Four hundred years ago, the herd at Hoghton had the honour of giving rise to the naming of a cut of beef that has become part of the language. In early August 1617, King James I found himself travelling south through Lancashire. He had a habit of descending upon his richer subjects and expecting liberal hospitality for his entourage. He lit upon Sir Richard Hoghton at Hoghton Tower, near Preston, who slaughtered for the occasion a beast from the herd of White Park cattle enclosed in his park. At the banquet James declared: ‘Finer beef nae man ever put his teeth into. What joint do ye ca’ it, Sir Richard?’
‘Sire, it is a loin of beef,’ replied his host.
‘A loin! By my faith, that is not a title honourable enough for a joint sae worthy. It wants a dignity, and it shall hae it. Henceforth it shall be Sir-Loin, an’ see ye ca’ it sae.’
And of course we have ever after obeyed the king’s injunction.
It is almost certain that the cattle enclosed in these parks were the same kind of white cattle that had been common across the west and north of England, Ireland and Wales for many centuries and are Britain’s oldest native breed. The 330-acre park round Chillingham Castle in Northumberland is one of the few of these gentleman’s parks that has survived. Its herd of white cattle with red ears are examples of the ancient British white cattle, with the added distinction of being, to a large extent, semi-wild because they have been mostly left to their own devices for a long time, though there has always been a steward or warden to keep an eye on them and feed them hay in winter if the snow is too deep to forage. The herd was reduced to eight cows and five bulls during the awful winter of 1947, and until 2001 its size was limited by having to share the grazing with a flock of sheep. When these were removed, the herd increased rapidly from about 40 to over 100 animals. It remains to be seen whether the grazing will be adequate to sustain such a large herd.
According to records kept between 1862 and 1899 on the suggestion of Charles Darwin, it was the practice to castrate 40 per cent of the bull calves and shoot about 12 per cent of the cows for meat – presumably the poorer bulls and the barren cows – and occasionally one would be put out of its misery if injured or ill. Until recent times they might also hunt a bull or two, if the herd was getting too big for its grazing and some culling was deemed necessary. Word would be passed around locally and people would turn up on the appointed day, on horseback or foot, in a state of great excitement. The animal to be culled would be ridden off from the rest of the herd and then shot by a marksman. In 1872, Edward, Prince of Wales, was staying at Chillingham, recuperating from typhus and, for ‘a bit of sport’, was allowed to shoot the dominant ‘king bull’. Concealed in a hay cart, he killed it from a distance of 70 yards with one shot. The head was then mounted for display at Sandringham. It somehow made its way into the lounge bar of The Bull (also known as The Chillingham Arms) in Jarrow, but has not been seen since the pub was demolished in 2005.
The Grey and Bennet families have owned Chillingham since the late thirteenth century, and have been proud and protective custodians of their cattle, which is one reason why, almost alone as a herd of white cattle, they have survived into modern times. Another reason is the remoteness of their domain. Over the last two or three centuries the herd has caught the imagination of many influential people, who have seen in it a reflection of their own particular preoccupations. Darwin used it to support his theories of natural selection, believing that the cattle were the direct descendants of the aurochs, the ‘Gigantis primogenis race … which was described by Caesar in the forests of Germany’. Others responded to the romantic call of the noble savagery of ancient wild cattle apparently untouched by human influence since beyond the memory of history. An early enthusiast was Marmaduke Tunstall from Yorkshire, whose own family had lost a herd of similar white cattle to rinderpest. He explained to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, in 1790 that the herd were ‘Ancient Britons’, aboriginal, dignified and ‘noble’, ‘once the unlimited rangers of the great Caledonian and British forests’ and retained ‘much of their native fierceness’.
Thomas Bewick was inspired by a commission from Tunstall in 1789 to produce an engraving on wood, The Wild Bull, which he is said to have regarded as his masterpiece. Bewick became friendly with John Bailey, the Chillingham steward, and came several times to sketch the cattle. In their bucolic grandeur, apparent freedom and indomitability, he saw a symbol of a pastoral England fast being destroyed by industrialization and the flight to the towns.
