52 THE MEYNELL HOUNDS. 



take him, and ' hold him so long as to cut off but some 

 small matter of his hair, and bring the same to the market 

 cross, in token that they had taken him,' the bull was 

 then their own, and they finished the day by baiting him 

 with dogs in the usual way, and then killing and dividing 

 him amongst them. From this origin, Tutbury bull- 

 running came down shorn of none of its barbarities almost 

 within the nineteenth century. After the dissolution of 

 the Abbey, the bull continued to be given by the Earl of 

 Devonshire, who held the estates. The court of minstrels 

 dropped out of the scene, but this festival day, the 

 'morrow of the Feast of Assumption,' August 16th, was 

 still the well-known 'Tutbury day,' and became the 

 occasion of a celebrated annual contest between the men 

 of Staffordshire and the men of Derbyshire, the former 

 trying to capture the bull within their own county, the 

 latter to drive him across the Dove into Derbyshire. The 

 rivalry at last became so keen as to be a serious matter 

 of contention in point of manhood between the two 

 counties, and so many skulls were fractured, and bones 

 broken, that shortly before the close of the eighteenth 

 century the Duke of Devonshire refused any longer to 

 give the bull, and the rustic sport was abolished." The 

 reason for it seems typical of the old couplet — 



"Staffordshire born and Staffordshire bred, 

 Strong i' th' arm and weak i' th' head " — 



though, for that matter, Derbyshire folk also claim this 

 distinction as their own. 



There was nothing easier in the old days than to get 

 lost in the Forest, and a bell used to be kept ringing at 

 Belmote Green, near Anslow, as a guide for the lost folk. 

 A curious story is told of how Henry VII., while huntino-, 

 lost his way, and eventually found himself near the cot- 

 tage of a man named Taylor at Barton-under-Needwood. 

 Without discovering his identity, the king asked Taylor 

 to guide him back to Tutbury. It so happened that the 

 latter's wife had just presented him with triplets, and these 



