HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 9 



tions was severely punished, in certain cases with death. 

 These game-laws were in existence at any rate down to the 

 time of John, and lost, we may be sure, none of their rigour 

 under the Norman rule. Hunting was then pre-eminently a 

 'royal pastime. Even Edward the Confessor, who abhorred all 

 secular amusements, made an exception in favour of the chase 

 both with hound and hawk. He took the greatest delight, says 

 Strutt, quoting William of Malmesbury, 'to follow a pack of 

 swift hounds in pursuit of game, and to cheer them with his 

 voice.' Everyone knows the cruel measures taken by the 

 Conqueror to make and stock the royal hunting-grounds, an 

 example followed, though in a less brutal degree, by his son 

 Henry, who made the great park at Woodstock, and walled it 

 round with seven miles of stone ; wherein after him his nephew, 

 the first of our Plantagenet kings, kept, if history speak truth, 

 other game than stag and boar. Gradually the great nobles 

 followed suit. Henry, Earl of Warwick, made a park at 

 Wedgenoke, and others began to inclose ground in various 

 parts of the country, without much regard to the rights of the 

 commons. A contemporary wTiter, John of Salisbury, gives a 

 gloomy picture of the height to which the ruling passion had 

 grown, and of the hardships to which the lower classes were 

 subject for their rulers' pleasure. ' In our time,' he says, ' hunt- 

 ing and hawking are esteemed the most honourable employ- 

 ments and most excellent virtues by our nobility, and they 

 think it the height of worldly felicity to spend the whole of 

 their time in these diversions ; accordingly they prepare for 

 them with more solicitude, expense, and parade, than they do for 

 war; and pursue the wild beasts with greater fury than they do 

 the enemies of their country. By constantly following this way 

 of life they lose much of their humanity, and become as savage 

 nearly as the very beasts they hunt. Husbandmen, with their 

 harmless herds and flocks, are driven from their well-cultivated 

 fields, their meadows and their pastures, that wild beasts may 

 range in them w'ithout interruption.' And he then gives the 

 following piece of advice to all whom it may concern : ' If one 



