ABSTRACT
The great industry of mediaeval sheep-keeping was a sufficient phenomenon to deserve a chapter on its own in any agrarian history of Britain, for four reasons. It was an industry, the first in these islands, although it was founded upon the land and not upon an urban workshop, for it turned a natural product—grass—into a commercial product—wool; and it was organized for mass production, as is much of modern agriculture, which is equally an industrial undertaking. It represented, in several ways, as great an advance upon the haphazard livestock husbandry of the earlier mediaeval period as did the controlled stock breeding of the eighteenth century Improvers mark a step forward from the haphazard herd and flock management that had gone before. On the larger estates, it was founded upon an un-precedentedly logical system of land use. And, most important of all upon the long view, it marked the way towards a ‘rationalization' of land ownership and the application of commercial methods to food production, both of which laid a firm foundation for the expansion of the nation's economy.
