230 



.S" TA G- HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 



et trois inilles de course avec les levriers les meilleurs de ce 

 roiaulme, desquelz quelquefois ung, deux et truis portoient 

 un grand cerf par terre ' ' He concludes by a tribute to 

 Lord Leicester's able management of everything, the satis- 

 faction of the queen and the company, and the excellence 

 both of the deer and of the hounds. 



The ' levriers,' I fancy, were not greyhounds as we under- 

 stand the term, but of the same breed which were still pre- 

 served at Godmersham and Eastwell in Kent a few years ago. 

 The keepers used them for deer-catching, and I was told that 

 the strain could be traced back to Elizabethan times. A 

 good one always pinned a deer by the ear, and this was 

 a criterion of purity of strain. They were cream or fawn- 

 coloured with dusky muzzles, with really greyhound speed, 

 and half greyhound, half mastiff-like heads, long ridgy backs, 

 loosely coupled, high on the leg and apt to be very crooked, 

 resembling in appearance the boarhounds in Snyders' and 

 Velasquez' pictures. 



Lord Leicester gave Queen Elizabeth the first watch 

 bracelet recorded in historj^ ; I suppose for her hunting days. 

 Once, when she and he went to stay at Berkeley Castle, they 

 had a day with the toils in the park in Lord Berkeley's 

 absence, and killed twenty-seven prime stags, again having 

 resort to screens and arblasts. When he came back and 

 heard what they had done he was very much annoyed, and 

 threatened to do away with his park and his deer altogether. 

 It sounds rather an excessive straining of royal prerogative. 

 I am sorry to say that one of Lord Leicester's first official 

 activities after he was appointed Master of the Buckhounds 

 in 1572 was to fall out with the Archbishop of Canterbury 

 over some lands. But up to this time the See of Canterbury 

 and the Queen's Hounds appear to have been on excellent 

 terms. Under date September 4, 1 564, Lord Leicester writes 



' Cheruel, Marie Stuart et Catherine dc .\fi'dicis, A)ipeinlix, p. 227. 



