280 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



Gisburne Park, where their descendants still remain." 

 In this respect Bewick and Whitaker both agree that 

 these wild cattle, intermediately between the time when 

 they were the unreclaimed denizens of the forest and 

 the date of their transference to Gisburne, inhabited the 

 Lord Abbot's Park at Whalley Abbey.* Nor must it 

 be supposed that Dr. Whitaker merely follows Bewick ; 

 for his son, the Pev. R. N. Whitaker, Yicar of Whalley, 

 says, " that the tradition in Whalley, which he remem- 

 bers to have heard the old people tell, was that the 

 Abbots of Whalley used to have these cattle in the 

 Lord's Park." 



The Cistercian Abbey, formerly dignified by the 

 name of " Locus Benedictus de Whalley," was of great 

 antiquity ; and it is a curious circumstance that in Saxon 

 and early Norman times its head, whose title was then 

 " Dean," was a married man and a temporal lord. In 

 later times its domains were extensive, and the power of 

 its mitred abbot great. So early as the year 1320, 

 when Adam, Abbot of Cumbermere, Visitor of the 

 Cistercian Order, took account of its property, it had 

 eight hundred head of cattle, and it possessed, con- 

 tiguous to the Abbey itself, a large park, called " the 

 Lord's Park." This, we may be sure, was for the purpose 

 of recreation and hunting : for that was in those days 

 the special object for which such parks were made ; and 

 nothing is more probable than that it contained wild 

 cattle, as many other parks then did. The only cir- 

 cumstances which may seem to militate against this 



* Dr. Whitaker, in a note, alludes to, and seems to attach some weight 

 to, a tradition in the family that these cattle were brought after the dis- 

 solution from Gisborough Priory, in Cleveland. The distance renders this 

 improbable ; it is supported by no evidence ; and it seems impossible, for 

 Gisburne was not, it appears, imparked till long after. 



