PREFACE. XV 



sliow that lie gave honest money for them to C ; thus 

 a team or row of successive owners was unravelled till 

 it ended in P, who had neglected to secure credible 

 witnesses to his bargain ; or in Q, who bought them 

 at a risky price from the actual thief Then Z recovered 

 his cattle or their value.^ Under this legislation the 

 chief difficulty of a loser was to trace the direction in 

 which his cattle had been driven off, and the skill of 

 the hunter in tracking the slot of the deer, helped to 

 follow the foot prints of horse or sheep or ox.^ The 

 less fertile parts of England are still patched by strips 

 of common, or ways with grassy wastes skirting them, 

 and the wanderer may often ramble by hedgerow elms 

 mid hillocks green, among the primroses and violets, 

 by ups and downs, through quagmires and over gates, 

 from his furthest point for the day, till he nears the 

 town and his inn. Elwes, the famous miser, could ride 

 seventy miles out of London without paying turnpike. 

 The Saxon herdsman watched the livelono- nie^ht.^ 



The Saxons also, like the Romans, fed their cattle, Cattle fed on 

 sometimes, so as to make the notion familiar, with the ^^aves. 

 foliage of trees. In his life of St. Cu6berht, the venerable 

 Beda gives an account of a worthy Hadwald (Eadwald), 

 a faithful servant of ^Iflced, abbess of Whitby, who was 

 killed by falling from a tree.^ ^Ifric three hundred 

 years afterwards telling the same story, gives us either 

 from some collateral tradition, by writing may be, may 

 be by word, or from his judgment of what was naturally 

 the mans business at tree climbing, an account that this 

 tree was an oak, and that he was feeding the cattle 

 with the foliage, so that he was killed in discharge 

 of his duty as herdsman.-'^ In the summer of 18G4< this 



' DD. in many passages. 



^ Ho^pec, Focppop. 



3 Coll. Mon. p. 20. Tota nocte 

 sto super eos vigilando propter 

 fures. 



■* Incautius in arborem ascen- 

 dens deciderat deorsiun, Beda, 256, 

 22. 



5 Horn. II. 150. 



b 2 



