QUAINT RECIPES.
The old treatises on falconry contain numerous quaint recipes for the various ailments to which hawks are subject. From one of these we learn that petroleum is nothing new, as some people now-a-days would have us believe. Turbervile, writing in 1575, says, in his “Booke of Falconrie”:—“An other approued medecine is to annoint the swelling of your hawkes foot with Oleum petrœlium (which is the oyle of a rocke) and with oyle of white Lillies, taking of each of these like quantity, the blood of a pigeon, and the tallow of a candle, heating all these together a little at the fire. This unguent wil throughly resolue the mischief.”—P. 258.
GOING A-BIRDING.
Hawking was sometimes called “birding.” In the Merry Wives of Windsor (Act iii. Sc. 3), Master Page says,—
“I do invite you to-morrow morning to my house to breakfast; after, we’ll a-birding together; I have a fine hawk for the bush.”
This was probably a goshawk, for, being a short-winged hawk and of slower flight, this species was considered the best for a woody district, or, as Shakespeare terms it, “the bush.”
In the same play (Act iii. Sc. 5) Dame Quickly, referring to Mistress Ford, says,—“Her husband goes this morning a-birding;” and Mistress Ford, herself, says (Act iv. Sc. 2),—“He’s a-birding, sweet Sir John.”
But it seems that birding was not always synonymous with hawking, for, later on in the last-mentioned scene, we read as follows:—
“Falstaff. What shall I do? I’ll creep up into the chimney.
Mrs. Ford. There they always use to discharge their birding-pieces.”
The word “hawk,” as in the case of the eagle, is almost invariably employed by Shakespeare in its generic sense:—