58 DIVISION I. VERTEBRAL ANIMALS.— CLASS II. AVES. 
except the air of heaven in common with their noble oppressors., The life 
of a serf was of less value in the eyes of a Norman baron than that of a 
buek, a hound, or a hawk; and in those days, the mass of what we now 
eall the people were serfs and slaves. As to the keeping of falcons, the 
ereat expense attending it put it entirely out of the power of the common- 
alty, but the prohibitive Norman law was probably meant at first to extend 
to such of the Saxon landholders as were rich and remained free, but had no 
rank nor nobility according to the conqueror’s estimation. In the days of 
John, however, every freeman was most liberally permitted to have eyries 
of hawks, falcons, eagles, and herons in Aés own woods. In the year 
1481 was printed the ‘Book of St. Albans,’ by Juliana Berners, sister of 
Lord Berners, and prioress of the nunnery of Sopewell. It consisted f two 
tracts, one on hawking, the other on heraldry. The noble dame obtained 
from her grateful contemporaries the praise of being ‘a second Minerva in 
her studies, and another Diana in her diversions.’ Her subject was well 
chosen; hawking was then the standing pastime of the noble, and the lady 
abbess treated it in the manner the most likely to please. The book became 
to frlconers what Ifoyle’s has since become to whist-players ; but the dame 
Juliana’s had, moreover, the merit of paying proper homage to the jealous 
distinctions between man and man, as then established. According to the 
‘Book of St. Albans,’ there was a nice adaptation of the different kinds of 
falcons to different ranks. Thus, such species of hawks were for kings, 
and could not be used by any person of inferior dignity, such for princes 
of the blood, such others for the duke and great lord, and so on down to the 
knave or seryant. In all there were fifteen @rades ; but whether this num- 
ber was so small, owing to the species of birds, or because it included all 
the fuctitious divisions of society then recognized, we cannot well determine. 
We have too much respect for the patience of our readers to follow the dame 
through all her directions, to which additions have been made in the fifteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. 
into the field. 
“Strutt, in his industrious work on the ‘Sports and Pastimes of the Eng- 
We would rather accompany the trained hawks 
lish,’ gives one or two engravings, from very old pictures, representing ladies 
followed by dogs, 
and running on foot, with their hawks on their fists, to 
cast them off at game. Indeed, John of Salisbury, who wrote in the thir- 
teenth century, says that the women even excelled the men in the knowledge 
and practice of faleonry, whence he ungallantly takes occasion to call the 
sport itself frivolous and effeminate. Taken altogether, however, a hunting- 
party of this kind, composed of knights and dames, mounted on their piaff= 
ing manéve horses, and with their train of falconers, in appropriate costuine, 
and their well-broken dogs, and the silver music of the bells, mingled with 
