The ram1 also, with his horns curving over his rough temples. .2 By the way the goddess is to pass, young and timid girls Veiled in simple white robes, after the Grecian custom, The sacred objects are placed upon their heads.3 Then the country people keep silence as the gorgeous procession comes. The goddess follows after her priestesses. In appearance the procession is Argive.+ .5 Helesus taught the sacred rites of Juno to his Faliscans. 1 Literally," the leader of the flock". 5 Four lines relative to Halaceus, the founder of the city. THE HORN OF ULPHUS IN YORK MINSTER. BY J. H. MACMICHAEL, ESQ. (Read at the York Congress, 1891.) AMONGST the abounding antiquities of the city of York, the treasured object known as the Horn of Ulphus may be cited as one of the most conspicuous, and one which is prolific of interest to visitors to the Cathedral both from the circumstances in which it came into the possession of the Chapter, and because of its extrinsic value as a relic of a custom in respect to the tenure of land, which is probably of the highest antiquity. The drinking-horn proper, made from the horn of the wild ox, of which the "olifant" was an ectype born of luxury, was confined, says Pliny, to the barbarous natives of the North,' and the statement is confirmed by what we know of its use by the Scandinavian, the High German, and the Saxon branches of the Teutonic race, and its discovery in the sepulchral tumuli of the Anglo-Saxons.2 1 "Urorum cornibus barbari septentrionales potant urnaque bina capitis unius cornua implevit." (Pliny, lib. xi, c. 45.) "Dans les monuments qui représentent des combats des Grecs et des Barbares, l'un de ceux-ci tient quelquefois la bucina qui est alors opposée a la longue trompette droite (2) de leurs adversaires." (Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire.) On a fragment of Samian ware (see Catalogue of the Roach Smith Museum, p. 37) Sileni are represented, one of whom is drinking out of an ox-horn, whilst he holds a wine-skin in his left hand. See also an illustration of a "four-squared marble", on one side of which, beneath an inscription (Laribus Augusti), are two young men crowned with leaves and flowers; the one holding in one hand a cup, and in the other an ox-horn; and the other also holds in one hand a horn, and in the other a basket. (Montfaucon's Antiquities Explained, vol. i, p. 203, plate xci, fig. 1.) 2 See Archaol. Journ., vol. xl, and Anglo-Saxon Department, British Museum; and a graphic illustration of the use of the drinking-horn is The importance of the horn in early times, for drinking and blowing purposes, can hardly be over-estimated. It was used as a summons for washing, preparatory to sitting down to meat,' having been superseded later, as in the monasteries, by the bell, and in other circumstances by the trumpet. It was used to call the army together among the Gaels, before the invention of the bagpipes, and, in short, for all purposes of assembly, while it survives to this day upon the mountain farms of Palestine, where it is employed to call the labourers home at mealtime. Ancient song is full of its praises; and it is cited by Mr. Thomas Wright as a curious proof of the high appreciation of the horn, that in the pictures of warlike expeditions, where two or three articles are heaped together in a kind of symbolical representation of the value of the spoils, drinking-horns are generally included. Keramos, the Greek word for pottery (whence our word "ceramic"), is supposed to be derived from keras, a horn, a supposition strengthened by the extreme probability that far beyond Pliny's ken, and even before the impress of the human foot in the plastic clay suggested the moulding of the first earthen cup,3 this most primiafforded in the Bayeux Tapestry, where Harold is departing on his expedition to William the Norman. His retinue are lingering at the feast with enormous drinking-horns in hand, whilst a messenger, who carries a smaller blowing-horn, tries to persuade them to quit the table for the boats. See also, for representation of the drenc-horn in Saxon times, MSS. Cott., Claud. B. 4, fol. 326, where two horns are depicted lying one at each end of the table. For the comparative dimensions, from tip to tip, of the horns of the extinct species of the genus Bos, formerly existing in this country, see H. Wood's Description of the Fossil Skull of an Ox, pp. 18-29. "The Britons", says Fosbrooke, “had three kinds of horns: 1, that out of which the king drank; 2, that by which he summoned his retinue; 3, the horn of his chief huntsman." (Encycl. of Antiquities.) A pair of horns, 33 in. long by 15 in circumference at the base, accompanying the remains probably of some chief buried on the spot, were discovered in an ancient British tumulus on the Wiltshire Downs. (See Henry Wood's Description, etc.) 1 "The Lady of the Fountain", vol. i of The Mabinogion, by Lady Charlotte Guest (1849), p. 51. 2 Domestic Manners and Customs, p. 32. 