propitious dun cow found at Durham (some time back now), which directed the monks attending the remains of St. Cuthbert to that seat of ease and magnificence."[1]
This legendary cow is of unusual interest. Her reward was to have her effigy carved in stone set up in one of the turrets of Durham Cathedral about the year 1300. After the Reformation she was the subject of the rhyme that—
"The dun cow's milk
Makes the prebend's wife go in silk,"
which if it be not sufficient to prove that the original cow herself was dun, is evidence that some of her post- Reformation successors were of that colour. That, however, is of small moment compared with the possibility that the model of the effigy may have been hornless. Having become worn and effaced, a new effigy was put up about 1778. The original, as will be seen from the illustration below, which is a copy of Grimm's drawing as taken from Hutchinson's "History of Durham,"[2] had no horns. But the Durham people of 1778 had no idea that a Durham cow could ever have been hornless. Weather and time must have made the old cow polled, and the new one therefore was carved to look a Shorthorn!
- ↑ Quoted in Bates's "Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns," 1897, p. 45.
- ↑ 1785-1794, vol. ii. p. 226.
