10 MARSH AXD FOEEST PERIODS. 



bank, the gentry of the day sought perditch and 

 plover, heron and wild fowl, many of which the 

 fowling-piece has since driven from their haunts, 

 and some — as the bustard and the bittern, the egret 

 and the crane — into extinction. 



Mention is often made of hawk aeries, as at Little 

 Wenlock, and in connection with districts within 

 the jurisdiction of Shropshire forests, which seem 

 to have been jealously guarded. The use of the 

 birds, too, appears to have been very much restricted 

 down to the time that the forest-charter, enabling 

 all freemen to ply their hawks, was wrung from 

 King John, when a sport which before had been 

 the pride of the rich became the privilege of the 

 poor. It was at one time so far a national pastime 

 that an old writer asserts that '^ every degree had 

 its peculiar hawk, from the emperor down to the 

 holy- water clerk." * The sport seems to have divided 

 itself into field-hawking, pond-hawking, brook-and- 

 river hawking ; into hawking on horseback and 

 hawking on foot. In foot hawking the sportsman 

 carried a pole, with which to leap the brook, into 

 which he sometimes fell, as Henry YIII. did upon 

 his head in the mud, in which he would have been 



* Appendix A. 



