The Jackdaw and Magpie 
already been made to the comparison of 
the lower orders of society to “crows and 
daws.” When, in the Temple Garden, 
the Earl of Warwick was asked to decide 
a legal point between the supporters of the 
White Rose and those of the Red Rose, he 
replied, that if the question had been one 
of hawks, sword-blades, horses or merry- 
eyed girls, 
I have perhaps some shallow spirit of judgement ; 
But in these nice sharp quillets of the law, 
Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw.! 
The macpie or Maggot-pie has already 
been alluded to. Macbeth associates it with 
choughs and rooks as a prophet or dis- 
coverer of evil. It isnamed by King Henry 
VI.among the boding portents that attended 
the birth of his murderer Gloucester : 
Dogs howl’d, and hideous tempest shook down trees ; 
The raven rook’d her on the chimney’s top, 
And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.? 
Pechemy Y 1. Yt. vy) FO, 
23 Henry VI. v. vi. 46. Chaucer’s epithet for this bird 
was “the jangling pye.” 
79 
