Race, Breed, and Myths of Origin: Chillingham Cattle as Ancient Britons

Abstract

BEGINNING IN THE SECOND HALF of the eighteenth century, British public attention was intermittently captivated by a small but distinguished group of cattle. These striking animals were white (a color not usually favored by British stockbreeders); they were powerfully built; and they roamed the parks of their wealthy proprietors untroubled by the restraints that conditioned the existence of ordinary domestic beasts. At the time when widespread celebration of the breeding methods associated with Robert Bakewell emphasized the vulnerability of livestock animals to human manipulation, these cattle gloried in their wildness.! The most famous of them lived at Chillingham, the remote Northumberland seat of the earls of Tankerville, and other herds, the number of which fluctuated constantly, were scattered across northern England and southern Scotland. Many of these herds were founded during the nineteenth century by landowners who admired the animals. So compelling was their appeal that proprietors who could not afford such a substantial investment in fancy livestock nevertheless occasionally commissioned portraits of their estates adorned by white cattle that, as far as can be determined from any corroborating historical records, never lived there.2 Imposing though it was, the physical presence of these animals accounted only in part for their appeal to the British imagination. Their figuration in a variety of discourses-from elite cultural productions to the technical literature of agriculture and natural history to mass-market journalism-suggested that they also carried a serious symbolic charge for a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences. That they were, without question, magnificent animals did not sufficiently explain their charisma. Eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain was well supplied with animals who might, from one perspective or another, claim magnificence (caged lions, mountainous swine, sheep with eight legs); most of them were lucky to attract attention as simple curiosities. The qualities embodied by (or associated with) certain animals, however, linked them metaphorically or metonymically with issues of great or contentious concern in the human arena. Such connections were powerful, whether or not they were explicit or even manifest to those who made them. The interpretive process that they