The evolution of British cattle and the fashioning of breeds/Bakewell

by James Wilson

X

BAKEWELL

It may be doubted whether the idea that their live stock might be improved ever took much hold of British farmers' minds before the arrival of the importations of cattle and other stock from Holland. At any rate it was not the overmastering idea it has since become. For one thing, they knew of nothing either very much better or very much worse than their own, unless, perhaps, on the common frontiers of two races, say the English and the Celtic, or here and there in the north, when the rievers returned from a raid far over the border. It is true that in " Seneschaucie," written not later than the time of Edward the First, it is laid down that the cowherd " must see that he has fine bulls and large and of a good breed pastured with the cows."^[1] It is also true that several English sovereigns took steps to improve the breed of horses, and that Henry the Eighth imposed a fine of forty shillings on "lords, owners, and farmers of all parks and grounds enclosed as is above rehearsed, who shall willingly suffer any of the said mares to be covered or kept with any Stoned Horse under the stature of fourteen handfuls."^[2] And advice like the following is found in some seventeenth and eighteenth century writings: The cattle "in Somerset-shire and Glocester-shire, are generally of a blood red colour, in all shapes like unto those in Lincoln-shire, and fittest for their uses. Now to mix a race of these and the black ones together is not good, for their shapes, and colours are so contrary, that their issues are very uncomely: therefore I would wish all men to make their breeds, either simply from one and the same kind, or else to mix York-shire with Stafford-shire, with Lanca-shire or Darby-shire, with one of the black races, and so likewise Lincoln-shire with Somerset-shire or Somersetshire with Glocester-shire."^[3] Yet it does not appear that there ever was any clear idea of improving the cattle of the country till the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries; and the first sign of it lay in the Dutch importations, or rather not so much in the importations themselves, for the original importers may have intended to keep the imported stock pure, as in the phenomenally rapid swamping of the native cattle by continued crossing with imported stock. "The means of improvement, in the established practice of the kingdom at large, are those of selecting females from the native stock of the country, and crossing them with males of an alien breed."^[4] It was by such crossings that a few breeders in the English midlands came to possess some cattle that were better than their neighbours'.

Then came Robert Bakewell, the master of them all, to show how those somewhat casually obtained improvements might be conserved and perpetuated. Results similar to those obtained by the midland farmers may have been obtained much earlier elsewhere—in Hereford by Lord Scudamore, for instance, or in Lincolnshire—but there is no evidence of Bakewell having had any forerunner.

The first part of the story may be told by Youatt.^[5] "It was not, however, until about the year 1720 that any agriculturist seemed to possess sufficient science and spirit to attempt the work of improvement in good earnest. A blacksmith and farrier, of Linton, in Derbyshire, on the very borders of Leicestershire, who at the same time rented a little farm, has the honour of standing first on the list. His name was Wei by. He had a valuable breed of cows which came from Drakelow House, a seat of Sir Thomas Gresley, on the anks of the Trent, about a mile from Burton. He prided himself much in them, and they deserved the care which he took In improving them and keeping the breed pure; but a disease, which defied all remedial measures then known, broke out and carried off the greater part of them, thus half ruining Welby, and putting a final stop to his speculations.

"Soon after this Mr. Webster, of Canley, near Coventry, distinguished himself as a breeder. He too worked upon Sir Thomas Gresley's stock, some of whose cows he brought with him when he first settled at Canley. He was at considerable trouble in procuring bulls from Lancashire and Westmoreland, and he is said to have had the best stock of cattle then known. One of his admirers says that 'he possessed the best stock, especially of beace, that ever were, or ever will be bred in the kingdom.' … Little more is known of Mr. Webster than that he established the Canley breed, some portion of whose blood flowed in every improved long-horn beast.

"The bull, Bloxedge, the Hubback of the longhorns, and, like him, indebted to an accident for the discovery of his value, was out of a threeyear-old heifer of Mr. Webster's, by a Lancashire bull, belonging to a neighbour."

