Formerly, there is reason to suppose, the gentry had many parks near their seats. Records in your possession show that the prior of Spalding, about 1265, compelled Thomas lord Moulton to compound with him for the venison in his park at Moulton; and in Holbech, about a mile south of the church, are lands in my tenure, called the Park. That fish and fowl is here plentiful, no one will wonder; but particularly the pigeons are noted for large and fine. [Sidenote: _Decoys._] [Sidenote: TAB. II.] In the out-skirts of it are great numbers of decoys, places so called where they take an incredible quantity of wild ducks,[21] mostly sent up to London: they are large pits dug in the fens, with five canals shooting from them, each ending in a point after one angle made, well planted with willows, fallows, osiers, and such underwood. I have given a drawing of one. The method of catching fowl in short is this: the decoy-man coming down to the angle of the pipe, or canal, which is covered with nets and over-shadowed with trees, peeps through the holes in the reedy sheds, disposed like the scenes at the play-house, and joined by the others with holes at the bottom, about as high as a man’s breast: when he sees a sufficient quantity of wild ducks in the mouth of the great pond, by whistling softly, the tame ducks wing-stocked, and brought up for that purpose, swim into the pipe covered with the nets, to feed upon the corn he throws over the sheds into the water: this tempts the wild ducks in to partake of the bait: in the mean time a dog they teach runs round the half-sheds, in and out at the holes in the bottom, which amuses the fowl so that they apprehend no danger: when he has brought them far enough into the pipe, stooping he goes along the scenes, till he is got beyond the ducks, and rising up shows himself at the half-scenes, which frightens the wild ducks only, the opposite way into the narrow end of the pipe, which terminates in a fatal net: and all this is done without any noise or knowledge of the rest of the wild ducks in the great pond; so that the decoy-man having dispatched one pipe, goes round to execute the same game at all the rest, whereby infinite quantities are catched in a year’s time at one of these places only. [Illustration: 2 _The Form of the Decoys in Lincolnshire._ _Richardo M. Masfey M.D. tabulam d.d. Wˢ. Stukeley_] [Sidenote: _The_ +Washes+.]