Sheep

Sheep are the working heart of Hewlands and a recurring measure of its fortunes. They must be fed, watered, watched, moved between pastures, and shorn; their wool and skins also carry economic value powerful enough to bind families together in debt and conflict. The novel presents them not simply as farm wealth but as living creatures whose care fills the household’s days and whose bodies are altered by the work that sustains it.

The Flock and the Farm

The sheep impose a continuous routine. Outside, someone must feed and water them, tend them whatever else is happening, and take them from one pasture to another and bring them back. This work belongs to the ordinary structure of life at Hewlands, not to an occasional task: the flock’s needs persist through changing circumstances and organize the movement between the farm’s interior and its fields.

After the small landowner’s death, the farm passes to Bartholomew under the terms of his inheritance. Joan remains in the house and governs its work, while Bartholomew takes responsibility for the sheep and fields with help from the boys. The two are to walk the land together once a week to make sure everything is in order. Sheep therefore stand at the center of a divided household economy: their care falls within Bartholomew’s sphere, while the domestic labor that supports the farm remains under Joan’s direction.

Their presence also fixes the setting of the family’s public business. Joan supervises Bartholomew among the flocks, and the children watch from behind a wall as Joan, Bartholomew, and John negotiate in a field among the sheep. The animals continue to occupy the landscape while the adults determine the family’s future. The children read the gestures and changing posture of the figures against that familiar setting, waiting to learn whether Agnes will be made to leave or permitted to marry.

Wool, Skins, and Debt

Sheep are also entangled in a dispute over the handling of their skins. The Latin tutor’s father, a prosperous glove-maker, had arranged for a shipment of the small landowner’s sheepskins to be sent for tanning. He then insisted that the wool not be removed, a demand that aroused suspicion and helped bring the disagreement to a head. The tutor learns that his father has entered into an illicit enterprise and that the children have been told to present the skins as material intended for gloves.

The exact terms of the debt remain uncertain to the tutor, but its consequence is concrete: his father cannot, or will not, pay what is owed, and the widow or her son will not give up their claim. Instead, the tutor’s time and Latin teaching become payment. Twice a week he must travel almost two kilometres from town along the river to teach the younger children at Hewlands, a remote house surrounded by sheep. The flock thus marks the setting of an arrangement in which an animal product, a concealed business, and a young man’s labor become parts of the same obligation.

Later, John approaches Bartholomew in a field with the sheep around them and privately imagines the animals becoming gloves for rich customers. His anticipation recalls the earlier dispute over skins and shows how readily the flock’s bodies are treated as potential merchandise. Yet the animals are not merely an abstraction in the scene: sheep move between the men’s legs, stare at John, and shy away from him. Their living presence persists beside the calculation of their commercial use.

Care, Shearing, and Transformation

The narrative gives the flock’s routine a physical cost. Sick lambs are placed in a basket beside the fire and fed by soaking milk into a cloth. Their sharp cries cut through the room. The image brings animal care into the household itself: the lambs’ vulnerability interrupts domestic space, and tending them requires attention even while the family carries on with its other work.

Shearing makes the transformation of the animals especially visible. In the yard, the father holds a ewe between his legs as she looks upward in terror. He guides the shears through her fleece, and the wool falls to the ground in heavy heaps. When the work is finished, the sheep appears radically changed: lean, white, and gaunt. The passage connects the useful wool to the altered body left behind, showing the flock as more than a store of raw material. The shearing is necessary farm work, but its description makes the animal’s fear and physical exposure part of what that work entails.

Narrative Significance

Sheep link the practical and economic layers of Hewlands. Their care requires repeated labor; their wool and skins support commerce; and disputes about those products help turn household obligations into conflicts over debt and authority. The same field can hold animals being tended and people negotiating who owes what to whom, so the farm’s economy is grounded in the daily presence of the flock.

That presence also supplies a steady contrast between human plans and living routine. While adults bargain and children wait for an outcome, the sheep remain among them, moving through the field and responding to the people nearby. The novel’s attention to feeding, sick lambs, shearing, and the animals’ flight from John keeps their material lives in view even when human characters value them chiefly for wool, skins, or money. Their importance lies in both roles: they sustain the farm’s economy, and they are creatures whose care and vulnerability that economy cannot entirely erase.