Sir Edwin Landseer’s magnificent painting, Wild Cattle of Chillingham, did much to bring the herd to public attention in the 1830s and touched the romantic imagination of an early Victorian Britain that saw the primeval freedom and purity of the cattle as a counterpoint to their own increasingly prosaic and utilitarian lives. The painting also represents the ideal family, a combination of the masculine readiness to fight to protect the nurturing mother and both parents caring for their vulnerable calf, which is symbolically placed in the foreground of the painting.
Wild white cattle stimulated the romantic interest of Sir Walter Scott, who wrote about them in his poem ‘Cadyow Castle’, published in 1802.
Mightiest of all the beasts of chase
That roam in woody Caledon
Crashing the forest of his race,
The mountain bull comes thundering on
Fierce, on the hunter’s quiver’d band,
He rolls his eyes of swarthy glow,
Spurns, with black hoof and horn, the sand,
And tosses high his mane of snow.
He is referring to a similar herd of white cattle in Cadzow Park belonging to the Duke of Hamilton and also established in the fourteenth century, about the same time as Chillingham. The herd was moved to the duke’s seat in East Lothian in the 1960s. Scott also had the Master of Ravenswood save Lucy from a wild white bull in The Bride of Lammermoor, where he does mention the white cattle of Chillingham, ‘descendants of the savage herds which anciently roamed free in the Caledonian forests …’
But as good as the tale is, and as much as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantics would have liked to believe that these white cattle were the direct descendants of the aurochs, it is simply not the case. Every breed of domestic cattle is of the same species, Bos taurus. Modern DNA analysis has been unable to make any connection between genetic material from the remains of what are believed to have been aurochs found in Britain, and the Chillingham cattle (or any other British breed of cattle, white or otherwise). But this does not dampen people’s fascination with these beasts, or diminish their admiration for their supposed ancient origins.
In one sense, white cattle are an ancient type, not as the offspring of wild animals, but as the descendants of domestic cattle that have been in Britain for a very long time – probably longer than any other. We do not know how long or where they came from, but this has not prevented various theories (fanciful or otherwise) from being promoted about their provenance. One common one is that they came with the Romans; another that they were kept by the druids for ritual sacrifice, and when Christianity supplanted druidism, they were released into the wildwood and became feral. There may be some truth in the second theory, but it is likely that white cattle very much pre-date the Roman invasion.
Pliny writes about a druidic sacrifice of two white bulls in AD 43, fully a decade before Caesar’s legions invaded. Numerous other literary sources refer to white cattle with coloured ears (black or red) at least two millennia ago throughout northern and western Britain, particularly Ireland and Wales. The cattle mentioned in the Irish epic, The Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúailnge) are white with red ears. There are also accounts of white cattle in Kilkenny in the early eighteenth century. This could mean either that they were ubiquitous, or they merited mention because they had a special or mystical significance and were reserved for ceremony or ritual. There are also clues in certain place names: for example, Inishbofin, off the coast of Connemara, means ‘the island of the white cow’.
Of course, naming an island after a white cow could mean that white cattle were unusual, rather than common.
There are similar references to white cattle in Wales. Rhodri Mawr, a Welsh king, who built Dynevor Castle as a defence against the Vikings, is recorded as keeping white cattle in AD 856. His grandson, Hywel Dda, formulated laws under which fines for certain offences were paid in cattle to the lords of Dynevor Castle, the administrative and military capital of Wales from about AD 800. Nine generations later, Rhys ap Gruffydd, who ruled the kingdom of Deheubarth in South Wales, and who died in 1197, was keeping colour-pointed white cattle. In the Holinshed Chronicle entry for 1211, the wife of the Norman baron William de Breos (Brecon), in an unsuccessful effort to appease King John, sent a gift of ‘four hundred kine and one bull, of colour all white, the ears excepted, which were red’.
