From a study of the many entries similar to the above, it appears that the price set on a fox’s head in Cleveland was, in the earlier period, 3s., and in the present century 4s. The “jackal head” is a mystery that I cannot pretend to solve; the only jackal I ever heard of in Cleveland being a tame one that I imported from Africa, which is living and thriving to-day, after several years of domestic life in anything but an African climate. When I was a boy, I was told by a very old sporting yeoman farmer, that it was the custom in other days, after a kill with the “Roxby and Cleveland” hounds, to go to the parson with the head, get the head money, and then to adjourn to the nearest public-house and expend the price of blood over a bowl of punch, the flavour of which was heightened by the addition of a pad, the brush, or the whole head to the mixture. This, I have no doubt, might correctly be described as strong drink. But to hark back on the line for a moment. I feel I must qualify my opening paragraph, for I have suddenly remembered a passage I lately read in one of the Reports of the Historical MSS. Commission, which both shows that royalty in the seventeenth century countenanced fox-hunting, and that it is of greater antiquity than some modern authors generally suppose. Here is the extract taken from a Newsletter, November 17, 1674: “11th, on Saturday or Sunday (!) next His Royal Highness and the Duke of Monmouth and divers persons of quality go to Chichester, where they are to lodge in the Bishop’s (!) Palace, and expect all the gentry of the neighbourhood to repair with their dogs for seven or eight days’ fox-hunting.” It must have been a curious sight on that Sunday morning to see His Royal Highness, the Duke, the Bishop, the divers persons of quality, with their dogs, at the palace--and one can picture the appearance of the “dogs,” collected from all parts of the country, of all shapes and sizes. But I am hanging on the line, if not dwelling in covert, and all this was meant to be by way of saying that these old-fashioned ideas of fox-hunting seem to have penetrated, to some extent at least, to the days when I first hunted with the Cleveland hounds. I can testify that to many of the sportsmen on foot, even to many of the farmers on horseback, the fox was certainly in the class of “verming and such like,” and that they considered it a most magnanimous proceeding, instead of “to knock” foxes on the head as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey, “to shake him out of a bag and collect all the dogs,” and have a “hoont.”