Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/521

] larger cattle represented by the breed of Chillingham were introduced by the English farmers into Britain, and probably by the Norwegians and Danes into Ireland.

The Vikings were in the habit of taking cattle on shipboard, and the Norwegian settlers in Iceland, in 874, brought their cattle along with them. Thorsin, a wealthy Icelander, founded a colony in Vinland, taking with him sixty sailors, much cattle, and implements of husbandry.

From the English Conquest down to the present day the additions to our domestic animals have been few and unimportant. The ass was known before A.D. 850, and the domestic cat was highly valued in Wales before the tenth or eleventh centuries.

The wars which followed the invasion of Britain by the English delayed, in an important degree, the destruction of the larger and fiercer wild animals that found shelter in the uncultivated lands. The wolves increased in numbers after that time, and became sufficiently formidable to be worthy of special enactments in the days of Eadgar and Edward the First. Those of Sussex devoured the bodies of the English slain on the battlefield of Senlac. They were exterminated in England about the end of the fourteenth century, in Scotland in 1680, and in Ireland in 1710. The bear has left no traces of his existence of a later date than the Roman occupation. The beaver was trapped for its fur