The Jacob is a British breed of domestic sheep. It combines two characteristics unusual in sheep: it is piebald—dark-coloured with areas of white wool—and it is often polycerate or multi-horned. It most commonly has four horns. The origin of the breed is not known; broken-coloured polycerate sheep were present in England by the middle of the seventeenth century, and were widespread a century later. A breed society was formed in 1969, and a flock book was published from 1972. The Jacob was kept for centuries as a "park sheep", to ornament the large estates of landowners. In modern times it is reared mainly for wool, meat and skins. History The origins of the Jacob are not known. It has been bred in the British Isles for several hundred years. Sheep of this kind, little different from the modern breed, were shown in paintings from about 1760 at Tabley House in Cheshire, and – by George Stubbs – at Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire. In the de Tabley family, the tradition was that the piebald sheep had come ashore in Ireland from a wrecked ship of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and been brought to England by Sir John Byrne on his marriage. Among the many accounts of ancient breeds of piebald sheep is the story of Jacob from the first book of the Hebrew Bible, called by Christians the Old Testament. According to the Book of Genesis (Genesis 30:31–43), Jacob took every speckled and spotted sheep from his father-in-law's (Laban's) flock and bred them. Due to the resemblance to the animal described in Genesis, the Jacob sheep was named for the Biblical figure of Jacob sometime in the 20th century. In 2009, a study which used endogenous retrovirus markers to investigate the history of sheep domestication found the Jacob to be more closely linked to sheep from Africa and South-west Asia than to other British breeds, though all domestic breeds can be traced back to an origin in the Fertile Crescent. Some believe that the modern breed is actually the same one mentioned in the Bible (although there is little genetic evidence) having accompanied the westward expansion of human civilisation through Northern Africa, Sicily, Spain and eventually England. Elisha Gootwine, a sheep expert at the Israeli Agriculture Ministry, says that the resemblance of a British breed to the Bible story is a coincidence, that the breed was not indigenous to ancient