[953] A decree of the Council of Vienne (1311) complains that many church ministers come into choir “bringing hawks with them or causing them to be brought and leading hunting dogs.” Coulton, Med. Garn. p. 588. Similarly Geiler on the eve of the Reformation complains, in his Navicula Fatuorum, that “some men, when they are about to enter a church, equip themselves like hunters, bearing hawks and bells on their wrists and followed by a pack of baying hounds, that trouble God’s service. Here the bells jangle, there the barking of dogs echoes in our ears, to the hindrance of preachers and hearers.” He goes on to say that the habit is particularly reprehensible in clergy. The privilege of behaving thus was an adjunct of noble birth and in the cathedrals of Auxerre and Nevers the treasurers had the legal right of coming to service with hawk on wrist, because these canonries were hereditary in noble families. Ib. pp. 684-5. Medieval writers on hawking actually advise that hawks should be taken into church to accustom them to crowds. “Mais en cest endroit d’espreveterie, le convient plus que devant tenir sur le poing et le porter aux plais et entre les gens aux églises et ès autres assamblées, et emmy les rues, et le tenir jour et nuit le plus continuelment que l’en pourra, et aucune fois le perchier emmi les rues pour veoir gens, chevaulx, charettes, chiens, et toutes choses congnoistre.” Gaces de la Bugne gives the same advice. Le Ménagier de Paris (Paris, 1846), II, p. 296.
[955] V.C.H. Yorks. III, pp. 168, 175.
[956] New Coll. MS. ff. 88-88d, translated in Coulton, Soc. Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, p. 397.
[957] Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. IX, app. pt. I, p. 57.
[958] Jessopp, Visit. of Dioc. of Norwich, p. 191.
[959] Chaucer’s description of the monk is well known:
Therfore he was a pricasour aright;
Grehoundes he hadde, as swifte as fowel in flight;
Of priking and of hunting for the hare
Was al his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.
Compare Langland’s picture of the monk, riding out on his palfrey from manor to manor, “an hepe of houndes at hus ers as he a lord were” (Piers Plowman, C Text VI, ll. 157-61). Visitation documents amply bear out these accounts; in a single set of visitations (those by Bishops Flemyng and Gray of Lincoln during the years 1420-36) we have “Furthermore we enjoin and command you all and several ... that no canon apply himself in any wise to hunting, hawking or other lawless wanderings abroad” (Dunstable Priory 1432); “further we enjoin upon you, the prior and all and several the canons of the convent aforesaid ... that you utterly remove and drive away all hounds for hunting from the said priory and its limits; and that neither you nor any one of you keep, rear, or maintain such hounds by himself or by another’s means, directly or indirectly, in the priory or without the priory, under colour of any pretext whatsoever” (Huntingdon Priory 1432); “also that hounds for hunting be not nourished within the precinct of your monastery” (St Frideswide’s Oxford, 1422-3) and a similar injunction to Caldwell Priory. Linc. Visit. I, pp. 27, 47, 78, 97.
[960] Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. Coll. I, p. 261. Compare also the provision in one of Charlemagne’s capitularies: “Ut episcopi et abbates et abbatissae cupplas canum non habeant nec falcones nec accipitres,” Baretius, Capit. Reg. Franc. (1853), p. 64. Some of the birds at Romsey may have been hawks, though it is more likely that they were larks and other small pets, such as Eudes Rigaud found in his nunneries.