3 The ancient Britons also had bronze trumpets fashioned on the mould of the tusk. The reverse of a bronze coin of Cunobeline bears a centaur blowing one of these horns. By this conjecture of Jacquemart, in conjunction with the fact that the horns and tusks of animals of the neolithic period have been found tive of drinking-vessels was familiar to the grasp of prehistoric man; and we may justly claim for it that from the time when the rights of property were first conceded in organised communities, when there were no laws but those which custom or precedent dictated (for as Lord Ellesmere says, "the common laws of England are not originally leges scripta"), so long has the drinking-horn been used as an instrument of conveyance or transfer of land. However seeming a contradiction it be to speak of a "horn" and the ivory tusk of the elephant as interchangable terms, yet the ancients, owing probably to its growth, like that of the walrus, from the upper jaw,1 seem to have regarded elephant-ivory as the horn of that pachyderm. Horns of ivory were not unknown to Tyre,2 and Pliny speaks of "cornua elephanti". A horn, however, in the strict sense, the "Cornu Ulphi" cannot be called; and because it is of ivory, it should, I submit, be the more highly appreciated archæologically, since relics 3 engraved with the figures of animals, art may be said to have had its origin in the humble ox-horn, seeing that, as necessity was the mother of the mechanical arts, so the mechanical gave birth to the fine arts, and that practical art had its beginning in the facilities offered by the plastic clay for moulding objects into shape. 1 This acceptation of the word "horn" as describing the tusk of the elephant is alluded to in Oppian's Cynegeticks. The French translation of the passage by E. J. Bourquin is as follows: "En effet ces deux glaives si forts, qui sortent de leur mâchoire et qui, semblables à des défenses, s'élèvent ensuite vers le ciel c'est sans aucune raison que le vulgaire les appelle des dents terribles; il nous paraît plus convenable a nous de les appeler des cornes, et la nature même des cornes nous engage à la faire......chez un animal, toute excroissance de la mâchoire supérieure lorsqu'elle tient de la corne est dirigée vers le ciel; dirigée vers la terre c'est une dent veritable." (Book ii, pp. 182-3. 1877.) 2 Ezekiel. There is some evidence that in early historic times the Asiatic elephant ranged much further west than it now does. Rawlinson's History of Phoenicia. Sec Hist. Nat., lib. xviii, cap. 1. Further, however, Pliny says:......" armis suis, quæ Juba cornua appellat Herodotus tanto antiquior et consuetudo melius, dentes"; and it deserves notice that when elephants were first seen in Italy they were called Lucanian oxen :"Elephantos Italia primum vidit Pyrrhi regis bello et boves Lucas appellant, in Lucanio visos, anno urbis quadringentesimo septuagesimo secundo." (Lib. viii, c. 6.) Elephant occurs in Virgil's Georgies (lib. iii) as a metonomy for ivory: "In foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto Gangaridum faciam victorisque arma Quirini." 1892 17 of that beautiful substance, illustrating (as in this instance) the progress of ancient toreutic art, are of great rarity, owing to the high percentage of organic matter which ivory contains,' and which renders it, therefore, quickly susceptible to decay if left in contact with the earth. Thus of the hue of mother earth, if not crumbling to her consistency, are probably the slices of ivory that veneered the chryselephantine statues of ancient Greece, the Olympian Zeus, the Argive Hera, and the Athena of the Parthenon; for, with the exception of a few small figures, no trace of ivory statues has yet been found,3 and earth had well-nigh claimed for her own the fragments of delicately carved ivory from Nimroud, now in the British Museum, but that these treasures of the toreutic art were (thanks to Professor Owen) preserved by a process which consists in replacing the gelatinous matter, giving them the appearance and consistency of recent ivory.* Of the carved ivory diptycha and triptycha with which we have been made especially familiar by the Arundel Society in their production of " fictile" ivories, it is unnecessary to speak, except to say that at least half of the objects alluded to, and which are described in Mr. Westwood's Catalogue of Fictile Ivories, do not date before the twelfth centery, and have, moreover, probably from their portability about the person in case of emergency, never been buried in the earth. The same may be said of the horns which served a purpose similar to that of Ulphus, and which were exhibited by that Society at South Kensington. These were eight in number, and included the Clan Clephane, the Bruce, and the Queen's College, 1 According to Von Bibra's analyses from 40 to 43 per cent. The most ancient piece of carved ivory extant is probably a fragment of mammoth tusk with a mammoth engraved upon it, which was found in La Madeleine, France, and of which an illustration may be seen in Prof. Dawkins' Cave-Hunting, P: 346. 2 ......" l'Asie Mineure possédait une multitude de statues et de colosses en or et ivoire dont le souvenir s'est perdu." (Le Jupiter Olympien, Quatremère de Quincey.) 3 Winckelmann's Ancient Art. 4 It was Professor Owen who, when consulted as to the preservation of the fragments on their arrival in England, perceived that it was to the loss of the gelatine that their decay was to be attributed; they were therefore boiled in that substance, with the foregoing happy result. |