Hawking was, indeed, a favourite diversion with the ladies, and they not only accompanied the gentlemen to this sport, but frequently engaged in it alone. The hawking of the ladies, however, appears to have been especially that of herons and water-fowl; and this was called going to the river (_aller en rivière_), and was very commonly pursued on foot. It may be mentioned that the fondness of the ladies for the diversion of hawking is alluded to in the twelfth century by John of Salisbury. The hawking on the river, indeed, seems to have been that particular branch of the sport which gave most pleasure to all classes, and it is that which is especially represented in the drawings in the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Dogs were commonly used in hawking to rouse the game in the same manner as at the present day, but in hawking on the river, where dogs were of course less effective, other means were adopted. In a manuscript already quoted in the present chapter (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii.), of the beginning of the fourteenth century, a group of ladies hawking on the banks of a river are accompanied by a man, perhaps the falconer, who makes a noise to rouse the water-fowl. Our cut No. 204 is taken from a very interesting manuscript of the fourteenth century, made for the monastery of St. Bartholomew, in Smithfield, and now preserved in the library of the British Museum (MS. Reg. 10 E. iv.); it is part of a scene in which ladies are hawking on a river, and a female is rousing the water-fowl with a tabor. The fountain is one of those conventional objects by which the mediæval artist indicated a spring, or running stream. This seems to have been a very common method of rousing the game; and it is represented in one of the carved seats, or misereres (as they have been termed technically), in Gloucester cathedral, which is copied in our cut No. 205. This scene is rather curiously illustrated by an anecdote told by an old chronicler, Ralph de Diceto, of a man who went to the river to hunt teal with his hawk, and roused them with “what is called by the river-hawkers a tabor.”[49] The tending of the hawks used in these diversions was no slight occupation in the mediæval household, and was the subject of no little study; they were cherished with the utmost care, and carried about familiarly on the wrist in all places and under all sorts of circumstances. It was a common practice, indeed, to go to church with the hawk on the wrist. One of the early French poets, Gaces de la Buigne, who wrote a metrical treatise on hunting in the middle of the fourteenth century, advises his readers to carry their hawks with them wherever there were assemblies of people, whether in churches or elsewhere-- _Là où les gens sont amassés,_ _Soit en l’église, ou autre part._