Part 3 (1/2)
The enumeration of nearly a hundred and sixty quadrupeds and birds either indigenous to or naturalised in Ireland at so early a period, possesses, I say, a peculiar interest.
If the editor's suggestion is correct, that the _Echtach_ was a bovine animal, then we have three distinct mentions of this family in the poem,--the Wild Oxen, the Echtachs, and the Bull and White Cow. The second and third of these were probably domesticated animals; the first one expressly ”Wild.” Now at least five distinct species of Oxen are known to have inhabited Europe and the British Isles during the later periods of the Tertiary era, which have been named respectively, _Bison priscus_, _Bos primigenius_, _frontosus_ and _longifrons_, and _Ovibos moschatus_. Of these, skulls of _Bos frontosus_ and _B. longifrons_ have been dug up in some numbers in Ireland. Some of these bear, in the perforation of the forehead, evident proof of having been slaughtered _secundum artem_, and therefore of having been domesticated. But one large skull of the _longifrons_ type, now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, has a cut in the forehead, into which can be accurately fitted several of the narrow bronze ”celts,” or arrow-heads so frequently dug up in Ireland; a pretty fair proof that this animal was killed by the hunter's arrow, and was therefore wild.
No bovine animals of the true taurine race are now known to exist in an aboriginally wild state; but at the epoch of our earliest historical knowledge of central and western Europe it was far otherwise. Caesar, describing, under the name of _Urus_, certain wild oxen of the great Hercynian forest, says, ”These Uri are little inferior to elephants in size, but are bulls in their nature, colour, and figure. Great is their strength, and great their swiftness, nor do they spare man or beast when once they have caught sight of him. These, when trapped in pitfalls, the hunters unsparingly kill. The youths, exercising themselves by this sort of hunting, are hardened by the toil, and those among them who have killed most, bringing with them the horns, as testimonials, acquire great praise. But these Uri cannot be habituated to man, nor made tractable, not even when taken young. The great size of the horns, as well as the form and quality of them, differs much from those of our oxen.”
It is probable that this race extended widely over Europe, and even into Asia. Herodotus mentions Macedonian wild oxen, with exceedingly large ([Greek: hypermegathia]) horns; and Philip of Macedon killed a wild bull in Mount Orbela, which had made great havoc, and produced much terror among the inhabitants; its spoils he hung up in the Temple of Hercules.
The a.s.syrian artists delighted to sculpture on the royal bas-reliefs of Nineveh the conquest of the wild bull by the prowess of their Nimrod monarchs, and the figures, in their minute anatomical characters, well agree with the descriptions and remains of the European _Urus_. The large forest that surrounded ancient London was infested with _boves sylvestres_ among other wild beasts, and it is probable that these were _Uri_. The legendary exploit of Guy, Earl of Warwick, in freeing the neighbourhood from a terrible dun cow, whether historically true or not, shews the existence of formidable wild bovines in the heart of England, and the terror they inspired among the people. The family of Turnbull, in Scotland, are traditionally said to owe their patronymic to a hero who turned a wild bull from Robert the Bruce, when it had attacked him while hunting.
What has become of the terrible Uri which lived in Europe at the commencement of the Christian era? Advancing civilisation has rooted them out, so that no living trace of them remains, unless the cream-white breed which is preserved in a semi-wild state in some of our northern parks be their representatives; or, as is not improbable, their blood may still circulate in our domestic oxen.
Yet there is no doubt of the ident.i.ty of a species found abundantly in Britain in the Tertiary deposits, and named by Owen _Bos primigenius_, with the Urus of Caesar. This fossil bull was as certainly contemporary in this island with the elephant, and the hyena, and the baboon, and, strange to say, with the reindeer, and the musk-ox, too--thus combining a tropical, a temperate, and an arctic fauna in our limited island at the same period! What a strange climate it must have been to suit them all!
Professor Nilsson, who has paid great attention to fossil oxen, mentions a skull of this species which must have belonged to an animal more than twelve feet in length from the nape to the root of the tail, and six feet and a half in height. Again, the skull of a cow in the British Museum, figured by Professor Owen, measures thirty inches from the crown to the tips of the jaws! What a beast must this have been! Would not the slaughter of such a ”Dun Cow” as this in single combat have been an exploit worthy of a doughty earl?
