For the remainder of his life Mr. Elliot resided chiefly in London, where some still survive who remember the charm of his society. One who knew him well described his conversation as 66 a shower of pearls and diamonds," so sparkling and so spontaneous; but whatever the felicity of his talk, or the grace of his manner, by his descendants he is best remembered for the gifts of heart and mind which made him beloved by a large and devoted family.'

He died on the 2nd of December, 1830, and was buried by the side of his brother (the first Earl of Minto) in Westminster Abbey.

We conclude in a state of mind rarely experienced by a reviewer at the completion of his task. L'appetit vient en mangeant. Like Oliver Twist, we feel irresistibly impelled to ask for more. If the remainder of the partially-quoted or suppressed letters correspond either with the specimens or with Lady Minto's description of them, she has been decidedly too chary in her selections; and her single volume might, we venture to predicate, be advantageously enlarged, if not expanded into two.

ART. III.-1. Some Account of English Deer Parks, with Notes on the Management of Deer. By Evelyn Philip Shirley, Esq., M.A., F.S.A. London, 1867.

2. Our Deer Forests. By Alexander Robertson, Esq. An Inaugural Lecture delivered to the Members of the Highland Economic Society. London, 1867.

3. Notes of the Chace of the Wild Red Deer in the Counties of Devon and Somerset. By Charles Palk Collyns. London, 1862.

4. Forest Creatures. By Charles Boner. London, 1862.

T is doubtful whether fallow deer, the graceful ornaments of

of the shade' with the multifarious beasts of chase which once peopled the extensive forests of our island

'Where stalked the huge deer* to his shaggy lair,

Through path and alleys roofed with sombre green,

Thousands of years before the silent air

Was pierced by whizzing shaft of hunter keen.'

Professor Owen is said to have declared that although he has found abundant remains of the red deer, the roe, and several extinct kinds of the cervus genus in Great Britain, he has never

*The deer here alluded to by the Poet (Wordsworth) is the "leith," a gigantic species long extinct.

discovered

discovered any of the fallow deer; and he appears to consider this negative evidence as affording a reasonable presumption of the foreign origin of that species. Be this, however, as it may, large herds of this most graceful of quadrupeds now graze peacefully within those enclosures, fenced in with rough oaken palings, grey with lichens and mosses, which form some of the most pleasing features of the rural scenery of England.

Nothing can be affirmed with certainty with respect to the history of the fallow deer. If it be not indigenous it must have been introduced into England at a very remote period, for it was hunted in a wild state in the numerous chaces and forests in which, in pre-Norman times, the country abounded. Two permanent varieties of the cervus dama or fallow deer appear to have been known from the earliest times, namely, the spotted and the dark brown. There is also a black and a white species, the latter of which is unquestionably a foreign importation, having been regarded in the Tudor times as a novelty, and consequently highly prized:—

At first' (says Pennant) all the beasts of chace had this whole island for their range; they knew no other limits than those of the ocean, nor confessed any particular master. During the Heptarchy they were reserved by each sovereign for his own particular diversion, hunting and war being in those uncivilised ages the sole employment of the nobility. The Saxon kings only appropriated those lands to the use of forests which were unoccupied; numerous forests possessing deer were consequently open, and the practice of enclosing portions of them for private chaces or parks was first introduced by the Norman kings.'

There are very few notices in 'Domesday Book' of any of our existing deer parks: it must therefore be inferred that by far the greater number have been formed since the time of the Great Survey. Deer were originally obtained from the unenclosed forests for stocking chaces and parks by means of haiæ, or hayes, a term derived from the Saxon, signifying a hedge. They consisted of enclosures into which the wild deer were driven and secured. The hayes mentioned in the Great Survey were chiefly in Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire, and more than seventy are specified. Their size is not noticed, excepting that of one belonging to Donnelie, the modern Beldesert, in Warwickshire, which is described as half a mile in length and half a mile in breadth. A precept is preserved among the records of the Court of Exchequer at Chester commanding one John Done to make a chamber in the forest' for the preservation of vert and venison, by which was undoubtedly meant one of those devices for facilitating the capture of game Vol. 125.-No. 250.

2 B

which

which were resorted to in those countries, particularly in Germany, where vast unenclosed and primitive forests occupied so large a portion of the soil. From these hayes the deer were transferred to larger enclosures, where they were hunted or shot at the pleasure of their owners.

Deer hunting has always ranked high among the recreations of every people, whether civilized or uncivilized. The pursuit of the stag was, however, in the Saxon, Norman, and Tudor times very different from the modern hunt, although it bore some resemblance to the system of driving, as practised in Scotland, the rifle having been substituted for the bow. N-owa-days,' says Mr. Earle, in the preface to his recent edition of the Saxon Chronicle,' quoted by Mr. Shirley, ‘men hunt for exercise and sport, but they then hunted for food, or for the luxury of fresh meat. Now the flight of the beast is the condition of a good hunt; but in those days it entailed disappointment. They had neither the means of giving chace nor of killing at a distance, so they used stratagems to bring the game within the reach of their missiles.' A labyrinth of alleys was penned out at a convenient part of the forest, and here the archers lay under covert. The hunt began by sending men round to beat the wood and drive the game with dogs and horses into the ambuscade; and horns were used, not as with us to call the dogs, or as in France to signal the stray sportsman, but to scare the game into the toils that had been artfully prepared for it.

