244 COVERT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



and this is tlie sport which must have been principally adopted 

 in enclosed parks, as that of chasing a poor animal round and 

 round a place from which it could not escape would have been 

 very slow indeed, whereas a couple of deer greyhounds have 

 ample scope to pull down a buck or lose him. Hunting in a 

 park, as we understand the term, no doubt was practised as a 

 matter of parade for ladies, or gouty old gentlemen, who, being 

 unable to ride up to hounds in the open, cantered about their 

 parks, as those in later days who cannot walk take to battue- 

 shooting and driving birds. 



The first park in England was Woodstock, made by Henry 

 Beauclerk, and walled round for the space of no less than nine 

 miles. Others quickly followed his example, and from that 

 time to the present a deer park has been considered almost an 

 indispensable appanage of a British nobleman, though within 

 the present generation the utilitarian spirit which has arisen 

 has in many replaced the deer with sheep and cattle. Few of 

 the general public ever have an opportunity of seeing deer- 

 coursing in a park, even when the sport is indulged in (which 

 is but seldom, the bucks being generally shot) ; but I can 

 remember, as quite a child, witnessing some very good sport of 

 this kind when the Duke of Buckingham's herd was caught in 

 Avington Park, near Winchester, and removed to Stowe. 



As the country became more enclosed and cultivated, deer 

 were proportionately scarce, and the gun of the poacher soon 

 completed their destruction, except in chases where they were 

 especially protected, and even there they had a very bad time of 

 it. One of the holds of the wild fallow deer in the last century 

 was Alice Holt Forest, near Selborne, in North Hants; and 

 Waltham Chase, near the town of Bishop's Waltham, which was 

 the property of the Bishop of Winchester. In both of these 

 places, as well as Woolmer Forest, which adjoins Alice Holt, 

 the Waltham Blacks, so called from their habit of blacking 

 their faces, committed their depredations, and the deer in each 

 have long been extinct. In Whaddon Chase the fallow deer 



