IN DEVON AND SOMERSE7 221 



went incautiously in his shirt to stop a fight in the 

 kennel. Coming back to Exmoor, we learn from 

 Mr. Rawle's book ] that there were forest officers there 

 in Saxon times, and the early Norman kings seem to 

 have hunted over it occasionally, when it was a Royal 

 forest of some 80,000 acres, in which roebuck as well as 

 red deer flourished. Hugh Pollard, Queen Elizabeth's 

 ranger, kept staghounds at Simonsbath in 1 598, and 

 his successors probably did the same, the great land- 

 owners of the district not taking up the task till 1 740, 

 when Mr. Dyke became master ; he was followed by 

 his kinsman, the first Sir Thomas Acland, and from 

 that time the record is unbroken. 



The old pack of hounds, bred expressly for stag- 

 hunting, of which I shall speak presently, was sold 

 out of the country in 1825, and for the next thirty 

 years the sport had a very precarious existence, six 

 masters and a committee following each other in quick 

 succession. At last, in 1855, when things were at a 

 very low ebb, the late Mr. Fen wick -Bisset came into 

 the country and took the hounds. What he accom- 

 plished by unbounded patience and much liberality, 

 coupled with unlimited capacity for taking pains, is 

 most readily shown by comparing his first season with 

 his last. In 1855 only four deer were killed in twenty - 

 1 Annals of Exmoor Forest. Truslove & Hanson, 1893. 



