54 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
from Syria and Arabia several expert falconers with their 
hawks. 
* * * * * 
In the Middle Ages the Germans were great falconers ; 
so also were the French and the natives of Brabant, of whom 
a celebrated Spanish falconer in 1325 wrote that they were 
the best falconers in the world. To a less extent the art was 
practised in Spain and Italy during many centuries.” * 
Wild-Fowl Decoys in England.—So tar nothing has been 
said about decoys, but they were already in use, with many 
other clever devices for netting birds, which were mostly 
superseded when guns came to be employed. The word 
decoy is one of antiquity, and is probably an abbreviation 
of the Dutch words eende-kooi or coy (Middle Dutch oye), 
that is a cage or trapping-place for Ducks, see Skeat’s 
“ Etymological Dictionary ’”’ (1901). Eend or Eende, which 
is Dutch for a duck, also comes very close to the Anglo-Saxon 
word Ened. In the “ Promptorium Parvulorum ” (fifteenth 
century) we find it spelled Ende, and the equivalent dooke 
byrde—Duck bird. 
The word enede is stated by the learned editor, Mr. Albert 
Way, to occur in the glosses on Gautier de Bibelesworth : 
‘En marreis ane iaroille (enede queketh) ” 
“In marshes the Duck quacketh”?; and in another 
passage : 
a3 
. . . llane (enede) et plounczoun (douke) ”’ 
‘“The Duck and the ? Grebe.” 
There can be no doubt that in the thirteenth and four- 
teenth centuries, and much later than that, Lincolnshire, 
where so many decoys were afterwards constructed, was a 
paradise for wild-fowl, though few of the early writers not 
excepting even William Camden (1586) bear any testimony 
to it. Here were situated Crowland, and its famous 
monastery, a place so encompassed with deep bogs and 
marshy pools that there was only access to it by two 
narrow causeways. + 
*“ Bibliotheca Accipitraria,”’ by J. E. Harting, Intro. XIII., XIV 
t “Britannia,” Vol. I., p. 553. 
