FALCONRY. 77 
The sport suffered no decline on the accession of the 
Tudors. Henry VII. made laws about hawking as did also 
Queen Elizabeth, who occasionally indulged in the amuse- 
ment with the ladies of her court. Sir Walter Raleigh, allud- 
ing to her sylvan sports, compares her and her retinue to the 
goddess Diana and her nymphs. John of Salisbury, who 
wrote in the thirteenth century, said, “that the women even 
excelled the men in the knowledge and practice of falconry.” 
Henry the VIII. followed the sport until he grew so fat and 
unwieldy, that in attempting to vault a ditch, he fell in 
where the “bottom had fallen out,” and would have drowned 
but for the assistance of a John Moody. Says Hall, “God 
in his goodnesse preserved hym.” 
In 1531, Sir Thomas Elyot “lamented that providing the 
numberless hawks then kept by the English gentry, with 
their customary food of hens, almost threatened the total 
extinction of the valuable race of domestic poultry.” In 
1536, in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Henry VIII, 
owing to the inroads made upon the game, he issued a pro- 
clamation to protect them, and made it imprisonment, and 
such other punishment as should seem meet to his highness 
the King, for “any person of whatever rank who should kill, 
or in any way molest herons, partridges and pheasants from 
his palace at Westminster to St. Giles’s-in-the-Fields, and 
from thence to Islington, Hampstead, Highgate and Hornsey 
ark.” 
Falconry had in a great measure lost its prestige in Eng- 
land by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Hawking 
. was then classed among “the amusements of squires and 
country gentlemen generally." In a book of advice which 
James I. wrote for the benefit of his eldest son Henry, Prince 
of Wales, after recommending manly exercises, hunting, etc., 
he adds, "as for hawking, I condemn it not, but I must 
praise it more sparingly, because it neither resembleth the 
warres so near as hunting doeth, in making a man hardie and 
skilfully ridden in all grounds, and is more uncertain and 
