Among the first animals humans domesticated, the sheep gave the world wool — a renewable fiber that clothed temperate civilization and drove economies from ancient Mesopotamia to medieval England. The demand for wool funded kingdoms, built cathedrals, and created the global merino trade. It also remade landscapes: sheep pasture was one of the prime engines of early English enclosure, especially in the Tudor period, when landlords cleared common fields and drove peasants off the land (later enclosure had other agricultural and legal drivers too). The gentlest-looking of domestic animals reorganized who owned the land and who was allowed to live on it.
Thomas More, writing in 1516, said that sheep were devouring men. He meant it nearly literally. Across England, landlords were tearing up villages, fencing common fields, and turning farmland into sheep pasture — because wool paid better than tenants. The animal that seems like the mildest creature in the barnyard had become an economic force powerful enough to clear people off the land. That is the paradox at the heart of the sheep's history: a gentle animal at the center of a violent economy.