28 DEER AND DEER PARKS. •■ Ch. 11. 



to be had amongst them, beside a more copious procreation of humaine 

 issue, wherby the realme was alwaies better furnished with able men to serve 

 the Prince in his affaires ; now there is almost nothing kept but a sort of 

 wilde and savage beasts, cherished for pleasure and delite, and yet the 

 owners styll desirous to enlarge those groundes, do not let daily to take 

 in more, affirming that we have already to great store of people in Efigland, 

 and that youth by mariying to soone, doe nothing profite the countrey, but 

 fill it full of beggars.'' He proceeds to say that 'The twentieth parte of 

 the realme is employed upon Deere and Conies already.' This is probably 

 an exaggeration, nevertheless there is abundant evidence to prove that there 

 were a vast, number of parks in England during the sixteenth centuryj 

 though towards the end of that period they had begun to decline; upwards 

 of seven hundred are marked in Saxton's maps, engraved between the years 

 157s and 1580, besides twenty-one, which are marked in Wales; but yet it is 

 plain by the accounts of Lambard, in his ' Perambulation of Kent,' printed 

 in 1576, and Carew, in his ' Survey of Cornwall,' printed in 1602, that a 

 great number had been within the memory of men disparked, the owners, in 

 the-quaint language of the Cornish Squire, ' making there Deere leape over 

 the pale', to give the bullockes place.' Stow in his Annals ('1592), and 

 Moryson in his Itinerary (1617), confirms what has been stated above, the 

 former quoting Andrew Bourd,^ ' that there be more Parks in England than 

 in all Europe beside,' and classing' ' Deare red and fallow,' with goats and 

 conies, ' for every where there is jolly maintenance of those kinds of beasts, 

 because it is full of great woods, whereof there riseth pastime of hunting, 

 greatly exercised, specially by the Nobility and Gentlemen.' Moryson 

 observes : — ' The English are so naturally inclined to pleasure, &s there is 

 rio Countrie, wherein the Gentlemen and Lords have so many and large 

 Parkes onely reserved for the pleasure of hunting, or where' all sorts of men 

 alot' so much ground about their houses" for pleasure of Gardens, and 



' Holinshed's Chronicles, ist ed, 1577, p. 89. ■■' Stow's Annals. Ed. Howes, an. 1631, p. 2. 



