xton, in Yorkshire, to protect
travellers against these ravenous brutes. King John, in a grant quoted
by Pennant, from Bishop Littleton's collection, mentions the wolf as one
of the beasts of the chase that, despite the severe forest laws of the
feudal system, the Devonshire men were permitted to kill. Even in the
reign of the first Edward, they were still so numerous that he applied
himself in earnest to their extirpation, and enlisting criminals into
the service, commuted their punishment for a given number of wolves'
tongues;--he also permitted the Welsh to redeem the tax he imposed upon
them, by an annual tribute of 300 of these horrid animals."

That Edward, however, failed in his attempt to extirpate them, is
evident from a _mandamus_ of that monarch's successor, to all bailiffs
and legal officers of the realm, to give aid and assistance to his
faithful and well-beloved Peter Corbet, whom the King had appointed to
take and destroy wolves (_lupos_) in all forests, parks, and other
places in the counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, and Salop,
wherever they could be found. In Derbyshire, certain tenants of lands,
at Wormhill, held them on condition that they should hunt the wolves
that harboured in that county. The flocks of Scotland appear to have
suffered a great deal from the ravages of wolves in 1577, and they were
not finally rooted out of that portion of the island till about the year
1686, when the hand of Sir Evan Cameron made the last of them bite the
dust.

Wolves were seen in Ireland as late as the year 1710, about which time
the last presentment for killing them was found in the county of Cork.
The Saxon name for the month of January, "wolf-moneth," in which dreary
season the famished beasts became probably more desperate; and the term
for an outlaw, "wolfshed," implying that he might be killed with as much
impunity as a wolf, indicate how numerous wolves were in those times,
and the terror and hatred they inspired. In every country the
inhabitants have declared this ferocious brute the enemy of man; and in
order, if possible, to annihilate him, have employed every device;--the
result in England has been most satisfactory. The Esquimaux, that
distant and half-frozen people, have their own peculiar way of trapping
wolves; and it is somewhat singular that their ice wolf-trap, as
described by Captain Lyon, resembles exactly, except in the material of
which it is made, that of France, though it is ve