[Footnote 118:  This requirement of short legs is the more remarkable because of the long journeys which Varro says the Roman sheep were required to make between their summer and winter pastures.  A similar necessity and bad roads created in England, before the eighteenth century, a demand for long legged sheep.  Prothero (English Farming Past and Present) quotes a description of the “true old Warwickshire ram” in 1789:  “His frame large and remarkably loose.  His bone throughout heavy.  His legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw feet.”

One of the things which Bakewell accomplished was to shorten the legs as well as to increase the mutton on his New Leicesters.  Of Bakewell, Mr. Prothero justly says, “By providing meat for the million he contributed as much to the wealth of the country as Arkwright or Watt.”]

[Footnote 119:  Shepherds still look for the black or spotted tongue in the mouth of the ram, for the reason given by Varro, but the warning is no longer put in the shepherds’ manual.]

[Footnote 120:  Varro would still feel at home in Apulia, for there the sheep industry is carried on much as it was in his time, and thence the calles publicae, to which he refers, still lead to the summer pastures in the Apennines.  Cf.  Beauclerk Rural Italy, chap.  V.  “The extensive pasturages of the ‘Tavoliere di Puglia’ (Apulia) are of great importance and have a history of their own.  This vast domain covers 750,000 acres:  its origin belongs to the time of the Roman Conquests and the protracted wars of the Republic, which were fought out in the plains, whence they became deserted and uncultivated, fit only for public pastures in winter time ... the periodical emigrations of the flocks continue as in the past times:  they descend from the mountains into the plains by a network of wide grassy roads which traverse the region in every direction and are called tratturi.  These lanes are over 100 yards in width and cover a total length of 940 miles....  Not less than 50,000 animals are pastured on the Tavoliere, requiring over 1,500 square miles of land for their subsistence....  Five thousand persons are employed as shepherds.”]

[Footnote 121:  Varro quite uniformly uses words which indicate that he was accustomed to see sheep driven (abigere, propellere, adpellere) but we can see the flocks led in Italy today, as they were in Palestine soon after Varro’s death, according to the testimony of that beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd (St. John, X, 4):  “And when he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.”  R. Child, in his “Large Letter” in Hartlib’s Legacie, gives the explanation of the difference in the custom: 

“Our sheep do not follow their shepherds as they do in all other countries:  for the shepherd goeth before and the sheep follow like a pack of dogs.  This disobedience of our sheep doth not happen to us, as the Papist Priests tell their simple flocks, because we have left their great shepherd the Pope; but because we let our sheep range night and day in our fields without a shepherd:  which other countries dare not for fear of wolves and other ravenous beasts, but are compelled to guard them all day with great dogs and to bring them home at night, or to watch them in their folds.”]