26 
FIRST INTRODUCTION. 
Fetch me a pheasant, or a brace of partridges, 
From goodwife poulterer, for my lady's supper, 
says Ben Jonson, in his ^Staple of News;' and Prigg, 
in Beamnont and Fletcher's ^ Beggars' Bush,' makes this 
modest demand : 
I must have my capons. 
And turkeys brought me in with my green geese, 
And ducklings in the season ; fine fat chickens ; 
And if you chance where an eye of tame pheasants 
And partridges are kept, see they be mine. 
With all his love of good eating, we question if this lux- 
urious dog would have relished the repast provided by the 
old pastoral poet, William Browne : 
Pheasant and partridge into jelly turned, 
Grated with gold, seyen times refined and burned, 
And dust of orient pearl. 
Archbishop Neville, we are told, somewhere about the 
middle of the fifteenth century, made a great feast, of which 
two hundred Pheasants formed a part, reminding us of the 
luxurious repasts of the ancient Eomans, with whom, for a 
time, this bird bore the palm, on account of its novelty 
and expense. Heliogabalus, in his ostentation, is said to 
have fed his lions with Pheasant's ilesh — right royal fare for 
the imperial brutes. 
The earliest English writer who mentions the Pheasant 
is Echard, whose 'History of England' bears date 1299 ; 
the market p)rice of the bird was at this time 4of. ; in 1512 
we find it set down at I5. 3^d., a very considerable sum in 
those days. 1250 was, according to Daniel, the date of its 
first introduction into Europe. Jason of the Golden Fleece 
and his Argonauts are said to have brought it from the 
banks of the Phasis — a river of Colchis, in Asia Minor ; 
hence the name Phasianus in Latin, Faisan in French, Fagi- 
ano in Italian, and Pheasant in our own language, and hence 
also the specific distinction colchicus. When Pheasants were 
first preserved in this country we have no means of ascer- 
taining ; but it must have been long since, as we find en- 
tries in the household books and privy purse accounts of 
various noble families, which show that they were, at a 
