Feral Bull

Owned by no one, its horns unmatched and its hide in ruins, this bull comes out of an empty steading at herd, horse and cart upon the drove. To the drover courts it was a straying case, and there was no owner to be fined.

Barrow Combe is where the drovers tell it, the court there sitting under the sky where four roads meet. Down the southern drove a herd passes an empty steading, such as the Wold has many of, their ground swallowed by an estate in some hard winter and their houses left standing. From the yard a bull comes out. No market ever saw a beast so heavy; one horn sweeps up, the other down, and its flank is broken open; it strikes the herd side-on. Two head fall dead, a third is gored, and at none of them does it pause. On it goes to the drover’s horse, then to the cart, for which it can have had no use whatever. Coming up the day after, the road officer sent the following herd back by his own authority, which is the purpose of the brass rod he carries, and word went from him to the bailiff of the roads.

Encroachment, water, straying and the state of the standings are the matters a drover court hears, and having no other head for the bull, they heard it as straying. Straying onto the drove makes a beast its owner’s responsibility and its owner’s fine. Nobody claimed it. The steward of the estate that owns its steading will tell you the beast stands on no stock account of his, and he says true: there is not an account in the county that carries it. Accordingly the court dealt with it as with anything it has no means to fine, entering it on the roll and passing word to the road officers. Elsewhere the county gives its usual answers: marred, write the vestry clergy; a strain, writes the Collegium. Turned is the drovers’ word, and before a road officer they add little to it, knowing a herd turned back may cost a man the season.

Cost is the county’s quarrel here, as it is everywhere. Should one steading close a drove, the drove’s traffic will go elsewhere, and already four of the eleven carry only local movement. In the roll, written in more than one hand, stands the courts’ most ancient line: a road not kept will not remain a road. Where and when the bull has been sighted is known to Marget Sperrin, bailiff of the roads, and sooner than lose the southern drove the drovers would hire a company from their own levy. The estates would have it be another’s concern, as in law it is. Forty-one holdings appear in Ashwell’s rental on ground which carries nine today; and each morning now the drovers ask what old steadings the herd must pass, and whether any still has someone living there.

As witnesses describe it

Mud flies and fencing splinters as a huge dark bull charges across the yard of a ruined farm; behind it are a roofless stone house and an old cart, beyond them pinewoods in mist. One horn sweeps up and backward and the other curls down, a mismatched pair. The hide gapes in raw patches; the eyes are red, and the mouth slack and open.