By lease dated 28th April, 1533, the Abbat of St. Edmund's Bury demised to
John Wright, glazier, and John Anable, pewterer, of Bury, the manor of
Haberdon appurtenant to the office of Sacrist in that monastery, with four
acres in the Vynefeld, for twenty years, at the rent of 5l. 4s. to the
Sacrist; the tenants also to find a white bull every year of their term, as
often as it should happen that any gentlewoman, or any other woman, should,
out of devotion, visit the shrine of the glorious king and martyr of St.
Edmund, and wish to make the oblation of a white bull. (Dodsw. Coll. in
_Bibl. Bodl._, vol. lxxi. f. 72.)
If we are to understand a white bull of the ancient race of wild white
cattle, it may be inferred, I suppose, that in some forest in the vicinity
of Bury St. Edmund's they had not disappeared in the first half of the
sixteenth century. The wild cattle, probably indigenous to the great
Caledonian forest, seem to have become extinct in a wild state before the
time of Leland, excepting where preserved in certain ancient parks, as
Chillingham Park, Northumberland, Gisburne Park in Craven, &c., where they
were, and in the former at all events still are, maintained in their
original purity of breed. They were preserved on the lands of some abbeys;
for instance, by the Abbats of Whalley, Lancashire.
Whitaker (_History of Craven_, p. 34.) mentions Gisburne Park as chiefly
remarkable for a herd of wild cattle, descendants of that indigenous race
which once roamed in the great forests of Lancashire, and they are said by
some other writer to have been originally brought to Gisburne from Whalley
after the dissolution. One of the descendants of Robert de Brus, the
founder of Gainsborough Priory, is stated by Matthew Paris to have
conciliated King John with a present of white cattle. The woods of
Chillingham Castle are celebrated at this day for the breed of this
remarkable race, by which they are inhabited; and I believe there are three
or four other places in which they are preserved.
In the form and direction of the horns, these famous wild white oxen seem
to be living {2} representatives of the race whose bones are found in a
fossil state in England and some parts of the Continent in the "diluvium"
bone-caves, mixed with the bones of bears, hyenas, and other wild animals,
now the cotemporaries of the Bos Gour, or Asiatic Ox, upon mountainous
slopes of Western India. I have read that white cattle resembling the wild
cattle of Chillingham exist in Italy, and that it has been doubted whether
our British wild cattle are descendants of an aboriginal race, or were
imported by ecclesiastics from Italy. But this seems unlikely, because they
were not so easily brought over as the Pope's _bulls_ (the pun is quite
unavoidable), and were undoubtedly inhabitants of our ancient forests at a
very early period.
However, my present object is only to inquire for any other instances of
the custom of offering a white bull in honour of a Christian saint. Perhaps
some of your correspondents would elucidate this singular oblation.
I am not able to refer to Col. Hamilton Smith's work on the mythology and
ancient history of the ox, which may possibly notice this kind of offering.