DATE OF INTEODUCTION 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 Eoman 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 Sanctse Crucis nostrse in Monte Acuto et de ductione ejusdem apud 

 Waltham,' edited from manuscripts in the British Museum by Professor Stubbs, 

 and published in 1861. The biU 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) : 



" ' Erant autem tales pitantise unicuique canonico : a festo Sancti Michaelis 

 usque ad caput jejunii [Ash Wednesday] aut xii merulse, aut ii agansese [Agace, 

 a magpie (?), Duccmge], aut ii perdices, aut unus phasianus, reliquis temporibus 

 aut ancsB [Geese, Duccmge] aut Gallinse.' 



" Now the poiat of this passage is that it shows that Fhasicmus colcUcm 

 had become naturalised ia 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 faUow deer in Britain." 



" The eattag 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 cnice Christi! 



The bird was not so unclean as the horse— the emblem of paganism— was 

 unholy." 



In Dugdale's " Monasticon AngHcanum " is a reference by which it appears 

 that the Abbot of Amesbury obtained a licence to kiU hares and pheasants in 

 the first years of the reign of King Henry the Eirst, which comimenced on the 

 second of August, 1100; and Daniell, in his "Rural Sports," quotes "Echard's 



D 



