294 WILD WHITE CATTLE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



his lordship mentions a curious fact. He says : — " I have 

 two bulls, I think the handsomest I ever remember 

 of the kind." Such is one of the singular effects of 

 long-continued in-and-in breeding when verging to its 

 close : it occasionally perfects the single animal, but 

 annihilates the race. 



The Middleton Hall Herd was, it appears to me, 

 quite an original one, though in later years, in conse- 

 quence of family relationships, intimately connected with 

 those at Whalley Abbey and at Gisburne. A schedule 

 of the pedigree of the ancient family of Assheton, 

 to which it belonged, I have already given ; and the Sir 

 Ralph Assheton, knight — whose elder son was the ances- 

 tor of the Asshetons Baronets of Middleton, and whose 

 younger son was the ancestor of the Asshetons Baronets 

 of Whalley — was (after being Page of Honour to King 

 Henry VI.), in the time of King Edward IV., Lieutenant 

 of the Tower of London, and at first Knight Marshal, 

 and afterwards Vice-Constable, of England. Their seat 

 was Middleton, which, though only about five miles north 

 of Manchester, was then in a very wild and primitive 

 country. The families of the two sons of Sir Ralph 

 Assheton re-united towards the close of the seventeenth 

 century, and in the year 1697 Sir Ralph Assheton of 

 Middleton inherited Whalley Abbey also. There must, 

 long before that, have been a herd of wild cattle in the 

 park at Middleton ; for about that time they were 

 seemingly visited by the learned Dr. Charles Leigh, 

 who, in his " Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, 

 and the Peak of Derbyshire," published at Oxford, a.d. 

 1700, thus describes them : — " In a Park near Bury in 

 Lancashire are Wild Cattel belonging to Sir Salp/t 



