of sheep and fleece

I was in Hodges Figgis at the back end of 2023 with money in my pocket with a clatter of birthdays and Christmas coming up. Ten minutes later I came out with a short handful of books including A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard. It's a better man than me who would buy a book-as-gift in which he has no interest whatsoever. And sure enough the same book found itself in the modest stack of books on my To Be Read TBR list.

One bonus for getting a dead-tree book is the set of chapter-heading linocuts by Sarah Price [example R]. If you want to commission a book-plate, this might be the place to go.

It's pretty good: easy to read and informative. Maybe not get signed by author and keep forever but good edutainment. One of the later chapters, waggishly titled Mills and Boom deals with the rise and rise of Yorkshire (esp Bradford) woollen mills in the late 1700s. Wool was spun into yarn and then woven or knitted into an alphabet of different fabrics: baise, cheviot, delaine, fearnought, flannel, gaberdine, jacquard, melton, petersham, serge, tweed, worsted. Each having its own properties and price point.

Ranging back and forth across space and time from the first ovine domestication event, there are loadsa nuggets and quotes. Like this advice to medieval shepherds: Let him provide himself with a good barkable dog and lie nightly with his sheep. ahem‽ I've done my share of lying with the sheep and I don't think that medieval shepherds were being encouraged to by-pass Leviticus 18v23. It's not about the snuggles so much as being aware of rustlers and wolves.

Coulthard offers the Lincolnshire version of Brythonic sheep-counting: Yan Tan Tethera Pethera Pimp Sethera Lethera Hovera Covera Dik [10]  Ya-a-dik Tan-a-dik . . . Bumfit [15] Yan-a-bumfit . . . Figgot [20]. Stan Carey reports some of the many regional variants. Wikipedia has a more extensive list. If you have more than 20 sheep, you have to tally up the "score" by shifting a token from one pocket to the other. Easy for me, we've only got bumfit ewes. On the etymology front, note that 4 is pedwar in Welsh but ceathair in Irish which is an example of the consonant shift that separated P-Celts from Q-Celts, 3000 years ago.