Another mode of capturing deer was by means of saltatoria, or pit-falls, which were generally constructed on the border of a forest or chace. Into these the deer were driven by persons employed for the purpose, and great numbers were thus caught and transferred to enclosed parks. There is an example of a chartered deer-leap still retaining its privileges in the park of Wolseley, Staffordshire.

Of the thirty-one deer parks noticed in Domesday Book,' eight belonged to the Crown, and the remainder were the property of the great monastic houses and of the nobility. The number of deer parks in England increased considerably after the Conquest. The desire to impark their woods appears to have then become very general among the great landed proprietors. It appears from the Chronicle' of Holinshed that in the year 1577 the increase in the number of parks had become so considerable that a twentieth part of the territory of the realm was thus appropriated. More than seven hundred deer parks are marked in the maps engraved by Saxton between the years 1576 and 1580. A great many of these parks belonged to the Church. The See of Canterbury, according to Spelman, enjoyed twenty, besides numerous

chaces;

chaces; the See of Norwich possessed thirteen; the Abbey of Glastonbury owned seven: indeed there were very few monasteries which did not possess, at least, one deer park in which the members of the house took their pastime, valetudinis gratia,' and from which the refectory and the abbot's table were abundantly supplied with venison. The bishops and mitred abbots were, in truth, not only the keenest sportsmen but the greatest bon vivants of their day.

A curious grant is extant to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's by Sir William le Baud, in 1275, of a doe yearly on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, and of a fat buck upon that of the commemoration of the Apostle, the formal reception of which in the Cathedral is said to have continued up to the reign of Elizabeth, the clergy standing on the steps of the choir wearing garlands of flowers upon their heads, while the antlers of the buck were carried in procession round the church on the head of a spear, with a great noise of horns.'

6

The practice of imparking appears to have been carried to such an excess at one period of our history as to have given rise to serious popular discontents, which manifested themselves in frequent breaches of the peace. In the Lives of the Berkeleys' it is related that in the reign of Edward III. the people, warlikely arrayed,' made an attack upon Sir Maurice's recently-enclosed park in Gloucestershire. Thornbury was also the scene of a popular tumult, because, Leland says, the Duke of Buckingham had made a fair park hard by the castle, and took much ground into it very fruitful of corn.' It is highly probable that, in the process of imparking, many commons and wastes had been enclosed with very little consideration for the rights of the tenants of manors, who thus lost many valuable privileges for which they received no compensation. It is stated by Holinshed that the deer parks in the two counties of Kent and Essex alone amounted in his time to a hundred, 'whereby,' adds the chronicler, 'is to be seen what store of ground is employed upon that vain commodity, deer, which bringeth no manner of gain or profit to the owners, since they commonly give away their flesh, never taking penny for the same, because venison in England is neither bought nor sold by the right owner; but the deer are maintained only for his pleasure, to the no small decay of husbandry and diminution of mankind.' The increase in parks was necessarily in some degree restrained by the cost of obtaining a licence or it would have been even greater than it was. The House of Commons, as appears by the Rolls of Parliament of the sixth year of the reign of Henry IV., endeavoured to get this right of the Crown annulled; but it being one

of the modes of obtaining money for the exercise of which the sovereign was not under the necessity of asking his subjects' consent, the attempt, as may be supposed, was unsuccessful.

Deer-hunting may be said to have been almost a ruling passion with many of our kings. There were several curious tenures in different parts of the country having reference to the enjoyment of their favourite pastime by these royal sportsmen. Thus, the manor of Bletchingdon, in Oxfordshire, was held by the singular service of carrying a shield of brawn, price twopence halfpenny, to the king, whenever he hunted in his Park of Cornbury; it being understood that the shield so provided for the use of his Majesty on his first day of stag-hunting should suffice for the whole of his stay at his manor of Woodstock. In the vicinity of the New Forest one manor was held by the tenure of finding provision for the king while hunting, and another of providing an esquire clad in coat of mail to attend upon him, together with litter for the king's bed and forage for his horse for forty days. The obligation of supplying arrows was attached to another manor bordering on the Royal demesne.* The chief forester of the Forest of Dean stated before the Royal Commissioners in 1767 that it was his duty to attend the king with bow and arrow, and six men clad in green, whenever it might be his Majesty's pleasure to hunt in that part of his dominions.

Notwithstanding the number of the parks and chases belonging to the Crown, the extent of the Royal forests, and the abundance and variety of game which they harboured, in the frequent progresses made by our sovereigns through their realm they rarely failed to do considerable execution among the bucks of every nobleman and gentleman whose seats lay in the route; and this practice seems to have continued up to the time of Charles I. Deer-hunting had indeed become quite a fashionable amusement in the reign of Elizabeth, and the parks in which England then abounded were not, as in the present day, enclosures where deer are maintained chiefly for ornament, but hunting-grounds wherein the inmates of the castle, the stately mansion, or the baronial hall regularly took their diversion. The Queen herself was an expert archer, and on one occasion killed with her own bow twenty-seven bucks in Lord Berkeley's park in Gloucestershire, to the intense disgust of that nobleman, who immediately disparked the scene of the exploit, and thus drew upon himself the anger of her Majesty for an act which seemed to reproach her, as she said, for her successful day's sport and to grudge her the pleasure she had enjoyed. As an especial mark of her regard, Elizabeth sometimes honoured

The New Forest,' by John D. Wise.

her