Leicester Longwool

The Leicester Longwool is a luster longwool, and the name is literal. Just after shearing, the clean wool next to the skin catches the light and the sheep genuinely glisten, for a few days, until the dust of ordinary life puts the glow away for another year. It is also called the English Leicester, and the county is pronounced lester.

It was made in England in the mid-1700s by Robert Bakewell, the first person to apply systematic selection to livestock improvement. He took a coarse, big-boned, slow-growing sheep and turned it into one that finished quickly and carried a better fleece. Those methods went on to reshape most of British farming.

Word of it reached the colonies before the Revolution. George Washington was interested enough to write about Bakewell in several letters, and said he chose good rams from the English Leicester breed for his own flock. By 1837 the agriculturist Youatt could write that in a little over half a century the New Leicester had spread to every part of the United Kingdom and into Europe.

Two practical points. They are slow growing, and they do not take to being worked by dogs. Neither sex carries horns or scurs.