That this ancient fossil bull was really contemporary with man in Scandinavia is proved by evidence which is irrespective of the question of its ident.i.ty with Caesar's Urus. For one of Professor Nilsson's specimens ”bears on its back a palpable mark of a wound from a javelin.
Several celebrated anatomists and physiologists, among whom,” he says, ”I need only mention the names of John Muller, of Berlin, and Andreas Retzius, of Stockholm, have inspected this skeleton, and are unanimous in the opinion that the hole in question upon the backbone is the consequence of a wound, which, during the life of the animal, was made by the hand of man. The animal must have been very young, probably only a calf, when it was wounded. The huntsman who cast the javelin must have stood before it. It was yet young when it died, probably not more than three or four years old.”
We may, then, a.s.sume as certain that the vast _Bos primigenius_ of Western Europe lived as a wild animal contemporaneously with man; and as almost certain (a.s.suming its ident.i.ty with the _Urus_) that it continued to be abundant as late as the Christian era.
The _Bos frontosus_ is a middling-sized bovine. ”Its remains,” says Professor Nilsson, ”are found in turf-bogs in Southern Scandinavia, and in such a state as plainly shews that they belonged to a more ancient period than that in which tame cattle existed in Sweden. This species lived in Scandinavia contemporaneously with the _Bos primigenius_, and the _Bison Europaeus_.... If ever it was tamed, and thereby in the course of time contributed to form some of the tame races of cattle, it must have been the small-horned, often hornless, breed, which is to be found in the mountains of Norway, and which has a high protuberance between the setting-on of the horns above the nape.”
This species occurs in a fossil state in some numbers in Ireland; it has also been found in England. It is by some supposed to be the origin of, or, at least, to have contributed blood to, the middling Highland races with high occiput, and small horns.
There is more certainty of the co-existence of the small _B. longifrons_ with man. Some of the evidence I have already adduced. ”Within a few years,” says a trustworthy authority, ”we have read in one of the scientific periodicals,--but have just now sought in vain for the notice,--of a quant.i.ty of bones that were dug up in some part of England, together with other remains of what seemed to be the relics of a grand feast, held probably during the Roman domination of Britain, for, if we mistake not, some Roman coins were found a.s.sociated with them. _There were skulls_ and other remains of _Bos longifrons_ quite undistinguishable in form from the antique fossil, whether wild or domesticated, which, of course, remains a question.”[55]
Professor Owen conjectures that this species may have contributed to form the present small s.h.a.ggy Highland and Welsh cattle,--the kyloes and runts; and a similar breed in the northern parts of Scania may have had a similar origin.
In the _Bison priscus_, the fossil remains of which occur in many parts of Europe, and more spa.r.s.ely in Great Britain,[56] we have an example of a n.o.ble animal, which, contemporary with all those which have been engaging our attention, survives to the present hour, but is dying out, and would have long ago been extinguished, probably, but for the fostering influence of human conservation. For the species is considered as absolutely identical with the _Bison Europaeus_ of modern zoology, the Bison or Wisent of the Germans, the Aurochs of the Prussians, the Zubr of the Poles, that formidable creature, which is maintained by the Czar in an ever-diminis.h.i.+ng herd in the vast forests of Lithuania,[57] and which, perhaps, still lingers in the fastnesses of the Caucasus. This, the largest, or at least the most ma.s.sive of all existing quadrupeds, after the great Pachyderms, roamed over Germany in some numbers as late as the era of Charlemagne. Considerably later than this it is reckoned among the German beasts of chase, for in the _Niebelungen Lied_, a poem of the twelfth century, it is said,
”Dar nach schlouch er schiere, einen wisent und einen elch, Starcher ure viere, und einen grimmen schelch.”
”After this he straightway slew a bison and an elk, Of the strong uri four, and a single fierce schelch.”[58]
It is a formidable beast, standing six feet high at the shoulders, where it is protected by a thick and profuse mane. Specimens have been known to reach a ton in weight. It manifests an invincible repugnance to the ox.
There are several other animals of note which, like the Bison, were once common inhabitants of these islands, but have long been extinct here, though more genial circ.u.mstances have preserved their existence on the continent of Europe. Of the great Cave Bear, no evidence of its period exists, that I know of, except that which may be deduced from the commixture of its remains with those of other animals of whose recent date we have proof. But there is another kind of Bear, whose relics in a fossil state are not uncommon in the Tertiary deposits, viz., the common Black Bear (_Ursus arctos_) of Europe.
