CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HERB. 305 



survives only in two herds which have sprung from it. 

 It had, however, while it existed, a great effect upon the 

 cattle of the district. To such an extent was this the 

 case, that when, in the memory of elderly men now 

 living, white polled cattle with black or brown muzzles 

 and ears appeared on Norwich Hill, the great local 

 cattle mart, they used to be called " Lord Suffield's 

 breed." The Rev. George Gilbert has also ascertained 

 from an independent and, he considers, " perfectly com- 

 petent" elderly witness,* a confirmation of Coleman's 

 statement with respect to the great size of the Gunton 

 cattle, and particularly of the steers, which, it is said, 

 were very high at the shoulders, and " stood up like a 

 dray-horse." The same witness also remembers "that a 

 tenant of the Gunton estate had a dairy all of these 

 white cows, and that they were rare milkers. And the 

 oxen were enormous when fat, but late in fatting, and 

 our best Norfolk graziers thought them slow feeders 

 in comparison with the Galloways." Nor was this an 

 exceptional case, for Mr. Hugh Aylmer, the well-known 

 Short-horn breeder, informs me that his father, 

 Mr. William Robert Aylmer, who took the Whinburgh 

 Park farm, three miles south of East Dereham, in 1816, 

 kept there first sixty, and, when he recollects them, in 

 1824 or 1825, twenty or thirty of such cows, "polled, 

 white with black spots, which there is very little doubt 

 were descended from the Gunton or BlickKng herd." 

 " I well remember," says Mr. Aylmer, " that the calves 



* Mr. Hylton, his father's churchwarden for forty years ; he remem- 

 bers, besides the above, at Felmingham, near Gunton, a farmer who had 

 five of these cows and a bull " from Lord Suffield's," and they were " very 

 tall, long cattle with black ears and noses, and polled." This Mr. T. W. 

 Gilbert, Mr. Gilbert's cousin, who remembers them well, completely 

 confirms. 