Now came Bakewell. He was born, "early in the year 1726, at the Grange, Dishley, two miles north of Loughborough, in the county of Leicester."^[6] He was come of a family distinguished for centuries in both Church and State. "The most remote ancestor named in the records of the family was Leverrettus, Thane of the King, and King's Chancellor in the reign of Henry II., presented to the rectory of Bakewell, in the county of Derby, in the year 1158." The Grange farm was 440 acres in extent, and Bakewell's father, who had always the reputation of being one "of the most ingenious and able farmers of his neighbourhood," died in 1773, when he was 88 years old, and when Bakewell was 47. It is thus possible that some part of Bakewell's work may have been traceable in knowledge, thought, or action to his father. At least, in their improvements, other than those connected with stock-breeding, there was a clear continuity.

Prothero, in his "Pioneers and Progress," tells us that Robert Bakewell "resembled the typical yeoman who figures on Staffordshire pottery, 'a tall, broad-shouldered, stout man, of brown-red complexion, clad in a loose brown coat and scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and top boots.' In his kitchen he entertained Russian princes, French and German royal dukes, British peers, and sightseers of every degree. 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.'" Clearly another Miller o' Dee: "I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me ": the kind of man who, having discovered his way, would stick to it!

For his time and occupation, Bakewell was a great traveller. In early life he "often left his home to travel about England." "He saw much of the west of England"; he saw the north - west and the south - west; he saw Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Norfolk; and he also travelled in Holland. Whether he travelled to find or travelled and found cannot now be told—probably he did both—but at one time and another he brought home the choicest of their stock from several of the places he visited: cattle from the borders of Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, sheep from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and horses from Holland. Here we are concerned only with cattle.

One statement regarding Bakewell, namely, that he thought the Devon cattle incapable of improvement by crossing with any other breed, indicates that, at one time, Bakewell held his neighbours' views as to how cattle should be improved, and this is confirmed by the fact that his stock were gathered from herds in different parts of the country, and that the cows he bought from Mr. Webster of Canley were put to a bull from Westmoreland. From the time, however, when he obtained that Westmoreland bull, which was somewhere about 1760, Bakewell continued to put his own stock to his own, regardless of their relationship and of the custom and sentiment of the country. It must also be remembered that he had probably tried this system with sheep before adopting it with cattle.

Several reasons might be imagined for Bakewell having adopted the system of in-breeding. He was a great traveller, a close observer, and an unparalleled judge. He must have seen how animals came truer to their kind when bred pure, and how irregular were the progeny of cross-breds; and he may have argued that the mating of close relations was the very essence of pure breeding. Or he may have been a pre- Darwinian Darwinist, and argued that an accumulation of good qualities could only be secured by their continued infusion. Or, still more likely, failing to find a better bull than Twopenny—the produce of the Westmoreland bull and a Canley cow—and fearing to use a worse one, he may have been compelled, sentiment or no sentiment, to stick to his own. This view is supported by Marshall, who was deeper in Bakewell's confidence than any other writer, and who was, to some extent, the expositor of his ideas: "The argument held out in its (in-breeding's) favour is, that there can be only one best breed; and if this be crossed, it must necessarily be with an inferior breed; the necessary consequence of which must be an adulteration, not an improvement."^[7]

In any case, Bakewell adopted the system of in-breeding, and, looking back, we can now see how it was possible for him to have done what he did. He came upon the scene during the great agricultural transition and near the beginning of the rise in British industry and commerce. Formerly the cow had been valued for her milk, the bullock for its labour, the sheep for its wool, and the horse for its strength and weight in battle. Now the horse is to split into two kinds, one valued for its strength, the other for its speed, and the former is to drive the bullock from the plough to the feeding stall. At the same time, the new agricultural discoveries and the new crops are to allow the bullock to be fattened off at an age at which, in former days, he would have been beginning his career in the plough and the waggon. Now it is not a bullock that will grow for three or four years and remain active and lean for a similar period that is wanted, but one that will fatten quickly and easily at the end of his period of growth. Bakewell saw that a new kind of animal must be bred from. Before his time calves that showed a tendency to fatness were turned into veal, while those not showing this tendency were retained. Bakewell reversed the process, and secured animals likely to breed him stock for the butcher rather than for the plough.

