It was the invention of shot-guns that struck the first and most deadly blow at the popularity of hawking. It was soon discovered that wild-fowl, rabbits, and most kinds of game could be captured much more easily and cheaply by the aid of "vile saltpetre" than by the laborious and costly processes involved in the reclaiming and moulting and conditioning of hawks. Economy, as well as novelty, pleaded in favour of the new sport of shooting. At the same time, the common use of fowling-pieces added a fresh and formidable danger for the owners of hawks, already exposed to a thousand unfair risks of losing their favourites. In the unsettled state to which Europe was reduced by the innumerable wars consequent on the Reformation, it was impossible for falconers to identify or punish those who recklessly or deliberately slaughtered a neighbour's lost hawks; and although the offenders were still liable to serve penalties, they could snap their fingers at the protective laws. Finally, the more rapid subdivision of the land, and its enclosure with fences for agricultural purposes, spoilt, for the falconer's purposes, large tracts of country which had formerly been the most suitable, and was especially hurtful to the flying of the long-winged hawks, for which an expanse of open ground is indispensable. On the Continent these various causes operated surely but slowly to displace falconry in the public estimation. But in England a special circumstance almost ruined it at one blow. The outbreak of the Great Civil War interrupted rudely all peaceful sports, and its disasters destroyed a vast number of those who were the best patrons of hawking. From the blow then struck English falconry never rallied in any general sense. Certainly it did revive, or rather survive, to a certain extent. It would be wrong to suppose that the sport has ever been extinct in the British Isles, as so many writers are fond of reiterating. But its devotees have kept it up without any of the pomp and show which once distinguished it, carrying on in comparative privacy, and in the retirement of rather remote spots, an amusement in which the difficulties always besetting the sport were aggravated by a thousand new dangers and annoyances.