, where the bishop's hounds
were stabled.

Hawking was a sport, until the magna charta, exclusively confined to the
nobility; lords and ladies alike indulged themselves in the exercise,
which from its gentleness, in comparison with others then in vogue, was
deemed somewhat an effeminate pastime, probably because, in the delicate
dexterity it required, the ladies bore off the palm of victory.

A hawk's eyrie was returned in doomsday-book as one of the most valuable
articles of property; and the estimation in which the bird was held, may
be judged of by the enormous prices given for them, and the heavy
penalties attached to stealing either them or their eggs; for destroying
one of which the offender was liable to imprisonment for a twelvemonth
and a day. Perhaps, however, this is no very safe criterion of their
intrinsic value, or those sentences that sometimes figure in our modern
assize reports--where seven years' transportation for stealing two ducks
from an open pond, stands side by side with twelve months' imprisonment
for murdering a wife, a friend, or a child, in a fit of temporary
insanity, alias intoxication--might lead to rather curious inferences.

But to return to our hawks; a thousand pounds for a cast of these birds,
and a hundred marks for a single one, are recorded prices. In hawking,
the bird was carried on the wrist, which was protected by a thick glove,
the head of the bird covered with a hood, and its feet secured to the
wrist by straps of leather, called jesses, and to its legs were fastened
small bells, toned according to the musical scale.

Among the chronicles of old monkish writers prior to the Conquest, is a
story accounting for the first advent of the Danes upon our shores, as
connected with the amusement of hawking: "A Danish chieftain of high
rank, named Lothbroc, amusing himself with hawking near the sea, upon the
western shores of Denmark, the bird in pursuit of her game fell into the
water; Lothbroc, anxious for her safety, got into a little boat that was
near at hand, and rowed from the shore to take her up; but before he
could return to land, a sudden storm arose, and he was driven out to sea.
After suffering great hardships, during a voyage of infinite peril, he
reached the coast of Norfolk, and landed at a port called Reedham, (now a
small village on the railway line from London to Yarmouth,) where he was
immediately seized by the inhabitants, and sent to the court of Edmund,
King