There was a sad lack of enterprise in the breeding of stock now and for many generations before; indeed, it may be doubted if this important branch of farming, except perhaps in the case of sheep, was much attended to until the time of Bakewell and the Collings.  In Elizabeth’s time a Frenchman had twitted England with having only 3,000 or 4,000 horses worth anything, which was one of the reasons that induced the Spaniards to invade us.[334] ’We are negligent, too, in our kine, that we advance not the best species.’

The size of cattle at this date, however, seems to have been greater than is often stated.  The Report of the Select Committee on the Cultivation of Waste Lands in 1795, states that the average weight, dressed, of cattle at Smithfield in 1710 was only 370 lb.,[335] yet the Household Book of Prince Henry at the commencement of the seventeenth century says that an ox should weigh 600 lb. the four quarters, and cost about L9 10s., a sheep about 45 lb., so that the latter were apparently relatively smaller than the oxen.  In 1603 oxen were sold at Tostock in Suffolk weighing 1,000 lb. apiece, dead weight.[336] According to the records of Winchester College, the oxen sold there in the middle of the century averaged, dressed, about 575 lb.; in 1677, 35 oxen sold there averaged 730 lb.  ‘Some kine,’ it was said at the end of the century, ’have grown to be very bulky and a great many are sold for L10 or L12 apiece; there was lately sold near Bury a beast for L30, and ’twas fatted with cabbage leaves.  An ox near Ripon weighed, dressed, 13-1/4 cwt.’[337] They were, of course, chiefly valued as beasts of draught, and no doubt the one Evelyn saw in 1649, ’bred in Kent, 17 foot in length, and much higher than I could reach,’ was a powerful animal for this purpose.  The young ones were taught to draw by yoking two of them, together with two old ones before and two behind, with a man on each side the young ones, ’to keep them in order and speak them fair,’ for if much beaten they seldom did well:  for the first two or three days they were worked only three or four hours a day, but soon they worked as long as the older ones, that is from 6 to 11, then a bait of hay and rest till 1, with work again till 5, at least in Lancashire.  They were kept in the yoke till nine or ten years old, then turned on to the best grass in May, and sold to the butcher.[338]

FOOTNOTES: 

[286] Surveyor’s Dialogue (ed. 1608), p. 2.

[287] Surveyor’s Dialogue, p. 188.

[288] Ibid. p. 207.

[289] Victoria County History:  Devon, Agriculture.

[290] Herefordshire Orchards a Pattern for All England (ed. 1724).

[291] See infra, p. 136.

[292] These extracts are from the original edition in the Bodleian Library.

[293] ‘The Flanders cherry excels’, says Worlidge, Syst.  Agr., p. 97.