Cotswold

Cotswold wool built the region. By the 1400s the wool trade had made it rich enough to put up the churches still called wool churches, and Elizabethan wool money helped finance English expansion abroad. The Chancellor of the Exchequer still sits on a ceremonial Cotswold wool sack.

The breed in its modern form came together between 1780 and 1820. The first one reached America in 1832, a ram imported to Albany, New York, and American farmers took to it quickly; by 1876 a shepherd's manual could call it common enough to be adopted as a native sheep.

The American Cotswold Record Association has kept the US book since 1878, and in Britain the Cotswold Sheep Society formed in 1892. By the middle of the 1900s the breed was nearly gone on both sides of the Atlantic, crowded out by crossbreeding, and its revival since owes a good deal to fiber artists.

This is a big sheep. The Conservancy puts rams up to 300 pounds and ewes up to 200. Both sexes are polled, with black hooves, nose and ear spots, and the heavy forelock falling over the face is the breed's signature.

The fleece is the point: lustrous and silky, in a staple of seven to thirteen inches, weighing thirteen to fifteen pounds, at 33 to 42 microns. White is the standard, and black Cotswolds can now be registered.

Docile and friendly, by the Conservancy's description, and rated for intermediate keepers.

The size is the handling consideration. A 300 pound ram is easy-natured but still a 300 pound animal, and shearing a thirteen pound fleece is a job.

Meat and wool, and today the wool leads. Handspinners seek the lustered staple, and the fleece trade is the reason most modern flocks exist.

The carcass is large and the breed fed England for centuries; where the forage supports it, it still finishes a heavy lamb.

It is a luster longwool, slow maturing, and it needs good forage to perform. That last point is the catch: this is not a breed for thin pasture.

Budget shearing seriously. A fleece this long cannot be skipped a year, and its value depends on how it is grown and handled.

The Conservancy moved the Cotswold to Critical in 2026 on falling numbers in its native UK.

Britain's Rare Breeds Survival Trust also lists the breed as at risk. The population that built the wool churches now depends on small flocks kept on purpose.

The American Cotswold Record Association has held the book since 1878 and runs a separate registry track for black Cotswolds; check which book an animal is in, and what its eligibility is, before you bid.

Match the sheep to your grass. On good forage they perform; on thin pasture they do not, and no discount fixes that.

Recent sale prices on HoofnHorn, where there are any, are further down this page.