18 FALCONRY IN BERWICKSHIRE. 



Wedderburn, says of him : " He was very handsome and 

 well-proportioned, and of great strength, and swift of 

 foot. He sang after the manner of the Court, and like- 

 wise psalms to his own playing on the harp. He was a 

 keen hunter and delighted in hawking. He was so 

 much given to that sport that he built a hunting lodge 

 called Handaxe Wood, in the Lammermuir Hills, in which 

 he often spent the night. He had Hawks called Merlins 

 and Falcons, and afterwards another kind called Tercells, 1 

 which he delighted in. even in his old age. He caught 

 both Partridges and Muir-fowl." 2 



Falconry appears to have been a common sport in 

 Berwickshire towards the end of the seventeenth century, 

 and Mr. Campbell- S win ton of Kimmerghame relates in his 

 Men of the Merse how a party of Merse lairds about this 

 time went "to the setting at Kettleshiel, where the dogs set 

 several times ; but it was either an old fowl who rose be- 

 fore the net was ready, or young fowls that were scattered, 

 so that there was none catched by the net but ane old han ; 

 but a hawk of Cavers 3 took severals, and some were marked 

 where they sat down and were taken." 



About the beginning of the eighteenth century guns 4 

 had been so much improved that sportsmen began to shoot 

 game on the wing, and this seems' to have led to the aban- 

 donment of hawking, a pastime which had delighted succes- 

 sive generations from the days of William the Lion. 



Towards the close of the eighteenth century a consider- 



1 Male Goshawks (Astur palumbarius). The female Goshawk was known as the 

 Goshawk, and the male, which is smaller than the female, as the Tercel. The 

 female Peregrine was known as the Falcon, and the male, which is considerably 

 smaller, as the Tercel-gentle. Harting's Ornithology of Shakespeare, p. 53. 



2 I am indebted to Colonel Milne Home of Wedderburn for the use of the 

 MS. History of the Homes of Wedderburn, from which the above is extracted. 



3 Carre of Cavers, who was also Laird of Nisbet. Men of the Merse, pp. 59, 60. 



4 They were formerly such miserable machines that in the middle of the 

 fifteenth century it took a quarter of an hour to charge and lire one, Hallam's 

 Middle Ages, vol. i. p. 342. 



