From Counting Sheep by Philip Walling But the enigmatic Jacob is different from the other primitive breeds and its origins remain tantalisingly obscure. Its fine bones, slender body and lean carcase, even its tendency to grow multiple horns set it firmly within the primitive camp. The gene for multiple horns is linked to a condition called split-eyelid. In its mild form the upper eyelid has a v-shaped nick in it, and at its worst the eyelid is divided into two, causing considerable irritation and distress. But the Jacob has remained aloof from the evolutionary links and changes that have affected other primitive breeds and has kept itself as a pure, direct link with the ancient world, unchanged since its creation, some would say since The Creation. As with the world’s other domestic sheep, its most likely birthplace is the Levant where a piebald sheep existed more than three thousand years ago, known as Jacob’s sheep, whose origin is explained in the Book of Genesis (30: 31-43).
Jacob had toiled, without wages, for his uncle (and father-in-law) Laban, for fourteen long years, for love for his wife Rachel ( ‘ewe’). He agreed to continue in Laban’s service on condition that he would be allowed to keep as his share of Laban's flock every ‘speckled and spotted’ sheep. These are described as the ’sportings of nature’, unusual and spontaneous variations from its regular production. There cannot have been many of these otherwise the acquisitive Laban would not have agreed. Jacob took these sheep ’three days’ journey distant’, to keep them separate them from Laban's flock, and continued to shepherd the rest of Laban’s sheep which were of a uniform colour – probably brown or black.
Then Jacob did something that in ancient times accorded with the commonly-held mystical belief that whatever the female is looking upon at the moment of conception will affect the nature of her offspring. He took some fresh saplings and ‘pilled white strakes in them’ – exposed in streaks the white pith beneath the bark. Then he set these sticks up at the watering troughs where Laban’s sheep mated when they came to drink. From these matings a few of the ewes produced speckled and ringstraked (streaked in rings) lambs. Then at their next conception Jacob ‘set the ewes’ faces towards the ringstraked’ so that they might produce more of the same. Jacob only chose the stronger animals to breed his speckled flock
from, so that gradually his speckled and spotted sheep became dominant in the flock leaving Laban with the weaker pure black or brown ones.
Laban was none too pleased by Jacob’s crafty behaviour and he tried to limit the kind of sheep that Jacob could have, first to speckled, but when the coloured lambs that were born next year were all speckled, to ringstraked lambs, but of course the next crop of coloured lambs turned out to be ringstraked. And so, over time, Jacob acquired all Laban's sheep as they gradually became multi-coloured. Then by selecting those sheep with more white in their fleeces, Jacob’s sheep gradually became white. So that by the time of King David, (as told in Psalm 147) their fleeces are compared to snow; and in the Song of Solomon he sings of his mistress’s teeth being like a flock of sheep just come up from the washing.
But the Jacob sheep that has come down to us is still spotted and piebald, whereas through divine favour Jacob’s flocks lost their multi-colour and became pure white. The breed was not called the Jacob in England until the twentieth century, before which it was known as the “Spanish Sheep”. One long-established flock in Warwickshire, the Charlecote, claims a Portuguese origin, but it is unclear whether the evidence of importation (in a letter from 1756) refers to the then existing flock or to an addition to it. There are numerous eighteenth century references to four-horned piebald sheep grazing gentlemen’s parks: Robert Bakewell was well-aware of them because he wrote to Arthur Young in 1791 asking if he could procure some of “the four-horned kind … called Spanish …”
Jacobs are yet another breed supposed to have swum ashore from a Spanish galleon in 1588. But the English used the word Spanish to describe anything foreign, exotic, or dubious: Spanish ‘flu, Spanish Practices, Spanish juice (liquorice) Spanish fly (the aphrodisiac), and so on. Spanish is used to indicate foreignness, often in a grudgingly admiring way. These were gentlemen’s sheep, and commercial farmers would be disdainful of their being kept as ornaments with no concern for profit. To their gentle owners they were living lawn mowers that bred their own replacements and needed no fuel. But to a working farmer they were (and still are) little better than goats, and ‘a damned nuisance’. It is most remarkable that they have resisted ‘improvement’ by crossing with any of the breeds that have come in and
out of vogue over the last two or three centuries. There is something rather magnificent about this, which I was too young to appreciate all those years ago, when I lost my temper with my neighbour’s silly sheep.