NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



upon his French campaigns, sixty couple of staghounds, 

 and as many of harriers — a very handsome outfit even 

 for a king of England. 



Before the Reformation many of the clergy spent 

 a large portion of their time in the chase of the stag, 

 hare, fox, and marten. Their habits — of which hunting, 

 by the way, seems to have been by far the least object- 

 tionable — aroused the deep anger of Langland. In 

 Piers Plowman is to be found a bitter tirade levelled 

 at the Church dignitary of that period, who is described 

 as "a pricker on a palfrey from manor to manor ; an 

 heap of hounds at his ears, as he a lord were." The 

 fox-hunting parson dies hard, but is now gradually 

 dwindling towards extinction. We still have, as I 

 have shown, a few hunting clergymen among us, of 

 whom it may be said with truth, that if they love 

 to hear horn and hound, and to pursue the most wily 

 and resourceful of all beasts of chase, they do not 

 neglect, as did their predecessors of the pre-Reforma- 

 tion period, the cures committed to them. It may be 

 said that all hunting clergy, whether before the Reforma- 

 tion or since, have had before them a shining pattern 

 and example in the saintly and monastic king, Edward 

 the Confessor. The Confessor had not a single secular 

 amusement save that of hunting ; but, according to 

 William of Malmesbury, the gentle King took an 

 unbounded delight "to follow a pack of swift hounds 

 in pursuit of game, and to cheer them with his voice." 



The Norman invasion had the effect for centuries 

 of making hunting the jealously guarded appanage 

 of the king and the great barons and landed proprietors. 

 The game and forest laws of that period were of almost 

 unexampled savagery, and the commoner people were 

 deterred by terrible penalties from interfering with the 

 various animals hunted by their overlords. But, in 



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