In the 33rd year of Edward III. (1358), Vitalis Engaine died, seized of part of the lordships of Laxton and Pichesse, in Northamptonshire, held by petit serjeanty, to hunt the wolf whensoever the King should command. {294d} In the 41st year of Edward III. (1366), Thomas de Engaine, Lord of Blatherwic, died, seized of lands, meadows, and rent, in Pightesse, in Northamptonshire, held by the service of “finding, at his own proper costs, certain dogs, for the destruction of wolves, foxes, martrons [marten cats], cats [wild cats], and other vermine,” within the counties of Northampton, Rutland, Oxford, Essex, and Buckingham. {295a} Of course it is not pretended, that upon the deaths of any of the before-mentioned personages, who died seized of lands, held by the tenure of hunting or destroying wolves, such a tenure is conclusive evidence that those animals existed at the times of the deaths of those personages respectively, because it may have happened that the lands may have descended from father to son, several times, after the dates of the original royal grants or charters creating such tenures; still, even in that case, enough has been shown to prove that they were not extinct until centuries after the time of King Edgar. Besides which, it must not be forgotten, that the charter before mentioned, of the 11th year of Edward III. (1836), to John Lord Roos, of Hamlake, then gave him a license to hunt the wolf in the King’s Forest of Nottinghamshire, &c., which would have been useless if there had not then been any such animal to hunt. We therefore have some evidence that wolves existed in England in the fourteenth century; but it is very probable that they had been destroyed in the more populous and cultivated counties, although for more than a century longer they might continue to be occasionally met with, in the wild and thinly peopled parts of England, especially in the northern counties. In the fifteenth century they probably became scarce.