the smoke of
the capital, was a region of five and twenty miles in circumference,
which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.
Deer, as free as in an American forest, wandered there by thousands.
[65] It is to be remarked, that wild animals of large size were then far
more numerous than at present. The last wild boars, indeed, which had
been preserved for the royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage
the cultivated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered by the
exasperated rustics during the license of the civil war. The last wolf
that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland a short time
before the close of the reign of Charles the Second. But many breeds,
now extinct, or rare, both of quadrupeds and birds, were still common.
The fox, whose life is now, in many counties, held almost as sacred as
that of a human being, was then considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver
Saint John told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded,
not as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a fox,
who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head without pity.
This illustration would be by no means a happy one, if addressed to
country gentlemen of our time: but in Saint John's days there were not
seldom great massacres of foxes to which the peasantry thronged with all
the dogs that could be mustered. Traps were set: nets were spread: no
quarter was given; and to shoot a female with cub was considered as a
feat which merited the warmest gratitude of the neighbourhood. The red
deer were then as common in Gloucestershire and Hampshire, as they now
are among the Grampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne, travelling to
Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five hundred. The wild bull with
his white mane was still to be found wandering in a few of the southern
forests. The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the side of every
hill where the copsewood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard
by night wailing round the lodges of the rangers of whittlebury and
Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pursued in Cranbourne
Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only to that of the sable. Fen
eagles, measuring more than nine feet between the extremities of the
wings, preyed on fish along the coast of Norfolk. On all the downs,
from the British Channel to Yorkshire huge bustards strayed in troops
of fifty or sixty, and were often hunted with greyhounds. The