276 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
monarch asked him to send over two Falcons that would do to fly 
at the Crane, for, said he, ‘‘ there are very few birds of use for this 
flight in our country,” 7. e., Kent.* 
Asser, in his ‘Life of Alfred the Great,’ says of this king, 
“His felicity in hunting and hawking, as well as in all the 
other gifts of God, was really incomparable, as I myself have 
often seen.” t 
William of Malmsbury records much the same of Athelstan, 
who was extremely fond of Hawking, and procured his hawks 
from Wales.{ The same historian (lib. ii. cap. 13) thus describes 
Edward the Confessor’s love of hunting and hawking:—“ It was 
his chiefest delight to follow a pack of swift hounds in pursuit of 
their game, and to cheer them with his voice, or to attend the 
flights of hawks taught to pursue and catch their kindred birds. 
Every day after divine service he took the field, and spent his 
time in these beloved sports.” 
So general was the pastime in Saxon times that the monks of 
Abingdon found it necessary to procure a charter from King 
Kenulph to restrain the practice in order to prevent their lands 
from being trampled on. 
Strutt gives an engraving from a MS. of the end of the 
9th or beginning of the 10th century, representing a Saxon 
nobleman and his faleoner with hawks on the bank of a river 
where a crane and wild ducks are feeding. Another drawing 
upon the same subject, with a little variation, occurs in a Saxon 
MS. of somewhat later date. 
Every British chieftain kept a large number of hawks,§ and in 
the 10th century, as we gather from the Laws of Howel Dha, 
Hawking was a favourite sport with the Britons in Wales. The 
Penhebogydd, or Master of the Hawks, was the fourth officer in 
rank and dignity, and sat in the fourth place from his sovereign 
at the royal table. He was permitted to drink no more than 
* [Epistole Sancte Bonifacii in Max. Bibl. patr., vol. xiii., Epist. xl., p. 85. See 
also Chronicum Saxonicum, Ed. Gibson (1692), p. 56; 2, and p. 60, 1. 
+ See also Florence of Worcester, Chronicon, ann. 871, p. 810; and Spelman, 
‘Glossarium Archaiologicum,’ pp. 6, 7. 
t It is recorded by this chronicler that Athelstan required of the Welsh 
“ Volucres que aliarwm avium predam per inane venari noscerent.” 
§ A passage in Ossian (i., p. 115) refers to a negotiation of peace by the proffer 
of 100 managed steeds, 100 foreign captives, and 100 hawks with fluttering wings 
that fly across the sky. 
he 
