80 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
considered friends by tillers of the soil in England, and it was 
the custom for boys to be sent into the fields with bows and 
arrows, which with the help of shouting, were expected to scare 
all such thieves away. Then, as now, the parasitical House 
Sparrow, whether a native or not, knew well how to thrive 
upon man’s labour. No one can prove from where the Sparrow 
originally sprung, but a robber of grain it has been from the 
earliest times, and in proof of this indictment may be cited 
an illustration in the ‘‘ Hortus Sanitatis.”’ This ‘‘ Hortus,” 
which was a medical treatise of the fifteenth century (printed 
1485 and 1491) sometimes with coloured pictures, depicts four 
Sparrows attacking a field of ripe corn, probably real Sparrows, 
but it has to be remembered that the term was used in a 
generic sense. Another very quaint delineation of street life 
occurs in the later editions of ‘‘ Hortus,” in which Kites and 
other birds form a prominent feature. One of the Kites is 
sitting on a man’s head, a plain testimony to the tameness of 
these privileged city cleaners. Everywhere they were tolerated, 
and especially in hot countries, because of their utility in 
clearing up garbage, and animal matter which would infallibly 
spread disease, if left to rot. In England, where they had not 
lost their Anglo-Saxon name of Glead—(glida or cyta from 
their gliding flight), they must have been quite common, and 
very serviceable, in spite of eating a few young fowls at times. 
In the same picture are to be seen Storks attending to 
their nests on chimneys. The Stork appears never to have 
been an English bird, yet it once bred in Scotland, as Dr. Eagle 
Clarke has pointed out; this was in 1416, when a pair nested 
on the top of St. Giles’s Church, in the heart of Edinburgh, 
according to the old chronicler Bower.* 
On the other hand, granivorous birds would have been 
less plentiful. Partridges, though commonly eaten, and 
Pheasants also, as bills of fare testify, would have been few 
compared with the multitudes of to-day. Yet the Pheasant 
seems to have been common in Ireland, and Professor Newton 
states, on the authority of Nicholas Upton (whose work was 
written in the fifteenth century and to whom we owe the first 
mention of Choughs in Cornwall), that Pheasants were occasion- 
ally reared and fattened in England, which indicates that they 
* Abbot Bower, see “‘ Scottish Naturalist,” 1919, p. 25. 
