Page:The Evolution of British Cattle.djvu/76

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64
EVOLUTION OF BRITISH CATTLE

But these facts, although they are suggestive, do not necessarily confine the arrival of the hornless cattle to the times of the Norse invasions. That, however, can be done by other considerations. By their geographical position, wedged in, as it were, between the red Anglo-Saxon cattle and the sea, the arrival of the Suffolk breed cannot be placed earlier than the very end of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. The same might also be said about the Devon and Yorkshire polls. And the fact that archaeologists, although they have found other skulls, have failed to find hornless skulls either of Roman or Anglo-Saxon date in East Anglia or any other hornless district, points to the same conclusion.

The latest date for the arrival of the hornless cattle in Britain can also be fixed. It is somewhere before the Norman Conquest. In previous chapters of this book it was shown that there was no general migration of cattle to Britain from Anglo-Saxon times till the Dutch importations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that these were horned, not hornless cattle. It was also shown that, in earlier times at any rate, cattle migrations were coincident upon the migrations of their owners. The only two sets of men who could have brought in the hornless cattle were therefore the Norsemen and the Normans. The latter we know to have consisted entirely of the nobility and