50 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
Perhaps it was a captured Crane brought home by some 
falconer to which a rather singular allusion occurs in 1265 in 
“The Household Roll of the Countess of Leicester.”* Here 
a payment is made to a boy for seeking a Crane in a well, 
or more likcly, as Mr. Evans suggests, in some wet place or 
marsh.t In 1282 Edward I. sent to Spain for the King of 
Castille four grey Gyr-falcons for Crane and Heron hawking. t 
In 1298 falconers took Cranes in Cambridgeshire, which were 
presented to the King.§ The passage having reference to 
them, as quoted by Mr. Harting from the King’s Wardrobe 
accounts, runs :— 
“Jan. 5. To Alexander Coo, The King’s falconer, for 
presenting to the King 3 Cranes taken in Cambridgeshire by 
the Ger-falcons of Sir Geoffrey de Hauville . . . 6s. 8d. 
(half a mark).” 
These Ger-falcons may have been from Iceland, forwarded 
to England via Norway. Mr. H. Slater cites very early 
instances of Falcons being sent from that country, in one 
instance even to Tunis.|| 
The Price of Hawks.{—Mr. Harting, in his admirable 
“ Ornithology of Shakespeare,” has collected (p. 77) various 
prices paid for Hawks and Falcons, which, as they were trained 
birds, ran into high figures, one ‘‘ cast” alone costing as much 
as £23. These large prices are very different from the small 
sums given for wild Hawks in the thirteenth century, which 
* Shakespeare Press, 1841. ‘‘ Manners and Household Expenses of 
England,” edited for the Roxburghe Club by B. Botfield, p. 57. 
{ Capons, Fowls and Geese are also named in the Countess’s Roll, and 
the editor points out that “ pullagium,”’ a term which is made use of, may 
have comprehended other species. Eggs, which seem to have been an 
important item in the ménage, cost the Countess about fourpence per 
hundred : on Easter Sunday upwards of 1200 were purchased at Wallingford, 
the greater part of which the editor supposes to have been stained and 
given away as Pasque eggs. 
t “ Mittimus vobis quatuor Girofalcones grisos, quorum duo apti sunt 
& instructi ad grues & heruncellos”’ (‘‘ Foedera conventiones,’’ ed. 1705, 
p. 1087). 
§ ‘Essays on Sport,” p. 78. 
|| ‘‘Manual of the Birds of Iceland,” p. 32. 
4 Mr. Harting has been at the pains to search out several early statutes 
relating to hawks and hawking, but finds nothing earlier than 1217, when 
Henry III., then in the first year of his reign, and anxious to adopt a 
conciliatory policy, granted by a Carta de Foresta (cap. XI,) the right to 
every man to have eyries of hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons and eagles in 
his own woods (‘‘ The Management of Hawks,” p. 243). 
