of the East Angles, who received him favourably, and soon became
strongly attached to him for his skill in training and flying hawks. The
partiality shown to the foreigner excited the jealousy of Beoric, the
king's falconer, who took an opportunity of murdering the Dane whilst he
was exercising his birds in a small wood, where he secreted the body.
The vigilance of a favourite spaniel discovered the deed. Beoric was
apprehended and convicted of the murder, and condemned to be put in an
open boat, without sails, oars, or rudder, and abandoned to the mercy of
the winds and wares. It so chanced that the boat was wafted to the very
point of land that Lothbroc came from; and Beoric was apprehended by the
Danes, and taken before their two chieftains, Hinguer and Hubba, the sons
of Lothbroc, to whom the crafty falconer made a statement as ingenious as
false, wherein he affirmed that their father had been murdered by Edmund,
and himself sent adrift for opposing the deed. Irritated by the
falsehood, the Danes invaded the kingdom of the East Angles, pillaged
their country, took their king prisoner, tied him to a stake, and shot
him to death with arrows." Lidgate, a monk of St. Edmund's at Bury, has
given this legend a place in his poetical life of the tutelary saint of
his monastery, but it bears upon it every mark of a legendary tale, and
the fact is well known that Danish pirates had infested the shores long
prior to the date assigned to the events narrated in it.

The office of "queen's falconer" yet exists, and it is written in a
certain little black book, that the duties attached to it, however
imaginary, receive substantial acknowledgement from the public purse in
the form of an annual stipend of no mean amount. Another recreation
peculiarly associated with the memory of knights and dames once tenanting
the feudal castle is the tournament, the site of whose gorgeous
pageantries yet bears the title of the "Gilden croft," though the lustre
of the name is the only ray of splendour bequeathed to it as an
inheritance of glory. Centuries have witnessed the mutations of the
properties of the great ones of the land, as they have gradually passed
down through the various gradations of society like cast-off garments,
until the once brilliant lists of the gay tournament have changed to long
tiers of poverty tenanted "_right ups_;" the music of the herald's
trumpet has been replaced by the rattle of the shuttle and the loom; and