THE WILD, WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN.
" W11EN wild in woods the noble savage ran," in lauds which it is difficult to picture to the imagination in any other than a minutely civilised and cultivated condition, there ran with him—herds as wild, but probably much bettor-looking- great herds of huge, horned cattle. These were, Wowever, merely modern in comparison with those immemorial ancestors of all beef, Bog U2'148, who could have tossed Behemoth on his horns, had that old salt invaded the land which resounded with his mighty bellow, and shook beneath his thundering tread, and Bos longi- from, the gigantic original Celtic shorthorn. It is of the remote descendants of the latter, after untraceable mixing of races, following the intrusion of man upon the face of the earth, and his migrations, the tribes bringing their cattle with them, that Camsar speaks, when he says of Britain that " the number of the cattle was great." By that time, the Celtic ox had be- come a small, deerlike animal, domesticated among the ancient Britons, and it exclusively supplied beef to the conquerors and conquered dm ing the Roman occupation. Bos longifrons, in its diminished form, was presumably of a dark colour, for the late Mr. Storer tells us, " so, generally, wore its known descendants, and so also was apparently the still remain- ing hair upon a very perfect skull of this animal, found, in 1846, in an Irish- bog. This specimen," he adds, " which has both the horns themselves, and also a part of the skin with the hair attached, seems to show that the creature had a rough, shaggy hide, like the Highland kyloes." With the extirpation of the Romano-Celts by the Britons and the predatory allies who helped them—coming with their families, their goods, and, according to Mr, Boyd Dawkins, their cattle—came the de- scendants of Boa Urea to these islands ; and those, sup- plemented by the cattle of the Danes, who followed, "have ever since remained the cattle of our eastern and northern counties, where the Continental tribes landed in the greatest numbers."
The story of the conquest and holding of the land by the de- scendants of Boa Urns is like that of the first chapters of the history of England, for the Celtic ox, poor longifrons, was driven, with his master, to desert regions beyond the reach of the irre- sistible English. There is an epic grandeur in the story of these herds, even of the tame species ; but the wild creatures, roaming in the great forests, and over the plains, fas- cinate our fancy, like the horses of the Ukraine, or the tameless North-American bison, never domesticated by man, and which are too surely, as Alexandre Dumas described them in one of his daring similes, "vanishing in the mist." That Boa Urea himself existed in historic times—in the East and in Southern Europe, but not in Britain, where historic times begin so much later—is not so pleasant to think of, except that the men were probably as wild as the beasts, at a period when, as Mr. Storer informs us, " Mount Hannus, the Car- path:ans, running through the middle of Europe, and the Hyrcinian Forest, stretching from these almost through Ger- many, and connecting them with other mountain ranges, were the formidable brute's favourite haunts ; from Scythia, Sarma- tia, and the Black Sea, to Denmark and the shores of the Northern Ocean, everywhere we find him." He lived after the fall of the Roman Empire and through the Middle Ages, although his range was greatly circumscribed, and he did not 'become finally extinct until the sixteenth century. From the animals of his race by which the Celtic ox was driven to the highlands of those regions afterwards called Scotland and Wales are descended the ancient British herds of white cattle, whether wild or domesticated, the " old nobility " of their kind, perfectly distinct from the ordinary cattle of our dairies and our markets, everywhere alike in colour (so variable and fleeting among domestic animals), of which herds a few still remain, and others are but recently extinct. Mr. Storer was of opinion that all white cattle are probably of the aboriginal breed, that .B08 Urns himself was white ; and in an interesting dissertation on the estimation in which white animals were held by the altieuts, and the modern prejudice against them, he quotes a passage from the writings of MM. Moll and Gayot, descriptive of the beautiful Hungarian ox, which might be applied, without alteration, to the famous white herds at Chillingham and Chartley :—" A certain air of nobility, a very striking aspect, are shown in the whole of its structure, and each movement displays vigour and activity. In the lofty , carriage of its head, in its proud shape, in its look, so open and full of courage, we see clearly that the Hungarian cattle de- scend from the ancient race which inhabited these plains, whose extent no eye can embrace ; that they do not only descend from, but are the continuation of it." According to Professor Wrightson, the majestic Hungarian ox, which is white, with a shading of grey on the neck, flanks, and buttocks ; the ear dark, shaded inside ; the horns long, wide-spreading, and tipped with black ; the muzzle, skin round the eye, the eye itself, and the foot all black,—is a, larger typo of the wild cattle of Chillingham Park ; and Mr. Storer holds that the Hungarian cattle, those of the vast Russian steppes, and our own wild. white forest breed, are lineal representatives of the ancient Urns, which existed in the bronze age, but of which there is no trace among the modern domestic races of western Continental Europe. It is as though we had a " remnant " of the Aztecs among us, or a selection of the dodo, or the moa, so linked are the Chillingham, Chartley, and Hamilton breeds with those lapsed ages, which
in their turn link themselves with the awful ancientness of days that saw,-- " Upcurled from light, The ever-sleeping ammonite; And the dragon-worms at play,
In the waters old and gray."
