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Bos primigenius in Britain: or, why do fairy cows have red ears?

Folklore, April, 2002 by Jessica Hemming

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   In the woods of Scotland, called Callender or Caldur, and in ancient time
   Calydonia ... there are bred white Oxen, maned about the neck like a Lyon,
   but in other parts like ordinary and common Oxen. This wood was once full
   of them, but now they are all slain, except in that part which is called
   Cummirnald (Topsell 1658, 42).

There is simply no way to know whether the Chillingham cattle were originally a group of feral "white Scotian bisons" or a domestic herd which reverted to wild behaviour during the course of its seven centuries in the park. Neither can we be sure if they were always white with red ears. White being recessive in cattle, at least some of the herd must have carried genes for that colour, and if the population was isolated for long enough (say, seven hundred years in a walled park), the recessive trait could well have become prevalent by a process known as genetic drift (Albarella, pers. comm.). There was presumably also a red gene in the mix which gave the red ears; this presents no great difficulty, as red seems to have been common in aurochsen and perhaps Iron Age domestic stock. It also persists most famously among that other northern breed, the Highland.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

This is one reasonable scenario for the origins of the Chillingham herd (which will no doubt continue to be the subject of much debate for years to come). But how does it help resolve the issue of why red-eared white cattle are special and Otherworldly in medieval literature? The fact that, even with centuries of inbreeding behind them, the Chillingham cows continued to throw the occasional black-eared calf until the eighteenth century suggests that maintaining the red-eared white pattern required vigorous artificial selection. Also, simply preserving whiteness involves selective breeding or strict isolation to make sure that no coloured animals contaminate the genetic pool. Even in the White Park cattle (which are a carefully managed rare breed), black or brown calves still occasionally turn up. In other words, in the eighth or tenth or thirteenth centuries, it would have been at least as difficult to maintain a sizeable stock of red-eared white cattle as it was in the early modern period. So we can immediately see that animals of this type are special by virtue of their unusual appearance and the effort needed to keep the breed pure and numerous. I have already mentioned why a white coat might have been a desirable characteristic. Its possible connection to sacredness, magic, or purity suggests that white cattle might have been bred by religious communities. It has been suggested by some that they were the Druids' sacrificial animals (see, for example, Storer 1879, 109-10; Whitlock 1977, 31). However, unless someone finds a red-eared white carcass bearing the marks of sacrifice, preserved in a bog, this suggestion can probably never be substantiated. Moving into the Christian period, it is certainly possible that herds of this colour were the property of monasteries, although Anthony Dent, who posits this, also suggests that the white colour originated in the capture of white "sports" from dark herds of aurochsen (Dent 1974, 31). This brings us right back to the argument that the red-eared white cattle are special because they are more closely related to aurochsen than are other modern breeds, but I think we have already laid that theory to rest.

Bos primigenius in Britain: or, why do fairy cows have red ears?

Folklore, April, 2002 by Jessica Hemming

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