VI
THE DUTCH INVASION
Although it was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that what we might call the "Dutch Invasion" took place, the tracks of the cattle brought in from the Low Countries at that time are only a little clearer than those of the Scandinavian cattle that came across the North Sea seven or eight hundred years before. One reason for this is that there was no great human migration to correspond; while another is that, misled by the great change the Dutch cattle induced upon the cattle of Britain, we look for the importations of enormous numbers: forgetting that such are not required if the imported animals and their progeny were thought much more worthy than those whose territory they invaded. The recent increase of Shorthorns and Herefords outside Britain might be quoted as cases in point.
In Britain there were incentives to the importation of foreign stock that had never existed before. During the sixteenth century, through political and other interests, England was drawn
70
