12 The Collie or Sheep Dog. 



subject in the English language when it came to be trans- 

 lated from the Latin by Abraham Fleming, includes the 

 shepherd's dog in the fourth section of his dissertation. He 

 alludes to them as " dogs of a coarse kind serving for many 

 necessary uses, called in Latin Cam's pastoralis" Any 

 illustration of this dog, as he appeared in the sixteenth 

 century, would no doubt have been most interesting, and 

 in the absence of such drawing, readers must trust to their 

 imagination to supply the deficiency. 



The quaintness of the writer and his more or less 

 interesting description must be my excuse for quoting a 

 great portion of the chapter on the " shepherd's hound," 

 which he says "is very necessary and profitable for the 

 avoiding of harms and inconveniences which may come to 

 men by means of beasts. Our shepherd's dog is not huge 

 and vast, and big, but of an indifferent stature and growth, 

 because it has not to deal with the bloodthirsty wolf, since 

 there be none in England, which happy and fortunate 

 benefit is to be ascribed to the puissant Prince Edgar, who 

 to the intent the whole country might be evacuated and quite 

 cleared from wolves, charged and commanded the Welshmen 

 (who were pestered with these butcherly beasts above 

 measure) to pay him yearly tribute which was (note the 

 wisdom of the king) three hundred wolves. Some there 

 be which write that Ludwall Prince of Wales paid yearly 

 to King Edgar three hundred wolves in the name of an 

 exaction (as we have said before), and that by the means 

 hereof, within the compass and term of four years, none of 

 those noisome and pestilent beasts were left on the coasts 

 of England and Wales. This Edgar wore the crown royal 

 and bare the sceptre imperial of this kingdom about the 

 year of our Lord 959. Since which time we read that no 



