the right Breed of Kine through our Nation, it generally affordeth very good ones, yet some Countries so far exceed other countries, as Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire for black Kine,"[1] and "Those that were bred in York-shire, Darby-shire, Lancashire, and Staffordshire were generally all black."[2]
That the red race possessed the rest of the country till the eighteenth, or at any rate till the seventeenth, century is practically certain, but the proof is less direct than clear. The question is complicated by several factors: by the importation of red and white flecked cattle to Lincoln and some other eastern counties in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the advent of the new breed—the Longhorns—in the eighteenth century, by the breaking down of the old English system of agriculture which did not encourage the movement of cattle, by the growth of London, and by "the graziers having mixed the cattle more or less in each county."[3] We can look backwards, however, and keep these points in mind in doing so. At the present day we see the south of England encircled by a broken band of red-coloured cattle—the Lincolns, the Norfolks and Suffolks, the Sussex, the South and North Devons, and the Herefords. According to Youatt and Marshall
- ↑ "The English House-Wife," 1683.
- ↑ "Cheap and Good Husbandry," 1683, p. 69.
- ↑ "Compleat Body of Husbandry," 1757, vol. iii. p. 36.
