Pope Innocent III. took the same view; for at the Lateran Council, in 1215, he prohibited the eating of Barnacle geese during Lent. In 1277, Rabbi Izaak, of Corbeil, determined to be on the safe side, forbade altogether the eating of these birds by the Jews, "because they were neither flesh nor fish." Michael Bernhard Valentine,[83] quoting Wormius, says that this question caused much perplexity and disputation amongst the doctors of the Sorbonne; but that they passed an ordinance that these geese should be classed as fishes, and not as birds; and he adds, that in consequence of this decision large numbers of these birds were annually sent to Paris from England and Scotland, for consumption in Lent. Sir Robert Sibbald[84] refers to this, and says that Normandy was the locality from which the French capital was reported to be principally supplied; but that in fact the greater number of these geese came from Holland. The date of this edict is not given. [83] 'Historia Simplicium,' lib. iii. p. 327. [84] Prodrom. Hist. Nat. Scot. parts 2, lib. iii. p. 21, 1684. Professor Max Muller says that in Brittany, Barnacle geese are still allowed to be eaten on Fridays, and that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ferns may give permission to people out of his diocese to eat these birds at his table. In Bombay, also, where fish is prohibited as food to some classes of the population, the priests call this goose a "sea-vegetable," under which name it is allowed to be eaten. Various localities were mentioned as the breeding-places of these arboreal geese. Gervasius of Tilbury,[85] writing about 1211, describes the process of their generation in full detail, and says that great numbers of them grew in his time upon the young willow trees which abounded in the neighbourhood of the Abbey of Faversham, in the county of Kent, and within the Archiepiscopate of Canterbury. The bird was there commonly called the _Barneta_. [85] Otia Imperialia, iii. 123. Hector Boethius, or Boece, the old Scottish historian, combats this version of the story. His work, written in Latin, in 1527, was translated into quaint Scottish in 1540, by John Bellenden, Archdeacon of Murray. In his fourteenth chapter, "Of the nature of claik geis, and of the syndry maner of thair procreatioun, and of the ile of Thule," he says:-- "Restis now to speik of the geis generit of the see namit clakis. Sum men belevis that thir clakis growis on treis be the nebbis. Bot thair opinioun is vane. And becaus the nature and procreatioun of thir clakis is strange we have maid na lytyll laubore and deligence to serche ye treuth and verite yairof, we have salit throw ye seis quhare thir clakis ar bred, and I fynd be gret experience, that the nature of the seis is mair relevant caus of thir procreatioun than ony uther thyng."