To think of those wild, white herds in the time of their strength is to have a strange vision of what England was ; for even so late as the days of King Edward the Confessor, "there abounded throughout the whole of Ciltria (the Chilterns) spacious woods, thick and large, the habitation of numerous beasts ; wolves, boars, forest bulls, and stags;" and close about London " lay an immense forest, woody ranges, hiding-places of wild beasts, of boars, and forest bulls." What of the mountain home of these noble, free creatures ? " What historian," asks Mr. Storer, " shall tell us how it fared with the wild bull hi the eleventh or twelfth century, amid the Grampians and the Cheviots P" Ill, doubtless, then; but he had had fine times of it, and the fairest of play in the preceding ages, when his range was over an expanse of hill and mountain, waste and wood, which might compare with the Hyreinian Forest itself when Omar landed in Britain. The seven hundred years of warfare which fol- lowed the withdrawal of the Romans were eminently favourable
to the flourishing of the forests and the preservation of their wild denizens. " Few people," says Mr. Storer, "realise what the huge mountain chain which Camden called the English Apennines,' was in Saxon and early Norman times," and-having eloquently described what he calls the skeleton of this rocky district, the great backbone of Northern England and Southern Scotland, which includes all the highest mountains in Britain, and with the exception of those of Wales and Devonshire, almost all the secondary ones, he proceeds thus to define the run of the wild bull :--" In ancient times, its large area was one enormous mass of mountains, deep and wild glens, forests, moors, and morasses, intermixed. Nothing we have left now can give us any idea of the state of things then ; not the moors of Derby- shire, West Yorkshire, and Lancashire, the wild wastes of Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Northumberland, nor even the extensive deer-forests and moors of the Scottish Highlands ; for the pathless woods which then covered a great part of these districts are all gone, and so are the thick forests which, outside of, but connected with them, skirted these higher grounds, We can scarcely over-estimate the wildness that everywhere pre- vailed, when an immense forest, spreading in all directions, was in Southern Scotland supposed to have filled the intervening space between Chillingham and Hamilton, a distance as the crow flies of about eighty miles, including within it Ettrick and numerous other forests ; or exaggerate the savagedom of the North, when the great Caledonian wood, known even at Rome, covered the greater part of both Highlands and Lowlands."
After the early Norman age, times became hard for the wild bull ; he had to retire before civilisation ; the forest was super- seded by the park. Princes and nobles gained the King's per- mission to enclose large ranges of the forest, with the wild creatures within them, and then all outsiders were speedily exterminated. First went the wild ox, then the roe-deer, in England ; next, the wild boar and the fallow-deer ; and lastly, with the exception of a few on Exmoor, and those in the Scot- tish deer-forests, preserved and protected by man, the red deer also. The wild boar became quite extinct in Great Britain, Of all the herds of wild white cattle in all the privileged " parks," creatures mighty and majestic, themes of many a romance and popular superstition, subjects of many a stirring tale of pride and prowess, dreaded as omens, and used as heraldic devices of many a great house, strange relics of mediaeval grandeur, there now remain but three. When Bewick wrote of them in 1790, there were five, and two had but recently ceased to exist. Tu song and legend they were to be found from the time of Guy of Warwick (in " the dayes of King Athelstan," who died A.D. 941), of whom it is told how he slew "A monstrous wild and cruel beast, Called the dun cow of Dunamore heath."
