r REBMRENGH. LOW EE DEOxS 
whose food consisted of milk, cheese and flesh. This 
inference is drawn from the curious fact that the remains 
of calves are particularly abundant ; it is supposed that 
the calves were at least killed if not eaten, the killing off 
of the calves being a necessity to prevent their suckling 
too long. Beef is suggested from the finding of the 
skull of an urus transfixed by a Neolithic flint weapon. 
In later periods than the Neolithic, these fine cattle 
“tossed high their manes of snow” over the whole 
country, and approached even the gates of London 
so lately as the year 1174. Their occurrence as wild 
animals even in the later days of medieval times is 
testified to by references in literature. Thus James 
the First of Scotland in The Kingis Quhair writes of 
“The bugill drawar by his hornis grete,” by which, 
however, he may mean a domestic ox : less doubtful is 
the line of Dunbar in The Thrissill and the Rots, who 
makes dame Nature order the wild ox thus— 
And lat no bowgle, with his busteous hornis, 
The meik pluch-ox oppress, for all his pryde, 
Bot in the yok go peciable him besyd. 
The contrasting of the Bowgle (from Latin Buculus) 
with the meek plough ox is clearly suggestive of a 
wild form at most imperfectly domesticated. It has 
-been pointed out that wild traits survive in the oxen 
of Chillingham and elsewhere. 
That the bulls are fierce and that it is unwise to go 
too near them is not. of course an argument in this 
direction, though it is a fact. We know well enough 
that the most flagrantly domestic bull of the common 
farmyard is not the beast to tackle from the wrong 
side of the gate. A feature born of wildness is the 
way of feeding of the Chillmgham cattle. They do 
not browse openly like an ox of the pasture, but feed 
as it were by stealth and at night or in the evening. 
Then, too, the cows when they calve propagate in the 
AG 
