Bos primigenius in Britain: or, why do fairy cows have red ears?

Folklore, April, 2002 by Jessica Hemming

The third problematic issue is the colour of the Chillingham cattle. The Countess's leaflet states, "They invariably breed true to type and have never been known to throw a coloured, or even partly coloured, calf." That the cows did occasionally produce calves with black, rather than red, ears in former times is suggested by the steward's account of 1692 and further supported by the engraver Thomas Bewick's remark in 1790 that "about twenty years since, there were a few, at Chillingham, with BLACK EARS [sic], but the present park-keeper destroyed them; since which period there has not been one with black ears" (Bewick 1970, 39) (see Figure 1). In other words, the colour may be as much the result of selective breeding as of ancient purity. If anything, the whiteness is an indication of not being aurochsen, as the northern European strain of aurochs (as far as one can tell from cave paintings) may have had black bulls (sometimes with a white dorsal stripe or pale saddle) and red cows and calves (Clutton-Brock 1987, 64). There is some evidence from remains preserved in bogs that the small oxen of the Iron Age may have been reddish. One zoological study also notes that "Coloured domestic herds frequently produce white calves with reddish-brown ears" and that the Chillingham herd may have "originated in the white calves dropped by a coloured domestic herd" (Bilton 1957, 147).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Relevance of the Chillingham Herd to Irish Fairy Cattle

What, then, do we know about the real history of the Chillingham herd and what can it tell us about the fairy cattle of Celtic literature? I think we can safely dismiss the many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century arguments that the cattle are direct, never-domesticated, descendants of British aurochsen. As they do not seem to have been brought in by the Romans, they are either of "Celtic shorthorn" or of Anglo-Saxon imported stock, or a mixture of both. They could have become feral at any point during the Middle Ages and there are certainly medieval accounts of wild forest cattle. The earliest is in Cnut's Forest Laws, where the king refers to "bubali" and "vaccae." [9] Properly speaking, these are "buffalo" and "cows," but as there have never been any buffalo in Britain, "bubali" must refer to some kind of cattle. It may simply mean "wild bulls," as opposed to wild cows, or it has been suggested that "bubali" were beef-type cattle, while "vaccae" were dairy cows (Dent 1974, 30). This suggestion clearly implies that the animals were feral, or even simply free-roaming domesticated herds, rather than genuinely wild. As turning domestic stock loose in the woods to forage for themselves was common in the Middle Ages (rather like the pasturing of ponies in the New Forest today), there would have been ample opportunity for feral herds to form. Neither Cnut's law nor the twelfth-century references to "tauri sylvestri" (Storer 1879, 56-60) clarifies the matter, That some of these bulls became quite ferocious and were regarded as wild is clear from some of the somewhat later accounts. The "Ballad of Sir Guy of Warwick" (written in 1591) features a tremendous struggle with such a creature, while Edward Topsell's 1658 History of Four-Footed Beasts gives an elaborate description of the "White Scotian Bison," which sounds much like a Chillingham-type animal (see Figure 2). He says: