That the clergy were as much in favour of these amusements as the laity, appears from an old Shropshire author, Piers Plowman (Langland), who satirically gave it as his opinion that they thought more of sport than of their flocks, excepting at shearing time; and likewise from Chaucer, who says, “in hunting and riding they are more skilled than in divinity.” That Richard de Castillon, an early rector of Madeley, was a sportsman appears from the fact that when Henry III. was in Shrewsbury in September, 1267, concluding a treaty with Llewellyn, and settling sundry little differences with the monks and burgesses there, he granted him license to hunt “in the royal forest of Madeley,” then a portion of that of the Wrekin. In 1283 also, King Edward permitted the Prior of Wenlock to have a park at Madeley, to fence out a portion of the forest, and to form a haia there for his deer. It has been said that Walter, Bishop of Rochester, was so fond of sport, that at the age of fourscore he made hunting his sole employment. The Archdeacon of Richmond, at his initiation to the Priory of Bridlington, is reported to have been attended by ninety-seven horses, twenty-one dogs, and three hawks. Walter de Suffield, Bishop of Norwich, bequeathed by will his pack of hounds to the king; but the Abbot of Tavistock, who had also a pack, was commanded by his bishop about the same time to break it up. A famous hunter was the Abbot of Leicester, whose skill in the sport of hare hunting was so great, that we are told the king himself, his son Edward, and certain noblemen, paid him an annual pension that they might hunt with him. Bishop Latimer said: “In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn me any other thing, and so I think other men did their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not draw with strength of arms as other nations do;” and the good bishop exclaims with the enthusiasm of a patriot, “It is a gift of God that He hath given us to excel all other nations withal; it hath been God’s instrument whereby He hath given us many victories over our enemies.” Such were the “merrie days,” when the kennels of the country gentry contained all sorts of dogs, and their halls all sorts of skins, when the otter and the badger were not uncommon along the banks of Shropshire streams, and ere the fox had taken first rank on the sportsman’s list. An old “Treatise on the Craft of Hunting” first gives the hare, the herte, the wulf, and the wild boar. The author then goes on to say— “But there ben other beastes five of the chase; The buck the first, the second is the doe, The fox the third, which hath ever hard grace, The fourth the martyn, and the last the roe.” CHAPTER II. MORFE FOREST.