Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/82

66 and, perhaps, an extra long notch trebles. (In Worcestershire the doubles are similarly marked by ordinary notches, but the singles and trebles by black and red coloured notches). By this simple method a shepherd can very quickly record and "tot up" the number of his lambs.

The flock tallies are used when the lambs are old enough to leave the ewes, and the time has come for dividing up the flock. In dividing, the animals are separated by twenties, or by the "score" (i.e. by the scratch or notch). After five "scores" have been made, the fifth notch is continued, either over the edge of a squared tally, or further round a natural bark-stick tally than the other notches, so that the hundreds on the tally can be read off simply and easily. Any odd animals are marked by smaller notches at the end of the row, so that, for a new flock of, say, 613 sheep, the completed tally would show six sets of five notches each, followed by thirteen smaller notches, thus,—



Fig. 2 (Plate I.) shows an actual flock tally recording 506 sheep.

One of the old shepherds made a very remarkable tally for me, saying that his grandfather used one like it. It consists of a piece of natural wood, with the bark on, about one inch in diameter and six inches long. This is hollowed out, and the ends stopped with two bits of cork. In this wooden bottle are placed small pebbles, each one representing a score of sheep, and the odd sheep are notched upon the bark in the same way as on the ordinary tally. In this tally a flock of 613 sheep would be recorded by thirty small pebbles and thirteen notches.

In the same locality,—Burpham, near Arundel,—tallies are still sometimes used for other purposes than those described above. For example, when a man buys lambs for feeding up, he will have a record of the original number in stock, and will keep a tally record of the deaths. Farm carters also use tallies for recording the number of cartloads moved of manure or of stones, and most of the older men well remember the "score" of cricket matches being kept by notching sticks.