8 HUNTING. 



that are legitimate objects of sport, and some directions foi 

 blooding the hounds and breaking up the game, the huntsman 

 being particularly warned against giving any part of the fox to 

 the hounds, 'for it is not good for them,' Dame Juliana, or 

 whoever is to be credited with the book that goes under her 

 name, has practically done little more than put into doggrel 

 rhyme the precepts of Twici and his English translator, though 

 the rhymester quotes the legendary authority of Sir Tristram, 

 who seems to have been regarded in those days as the par- 

 ticular patron of huntsmen ; we find Cockaine, for example, 

 gravely asserting that ' it hath been long received for a truth 

 that Sir Tristram, one of King Arthure's knights, was the firsi 

 writer and as it were founder of the honourable and delightful 

 sport of hunting.' They have their own interest, all these 

 works, but the interest is one which appeals rather to the anti- 

 quarian than the sportsman. They tell the latter little, and it is 

 hard to imagine that they can have told their own contem- 

 poraries very much. 



Our knowledge of what we may call the dark ages of hunt- 

 ing is derived mainly from the indefatigable Strutt, who has, if 

 we may employ a sporting metaphor, drawn all sorts of coverts 

 which up to that time had been undisturbed, and but for him had 

 very likely remained so to this day. It is true that what he has 

 contrived to unearth is not very much, but it is something ; it 

 gives us some idea of the estimation in which hunting was held 

 by our remote ancestors, if not very much of the way in which 

 it was pursued. He found, for example, that Alfred the Great, 

 that pious and learned king, was a ' most expert and active 

 hunter, and excelled in all the branches of that most noble art, 

 to which he applied with incessant labour and amazing success.' 

 While the Danes ruled in England the sport began to be fenced 

 about with certain restrictions tending to confine it to the 

 upper classes, though Canute, who also prohibited all hunting 

 and hawking on the Sabbath, while rigorously forbidding all 

 trespass on the royal hunting-grounds, allowed each man to dis- 

 port himself at will on his own. Any violation of these restric' 



