Wilson — Scandinavian Origin of Hornless Cattle of British Isles. 149 



to tlie sliape of the head in these polled cattle, and, to a certain extent, 

 also, in the horned ones. If the crown of the head is fine like tliat of a 

 doe, and drawn almost to a point on tlie top, the breed is supposed to 

 be good." 



Durham. — The legend goes tliat tlie monks who were carrying St. Cuth- 

 bert's body to its last resting-place set it down and coulel not raise it again. 

 " Whereupon they fasted and prayed three Days with great Devotion, to 

 know by Revelation from God, wliat to do with the holy Body, which was 

 soon granted to them, it being revealed to Eadmer, a virtuous man, that 

 lie was to be carried to Lunholnie, where he was to be received to a Place 

 of Rest. They were again in great Distress, in not knowing where Dun- 

 holme lay ; but as they proceeded, a Woman wanting her Cow, called 

 aloud to her Companion, to know if she had seen lier ? Who answered. She 

 was in Bunholme."^ The position of Dunholme being thus revealed, 

 St. Cuthbert's body was buried there ; and a figure of the cow was " carved 

 on the north-west corner turret of the Nine Altars or eastern chapel of the 

 cathedral about the year 1300.'"' Our present interest in this cow is that 

 she was reputed to have been dun : — 



" The dun cow's milk 



Makes the prebend's wife go in silk." 



Repute, however, may not be fact, especially in connexion with an 

 animal dead so many hundred years. But if the words of tlie rhyme 

 are not evidence that the original cow was dun, they are evidence that, when 

 they came into Yogue two or three centuries ago, there were dun cattle in 

 Durham. There were both dun and yellow cattle in Durham in the 

 eigbteentli century. About 1777, Mr. Hutchinson of Smeaton " possessed 

 himself of a large yellow cow with some white." Mr. Thomas Hutchinson 

 wrote of her in 1821 : " She might have been descended (for anything I know 

 to Die contrary) from the old woman's propitious dun cow. . . . They were 

 nearly all of the same colour."^ 



And there is some presumption that the oiiginal figure of 1^00 was horn- 

 less. Having become broken and effaced, it was "restored" about 1778. The 

 restorers saw the original figure hornless ; but, believing that the horns had 



1 Quoted in Bygale's " Cathedral Church of Diiiham," 1899, from Sanderson's "Antiquities of 

 Durham." 



2 Bates's " Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns," 1897, p. 25. 

 ^ Ibid., p. 45. 



