A History of British Livestock Husbandry, 1700-1900

Robert Trow-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136601347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First Published in 2005. History books have told us for far too long that farming in Britain was, in the eighteenth century, Tull's drill, Townshend's turnips, and Bakewell's metamorphosis of the cow and sheep; in the nineteenth century, corn laws, Coke's enlightened Norfolk squire-dom, and the collapse of the cereal market; and in both centuries, enclosures. In this volume the author has taken the evidence, sieved and analysed it. The result of the analysis may, or may not, show the animal husbandry at least of these two centuries in a truer light.
The present book is a sequel to the author's History of British Livestock Husbandry to 1700.

1

PASTORAL BRITAIN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE livestock husbandman of eighteenth century Britain inherited from the seventeenth century four things. He inherited breeds, or more properly types, of farm animals which had probably been modified over several hundred years only by the introduction of Dutch blood into the cattle, some remote Merino blood into the sheep, and some miscellaneous European strains into the horses. He inherited techniques of management which were beginning to be improved out of the mediaeval methods only by the leading stockmen. He inherited new fodder crops now creeping into the fields. And he inherited a new spirit of scientific theoretical inquiry; but it was a spirit which was not to be widely reflected practically in the byre or in the fold until the nineteenth century approached. To these legacies from the past the eighteenth century farmer could, however, add a most potent motivating factor in the shaping of a new and advanced animal husbandry. This was the fast-growing demand for livestock products—meat, milk, butter and cheese— which an urban population rapidly increasing in numbers and in prosperity brought about, and which was a demand which foreign graziers and dairymen were not yet able to meet.

The history of agriculture in Britain in the 250 years since 1700 has been largely, but not exclusively, the history of the efforts of the man in the field to supply the home market with these products of his cattle, his sheep and his pigs. The same two and a half centuries have, over the long view, seen the triumph of horn over corn in the farm lands of Britain. It was at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the farmer’s livestock first commenced to underpin the economic structure of the British farm, although the squire, the yeoman and the husbandman were a long time in realizing this fact. Throughout the successive collapses of the highly regarded superstructure of corn-growing husbandry—in the 1780’s, in the days after the Napoleonic Wars, in the 1880’s, and in 1921—the hoof of the grazing animal has been the foundation upon which prosperity has been built anew.

It is to a factual support of these introductory generalizations that this volume is devoted. The conclusions which should more properly end this essay in agrarian history are removed to the beginning and intruded here so that the reader may pursue the facts from page to page with some foreknowledge of the theme which is inherent in them.

The Sources

The evidence for the techniques of livestock husbandry in their regional variations is notoriously scarce for the first six decades of the eighteenth century. The arts of topography, so prolific of material for the preceding period, were not exercised upon the lowly pursuits of the ignoble countryman. The great series of estate papers which illuminate the agriculture of Britain so brilliantly for the preceeding 600 years now throw a far dimmer light upon rural affairs. The didactic authors added little that was new to the theory and practice of livestock husbandry, however stimulating Jethro Tull and his contemporaries might be in the field of arable cultivations.

It was not until the seventh decade of this century that the wide-ranging curiosity and the lucid reporting by Arthur Young of the agriculture of his time began a flood of realistic agrarian literature that has lasted to the present day. This prolific factual reporting, added to the statistical and official sources, makes the task of the livestock historian of the nineteenth century one of critical selection rather than one of despairing and fruitless search. It is for these reasons that the historian of agricultural techniques has been prone to scurry over the unmapped country of the early eighteenth century in his journey from the comparatively well documented seventeenth century to the exhaustively surveyed Britain of Young and Marshall, of Sinclair and the Board of Agriculture; and to become effusively and uncritically grateful when he encounters the familiar signposted roads to Holkham Park and Dishley Grange. Nevertheless, there is evidence from which a generalized description of British stock husbandry from 1700 to 1770 can be compiled.

Scottish Cattle Economy

The supply line of meat and other livestock products for the great London markets was already extending into the remote Highlands of Scotland, into the fastnesses of the Welsh mountains, and into the extreme south-west peninsula. The production of the Highland type of black cattle was nearly the sole source of the cash income of both laird and cottar, and such cattle were reared exclusively for sale. The bulk of the Scottish people went meatless, or nearly so; as Smollett made Matthew Bramble remark: ‘Flesh meat they seldom or never taste.’ Macintosh noted that ‘in many towns in Scotland for almost half the year there is no beef nor mutton to be seen in their shambles’.¹ This vegetarianism, enforced by poverty and not by Shavian perversity, did not extend to the upper classes. The estate papers of Grant of Monymusk are full of purchases of flesh for the table; in 1735–6 the household spent £6 19s. 7d. on beef at 1

d. to 2d. lb., besides having two of the home farm’s oxen killed as well; £12 2s. 7d. on mutton and veal, at 4s. 2d. for a full-grown wether and at 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. a head for calves; and £15 4s. 1d. on pig meat.²

While on the lesser estates expenditure on meat did not usually run so high, most lairds with a tenantry still, in the eighteenth century, received a large head of stock in the form of rents in kind. In the period immediately following the Rising of 1715 the surveyors of the estates forfeited by the rebels listed some extensive payments of this kind among the nobility: the Earl Marischall received sixty-four wethers and twenty-three lambs a year; and even such a comparatively minor laird as Gordon of Auchintowl had twenty-four wethers and fifteen lambs to add to his larder, or his flock, each year.¹ Poultry rents were often on a mediaeval scale, such as the 738 ‘chickens’ and 436 hens which came in annually to the Earl of Linlithgow.²

