Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/394

 354 Correspondence.

in either of the three kingdoms do exist ; and I think this is more than probable from the fact that a custom in connection with cattle, recorded in the Gentleman^ s Magazi?ie for February, 1791, as being common in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, and there termed " the antient ceremony of wassailing," is, I find, held to be the ceremony of Ferine Sementivse, while the wassailing bowl is the grace-cup of the Romans.

After the Roman period many references to white cattle, their value, use, and employment, must exist in Saxon and Norman chronicles and poems that are unknown to me. Such references will no doubt also be found in the early Welsh and Irish writings. Professor M 'Kenny Hughes, for instance, in his paper on white cattle published in vol. Iv. of Archaeologia relates the story of Twm Sion Catte, from which we learn that a pair of oxen were ploughing together, one was black, the other was white. Twm wanted to steal the white ox, so he drew the boy away from his charge by letting out a wired hare in front of his corgi ; and, as the dog was gaining on the hare, the boy could not resist the temptation, and followed, looking back from time to time to see that the white ox, at any rate, was safe. Twm, watching his opportunity, threw a white sheet over the black ox and drove the white ox away. I find another illustration that white cattle were a domesticated race in an Irish zoological and topographical poem as old as the ninth century, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. The poem begins :

" I then went forth to search the lands, To see if I could redeem my chief, And soon returned to noble Tara With the ransom that Cormac required."

The poem, eighty lines in length altogether, then goes on to detail the animals brought as the ransom, and where obtained. After detailing where he got foxes, otters, gulls, and ravens, the tenth line reads :

" Two wild oxen from Burren."

Now wild oxen does not mean wild white cattle, for these are specially mentioned later. The poem ends with these eight lines : —