268 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



henceforth at command of any one who cared to pay for 

 the privilege in the most ordinary commercial fashion. 

 Bat this measure, intended probably to diminish poaching 

 by underselling the wood thief in his illegal booty, was 

 ineffectual. It doubled the number of shooters, and swept 

 away game from those freelands where it had hitherto 

 existed in the security of the ample hedgerows of an early 

 period, harried by few village firearms. 



On the 1st of September, 1827, Lord Althorp, shooting 

 by himself over unpreserved land in Warwickshire, where 

 any one might shoot who pleased, killed twenty brace of 

 birds to his own gun ; a few days afterwards nineteen, one 

 day fifteen, and two other days eleven brace. Such un- 

 covenanted sport is, alas, utterly out of date ; game has been 

 accumulated into centres, and with its abundance in known 

 localities and semi-domestication comes that chance of great 

 booty to the poacher which Sir Robert Peel, alone of the 

 statesmen of his time, foresaw when the thin end of 

 the wedge was introduced by a well-meaning Liberalism in 

 1831. Then, again, the Rating Act of 1874, for the first 

 time taxed sporting rights as such ; and more recently Sir 

 William Harcourt's Bill gives to the tenant the right of 

 killing the hares and rabbits on his own farm, any agreement 

 with his landlord to the contrary notwithstanding : that is 

 to say, that no covenant on the occupier's part to reserve 

 the ground game for the proprietor can any longer be 

 enforced by law. The game in England, be it remembered, 

 whether four-footed or winged, had always belonged to the 

 tenant, and only ceased to be his when he transferred it by 

 agreement to his landlord. This transfer he is now, as far 

 as ground game is concerned, forbidden to make, and can no 

 longer therefore do what he will with his own. 



A clause in this latter enactment makes it necessary to 

 set rabbit traps (by the. tenant who does not own the game 

 shooting) only in rabbit holes, or runs. A learned judge, 

 I notice, has given it as his opinion that a " run," or burrow, 



