108 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
The Keeping of Tame Geese.—That domesticated Geese, 
originally the progeny of wild Grey-lag Geese, were a source 
of profit may be safely inferred, and that they were largely 
kept and pastured on the grass-lands of several counties, and 
particularly in Lincolnshire, Huntingdon, Cambridge and 
Norfolk. These Geese were most likely very close in the tints 
of their plumage to the original wild stock of Anser cinereus, 
from which they sprang, and so they continued to be for 
long afterwards.* 
William Harrison (1577),f who has a good deal to say 
about tame Geese, chiefly from a utilitarian point of view, 
observes that in many places they were bred less for eating than 
for the sake of their valuable feathers. Large droves, he tells 
us, were attended by a gossard, no doubt packed together, and 
driven slowly along, as they continued to be in the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, for custom is not likely to have 
changed much.t Harrison, who was a canon of Windsor, 
appears to have been much struck by the spectacle of Geese 
being led to a field like sheep, remarking that “ their goose- 
herd carries a rattle of paper or parchment with him, when 
he goeth about in the morning to gather his goslings together, 
the noise whereof no sooner cometh to their ears than they fall 
to gagling, and hasten to go with him,” obedient to the sound. 
In the le Straunge accounts, which will be the subject of 
the next chapter, we find tame Geese named seven or eight 
times in connection with rabbits and wild-fowl, but the items 
may be worth giving. 
To a wife of Yngaldesthorpe for vi gees xxd. 
A Goos, iij Malards, ij Telys, and ij conyes of store. 
A Goose and a coney of gist 
A Goos vd. 
A Goose, a cockerell, and ij coneys of store. 
To Potter’s daughter of Holme for bryngyng of a goose jd. 
* In the early part of last century, when my father as a young man used 
to travel by road in Marshland and South Lincolnshire, he has told me that 
he was in the habit of passing many flocks of tame Geese being fed on the 
grass-lands, and that the large proportion of whole-coloured grey ones was 
very marked. 
j A contributor to “ Holinshed’s Chronicles.”’ 
+ Sce Rowley’s pictures of Geese in ‘“‘ Ornithological Miscellany,’’ III., 
pl. 105, et seq 
