286 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
Wolves are expressly mentioned in the Forest Laws of King 
Canute, and Liulphus, a dean of Whalley in the time of Canute, 
was celebrated as a Wolf-hunter at Rosendale, in Lancashire.* 
Upon many an English battle-field, at the period of the 
Norman Conquest, as we learn from incidental remarks in the old 
chronicles, the bodies of the slain were preyed upon by Wolves. 
Henry II. and John both hunted the Wolf in various parts of 
England, and kept regular establishments for the purpose, paying 
large prices for good Wolf-hounds, and liberal wages to “ the 
keepers of the King’s Wolf-hounds,” as they were called. 
In Henry III.’s reign Wolves were sufficiently numerous in 
some parts of the country to induce the king to make grants of 
land to various individuals upon the express condition of their 
taking measures to destroy these animals whenever they could be 
found ; and Edward I. formally appointed Sir Peter Corbet to be 
Wolf-hunter-in-chief, commissioning him to destroy all the Wolves 
he could find in the counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, 
Salop, and Stafford. When he died, in 1301, his hounds were all 
brought to the king, and there is an entry to be found in the 
Wardrobe Accounts of this reign (preserved amongst the addi- 
tional MSS. in the British Museum), showing the payment of 
a reward to the huntsman who brought them. 
Towards the close of that century, in Richard the Second’s 
reign, Wolves must have been still pretty common in some parts 
of the country, as, for example, in Yorkshire ; for in the Account 
Rolls of Whitby Abbey at that period we find entries of payments 
made for curing and dressing Wolf-skins ; and in the Accounts of 
Bolton Priory are entries of rewards paid for killing Wolves 
in the Craven district. 
During the reign of Henry VI. it appears that grants of land 
were still made on condition of destroying the Wolves in certain 
localities where they still lingered, as in the Forest of Sherwood, 
but they were then getting very scarce, and the last in England 
was probably killed in Henry the Seventh’s reign, when a member 
of the Barnes family earned a reputation as a noted Wolf-hunter 
in Durham. 
The old books on hunting state that the season for Wolf- 
hunting was between the 25th December and the 25th March. 
* Whitaker’s ‘ History of Whalley,’ p. 222. 
