70 THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND. 



sacked by the palaeontologists of our day, and when man, 

 if he were contemporary, must have rather been the prey 

 than the pursuer, we may draw some fixed conclusions 

 from the few and scattered notices which have come down 

 to us on the subject ; and we may assume, from the great 

 virgin forests still existing, that there were no woods then, 

 any more than now, without some living creatures to 

 inhabit them, such as could find sustenance on the seeds 

 and berries of the trees, or on the herbage of the ground 

 around them. The hare must have been found at all 

 periods in the woods of England ; its great fecundity 

 (notwithstanding its defenceless nature) has long been 

 known. ^Eschylus calls it epiKv/mova (frepri, "extremely 

 prolific." In early Britain, its life was guarded from its 

 greatest enemy by superstition ; " leporem gustare fas non 

 putant," wrote Caesar. The red and fallow deer were to be 

 found, no doubt, in the woods ; wild-fowl would circle 

 above the waters, wherever the hindered rivers spread out 

 into a sedgy lake ; the badger and the fox had their earths, 

 already subject to be disturbed by those who even then 

 killed what they refused to eat. Perhaps the catalogue 

 may be more questioned, when to these are added the 

 birds which we are apt to associate in our minds with the 

 civilization and luxury of only modern times ; yet it is no 

 less true that the partridge and the pheasant had found a 

 home in this land at least as early as the Saxons, for a 

 charter of the Confessor's enumerates the beasts of the 

 chase as follows : 



' ' Hart and hind, doe and buck, 

 Hare and fox, cat and brock ; 

 Wild-fowl with his flock, 

 Partridge, pheasant, hen and cock."* 



" To this list of indisputable authority we may, without 

 much misgiving, suggest that the bittern and the heron 

 may be added j the woodcock and the snipe too would be 



^ Codex Dipl. 899| p. 4, Pearson's Maps. 