The nearest modern relatives of these ancient white British cattle (represented by the Chillingham and Cadzow herds) are the horned White Park, the polled British White and another closely similar horned type, the Vaynol, of which there are only three herds in Britain. They all have the same distinctive points (although black, not red) on the ears, nose, eye rims, feet, teats and tips of their long horns. The Chartley herd of White Park cattle, now kept at Ditchingham, in Norfolk, has been in the Shirley family since 1248 (although it was dispersed in 1905 and then re-formed in 1970). The head of a Chartley White Park bull was adopted as the emblem of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. All the White Park cattle are of the same lineage as the Chillingham cattle, but the latter have been kept as a closed herd, isolated and semi-feral, whereas the White Park herds have all exchanged stock and introduced blood from other breeds at various times and are more or less docile. As a result, the Chillingham cattle are recognized as a separate breed in their own right, which is technically correct, because they are the only one of the three to have red points, particularly the ears.
As with many of the older breeds, the White Park are exceptionally thrifty and indiscriminate grazers of all kinds of vegetation, which makes them ideal ‘conservation’ grazers. This is a new way to describe old knowledge that any farmer would have imbibed almost with his mother’s milk. Grazing a sward with old breeds of cattle improves its quality and productivity and makes its stems tiller out to cover the soil, because the cattle do not favour one type of grass or plant over another and therefore none of the sward grows to seed and, in theory at least, it all remains young.
One great disadvantage of enclosing a herd is the effect of continual inbreeding. The Chillingham cattle have been isolated in their park for longer than any other British park cattle. Classical genetics would tell us that harmful recessive genes would manifest themselves quite quickly and after only a few generations would kill off the population. Why this has not happened with these cattle is unclear. One theory is that 5 per cent of animals in a closed herd will survive inbreeding and the recessive genes will have been ‘purged’ from the population. This has probably happened at Chillingham, although they have retained (along with other White Park cattle) a relatively harmless congenital dental defect that causes some of their molars to be misaligned. There will also have been a loss of some beneficial characteristics: for example, the cattle are smaller than their White Park relatives, which has probably occurred because it helps them to survive hard times; and there could have been a loss of bull fertility, but that is just speculation.
One thing that concerns their keepers is that although the herd is tough enough to survive harsh weather and starvation rations, they may not have resistance to infectious diseases because of their isolation. That, and fear of having to slaughter the herd if foot and mouth broke out nearby, persuaded the trustees who now own the cattle and the park to establish a reserve herd in the north-east of Scotland in 1970. And during the Second World War, the threat of invasion persuaded Winston Churchill to send some of the herd to Canada for safe keeping.
It seems from the available sources that in Celtic folklore and culture white cattle with red ears were special, ‘fairy cattle’, owned and controlled by the inhabitants of the other, unseen world. One of the most, if not the most important of the early Irish epics is Táin Bó Cúailnge. In this, two great bulls, Donn Cúailnge (the Brown or Dun Bull of Ulster) and Finnbennach (the White-horned Bull of Connaught) represent the fortunes of their respective provinces. Their conflict runs through the narrative, climaxing with the vanquishing of Finnbennach by Donn Cúailnge. They are of supernatural, probably divine origin, as are the bulls that appear in Celtic oral tradition in Ireland, Scottish, Manx and Galician folklore.
White cattle with red ears belonged to the Sidhe, the elemental powers from an alternative dimension – fairies, as they’re commonly described – who kept herds of them, usually under a lake or beneath the sea, where they grazed on seaweed. Occasionally one of these fairy cattle would appear on the shore as a gift for a human farmer, and if he treated it with respect and gratitude it would give him boundless milk. Scottish legends have these fairy cattle left as gifts, and they can be identified by their red ears. In Ireland, a sacred white heifer would appear somewhere every May Day to bring luck to a certain farmer. On occasion, the fairies would insert an enchanted cow into a mortal herd, and if the farmer was not vigilant in preventing his cattle from following it, it would lure them into the Otherworld through a fairy mound or knoll and they would never be seen again. It is said that harming a white cow with red ears will result in the Sidhe avenging their beast with the death of the malefactor. According to another old belief, if a man should give a cow to the poor, at his death the spirit of the animal will come to guide him to Paradise. White cattle were a particularly powerful symbol of purity, and their milk even more so. It was credited with healing properties for wounds suffered in battle and as an antidote to poison. Its efficacy was enhanced because the cattle came from the Sidhe.
