SIXTEENTH CENTURY 121 
where in most cases disbursements are entered under weeks 
calculated from the last festival. It will be seen that a great 
many records of birds additional to those in the printed 
Accounts can be cited, and three more species can be added, 
the Gull, the Godwit and the Scoter Duck. The entries of 
such an important species as the Great Bustard, hitherto 
supposed to be only two, are also shown by Mr. le Strange to 
be eight, while the number of Cranes, instead of being five, is 
at least twenty-eight. 
It certainly cannot besaid that justice has ever been done 
to the zoological aspect of these old Norfolk Accounts, although 
they are often quoted in the first two volumes of Stevenson’s 
‘“* Birds of Norfolk’ and have formed the subject of a short 
but valuable article by the late Mr. T. Southwell in the 
Transactions of the Norwich Naturalists’ Society.’”’* 
Birds brought to Hunstanton Hall. — In the eyes of a 
naturalist, the birds are the great feature of these Accounts; 
forty-two species are enumerated, and all but two of them 
can be at once identified. Some species are repeated several 
times, and anything may be comprised in the general term of 
Wild-fowl. The Mallard would naturally be the most abundant, 
and accordingly it is brought in by the useful fowlers very 
many times, while the Swan—tame ones, it is to be pre- 
sumed—the Pheasant and the Plover each come to the house 
repeatedly, and the Curlew, Redshank and Stint not much 
less often. Here it may be remarked that the word Plover is 
somewhat vague, not only in its use in these le Straunge 
Accounts, but wherever it occurs in bills of fare. What leads 
to some confusion is that in the succeeding century Sir Thomas 
Browne (circa 1662) applied the name Green Plover to what we 
now kriow as the Golden Plover as did Merrett in 1666 and 
Ray in 1676, a nomenclature which would have been copied 
by others.t When Thomas Pedder was sent to Walsingham to 
* Vol. L, 1870, 
+ The Pewit (Vanellus vulgaris) is given by Ray under the appellation of 
Lapwing or Bastard Plover (‘‘ Ornithology,’’ p. 307), the latter term denoting 
something inferior or worthless, yet neither of these names occurs in the 
le Straunge papers. 
In Gage’s ‘Antiquities of Hengrave in Suffolk,’ we meet with 
“ bastard’? among the household accounts, but only in one entry:— 
“October, 1572. To Damon the caterferj for iij dosen bastard plovers 
vijs viijd—for ij dosen larks xijd. 
