Ch. I. SINCE THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 7 



of the hundred of Chelmer and Dancing 

 to Randolf Peperking and his kindling, 

 with heorte and hinde, doe and bocke, 

 hare and foxe, catt and brocke. 

 wilde fowell with his flocke, 

 Patrich, fesant hen, and fesant cock, 

 with gieene and wild stob and stock ; 

 to kepen and to yemen by all her might, 

 both by day and eke by night,' &c. 



The original, observes Camden, is in the Exchequer Records,' ■ but the 

 language softened by being frequently transcribed. 



However, an undoubted evidence of the existence of the buck and doe 

 in England in the middle of the thirteenth century is afforded by the 

 curious agreement between the Earl of Winchester and Roger de Somery, 

 which I have given at length at page 16 of this volume, and which is dated 

 in the 31st year of Henry HI. (1247) ; and in the 3rd year of Edward I. 

 (1275) Sir William le Baud Knt. made a signal grant to the dean and 

 canons of St. Paul's, London-, of a doe yearly, on the feast of the Conver- 

 sion of St. Paul, and of a fat buck upon the Commemoration of the same 

 saint, to be offered at the high altar in St. Paul's by Sir William and his 

 family, the reception of which buck and doe, it may be observed, was kept 

 •up even to the days of Queen Elizabeth, at the steps of the choir by the 

 canons of St. Paul's, attired in their sacred'vestments and wearing garlands 

 of flowers upon their heads ; and the horns of the buck carried on the top 

 of a spear in procession, round about within the body of the church, with a 

 great noise of horn-blowers, as the learned Camden upon his own view of 

 -both affirms.^ From the beginning of the fourteenth century instances bf 

 the same kind abound, both in the legal writings of the period and in the 

 poetry of that early age. Thus in the rhyme of Sire Thopas, in Chaucer's 

 Canterbury Tales, we have 



• Record. Hilar. Term. 17 Edw. II. ' Blount's Tenures, ed. Beckwith, p. 395. 