In the same way the consumption of milk by the Scottish peasantry was low, as was also that of butter and cheese; and many large estates were without any internal source of supply of dairy products. The cow was primarily a begetter of saleable, or workable, flesh, and not yet essentially a milking machine; but on some estates there were sizeable dairying branches: a good deal of butter and cheese came into Inverness market from the Lovat farms.³

The stock which gave subsistence to both laird and crofter was largely made up of ‘black cattle’, sheep being of minor importance until the rise of the great Highland and Lowland flocks at the end of the eighteenth century. It is misleading to take the title ‘black cattle’ at its face value. It also embraced the duns, the browns and the other colours which were found in Scottish cattle and was merely the generic name for bovines, as horned cattle was for bovines and ovines in contrast to the pig. Distinctions of colour, type and size in cattle do not, in fact, become clear until the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Board of Agriculture’s surveyors analysed the regional variations in some detail. Contemporary sources invariably speak of these ‘black’ cattle and none others. The barony of Monaltry, Aberdeen, was described after the ’45 Rising as producing black cattle which sold at about 40s., with some sheep and goats, and in the same period the Lovat estates had good pastures for black cattle, of which ‘a good many’ were reared at from 40s. to 50s. value.⁴

The method of management, or lack of management, usually employed was tersely described by the surveyor of the estate of Strowan: ‘There were never any grass seeds sown in Rannoch, nor any hay made, except on little spots. The cattle are generally small, as they live in the hills most part of the winter, and are then generally ill-fed.’¹ This was a form of stock husbandry which can have differed little from the ranching of the prehistoric pastoralists in Scotland. In so far as it is not yet extinct, it may be said to be a valid and economical method of land use in these remote, wet and ill-pasturing hills. When these black cattle reached the marketable stage, usually in the autumn of their fourth or fifth year, and they had acquired the size and strength to endure the long trek southwards over the English Border, they were collected off the hills and consigned to the drover. It is, indeed, commonly said that in the early decades of the eighteenth century they flooded the English store cattle markets to such a degree that the prices of English beast were depressed.²

To this generalized and popularly accepted account of the cattle husbandry of Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century there may be added some specific exceptions. First, there was some fattening in the kindlier lowlands. Neilson of Corsock communicated to the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland a recipe for stall-feeding black cattle to show a 40s. profit on an 80s. ox, but these cattle must be ‘of right shapes, not under seven years old’. The rations comprised bruised peas and oats fed twice a day and hay every two hours, with cabbage or turnips alternating with the hay if they were available. The secrets of successful fattening, however, were to yoke the beast so that they could not lick themselves and so massage off their flesh, and to stall them in as dark a place as possible, where they would find less amusement and became the more indolent.³ This notion of quicker fattening in the dark has recently been revived deliberately by some British pig-farmers. The suggestion that the age of seven years was usual for a finished fat beast is supported by a comment, of the same period, upon a grass-fattened bullock of Macintosh of Borlum’s, which was four years old but ‘too young by two years’. Borlum, quoting his costs, showed that he had made a profit of £2 16s. 10d. in fattening on grass and hay alone, compared with Neilson’s estimated £2 on grain, pulse and roots. On 22 June, 1730, this small black grass-finished bullock killed out at 392 lb. dead carcase weight, without the offals, indicating a live weight of some 8 cwt.¹ Its mature live weight could, therefore, be put at about 10 cwt., but its home was in the fine pastures of the Lothians, and the mature live weight of a Highland black beast was about 4 to 5 cwt.

The second exception to the almost universal store-cattle rearing industry of Scotland was the incipient interest in dairy farming taken by some of the most progressive lairds—an interest which was to become much intensified by the end of the eighteenth century. Grant of Monymusk is the exemplar of these agrarian pioneers because he is by far the most fully documented. In the proposals which he drafted about 1744 for the stocking and management of a farm after the best English fashion, he provided for the purchase of twenty cows, which ‘are said in other places to yield, with good mangement, by butter, buttermilk, cheese and whey, skim, £5 per cow besides rearing the calfs, if the cow render 7 pints for 4 months and 3 pints for 4 more and be tolerably fed’, but he later amended his estimate with the rider that ‘many tolerable cows will give more milk and longer’.² The yield of milk to be expected, it will be noted, was only 170 gallons in a lactation, plus the little fed to the calf. This was low by the best contemporary English standards; but few modern ‘black cattle’ would give as much. Monymusk, however, had an eye on the store trade as well, for he planned to rear the calves to three years old on pasture in summer, stubble and forage in autumn, and on winter grazing with straw supplied in bad weather, and then to dispose of them to the drovers.³

It was this hardily reared stock, drawn from all corners of Scotland, that found its way to the great trysts at Crieff and Falkirk, and was then driven south. The full account of the droving system, with the methods and routes of the collection ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Text Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Pastoral Britain in the Eighteenth Century
• 2. The Work of Robert Bakewell
• 3. The Late Eighteenth Century 1: Fodder Crops and Cattle
• 4. The Late Eighteenth Century 2: Sheep, Pigs and Horses
• 5. The Late Eighteenth Century 3: The Techniques of Cattle Husbandry
• 6. The Late Eighteenth Century 4: Management of the Sheep and Pig
• 7. Development of the Livestock Market
• 8. The Nineteenth Century 1: Perfecting British Breeds of Cattle
• 9. The Nineteenth Century 2: Sheep, Pigs and Horses
• 10. The Nineteenth Century 3: Livestock Management and Markets
• List of Principal Sources
• Index