The poor little hare and a fox or two, alone are left us of all these original tenants of the soil; and game laws were, even in those days of plentiful supply, found needful to preserve the aborigines of the woods as their especial property, by the great ones of the land, and when manslaughter was to be atoned for by a fine of money, the death of a head of deer was punishable by the forfeiture of the offender’s eyes, and a second instance by death. Who will dispute the aristocratic lineage of the game laws, with such facts of history before them? Hunting had its proper seasons; the wolf and fox might be hunted from Christmas-day to the Annunciation, the roebuck from Easter to Michaelmas, the roe from Michaelmas to Candlemas, the hare from Michaelmas to Midsummer, the boar from the Nativity to the day of the “Presentation in the Temple.” The clergy were not behind-hand in partaking of the privileges of the chase within their own demesnes, and they took care generally to have good receptacles for game in their parks and enclosures. At the time of the Reformation, the see of Norwich had no less than thirteen parks well stocked with deer; and the name of one of the city churches, St. Peter’s, Hungate, is derived from the _Hound’s_-gate, where the bishop’s hounds were stabled. Hawking was a sport, until the magna charta, exclusively confined to the nobility; lords and ladies alike indulged themselves in the exercise, which from its gentleness, in comparison with others then in vogue, was deemed somewhat an effeminate pastime, probably because, in the delicate dexterity it required, the ladies bore off the palm of victory. A hawk’s eyrie was returned in doomsday-book as one of the most valuable articles of property; and the estimation in which the bird was held, may be judged of by the enormous prices given for them, and the heavy penalties attached to stealing either them or their eggs; for destroying one of which the offender was liable to imprisonment for a twelvemonth and a day. Perhaps, however, this is no very safe criterion of their intrinsic value, or those sentences that sometimes figure in our modern assize reports—where seven years’ transportation for stealing two ducks from an open pond, stands side by side with twelve months’ imprisonment for murdering a wife, a friend, or a child, in a fit of temporary insanity, alias intoxication—might lead to rather curious inferences. But to return to our hawks; a thousand pounds for a cast of these birds, and a hundred marks for a single one, are recorded prices. In hawking, the bird was carried on the wrist, which was protected by a thick glove, the head of the bird covered with a hood, and its feet secured to the wrist by straps of leather, called jesses, and to its legs were fastened small bells, toned according to the musical scale.