MUTE SWAN. 217 



this will be sufficient to show the degree of value and 

 importance attached to the possession of the bird, and he 

 authorised power to protect it. 



In England the Swan is said to be a bird royal, in which 

 no subject can have property, when at large in a pub- 

 lic river or creek, except by grant from the crown. In 

 creating this privilege the crown grants a swan-mark. 



A silver swan was the principal device on the badge of 

 Henry the Fourth: derived from the Bohuns, Earls of 

 Hereford, of which family his first wife was the daughter 

 and co-heiress. Another of his badges was a white ante- 

 lope. Henry the Fifth before his accession to the throne 

 used the silver swan ; afterwards the fire beacon appears 

 to have been his cognisance. Over his tomb in Westmin- 

 ster Abbey is a representation of an antelope and a swan, 

 chained to a beacon. Montagu's Heraldry. 



In the twenty-second year of the reign of Edward the 

 Fourth (1483), it was ordered that no person, other than 

 the king's sons, should have a swan-mark, or game of 

 swans, who did not possess a freehold of the clear yearly 

 value of five marks. 



Sometimes, though rarely, the crown, instead of granting 

 a swan-mark, confers the still greater privilege of enjoying 

 the prerogative right (within a certain district) of seizing 

 White Swans not marked. Thus the Abbot of Abbots- 

 bury, in Dorsetshire, had a game of swans in the estuary 

 formed by the Isle of Portland and the Chesil Bank. The 

 swannery at Abbotsbury is the largest in the kingdom, and 

 is an object of considerable attraction and interest to those 

 who visit that part of the south coast, and has been before 

 referred to : it is now vested in the Earl of Ilchester, to 

 whose ancestor it was granted on the dissolution of the 

 monasteries. 



In the eleventh year of the reign of Henry the Seventh 



