advantage of the example and advance of the Low Countries. The change could not come all at once, however, but it was begun about 1644 through the introduction of turnips and red clover to Kent by Sir Richard Weston, who had been educated in the Low Countries, and who, in later life, passed some years of exile there;[1] and it was accelerated by the work of Jethro Tull and Lord Townshend early in the following century. And just as better crops and better farming were introduced by Sir Richard Weston and others, so also were better stock imported by proprietors and farmers who wished to improve their own and the cattle of the country.
It will be noticed that, so far, the original British cattle and all the intruding races were whole coloured: the Celtic cattle were black, the Roman white, the Anglo-Saxon red, and the Scandinavian light dun. The cattle now to be imported were chiefly of broken colours. The date of their first arrival cannot now be fixed, but the will of John Percy, of Haram, near Helmsley, in Yorkshire, suggests that it may have been as early as 1400: " To my son John I bequeath two stots with short horns; to John Webster a small horned stot; to John Belby a cow with a white leske; to my son a heifer with a white head."[2]
- ↑ "Dictionary of National Biography."
- ↑ Bates's "Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns," 1897, p. 23.
