396 The Book of the Horse. 



made in the seventeenth century for tlie Grand Duke Cosmo scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and 

 numerous tracts now rich with cultivation were then barren as SaHsbury Plain. 



Between Biggleswade and Lincoln there was scarcely an enclosure ; nor from Abingdon 

 to Gloucester (forty or fifty miles). 



John Ogilby, the Cosmographer Royal, in Ilincrariuvi Anglia, 1675, describes great part 

 of the land as wood, fen, heath, and marsh. In some of his maps the roads through enclosed 

 districts are marked by lines, and through unenclosed by dots ; the proportion of unenclosed 

 country (which, if cultivated must have been wretchedly cultivated), seems to have been 

 very great. 



In 16S5 the arable and pasture were supposed to amount to little more than half the 

 area of the kingdom ; the rest was believed to consist of moor, forest, and fen. And yet 

 the value of the produce of the soil far exceeded that of the other fruits of industry. 



At Enfield was a region twenty-five miles in circumference, which contained only three houses 

 and scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer wandered there in thousands, free as in an American 

 forest. 



The red deer were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hants as they are now 

 among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne, on her way to Portsmouth, saw 

 a herd of no less than 500. 



Hedges must have greatly altered the aspect of this country at the time when they 

 came into general use — with the introduction of the Flemish husbandry in Norfolk at the 

 end of the seventeenth century. Until the time of George I. almost every part of the country was 

 composed of four kinds of scenery: — i, the houses and parks of proprietors and the villages 

 adjoining, where their farmers and labourers resided ; 2, the common fields under the plough ; 

 3, the common pasture or waste ; 4, the woods and forests. 



King James I., his grandsons Charles and James, were keen sportsmen, but they hunted 

 the deer only — sometimes in parks like Greenwich, sometimes at Enfield, where the crafty 

 Sir John Reresby, as he relates in his curious autobiography, made the acquaintance of 

 Charles II. and his brother, in consequence of having an excellent horse. Queen Anne hunted 

 deer in Windsor Park, driving herself in a one-horse carriage — furiously, as Dean Swift writes 

 Stella, like Jehu, and one day drove forty-five miles. 



The fox's day of worshipful dignity as the premier animal of the British chase is not 

 more than a hundred years old ; it had not yet come under the Stuarts. 



In a speech of Oliver St. John against Straft'ord, quoted by Macaulay, he said : — " Straft'ord 

 was to be regarded not as a stag or hare, but as a fo.x, who was to be snared by anj- means, 

 and knocked on the head without pity." 



Nicholas Wood, whose third edition of " The Gentleman's Recreations," with the addition 

 of "The Hunting Horse," was published in 16S6, names "five beasts of venery, also 

 called beasts of the forest (that is, only to be hunted b)- the privileged feudal superiors) — the 

 hart (which hath his season in summer), the hinde (which begins when the hart's is over), 

 the hare, the boar, and the wolf There are also five beasts of chase — the buck, the doe, the 

 fox, the martin, and the roe." Fox-hunting was evidently considered inferior to hare- 

 hunting ; he divides it into limiting underground with terriers, and above ground. On the 

 latter he says : — " To this purpose you must draw with your hounds about groves, thickets, and 

 bushes near villages, for a fox will lurk in such places to prey on young pigs and poultry. 

 But it will be necessary to stop up his earths, if you can find them, the night before you 

 intend to hunt. At first only cast off )-our sure finders ; as the drag mends so add more 