A famous incident in the " Life of Saint Robert" is his begging a cow from a certain " Earl," with the following result, awe- inspiring to the beholders ;--
'; Gave the Earl, thereon, to Robert, One fierce, wild one in the desert.
lifer he brought out, and naught was hurt,- ' She gentle as she should be."
The " dun cow " figures as a hostelry sign in innumerable in- stances, and the heraldic employment of .the " wild beast" is frequent. Mr. Storer, however, traces it erroneously in one rather remarkable instance. There is no record of wild cattle having existed in the park of Raby Castle, the great feudal re- sidence of the Nevins, and where, it is said, assembled at once seven hundred knights who held of that princely family. " We may be sure," says Mr. Storer, "that no wild animal worth keeping would be absent from their parks and chaces. A singular circumstance, too, corroborates this opinion, for the house of Nevill has borne as its crest for at least 650 years Britain's white wild bull, argent, pied sable.' In Hutchinson's Durham,' there is an engraving of a carving in stone, still existing at Ruby Castle, which represents the Nevill bull, holding a standard charged with the Nevill arms, very well executed, and apparently from blo, for the horns most strikingly resemble those of the Chillingham bulls." This is ingenious, but a mistake ; the Nevill crest has nothing to do with the supposed wild denizens of Baby Park, it was simply imported by intermarriage with an heiress. Alan Dahmer, Lord of Bulmer, Brancepeth, Middleham, had issue Bertram, his heir, who had only one daughter, his sole heir. She married Robert, Lord Nevill, of Raby Castle, from whom descended the great family of the Nevills, Earls of Westmoreland, and Barons of Raby and Brancepeth. The Bulmer crest was a white bull, with black feet.
The Chillingham herd—the connecting link between the wild cattle of England and those of Scotland—beautiful crea- tures, with black oars and muzzles ; " their horns flue, and with a bold and elegant bend," who hide their young and feed in the night, and whose calves lie in the form like hares, is foremost of the remaining three. It has had many chroniclers, and Bewick and Landseer took portraits among its members. The late Lord Tankerville observed their manners and customs attentively, no easy task, as he would sometimes, in summer, be for several weeks at a time without getting sight of them. At that season, on the slightest appearance of any one, the wild cattle retire into their forest sanctuary ; but in winter they come down for food into the inner park, and will let one come almost among them, especially if on horseback. Here is a 'pretty picture of these strange creatures, remnants of an old world, which have hitherto been 'preserved under extraordinary diffi- culties, but cannot, we should think, long continue to exist :- "When they come down into the lower part of the park, which they do at stated hours, they move like a regiment of cavalry in single file, the bulls leading the van ; and when they are in retreat, the bulls bring up the rear. Lord Ossulton was witness to a curious way in which they took possession, as it were, of some now pasture, recently laid open to them. It was in the evening, about sunset. They began by lining the front of a small wood, which seemed quite alive with them, when all of a sudden they made a dash forward all together in a line, and charging close by him across the plain, they then spread out, and after a little time, began feeding." The wild white cattle are ferocious animals, valiant fighters, capable of domestication when taken very young, but once partially or wholly grown up, quite untameable. Mr. Storer says that they hate and fear man, scent- ing him, as related by Boethius, and he adds :—" I am con- vinced that if any of them were placed in captivity, his description would be verified ; they would be ` sa impacient that, eftir thair taking, they deit for importable doloure "
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