TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES 29 
MacistEr: What say you, Auceps? How do you beguile 
birds ? 
Auceps: I beguile birds in many ways; sometimes with 
nets, sometimes with snares, sometimes with bird- 
lime, sometimes with a call, sometimes with a hawk, 
sometimes with a decoy. 
MaagtstEr: Have you a hawk? 
Avuceps: I have. 
Magister: Do you know how to tame them ? 
Aucers: Ido know. What use would they be to me if I did 
not know how to tame them ? 
VeEnaToR: Give me a hawk. 
Avucers : I will willingly give you one, if you will give me 
a swift dog. What hawk do you desire to have, a 
larger or a smaller one ? 
VeNnator: Give me a larger one. 
Magister : How do you feed your hawks ? 
Avucers: They feed themselves and me in winter, and in spring 
T let them fly away to the wood, and I take the young 
in autumn and tame them. 
Magister: And why do you let your tamed hawks fly away ? 
Auceps: Because I do not wish to feed them in summer, 
for they eat too much. 
Macister: Yet many people feed their tamed hawks through 
the summer, that they may have them ready again. 
Avucers: They do so, but I do not wish to take so much 
trouble about them, for I know how to catch others, 
not one only but more. 
As indicated by Professor Newton, one of the points 
of this dialogue is that the letting loose of a Goshawk 
or Sparrow-hawk to tend for itself and breed, mentioned 
in at least one instance in the fifteenth century—see 
“ Hawking in Norfolk,’ by A. Newton (Lubbock’s “ Fauna of 
Norfolk ’?)—was no exceptional practice at a much earlier 
date. Another point, as Mr. Harting observes (in Jitt.), is 
the describing of the various methods of bird-catching 
adopted in Anglo-Saxon times, which is not without interest. 
Legends of Birds. A Fwréese Legend of a Fowl of Value. 
—Undoubtedly some of the legends of the North are of 
antiquity ; and a history of the early annals of ornithology 
