Leicester Longwool

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.

In America the breed faded as Merinos took over in the 1800s and was probably extinct here by the 1930s or 1940s. The modern US flock dates to 1990, when Colonial Williamsburg imported sheep from Australia to restock its historic farms, and conservation flocks have grown from there.

The Conservancy puts rams anywhere from 140 to 330 pounds and ewes from 110 to 220, a wide range for a breed this rare. The face is covered in short, pure white hair over dark skin, which reads as a blue tinge; black and brown Leicesters also exist.

The fleece is the heavy, curly, lustrous one the name promises: spiral-tipped staples up to eight inches, eleven to fifteen pounds a year and occasionally twenty, at 32 to 38 microns. Sheep can be shorn twice a year.

Neither sex carries horns or scurs.

Docile, by the Conservancy's description, but rated for advanced keepers, a combination worth reading twice: the sheep are easy, the enterprise is not.

They do not take to being worked by dogs, so plan your handling around that.

Wool first. The lustered fleece dyes well without losing its shine, felts, and sells to handspinners; it is the product the breed was rebuilt around.

The breed's other legacy is genetic: Bakewell's Leicester went into the making of the Border Leicester, the Wensleydale and the Corriedale, among others.

Time and grazing. They are slow growing, eager grazers, and a flock earns its way on fleece while the lambs take their time.

Budget shearing twice a year and handle the fleece as the crop it is; the wool income depends on it arriving clean and whole.

The Livestock Conservancy lists the breed as Threatened, and in Britain it is endangered, with fewer than 500 registered breeding females. This is a breed that has already gone extinct in America once.

Every registered flock is therefore doing conservation work whether it means to or not; the genetics have nowhere else to live.

The Leicester Longwool Sheep Breeders Association maintains the US registry. Numbers are small, so ask how an animal is related to your existing stock before you bid.

Be honest about the word advanced. The Conservancy's experience rating reflects the fleece work; this is a breed for someone who wants the wool.

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