Mention is often made of hawk aeries, as at Little Wenlock, and in connection with districts within the jurisdiction of Shropshire forests, which seem to have been jealously guarded. The use of the birds, too, appears to have been very much restricted down to the time that the forest-charter, enabling all freemen to ply their hawks, was wrung from King John, when a sport which before had been the pride of the rich became the privilege of the poor. It was at one time so far a national pastime that an old writer asserts that “every degree had its peculiar hawk, from the emperor down to the holy-water clerk.” {10} The sport seems to have divided itself into field-hawking, pond-hawking, brook-and-river hawking; into hawking on horseback and hawking on foot. In foot hawking the sportsman carried a pole, with which to leap the brook, into which he sometimes fell, as Henry VIII. did upon his head in the mud, in which he would have been stifled, it is said, had not John Moody rescued him; whether this Moody was an ancestor of the famous Whipper-in or not we cannot say. Evidence is not altogether wanting to show that during the earlier history of the Marsh period, the gigantic elk (_Cervus giganteus_), with his wide-spreading antlers, visited, if he did not inhabit, the flatter portions of the Willey country; and it is probable that the wild ox equally afforded a mark for the arrow of the ancient inhabitants of the district in those remote times, which investigators have distinguished as the Pile-building, the Stone, and the Bronze periods, when society was in what has been fittingly called the hunter-state. At any rate, we know that at later periods the red deer, the goat, and the boar, together with other “beasts,” were hunted, and that both banks of the Severn resounded with the deep notes of “veteran hounds.” Of the two pursuits, Prior in his day remarks, “Hawking comes near to hunting, the one in the ayre as the other on the earth, a sport as much affected as the other, by some preferred.” That the chase was the choice pastime of monarchs and nobles before the Conquest, and the favourite sport of “great and worthy personages” after, we learn from old authors, who, like William Tivici, huntsman to Edward I., have written elaborate descriptive works, supplying details of the modes pursued, and of the kinds of dog which were used.