EARLY ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 241 



area of the kingdom. The remainder was believed to consist 

 of moor, forest and fen. These computations arc strongly con- 

 jfirmed by the road-books and maps of the seventeenth century. 

 From those books and maps, it is clear that many routes which 

 now pass through an endless succession of orchards, hay-fields 

 and bean-fields then ran through nothing but heath, swamp and 

 warren. In the drawings of English landscapes made in that 

 age for the Grand-Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedge-row is to be 

 seen, and numerous tracts now rich with cultivation appear 

 as bare as Salisbury Plain. At Enfield, hardly out of sight 

 of the smoke of the capital, was a region of five and twenty 

 miles in circumference, which contained three houses and 

 scarcely any enclosed fields. Deer, as free as in the American 

 forest, wandered there by thousands. It is to be remarked that 

 wild animals of large size were then far more numerous than at 

 present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had been preserved 

 for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage the 

 cultivated lands with their tusks, had been slaughtered by the 

 exasperated rustics during the license of civil war. The last 

 wolf that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland 

 a short time before the close of the reign of Charles the Second. 

 But many breeds, now extinct or rare, both of quadrupeds and 

 birds, were still common. The fox, whose life is, in many coun- 

 ties, held almost as sacred as that of a human being, was con- 

 sidered as a mere nuisance. Oliver St. John told the Long 

 Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded, not as a stag 

 or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a fox, 

 who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head 

 without pity. This illustration would be by no means a happy 

 one if addressed to country gentlemen of our time ; but in St. 

 John's days there were not seldom great massacres of foxes, to 

 which the peasantry thronged with all the dogs that could be 

 mustered ; traps were set ; nets were spread ; no quarter was 

 given ; and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a feat 

 which merited the gratitude of the neighborhood. The red 

 deer were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire 

 as they now are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion 

 Queen Anne, on her way to Portsraoutli, saw a herd of no less 

 than five hundred. The wild bull, with his white mane, was 

 still to be found wandering in a few of the southern forests. 

 31 



