“I am clad in youthful green, I other colours scorn, My silken bauldrick bears my bugle or my horn, Which, setting to my lips, I wind so loud and shrill, As makes the echoes shout from every neighbouring hill; My dog-hook at my belt, to which my thong is tied, My sheaf of arrows by, my wood-knife by my side, My cross-bow in my hand, my gaffle on my rack, To bend it when I please, or if I list to slack; My hound then in my thong, I, by the woodman’s art, Forecast where I may lodge the goodly hie-palm’d hart, To view the grazing herds, so sundry times I use, Where by the loftiest head I knew my deer to choose; And to unherd him, then I gallop o’er the ground, Upon my well-breathed nag, to cheer my learning hound. Some time I pitch my toils the deer alive to take, Some time I like the cry the deep-mouthed kennel make; Then underneath my horse I stalk my game to strike, And with a single dog to hunt or hurt him as I like.” DRAYTON. IT is important, to the completion of our sketch of the earlier features of the country, that we cross the Severn and say a word or two respecting the forest of the Wrekin, of which the early ancestors of the present Willey family had charge. This famous hill must then have formed a feature quite as conspicuous in the landscape as it does at present. As it stood out above the wide-spreading forest that surrounded it, it must have looked like a barren island amid a waving sea of green. From its position and outline too, it appears to have been selected during the struggles which took place along the borders as a military fortress, judging from the entrenchments near its summit, and the tumuli both here and in the valley at its foot, where numbers of broken weapons have been found. At a later period it is spoken of as Mount St. Gilbert, in honour, it is said, of a recluse to whom the Gilbertine monks ascribe their origin. Whether the saint fixed his abode in the cleft called the Needle’s Eye (which tradition alleges to have been made at the Crucifixion), or on some other part of the hill, there is no evidence to show; but that there was a hermitage there at one time, and that whilst the woods around were stocked with game, is clear. It is charitable to suppose, however, that the good man who pitched his tent so high above his fellows abstained from such tempting luxuries, that on his wooden trencher no king’s venison smoked, and that fare more becoming gown and girdle contented him; so at least it must have been reported to Henry III., who, to give the hermit, Nicholas de Denton by name, “greater leisure for holy exercises, and to support him during his life, so long as he should be a hermit on the aforesaid mountain,” granted six quarters of corn, to be paid by the Sheriff of Shropshire, out of the issues of Pendleston Mill, near Bridgnorth.