EARLY HUNTING IN ENGLAND. 387 



man French, by William Twice, huntsman to Ed- 

 ward II., an ancient translation of which occurs 

 amongst the Cottonian manuscripts. In it are 

 enumerated and described the different beasts that 

 were then objects of the chase in England ; and, in 

 the manner of a dialogue, the huntsman is informed 

 how he should blow his horn at the different points 

 of a chase. But the generally rude system of 

 hunting in the earlier days of England had pre- 

 viously been in some measure improved and amend- 

 ed by William the Conqueror, of whom Somerville 

 thus writes : — 



" Victorious William to more decent rules 

 Subdued our Saxon fathers ; taught to speak 

 The proper dialect ; with horn and voice 

 To cheer the busy hound, whose well-known cry 

 His Ust'ning peers approve with joint acclaim. 

 From him successive huntsmen learn'd to join 

 In bloody social leagues, the multitude 

 Dispersed ; to size, to sort, their warrior tribes, 

 To rear, feed, hunt, and discipline the pack." 



Edward III. was a great stag-hunter ; and even 

 at the time he was engaged in war with France, 

 and resident in that country, he had with him, at- 

 tached to his army, sixty couples of stag-hounds, 

 and an equal number of hare-hounds. We also 

 learn from Froissart, that the Earl of Foix, a fo- 

 reign nobleman, contemporary with King Edward, 

 had one hundred and fifty couples of hounds in his 

 castle. But it does not appear that the fox was 

 much in esteem for the chase by any of the Anglo- 

 Norman sportsmen ; for in Twice's Treatise on the 

 Craft of Hunting, he is classed last of all the beasts 



