Grease, as the fat of the boar or sow was called, was supposed to bear medicinal qualities. "And fayre put the grece whan it is take away, In the bledder of the boore my chylde I yow pray, For it is a medecine: for mony maner pyne" ("Boke of St. Albans").
which at one time was extremely common in England, was included among the beasts of the chase. It is frequently mentioned in royal grants giving liberty to enclose forest-land and licence to hunt therein.
It was probably more for its skin than for diversion that the wild cat was hunted, as its fur was much used for trimming dresses at one time.
The wild cat is believed to be now extinct, not only in England and Wales, but in a great part of the South of Scotland. A writer in the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (art. "Cat") expresses the opinion that the wild cat still exists in Wales and in the North of England, but gives no proof of its recent occurrence there.
Harvie-Brown in his "Vertebrate Fauna of Argyll" (1892) defines the limit of the range of the wild cat by a line drawn from Oban to Inverness; northward and westward of this line, he states, the animal still existed. But there is no doubt that of late years the cessation of vermin trapping in many parts of Scotland, which has caused a marked increase in the golden eagle, has had the same effect upon the wild cat.
The natural history chapter of the wild cat is taken by the Duke of York from G. de F.; did we not know this, some confusion might have arisen through the fact being mentioned that there are several kinds of wild cat, whereas only one was known to the British Isles. G. de F. says there were wild cats as large as leopards which went by the name of loups-serviers or cat wolves, both of which names he declares to be misnomers. He evidently refers to the Felis Lynx or Lynx vulgaris, which he properly classes as a "manner of wild cat," although some of the ancient writers have classed them as wolves (Pliny, Lib. viii. cap. 34).
For a long time it was a popular delusion that wolves had been entirely exterminated in England and Wales in the reign of the Saxon King Edgar (956-957), but Mr. J. E. Harting has by his researches proved beyond doubt that they existed some centuries later, and did not entirely disappear until the reign of Henry VII. (1485-1509).
This was supposed to be a preventive to the power of a mad dog's bite. It was a superstition promulgated in very early times, and seems to have been believed in until comparatively recent times. We find it repeated in one book of venery after another, French, English, and German: in England by our author, Turbervile, Markham, and others.
Pliny suggests this operation, and he quotes Columna as to the efficacy of cutting off a dog's tail when he is very young (Pliny, chap. xli.).
G. de F. and the Duke of York are careful to say that they only give the remedy for what it is worth, the latter saying: "Thereof make I no affirmation," and further on: "Notwithstanding that men call it a worm it is but a great vein that hounds have underneath their tongue" (p. 87).