This savage animal must have early succ.u.mbed to man. The ”Triads”[59]
mention bears as living here before the Kymri came. The Roman poets knew of their existence here: Martial speaks of the robber Laureolus being exposed on the cross to the fangs of the _Caledonian_ Bear; and Claudian alludes to British bears. The Emperor Claudius, on his return to Rome after the conquest of this island, exhibited, as trophies, combats of British bears in the arena. In the Penitential of Archbishop Egbert, said to have been compiled about A.D. 750, bears are mentioned as inhabiting the English forests, but they must have gradually become rare, for the chase-laws of Canute, at the beginning of the eleventh century, are silent about them. In Doomsday Book, we find incidental notice of this animal, for the city of Norwich is said to have been required to furnish a bear annually to Edward the Confessor, together with ”six dogs for the bear,”--no doubt for baiting him. This seems to have been the latest trace on record of the bear in Britain; unless the tradition may compete with it, which states that one of the Gordon family was empowered by the king of Scotland to carry three bears' heads on his banner, as a reward for his prowess in slaying a fierce bear.
In Ireland it seems to have become extinct even yet earlier. Bede says the only ravenous animals in his day were the wolf and the fox; Donatus, who died in A.D. 840, distinctly says it was not a native of the island in his time; and Geraldus Cambrensis does not enumerate it as known in the twelfth century. Neither is it included in the ransom-beasts of Cailte's collection. Yet a native Irish name for the bear--Mathghambain--occurs in an old glossary[60] in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin; and the late Wm. Thomson says that a tradition is current of its having once been an Irish animal; and it is a.s.sociated with the wolf as a native beast in the stories handed down from generation to generation to the present time.
The wolf, however, survived in both islands to a much later era. In the days of the Heptarchy it was a terrible pest; King Edgar commuted the punishment of certain offences into a requisition for a fixed number of wolves' tongues; and he converted a heavy tax on one of the Welsh princes into an annual tribute of three hundred wolves' heads. These laws continued to the time of Edward I., when the increasing scarcity of the animal doubtless caused them to fall into disuse. Mr Topham, in his Notes to Somerville's ”Chase,” says, that it was in the wolds of Yorks.h.i.+re that a price was last set on a wolf's head. The last record of their occurring in formidable numbers in England is in 1281; but for three centuries after this, the mountains and forests of Scotland harboured them; for Hollinshed reports that in 1577 the wolves were very troublesome to the flocks of that country. Nor were they entirely destroyed out of this island till about a century afterwards, when the last wolf fell in Lochaber, by the hand of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel.
In Ireland the last wolf was slain in 1710.
Thus here we are able to lay our finger on the exact dates when a large and rapacious species of animal actually became extinct so far as the British Isles are concerned. And if the species had been confined in its geographical limits, as many other species of animals are, to one group of islands, we should know the precise date of its absolute extinction.
The Beaver was once an inhabitant of British rivers. Its remains are found in Berks.h.i.+re, Cambridges.h.i.+re, Yorks.h.i.+re, and elsewhere, a.s.sociated with the other Mammalia of the fresh-water deposits and caves, but not in any abundance. No record of its actual existence, however, in these counties exists, nor anywhere else but in Wales and Scotland, whose mountain streams and rugged ravines afforded it shelter till after the Norman Conquest. It was very rare even then, and for a hundred years before; for the laws of Howel Dda, the Welsh king, who died in 948, in determining the value of peltry, fix the price of the beaver's skin at a hundred and twenty pence, when the skins of the stag, the wolf, the fox, and the otter, were worth only eightpence each, that of the white weasel or ermine at twelvepence, and that of the marten, at twenty-four pence.
The appropriate epithet of Broad-tail (Llostllyddan) was given it by the Welsh. Giraldus Cambrensis, who travelled through Wales in 1188, gives, in his Itinerary, a short account of the beaver, but states that the river Teivy in Cardigans.h.i.+re, and one other river in Scotland, were the only places in Great Britain, where it was then found. In all probability it did not long survive that century, for no subsequent notice of it as a British animal is extant. Tradition, however, still preserves the remembrance of its presence in those indelible records, names of places. ”Two or three waters in the Princ.i.p.ality,” says Pennant, ”still bear the name of _Llyn yr afangc_,--the Beaver Lake....