DATE OF INTRODUCTION INTO ENGLAND. 17 
the pheasant. After attentive observation, I can perceive nothing else in the habits 
of the bird to serve as a clue by which we may be enabled to trace the cause of 
failure in the many attempts which have been made to invite it to breed in our 
yards, and retire to rest with the barndoor fowl and turkey.” 
With regard to the date of the introduction of the pheasant into England, 
Mr. ‘Thompson, writing in 1866, says he knows of no records which afford any 
clue to the period when it was first brought into this country; and that though 
probably its ‘acclimatisation does not date back further than the Norman Conquest, 
yet it is possible that our Roman invaders may have imported it at a much earlier 
period, with other imperial luxuries. 
This suggestion is singularly near the truth, for the pheasant has been 
recently shown by Mr. W. Boyd Dawkins to have been naturalised in this country 
upwards of eight hundred years. Writing to The Ibis for 1869, that gentleman 
says, ‘it may interest your readers to know that the most ancient record of 
the occurrence of the pheasant in Great Britain is to be found in the tract ‘De 
inventione Sanctz Crucis nostre in Monte Acuto et de ductione ejusdem apud 
Waltham,’ edited from manuscripts in the British Museum by Professor Stubbs, 
and published in 1861. The bill of fare drawn up by Harold for the canons’ 
households of from six to seven persons, A.D. 1059, and preserved in a manuscript 
of the date of circa 1177, was as follows (p. 16): 
*« Krant autem tales pitantiz: unicuique canonico: a festo Sancti Michaelis 
usque ad caput jejunii [Ash Wednesday] aut xii merule, aut ii aganse [Agace, 
a magpie (?), Ducange], aut ii perdices, aut unus phasianus, reliquis temporibus 
aut ance (Geese, Ducange| aut Galline.’ 
** Now the point of this passage is that it shows that Phasianus colchicus 
had become naturalised in England before the Norman invasion; and as the English 
and Danes were not the introducers of strange animals in any well authenticated 
case, it offers fair presumptive evidence that it was introduced by the Roman con- 
querors, who naturalised the fallow deer in Britain.” 
“The eating of magpies at Waltham, though singular, was not as remarkable 
as the eating of horse by the monks of St. Galle in the time of Charles the Great, 
and the returning thanks to God for it: 
Sit feralis equi caro dulcis sub cruce Christi! 
The bird was not so unclean as the horse—the emblem of paganism—was 
unholy.” 
In Dugdale’s “ Monasticon Anglicanum” is a reference by which it appears 
that the Abbot of Amesbury obtained a licence to kill hares and pheasants in 
the first years of the reign of King Henry the First, which commenced on the 
second of August, 1100; and Daniell, in his “ Rural Sports,” quotes ‘ Echard’s 
D 
