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ART. V.-ELIZABETHAN SPORT.

1. The Diary of Master William Silence, a Study of Shakespeare and of Elizabethan Sport. By the Right Hon. D. H. Madden. London: Longmans, 1897.

2. The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting. By George Turbervile. London: 1575.

New edition.

3. Coursing and Falconry. By Harding Cox and the Hon. Gerald Lascelles. (Badminton Library.) London: Longmans, 1899.

4. The Animal Lore of Shakespeare's Time. Phipson. London: Kegan Paul, 1883.

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By Emma

LL lovers of old books should feel indebted to Mr. Eliot Stock for the valuable facsimile reproduction which he has recently issued of that delightful and quaint work 'The Boke of St. Albans,' by Dame Juliana Berners, of whom even Mr. Blades could tell us so little. Originally printed in 1486, it was held in such estimation that by the end of the sixteenth century it was reprinted, wholly or in part, some twenty times. Many other valuable works on sport and horses appeared in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. But the religious and political struggles of the Puritan era and the licence of the Restoration killed interest, if not in sport, certainly in the literature of sport. The average country gentleman of the eighteenth century could beat a cover and follow the hounds with zest, but his interest in books on sport or animals rose no higher than the study of a treatise on farriery. What could be expected from him as he is presented to us in the novel and on the stage, in the type of the Pickles, the Westerns, the Sullens, the Sir John Brutes, the Sir Tunbelly Clumsys? Notwithstanding the redeeming features of Squire Allworthy, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and others, their attainments as a class were not such as to stimulate the literature of sport.

In this century the literature of sport leaves little to be desired, and there is hardly a branch of it that has not received more or less exhaustive treatment in our own day. Nevertheless, among recent books on the subject, 'The Diary of Master William Silence' stands, in a sense, alone. The book is not a diary, even though based on a supposed one; it is not a study, in the sense in which the word is usually understood; it is, however, the work of a keen sportsman and a ripe scholar deeply versed in the literature of the subject. The author draws largely from Shakespeare, and weaves apt illustrations

from the dramatist into his text with rare skill and judgment. Few subjects connected with the England of Shakespeare have been left untouched, but sport is one; and a book on Elizabethan sport supplies a long-felt want. Though Mr. Madden's work is not a complete study of the subject, yet the special departments he deals with are so fully and exhaustively treated that he puts all students, both of sport and Shakespeare, under a debt of deep obligation. The author veils his knowledge under a delicate web of romance; and whether this be the best form in which to give the world a study of Elizabethan sport or not, no one can deny that he succeeds admirably in maintaining interest in the Shakespearean characters that figure in his pages. He has traversed the highways and byways of Elizabethan literature, and throws much light on many words and phrases in the language of Tudor sport, whose meaning has been hitherto hidden, not only from the ordinary reader, but even from most Shakespearean commentators.

It has ever been characteristic of the British race to delight in the open air and the pleasures of the woods. Outdoor life was, it is true, much more common, and the practice of field sports more general, in Tudor times than in these days of mechanical industry, when the toiling millions are confined to shops, factories, mills, and mines, and when the vast increase of population and the wholesale enclosure and cultivation of land-only one-fourth of England being under tillage in Elizabeth's reign-have made a profound change in the conditions of sport. But the Englishman remains a sporting animal, even if the instinct sometimes shows itself among the working classes in a form not to be admired. It is a natural instinct in man, whether savage or civilised, to follow the chase; and it is a healthy element in the British race, which civilisation, it is to be hoped, will never eliminate, for it would be to the loss of some of the best qualities which have enabled us to maintain our place in the van of human progress. A quick eye, a steady hand, a ready judgment, intrepidity, courage, and endurance-such are the qualities required for, or acquired in, sport, qualities which in a large measure have contributed to build up the British Empire.

The England of the sixteenth century was very unlike what it is now. Much of the land remote from the towns was then open and unenclosed; thousands of square miles of country now fruitful and well cultivated were then barren uplands, moors, marshy fens, or, as Shakespeare has it, 'bosky acres and unshrubb'd down.' Home and foreign writers describing Tudor England agree as to the great extent of land devoted to

the harbouring of game, and to the large tracts of pasturage compared with the limited areas under cultivation. Harrison estimates that the twentieth part of the realm is imploied upon deere and conies alreadie.' He makes a vigorous protest against the game enclosures, and the Malthusian doctrine defending them, in the following passage:

'Where in times past, manie large and wealthie occupiers were dwelling within the compasse of some one parke, and thereby great plentie of corne and cattell seene now there is almost nothing kept but a sort of wild and savage beasts, cherished for pleasure and delight; and yet some owners, still desirous to inlarge those grounds, (as either for the breed and feeding of cattell,) doo not let dailie to take in more, (not sparing the verie commons whereupon manie towneships now and then doo live,) affirming that we have alreadie too great store of people in England; and that youth by marrieng too soone doo nothing profit the countrie, but fill it full of beggars, (to the hurt and utter undooing, they saie, of the common wealth.)' *

