Ｔｒａｖｅｌ ｔｏ ｔｈｅ Ｐｌａｃｅ ｗｈｅｒｅ Ｓｈｅｅｐ ｏｎｃｅ Ａｔｅ Ｍｅｎ

Ｌｕｏ　Ｈａｉｙｉｎｇ

The Enclosure in the British history was something we learned in our history classes during middle school days. But “sheep eating men” was all I knew about the event that took place about 600 years ago far away in England. It was not until June, 2006 when I was visiting the place where sheep used to eat men that I began to understand the history.

On the morning of June 1st, we set out from Manchester to the lake area. Our tour bus cruised into a hilly area where we saw fields on hill slopes, separated by short stone walls. From far, the stone walls looked like the Great Wall back in China. We saw some sheep grazing here and there.

While we felt amazed at the scene, the guide, a Chinese surnamed Yang who used to be a university teacher back home, told us we were in the heart of the place where the movement of enclosures raged once. As all of us in the bus knew something about the sheep-eating-men phenomenon, we asked Yang to give us a mini lecture.

The movement started in the 1470s when the England stopped exporting wool. Instead, large quantities of wool were urgently needed by the emerging textile industry. The demand for wool drove sheep farming to prosper. Lands change hands. Peasants who had lost their lands had to get employment somewhere else. The movement destroyed the feudal system and paved way to the capitalist system. The Enclosure was an epoch-making event in history because it was an agricultural revolution leading to capitalism in the 17the century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century.

The on-the-spot lecture enabled me to realize that what I had learned about sheep-eating-men in my middle school years was not the whole picture. It highlighted the brutality of the movement, but it said nothing about the positive role it played in pushing forward social progress. Looking outside the bus window, I wondered about the feudal system in ancient China and wondered if the deep-rooted feudal system arrested the development of the Chinese society and devastated its progress until the oriental empire became weak and fell under the invading powers from the other parts of the world.

The enclosure movement is now history. The land where sheep once thrived now is a tourism attraction. I leaned from the guide that about 1.4 million tourists visit the 2,300-km2 lake area per year, attracted by its picturesque natural environment, which was once a paradise for sheep.

My interest in the sheep that ate men 600 years grew. The guide promised to take us in the afternoon to take a look at the black-faced creatures.

After the lunch, we left Bowness, a small lakeside town in the area, for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. The bus zigzagged along the highway in mountains, much higher than those we had seen in the morning. We saw stone walls that went from the valley up to the top. At one spot, we stopped and got off. Five or six black-faced sheep were grazing on a terrace. They were all white except their faces. I dont know why, but the sheep looked ferocious to me. We looked at them across the fence and took a few photographs. The sheep gazed up at us blankly. I teased them, “You want to eat me?” They made no reply and went back to eat grass again.

We left the mountain area and went on the expressway to Edinburgh. Slopes enclosed by stonewalls became rarer and rarer. The travel across the land where sheep once ate men was enlightening. We wondered and agreed that change and development were fundamental and absolute for survival. □