ABSTRACT
While deforestation was going on apace in England, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain, the lands of the North, East, and Centre of Europe were turning their forest resources to more and more profitable account. Princes and lords increased the number of their studs in Italy and England. The raising of sumpter-horses, battle-horses, and race-horses prospered in regions rich in grasslands, as did that of homed cattle in the Alpine zone and in the Westem countries, which furnished meat, bacon, and lard to the rest of Europe. In the Low Countries the art of fattening cattle on turnips and leguminous plants was first invented. Elsewhere milch cows were the chief speciality. The scarcity of labour after the Black Death, combined with the fact that sheep required but little labour and expense, and with the growing demand for and high price of wool, led to an extraordinary development in one form of pasture-farming, that of sheep-rearing. In the majority of European countries this business became once more extremely popular, and pasturefarming even took the place of com-growing in Central Italy, the Roman Campagna, the Castiles and Upper Aragon, and,
finally, in England. In Spain, in the fifteenth century, the great association of sheep-farmers known as the Mesta grouped into a single organization 2,694,000 sheep, out of the 10,000,000 then kept in the peninsula. In England the great landowners, attracted by a system of rural economy which gave them ten or twelve times as high a return as corn-growing, kept flocks of 4,000 to 25,000 sheep. In 1400 the English were exporting as many as 180,000 packs of fine wool, weighing 864 pounds apiece, and had ousted the Spaniards as masters of the market.