"This little world, . . . set in a silver sea,' was then, indeed, rural England, something like what our great modern idealist speaks of, no 'heap of cinders trampled by contending and miserable crowds; . . . her sky polluted by no unholy clouds

under the green avenues of her enchanted garden a sacred Circe, true daughter of the sun.' Every shire had its parks, and in early Tudor times they are said to have numbered four thousand. Stow tells us that the first enclosed park in England was Woodstock, seven miles in circumference, and walled with stone by Henry I. According to Harrison, Queen Elizabeth had nearly two hundred parks, a sufficient number for the 'great Diana throned in the West.' The parks were enclosed by strong oak palings, stone, or slate, 'wherein great plentie of fallow deere is cherished and kept.' The forests were numerous; Harrison names twenty-six, besides 'manie other now cleane out of my remembrance,' of the eighty-six mentioned as existing in Elizabeth's reign, though many were rapidly losing all the characteristics of forest-land. The greater part of Lancashire was moor and forest, its surface unseamed by unsightly pit heaps, and its streams unpolluted by the poisonous refuse of factories and the sewage of its many towns. There was the forest of Arden, which at one time stretched from the Severn to the Trent. In Queen Elizabeth's time Needwood Forest was twenty-five miles in circumference.' Sherwood covered the country lying between Nottingham and York. In the reign of Henry VIII, according to Leland, 'The forest,

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* Description of England,' pt. i, bk. ii, p. 306, New Shak. Soc.

from a mile beneth Gnarresburgh to very nigh Bolton yn Craven is a 20 miles yn lenght; and yn bredeth it is yn sum places an viii miles.' The Forest of Dean occupied nearly the whole of Gloucester west of the Severn, an area of four thousand three hundred acres. It was there that the oak grew which chiefly supplied material for the ships of the royal navy; and hence the reason of the special injunction given to the commanders of the Spanish Armada not to leave a tree standing in the Forest of Dean.

It is indeed true that the country, as a whole, was gradually being stripped of its trees for house and shipbuilding, firing, and charcoal-burning. Many warning notes were sounded against the evil of excessive clearing of woods. Statutes were passed by Henry VIII and Elizabeth for the preservation of timber; Norden in his 'Surveyor's Dialogue' (1607) states that the wealds of Sussex, Surrey, and Kent had been stripped of trees to feed iron furnaces and glass kilns. Harrison complains of the destruction on the Peak Hills and in the East, saying that Lud, the builder of Lincoln, if he were alive againe, would not call it his citie in the wood, but rather his towne in the plaines.' Drayton's soul is vexed that the fairies are—

Exiled their sweet abode, to poor bare commons fled,

They with the oaks that lived now with the oaks are dead.' But there were still plenty of wild and tree-clad tracts in England to afford material for the brilliant descriptions of woodland scenery in Spenser's Faerie Queene,' or in that dramatic idyll of life in the woods 'As you Like It.' Besides the park there was—

'the franke chase, which taketh something both of parke and forrest, and is given either by the king's grant or prescription. Certes it differeth not much from a parke, nay, it is in maner the selfe same thing that a parke is, saving that a parke is invironed with pale, wall, or such like, the chase alwaie open and nothing at all enclosed, as we see in Enveeld and Malverne Chases.' (Harrison, bk. iii, p. 310.)

Of the beasts of the chase we shall presently speak. There were rabbit warrens innumerable, the black rabbit being especially prized for its skin. Rabbits were as much eaten then as now, as we gather from the household books of the time; in Wild Darrell's bills, published by Mr. Hubert Hall in the appendix to 'Society in the Elizabethan Age,' they figure at most meals, and seem to have been generally roasted. Fynes Moryson says:

The English have great plenty of connies, the flesh wherof is fat, tender, and much more delicate than any I have eaten in other

parts, so as they are in England preferred before hares, at which the Germans wonder, who having no venison (the princes keeping it proper to themselves, and the hunting of hares being proper to the gentlemen in most parts), they esteem hares as venison, and seldom eate connies, being there somewhat rare, and more like rosted cats than the English connies.' (Itinerary' [1617], iii, p. 149.)

In the changing conditions of the ownership and occupation of lands in Tudor days care was taken that game should be preserved in as wild a state as possible. It was a time,' says Mr. Madden, when a man could no more take to himself without lawful title the right to empark animals feræ naturæ, than he might assume coat-armour, a barony, a manor, or the estate of esquire.' But the old days of true forest hunting, with all its primitive attractions, were drawing to a close in England. Rules regulating hunting grew out of tribal relations, for the exercise of sporting rights was conditioned by the circumstances of early existence. Deadly wars have often been waged between savage tribes for breaking the bounds of hunting territories settled by mutual agreement. Forest laws are of early origin; their spirit exists in all laws for the preservation of game, wild birds, and fish, and the general principle upon which they are based is eminently sound. Man early exercised his ingenuity to lessen his labours and ensure success in the pursuit of game for food. Every development in hunting weapons, the use of toils, nets, or traps, increased his power, and lessened the chance of life for the creatures he pursued. Had laws then not been put in force for the preservation of game, wild birds, and fish, not only would most, if not all, animals of the chase have been exterminated, but many other creatures supplying human food would have been destroyed, and irreparable mischief wrought to all cultivators of the soil-a truth unfortunately not generally recognised or understood by gamekeeper, farmer, and peasant.

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From early hunting days there was a broad classification of animals into beasts of venery' and 'beasts of the chase'; all outside these might be termed rascals.' Dame Juliana Berners thus names the beasts of venery to my dere chylde' :—

Lystyn to yowre dame and she shall yow lere.

Fowre maner beestys of venery there are:

The first of theym is the hert, the secunde is the hare,
The boore is oon of tho, the wolff and not oon moo.'

The laws of Canute (1016) enumerate, among the wild beasts of the forest, horses, bugalls,' kine, goats, and wolves. Of the wild oxen that once existed in Great Britain none were

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