chine excepted, large, roomy, deep, and well spread.’[487] The new longhorn, however good for the grazier, was not a good milker.  Bakewell was a great believer in straw as a food, and strongly objected to having it trodden into manure; his beasts were largely fed on it, in such small quantities that they greedily ate what was before them and wasted little.  His activity was not confined to the breeding of cattle and sheep, for he also produced a breed of black horses, thick and short in the body, with very short legs and very powerful, two ploughing 4 acres a day, a statement which seems much exaggerated; and was famous for his skill in irrigating meadows, by which he could cut grass four times a year.  He was a firm believer in the wisdom of treating stock gently and kindly, and his sheep were kept as clean as racehorses.  A visitor to Dishley saw a bull of huge proportions, with enormous horns, led about by a boy of seven.  He travelled much, and admired the farms of Norfolk most in England, and those of Holland and Flanders abroad, founding his own system on these.  It was his opinion that the Devon breed of cattle were incapable of improvement by a cross of any other breed, and that from the West Highland heifer the best breed of cattle might be produced.

He died in 1795, and apparently did not keep what he made, owing largely to his boundless hospitality, which had entertained Russian princes, German royal dukes, English peers, and travellers from all countries.  His breed of cattle has completely disappeared, unless traces survive in the lately resuscitated longhorn breed, but his principles are still acted upon, viz. the correlation of form, and the practice of consanguineous breeding under certain conditions.

Bakewell’s earliest pupil was George Culley, who devoted himself to improving the breed of cattle, and became one of the most famous agriculturists at the end of the eighteenth and the commencement of the nineteenth centuries.  Another farmer to whom English agriculture owes much was John Ellman of Glynde, born in 1753, who by careful selection firmly established the reputation of the Southdown sheep which had previously been hardly recognized.  He was one of the founders of the Smithfield Cattle Show in 1793, which helped materially to improve the live stock of the country.

The relations between landlord and tenant, judging from the accounts of contemporary writers, were generally good.  Leases were less frequent than agreements voidable by six months’ notice on either side, and when there was a tenancy-at-will the tenant who entered as a young man was often expected to hand on the holding to his posterity, and therefore executed improvements at his own cost, so complete was the trust between landlord and tenant.  Tenants then did much that they would refuse to do to-day, as the following lease, common in the Midlands in 1786, shows[488]: 

  Tenant agrees to take, &c., and to pay the stipulated rent
    within forty days, without any deduction for taxes, and
    double rent so long as he continues to hold after notice
    given.