712 Quadrupeds. 



any fine or correction. Edgar, the Saxon king, commuted the pu- 

 nishment of certain offences for a given number of wolves' tongues 

 from each criminal, and he also taxed the Welsh princes at three hun- 

 dred of their skins per annum ; this tribute (we are informed by Wil- 

 liam of Malmesbury) ceased after three years, because they asserted 

 that there were no more wolves to be found in their territories ; and 

 this statement has led to an erroneous conclusion, that wolves were 

 extirpated throughout the island at that early period of our national 

 history. The absurdity of this supposition however is sufficiently evi- 

 dent by a reference to subsequent documents. A grant of the Lord- 

 ship of Riddesdale, in Northumberland, was made by William the 

 Conqueror to Robert de Umfraville, in the tenth year of his reign, on 

 condition of his defending that part of the country from enemies and 

 wolves. In 1281, Edward the First gave a singular commission to 

 Peter Corbet (a copy of which is still preserved in Rymer's Feeder a), 

 to destroy the wolves in the shires of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, 

 Salop and Stafford ; and the same king directed John Gifford to hunt 

 them in all the forests of England. In the forty-third year of the 

 reign of Edward the Third, Thomas de Engaine held lands in Pitch- 

 ley, in the county of Northampton, by service of finding certain dogs 

 for the destruction of wolves, foxes, martens, cats and other vermin, 

 within the counties of Northampton, Rutland, Oxford, Essex and 

 Bucks. It is rather remarkable, that the very place in which lands 

 were held by this tenure, is still famous in fox-hunting annals. Sir 

 Robert Plumpton, Knight, was seized of one bovat of land in Mans- 

 field Woodhouse, in the county of Nottingham, called wolf-hunt 

 land, which he held by the service of winding a horn, and chasing and 

 frightening away the wolves in the Forest of Shirewood. In a treatise 

 upon Hunting, in the British Museum, written by the Master of the 

 Game to Henry the Fourth, the wolf is mentioned ; and in the reign 

 of Henry the Sixth, William de Reynes held lands in Boyton, on 

 condition of finding five wolf-dogs. Wolves, according to Hollings- 

 hed, committed great havock among the flocks in Scotland, in the year 

 1577 ; and the last in that part of the kingdom is said to have been 

 killed by the brave Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, about the year 1680. 

 It is therefore certain that these ferocious animals were not wholly 

 exterminated in Britain until the middle of the seventeenth century. 



I purposely omit the wild boar from my list of indigenous animals 

 which are become extinct, because there is every reason to believe, 

 from the authority of ancient records, that the first breed of domesti- 

 cated pigs descended from this wild stock. And for a similar reason 



