Vancouver, a few years after this, praised their activity in work and their unrivalled aptitude to fatten, but says they were then declining in their general standard of excellence, and in numbers, owing to the great demand for them from other parts of England, where the buyers (Mr. Coke, who had established a valuable herd of them, and others) spared neither pains nor price to obtain those of the highest excellence.

This danger was clearly perceived by Francis Quartly of Molland, who set to work to remedy it by systematically buying the choicest cows he could procure.  As the reputation and perhaps continuance of the Devon breed is due to him more than to any other man, his account of his own efforts on behalf of it is specially valuable.[748] At the end of the eighteenth century the principal North Devon yeomen were all breeders, and every week you might see in the Molton Market, their natural locality, animals that would now be called choice.  There were few cattle shows in those days, and therefore the relative value of animals was not so easily tested.  The war prices tempted many farmers to sell their best bulls and cows out of the district, so that good animals were becoming scarce, and the breed generally going back.  Mr. Quartly therefore for years bought all the best animals he could find with rare skill and judgement, and continued to improve his stock till he brought it to perfection.  About the year 1834 cattle shows began at Exeter, and for the first year or two Mr. Quartly did not compete; then he allowed his nephews to enter in all the classes, and they brought home all the prizes.  This lead they kept, and at the Royal Show at Exeter in 1850 their stock obtained nine out of the ten prizes for Devons.  The Devon Herd-Book was first published in 1851 by Captain T.T.  Davy, and a writer in 1858 says that of twenty-nine prize bulls in the first three volumes twenty-seven were descended from the Quartly bull Forester, and of thirty-four prize cows twenty-nine from the cow Curly, also of their stock.

Among other famous breeders of Devons contemporary with Quartly were Messrs. Merson, Davy, Michael Thorne, Yapp, Buckingham, the Halses, and George Turner.

In 1829 Moore says, ’The young heifers of North Devon, with their taper legs, the exact symmetry of their form, and their clear coats of dark red, are pictures of elegance.’  Their superiority for grazing and draught was proved by the high prices demanded for them, but they were not equally esteemed as dairy animals,[749] though of late years this reproach has been removed.  The ploughing of two acres of fallow land was the common work of four oxen, which, when fattened at five years old, would reach eleven score a quarter.

Since the publication of the Herd-Book, Devons have spread all over the world, to Mexico, Jamaica, Canada, Australia, France, and United States, and the fact that in their original home they have been largely kept by tenant farmers proves them a good rent-paying breed.  Yet it cannot be pretended that away from their native country they are as much valued as the Shorthorn and Hereford.