THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
“I braid nets,” he says, “and set them in a convenient place, and set 
on my hounds that they may pursue the beasts of chase until they come 
unexpectedly to the nets, and so become entangled in them, and I slay 
them in the nets.” 
This mode of taking Roe deer in nets is mentioned in Domesday Book, 
as practised in Lancashire at the time of the Conquest. “Rogerius de 
Laci ten Cortune. Ibi est haia capreolis capiend.” In the Welsh laws of 
“ Howel Dha 940 A.D.,” we learn that the skin of a roebuck was worth a 
penny. The early Bishops of Durham — ^A.D. 1123 — ^used to hold annual 
meetings of villeins and farmers for the purpose of constructing “ hays,” 
and assisting at great Roe hunts. 
Mr Harting, in his account of ancient British mammals, has given 
several instances of the plentifulness of Roe during the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries; but at the date of “ Hollinshed’s Chronicle ” 
(1586-87) Roe seem to have become somewhat scarce, for that writer 
speaks of there being then “ an indifferent store of Roe.” Yet there 
were still many Roe in the north of England at that date, especially 
in Northumberland, where Leland in 1538 testified to their being 
common. 
Dr Muffett, “Health’s Improvement,” 1655, states that Roe were still 
existent in Wales in the time of Elizabeth; but George Owen says that 
they were extinct in Pembrokeshire in 1595. They never became quite 
extinct in Cumberland or Northumberland. 
The first successful reintroduction of Roe to England took place in 1800, 
when Lord Dorchester turned out a few from Perthshire into the woods 
of Milton Abbas, Dorsetshire. Since that time they have extended all 
over the Blackmore Vale country from Moreton to Warmwell in the Frome 
Valley and from Hyde to Houghton in the Vale of the Puddle. In 1879 
Mr Mansell Pleydell estimated that in the Milton, Whatcombe and 
Houghton woods there were 120 head, their numbers being merely a ques- 
tion of preservation. Now there are probably three or four hundred in 
Dorsetshire alone, and I have hunted them at Melbury with the late Lord 
Ilchester, who kept several couples of hounds for this purpose. Here they 
generally run up on to the downs, after being moved out of the hanging 
combes, and give a fast run of a couple of miles or so before taking covert 
in another wood, where the hounds generally brought them to bay. These 
deer were seldom killed, the hounds being whipped off, as the stock was 
not considered to be sufficiently large. 
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