A Donegal story tells of a family with ten children who were starving. One dreadful stormy evening there came a lowing outside the door, and standing there was a white cow with red ears. The father let her into his byre, and next day she gave birth to a fine heifer calf and started to produce copious amounts of milk. They asked around to find if anybody had lost a cow, and when nobody claimed her, the family kept her. Over the years, she gave birth to more calves and continued to give abundant milk that fed the family. One day the father found her grazing and trampling a field of oats, and forgetting the good fortune she had brought, chased her off with his stick. She gathered up her little herd and disappeared and was never seen again.
There is an ancient and powerful human taboo against eating carrion. But only in Ireland could it be turned into a supernatural story concerning the Sidhe. When a cow died suddenly, the owner would not touch its meat, or any part of the beast, but would organize a burial party to inter it as quickly as possible, crossing themselves as they walked away from the hastily dug grave. Its sudden death could only be explained by the real cow having been stolen away by the Sidhe into the next world, leaving behind the appearance of a cow that had pined away and died because its substance had been stolen. The real cow had been transmuted by a glamour, a spell, and the owner saw only a dead cow rather than what was really there: a horrible corpse from the Otherworld that was almost too dangerous to touch, never mind eat.
Another sort of carrion that must never be touched or eaten is calamity meat. This is the flesh of a beast that has died unexpectedly from some unexplained cause – maybe an accident. In reality the animal has been stolen by the Sidhe and taken to add to their herds in the Otherworld. The remaining carcase is not actually a cow, but a piece of alder wood magically fashioned to look like one. This must never be eaten because it is enchanted and will do harm.
Many of these cautionary tales have survived into modern times in Ireland. They run too deep in the culture to be eradicated by a few decades of scientific rationalism. One modern story concerns a young woman who kept a few sheep for their wool, which she spun into yarn. When one died unexpected
ly (as sheep are wont to do), she told her old wise-woman neighbour that she was going to shear the dead sheep before she buried it. The neighbour was horrified and warned her against it in strong terms. She must bury the carcase, fleece and all: nobody would ever wear a garment made from such wool because it would be enchanted and harm the wearer.
We might be surprised to learn that the most valuable thing we can get from cattle is neither milk, nor meat, nor motive power, but the calcified bolus of hair from one of their stomachs. Bezoar stones, sometimes found in the reticulum (second stomach) of a ruminant, can still be worth ten times their weight in gold. The common-law rule of caveat emptor (‘let the buyer beware’) that had endured for many centuries was confirmed in a case concerning a bezoar. In 1603, one Lopus paid £100 to Chandelor, a goldsmith, for what Chandelor claimed was a bezoar. It turned out not to be a bezoar, and Lopus sued for the return of his money. He won in the lower court but lost on appeal because although Chandelor knew the object was not a bezoar, he didn’t guarantee it to be one; he merely asserted that it was: ‘The bare affirmation that it was a bezar-stone, without warranting it to be so, is no cause of action: and although [the defendant] knew it to be no bezar-stone, it is not material; for everyone in selling his wares will affirm that his wares are good, or the horse which he sells is sound; yet if he does not warrant them to be so, it is no cause of action, and the warranty ought to be made at the same time of the sale.’ Lopus lost his £100 (more than £30,000 in today’s money) because he ought to have looked out for himself.
But why did Lopus pay ten times its weight in gold for what he believed to be a calcified bolus from the reticulum of a ruminant? The commonest source of bezoars was the intestines of wild goats from Persia; hence their name, derived from the Persian padzhar – pad, meaning ‘protector’, and zhar, meaning ‘poison’, thus ‘counter-poison’ or antidote. It had been believed from ancient times that a bezoar was a universal antidote to any poison and simply immersing one in a drinking glass would neutralize poison drunk from it. The Andalusian Muslim physician Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr, d. 1161) records the widespread medical use of bezoars as a panacea in the twelfth-century Arabic book of magic and astrology Picatrix, which contains extensive references to their efficacy. The Crusaders brought them to Europe from the Middle East in the eleventh century.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 31