C EAT TON AND CHILLINGHAM. 95 



wards hy the present lord king were disafforested, and in 

 these lie claimed not chase and warren." * This park 

 existed in the year 1368, for it appears, from an in- 

 quisition taken in the forty-second year of Edward III., 

 that "a park with wild animals, called 'Kelsowe,' is of 

 no value beyond the maintenance of the wild animals." 

 It is considered to be very probable that the whole or 

 part of this park, with the " wild animals " it contained, 

 has since been taken into the park at Chillingham ; for 

 "in 1634 the tenants of Chatton complained of Sir 

 Ralph Grey, of Chillingham, taking land of Chatton 

 without right, and enclosing from Chatton Common. 

 This encroachment may refer to the enclosure made by 

 the park wall of Chillingham, which projects with 

 an elbow into Chatton Moor on the west. ' Robin 

 Hood's Bog,' to which, when disturbed, the wild cattle 

 habitually resort, and to which tradition points as their 

 pristine habitat, is at the extreme elbow of this con- 

 jectural intake." This curious coincidence of circum- 

 stances seems to make it very probable that the " wild 

 animals " of the royal park of Chatton at the close of 

 the fourteenth century were, in part at least, the an- 

 cestors of the " wild beasts " still kept at Chillingham 

 at the end of the nineteenth. 



In the north of Cumberland, surrounded by ancient 

 forests, fells, moors, and wastes, which extend from 

 thence to Chillingham, and continuously through 

 Southern Scotland, lies the well-known border-fortress 



* Tate's " History of Alnwick," vol. i., p. 94. For the whole of this 

 information, and all the following quotations, I am indebted to a learned 

 pamphlet, full of references to ancient authorities, entitled " Notes on 

 Chatton," by the Rev. William Procter and Mr. James Hardy, which has been 

 kindly given to me by the Rev. Henry Edward Bell, Yicar of that parish. 



