Agricultural History Review, Volume 46 Part 2 (1998), pp. 142–161

Before the appearance of official basic agricultural statistics in the 1860s agricultural historians have had relatively few estimates of the extent of farm crops and the number of fatal animals on which to rely. This article is concerned with farm animals. It is based on a series of government inquiries which were conducted from 1796-1803, which together covered about 25 per cent of the land area of England. Estimates of the size of the national herds of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep have been constructed on the basis of these inquiries. From this base, the article proceeds to concentrate on the sheep estimate, which turns out to be much smaller than the one which historians have used in the past. A case is made for suggesting that the recycling of old estimates, on the basis of guesswork rather than scientific methods, has perpetuated a myth about the size of the sheep population in c.1800. 

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