ROMANO-CELTIC CAVES. am 



imported from the Continent, and since the English people, as distinguished from the 

 British, in common with their Scandinavian kinsmen, were herdsmen, and lived, more- 

 over, in the country between the mouths of the Rhine and Elbe, now famous for 

 its breeds of large cattle, it is impossible to shut our eyes to the full weight of the 

 argument. The cattle of Schleswig at the present day are larger than the Chillingham 

 ox, the living representative of the old breed, comparatively unaltered, but that is probably 

 due to the care taken in breeding and to the superior richness of the pastures. 1 



These two breeds, therefore, are of interest, not merely from the biological 

 point of view, but because they throw light on an obscure part of our history. 

 Their present distribution in Britain should correspond with that of the Celtic and 

 Teutonic populations. The highlands of Wales and Scotland, and till lately of Cornwall, 

 have afforded a resting place for the Celtic shorthorn and its Celtic masters, while the larger 

 herds of the Urus types have penetrated wherever the Teutonic invader has set his foot. 



The view taken by Prof. Owen, that the larger breeds were introduced by the 

 Roman coloni, and that the smaller shorthorn, along with its Celtic possessors, was then 

 driven from the British lowlands, is negatived by the fact that no such larger oxen 

 have been met with in any Roman accumulation in Great Britain, and that the Celtic 

 shorthorn was, as we have seen, the food of the Roman provincials in the lowlands. 



Romano- Celtic or Brit-Welsh Caves. 



The same group of animals which occur in the refuse-heaps around Roman 

 habitations is found also associated with traces of Roman civilisation in caves which 

 have afforded shelter to man and the wild animals from the earliest times. 

 The Victoria Cave, near Settle, in Yorkshire, explored by the Settle Cave Explora- 

 tion Committee, has afforded the same animals, associated with fragments of pottery, 



1 See 'Brit. Foss. Mammals,' p. 500, and Royal Institution Lecture, 2nd May, 1856. "The small ox 

 (Bos longifrons) is that which the aboriginal natives of Britain would be most likely to succeed in 

 taming. They possessed domestic cattle (pecora) when Csesar invaded Britain. The cattle of the 

 mountain fortresses to which the Celtic population retreated before the Romans, viz. the Welsh 'runt ' and 

 Highland ' kyloe,' most resemble in size and cranial characters the Pleistocene Bos longifrons. Prof. Owen 

 therefore regards the Bos longifrons, and not the gigantic Bos primigenius, as the source of part of our 

 domestic cattle." 



The view that the Celtic herdsmen retreated to Wales before the Roman legions is based on the 

 historical error of supposing that the Romans came into Britain as the destroyers and the uprooters of the 

 Celtic civilisation, instead of being rulers and organisers in the same way as Englishmen in India. The Celtic 

 population did not fall hack on the highlands of Wales and Scotland, but submitted to the Roman yoke, 

 and Wales was as completely a portion of the Colonia as Essex or Kent. The idea also that the " aboriginal 

 natives "of Britain tamed the Bos longifrons, or that the animal is of Pleistocene age, is unsupported by 

 any proof. See 'Quart. Geol. Journ.,' 1867; "Brit. Foss. Oxen," part 2. 



