44 WILD WHITE CATTLE 



a matter of time and skill. There were two black calves 

 dropped in 1904, and black-and-white, dun, and deep rich 

 sable (but never red or brown) coloured calves often 

 appeared before crossing was introduced. For some time 

 before 1880 the average was three dark calves a year. The 

 six heifer calves selected for keeping in 1903 were all well 

 marked. They were the most typical lot seen since crossing 

 had begun. Only one had Vaynol blood. Storer, after a 

 careful study of the whole question of breeding, had excellent 

 grounds for making the assertion, that " no wild herd, if 

 imprisoned in a park, and interbred for several hundred years 

 without a cross, could be in existence now." 



In Chartley Park, near Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, there 

 existed a wild breed, dating back for six and a half centuries 

 to 1248-9, which till its sale in 1905 belonged to the Lords 

 Ferrers. The herd numbered forty-one in 1852, and forty- 

 three in 1893-5, although, before Storer wrote, reputed rarely 

 to number thirty. 



Under a charter of Henry III. permission was given to 

 enclose a number of the wild white cattle (" Wild Beasts," as 

 they have been called for 250 years) from the Royal Forest of 

 Needwood in " the mighty large park " of over 900 acres an 

 elevated but broken tableland in a state of nature. 1 Much of 

 it is wild waste, poor, light, sandy and shingly, as well as 

 heavy clay and moory soil, growing bent and coarse grasses, 

 bracken, and straggling Scotch firs, birch, and ancestral oak 

 trees the last, like the aged oaks at Cadzow, falling into decay. 



The cattle have strong deep voices, and in form and 

 general appearance they strongly resemble the Castle Martin 

 variety of the black Welsh breed. The colour of skin and 

 hair, including the udder and the brush or extremity, as well 

 as the rest of the tail, is white. The upper side of the tongue 

 and the teats are black, and so are the points corresponding to 

 the points of the Hamilton cattle, but not quite so extended. 



1 The Standard, 5th April 1905, says : "The enclosure of the cattle is 

 believed to have taken place as the result of the passing of the Charta 

 Forestae (1225), which enacted that all lands afforested by Henry II., 

 Richard I., and John, except the demesnes of the Crown, should be dis- 

 afforested and freed from the various laws, so as to remit to former owners 

 their rights." 



