the light, poorly-fed, short-wooled sheep of the commons diminished so rapidly that, before the end of the century, a new classification of sheep was introduced. Instead of being divided into long wools and short wools, they were now classified as long wools and middle wools. Improvements in machinery and the introduction of new fabrics utilised the produce of the heavier breeds of sheep; but, for the better kinds of cloth, home manufacturers became increasingly dependent on foreign supplies of short wool, brought from Spain, Saxony, and New South Wales. A change of fashion intensified the need of wool for a finer quality of cloth than could be obtained in this country. The coarser fabrics of manufacture from English material, which had contented our ancestors, could not retain their hold on the home or foreign markets. During the Napoleonic wars, the full effect of this change in the raw material of woollen manufactures was concealed by the suspension of continental rivalry. When peace was finally proclaimed, it was at once felt. A pitched battle began between the manufacturer and the agriculturist; the one demanded the free import of foreign short wool, the other the free export of English long wools, which made better prices abroad. Each resisted the demand of the other. Home manufacturers opposed the free export of British long-wools, because they feared the competition of foreign cloth. British farmers opposed the free import of foreign short wool, because they dreaded lest its introduction would force down the price of their home produce. Finally, in 1826, Lord Liverpool's government took off the duties both on the import and the export of the raw material. To advocates of enclosures, the last agricultural defence of the open-field farmer and commoner sebmed to be destroyed, when the removal of the import duty deprived the fleeces of their half-starved sheep of all artificial advantages over the finer and cheaper wools of foreign countries.