The poor little hare and a fox or two, alone are left us of all these original tenants of the soil; and game laws were, even in those days of plentiful
supply, found needful to preserve the aborigines of the woods as their especial property, by the great ones of the land, and when manslaughter was to be atoned for by a fine of money, the death of a head of deer was punishable by the forfeiture of the offender’s eyes, and a second instance by death. Who will dispute the aristocratic lineage of the game laws, with such facts of history before them? Hunting had its proper seasons; the wolf and fox might be hunted from Christmas-day to the Annunciation, the roebuck from Easter to Michaelmas, the roe from Michaelmas to Candlemas, the hare from Michaelmas to Midsummer, the boar from the Nativity to the day of the “Presentation in the Temple.”
The clergy were not behind-hand in partaking of the privileges of the chase within their own demesnes, and they took care generally to have good receptacles for game in their parks and enclosures. At the time of the Reformation, the see of Norwich had no less than thirteen parks well stocked with deer; and the name of one of the city churches, St. Peter’s, Hungate, is derived from the Hound’s-gate, where the bishop’s hounds were stabled.
Hawking was a sport, until the magna charta, exclusively confined to the nobility; lords and ladies alike indulged themselves in the exercise, which from its gentleness, in comparison with others then in vogue, was deemed somewhat an effeminate pastime,
probably because, in the delicate dexterity it required, the ladies bore off the palm of victory.
A hawk’s eyrie was returned in doomsday-book as one of the most valuable articles of property; and the estimation in which the bird was held, may be judged of by the enormous prices given for them, and the heavy penalties attached to stealing either them or their eggs; for destroying one of which the offender was liable to imprisonment for a twelvemonth and a day. Perhaps, however, this is no very safe criterion of their intrinsic value, or those sentences that sometimes figure in our modern assize reports—where seven years’ transportation for stealing two ducks from an open pond, stands side by side with twelve months’ imprisonment for murdering a wife, a friend, or a child, in a fit of temporary insanity, alias intoxication—might lead to rather curious inferences.
But to return to our hawks; a thousand pounds for a cast of these birds, and a hundred marks for a single one, are recorded prices. In hawking, the bird was carried on the wrist, which was protected by a thick glove, the head of the bird covered with a hood, and its feet secured to the wrist by straps of leather, called jesses, and to its legs were fastened small bells, toned according to the musical scale.
Among the chronicles of old monkish writers prior
to the Conquest, is a story accounting for the first advent of the Danes upon our shores, as connected with the amusement of hawking: “A Danish chieftain of high rank, named Lothbroc, amusing himself with hawking near the sea, upon the western shores of Denmark, the bird in pursuit of her game fell into the water; Lothbroc, anxious for her safety, got into a little boat that was near at hand, and rowed from the shore to take her up; but before he could return to land, a sudden storm arose, and he was driven out to sea. After suffering great hardships, during a voyage of infinite peril, he reached the coast of Norfolk, and landed at a port called Reedham, (now a small village on the railway line from London to Yarmouth,) where he was immediately seized by the inhabitants, and sent to the court of Edmund, King of the East Angles, who received him favourably, and soon became strongly attached to him for his skill in training and flying hawks. The partiality shown to the foreigner excited the jealousy of Beoric, the king’s falconer, who took an opportunity of murdering the Dane whilst he was exercising his birds in a small wood, where he secreted the body. The vigilance of a favourite spaniel discovered the deed. Beoric was apprehended and convicted of the murder, and condemned to be put in an open boat, without sails, oars, or rudder, and abandoned to the mercy of
the winds and wares. It so chanced that the boat was wafted to the very point of land that Lothbroc came from; and Beoric was apprehended by the Danes, and taken before their two chieftains, Hinguer and Hubba, the sons of Lothbroc, to whom the crafty falconer made a statement as ingenious as false, wherein he affirmed that their father had been murdered by Edmund, and himself sent adrift for opposing the deed. Irritated by the falsehood, the Danes invaded the kingdom of the East Angles, pillaged their country, took their king prisoner, tied him to a stake, and shot him to death with arrows.” Lidgate, a monk of St. Edmund’s at Bury, has given this legend a place in his poetical life of the tutelary saint of his monastery, but it bears upon it every mark of a legendary tale, and the fact is well known that Danish pirates had infested the shores long prior to the date assigned to the events narrated in it.