FOURTH TO NINTH CENTURIES 23 
discover some of the prices for hawks, and in particular the 
value set on a falcon of one year, 
s. d. 
C. 37 Lex An untamed Hawk is ae Pee 3. (0 
Rip. A Hawk a year old oe a se 12° 0 
C. 84 Lex A Hawk that flies at Cranes .. ae 6 0 
Alum. A Goshawk wie Nes ia i 3° «0 
A Crane os 3 0 
In Persia there was Hawking 1700 years b.c., and in 
China before that, and even in Europe Mr. Harting thinks that 
it was practised three centuries before the Christian era,* 
which shows the extraordinary antiquity of this sport. 
Pennantt+ and Strutt—who devotes an elaborate chapter 
to the early history of Hawking in Great Britain in his 
“Sports and Pastimes of the People of England ’’ (1801)— 
would seem to be the first authors to relate the following, 
which is somewhat differently told by Mr. Harting, and 
the original of which is to be sought in “ Epistole Sancti 
Bonifacii.”’t 
About the middie of the eighth century (prior to 755) 
Boniface, Archbishop of Mons in Belgium § himself a native of 
England, presented to Ethelbert II., the Saxon King of Kent, 
one Hawk and two Falcons, the latter probably Gyrfalcons. 
A King of Mercia, which was a part of England farther north, 
also requested the same Archbishop to send to him two 
Falvons which had been trained to kill Cranes. 
This is an early notice of the Crane, and here, no doubt, 
the real Crane was meant. There must have been Cranes—for 
which the Saxon name was Cren or Cornoch—on the marshes 
of the west and north cf England, or Falcons would not have 
been needed in Mercia to fly at them. The passage further 
shows that to be an ecclesiastic was no bar to the enjoyment 
of the pursuit of Hawking. But the Kings of Kent and Mercia 
were not the only monarchs who took delight in Falconry, 
as will appear presently. ‘Their sports were imitated by that 
* Tc. p. 68. 
+ “Arctic Zoology,’’ 1784, by Thomas Pennant (Vol. IL., p. 219). 
+ See edn. Wiirdtwein, Ep. 84, or edn. Duemmler (Mon. Hist. Germ.), 
Ep. 106. 
§ According to one account, Boniface, who was murdered in 752, was 
Archbishop not of Mons, but of Mentz in Germany. 
