‘Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim,
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,
Or bobtail tike or trundle tail,’
figure often enough in our old records, and often enough got their owners into trouble for poaching, but they were not so frequently complained of for assault as might have been expected. I remember coming across one rather interesting case in which a man complained that a neighbour’s dogs had chased a tame deer belonging to his daughter, and when she interfered to rescue it had bitten her hands. The keeping of tame deer was common enough; Edward III. had a tame hind brought from St. Albans to Woodstock on one occasion, and about a couple of centuries later a Lincolnshire clergyman, John Barnardiston, rector of Great Coates, for his own recreation and comfort and the amusement of his friends, ‘norysched, kept and brought up a tame hynde calfe.’ Unfortunately he had annoyed Sir Christopher Askew, who instigated William Morecropp and other ‘lyght and evyll disposed persons’ to kill the hind. They discovered where it frequented day and night and carried it off to Morecropp’s house, where they assembled next day ‘with force and aryms; that is to saye wyth staves, bylles, swordes and bokelers,’—an almost excessive armament for the purpose,—and slew the unfortunate hind and carried its body to Sir Christopher, who, when Barnardiston complained, ‘lyghtly and wantonly made a gret game and sport therat’ and threatened that worse should befall him if he did not sit still. While sympathising with the rector for the loss of his pet, it is difficult to deny that the assembly of half-a-dozen ruffians fully armed with swords and bucklers to tackle one tame little fawn suggests the four-and-twenty tailors who set out to kill a snail, and is not without its ludicrous side.
‘... fully armed with swords and bucklers.’
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
Footnotes:
[1] June 1911.
[2] The record of one of this man’s acts of torture is worth preserving, though it is, for obvious reasons, best left in the original Latin: ‘cepit unum vermem qui vocatur clok [i.e. a sheep tick] et posuit infra virgam Roberti de Alverton et ligavit virgam cum parva corda et posuit ipsum Robertum super unam cordam et ligavit cordam de una trabe ad aliam et fecit ipsum moveri super cordam predictam et membra sua frotari quousque finem fecit pro x marcis.’