Pre-Mono Monday HERITAGE MM120

For today's Pre Mono Monday HERITAGE theme I drove over to Beauport on the south-east coast of the island to get a shot of one of the Manx Longhorn Sheep (see extra for 4 horns!). I look forward to seeing your HERITAGE theme blips with the tag mm120.

In Jersey in the 1600s sheep (which resembled the breed in this shot) were far more important than the Jersey cow and throughout that century and the 18th, knitting was an important industry. It was not, as many people believe, the fisherman’s jersey, which gave rise to the generic term for a knitted sweater now in common use throughout the English-speaking world, which was knitted for export, but woollen stockings.
Hardly a working class household was not involved with knitting, which caused considerable concern because farming and fishing, the two most important activities for the island were both neglected.
Nobody knows exactly how or when knitting became important in Jersey, but it was perhaps towards the end of the 1500s following the arrival of Huguenot refugees from France, where knitting of patterned stockings was already a speciality.
The industrial revolution brought the knitting industry to an abrupt end, and little or no tangible evidence now remains to prove its earlier existence.
Many people interested in the history of Jersey know about the knitting industry, but few are aware that, although the island was by no means self-sufficient in wool and had to import large quantities from England, Jersey’s own breed of sheep were kept in large numbers to supplement those imports.
The multi-horned Jersey sheep which used to graze the headlands and slopes of the island’s north coast has long died out. Jean Poingdestre in Caesarea, his 1662 description of Jersey, said: ”In former times, the females had most times four horns, and the rams oft-times six.”
An earlier literary reference to Jersey sheep can be found in English poet Michael Drayton’s Polyalbion in 1617. He wrote:
”Fair Jersey, first of these here scattered in the deep. Peculiarly that breeds they double-horned sheep …”
The six-horned sheep apparently had one horn on each side bent towards the nose, another pair towards the neck and the third upright. It was a breed probably with Viking ancestry and the closest to be found today are the Manx Laoghtan or Soay breeds.