After long observation, with close inspection not only of the living but also of the animal post-mortem, and with many experiments in the use of such feeding stuffs as were then in use at Dishley, Bakewell set up a type for himself and to that type bred persistently. With the light cast upon Bakewell's work by Mendel's discovery we can now see that some of the stock from which Bakewell bred may have been mere masqueraders and must have produced him not only masqueraders again but also some others that were frankly undesirables. Bakewell's original stock were certainly not pure, for they were drawn from the north and from the south, from parts of the country in which the recently imported Dutch cattle, themselves possibly of several breeds, had mingled with several others. To eliminate from these those that did not breed true to the type he desired, Bakewell took the quickest and surest method, namely that of mating close relations; for in those days of almost haphazard breeding, two closely related animals were much more likely to be pure for the same characters, than two animals drawn from different parts of the country or even of a county. Apart from the fact that he was a man of outstanding ability, power, and perseverance, there are several points in connection with Bakewell and his work that will bear reiteration:

(a) He was an unparalleled judge of stock.

(b) He was at enormous pains to secure the best stock in the country for his purpose.

(c) Having secured these, he bred from remarkably close

(d) He ruthlessly eliminated undesirable stock.

The truth of this last statement may be inferred from the facts that he educated breeders' tastes to a change of type, that from such mixed foundation stock as he began with he must have bred many undesirables, and that he used his bulls till they were very old and that upon their near relations.

The accompanying diagram, showing the pedigree of two of Bakewell's bulls, Twopenny and D, and of D's son Shakespeare, bred by Mr. Fowler of Rollright in Oxfordshire, will indicate Bakewell's system.

The figures in brackets attached to a bull's name indicate, approximately, the date of its birth.

In addition to being the great pioneer in the art of stock-breeding, Bakewell also took the lead in organising a system whereby the "blood" of his stock was disseminated among the stock of other breeders, while at the same time its connection with the fountain-head was not necessarily broken. A good many of his bulls and some of his cows were sold outright. Even in Ireland Arthur Young (1776-78) reported twelve or fifteen cases in which cattle had been brought direct from Bakewell. But to farmers in his own neighbourhood Bakewell arranged to let out some of his bulls for a season, at the end of which they returned again to Dishley. For instance, Bakewell's bull D was once let to Fowler of Rollright.

This system was advantageous to men of smaller means, as well as to Bakewell, for, if he discovered that any animal which had been let out produced unusually good stock, he could recall that animal for his own use at the end of its season. This system was adopted by other Longhorn breeders and in breeds that were established subsequently to the Longhorns.

It has often been argued that the system of breeding which Bakewell established must be a wrong one, since the breed which he did so much to improve, and which at one time overran a great part of England and almost the whole of Ireland was well-nigh extinct within a century of the time when Bakewell was in his zenith. But it must be remembered that another type of animal has been in demand since Bakewell's day. The Longhorns were graziers' cattle—slow to mature as we now understand them, and capable of withstanding the severity of winter in the open air. The great increase of tillage farming in the east of England and of dairy farming in the neighbourhood of large cities demanded a bullock that would turn turnips and straw quickly into beef in a stall or covered shed and a cow that also in the house would produce a large quantity of milk and afterwards fatten quickly. If only for its horns alone, the Longhorn was not the animal to meet this demand.

But the greatest argument for the Bakewellian system is that the breeds that superseded the Longhorn were originated, and have been maintained, in the same manner. Besides, to say nothing of his horses, the blood of Bakewell's Leicester sheep, which were equally or more in-bred than his cattle, now flows in the veins of every "longwooled" sheep that trots, and is still alive in almost absolute purity in two breeds—the Leicesters and the Border Leicesters.

1. Walter of Henley's "Husbandry," pub. 1890, p. 113.
2. Ridgeway's "Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse," 1905, p. 360.
3. Markham's "Cheap and Good Husbandry," 1683, p. 70.
4. Quoted from Marshall's "Rural Economy of the Midland Counties," published, 1790, in "The Complete Farmer," 4th ed.
5. "Cattle," p. 190.
6. The information about Bakewell is drawn mostly from a paper by W. Housman in The Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England for 1896.
7. "The Complete Farmer," 4th ed., under article "Cattle."