STATE OP ENGLAND IN 1685 .

307

fields. Deer, as free as in an American forest, wanderedthere by thousands.* 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 forthe royal diversion, and had been allowed to ravage the culti-vated land with their tusks, had been slaughtered by the ex-asperated rustics during the license of the civil war. The lastwolf that has roamed our island had been slain in Scotland ashort time before the close of the reign of Charles the Second.But many breeds, now extinct or rare, both of quadrupedsand birds, were still common. The fox, whose life is, inmany counties, held almost as sacred as that of a humanbeing, was considered as a mere nuisance. Oliver Saint Johntold 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 knockedon the head without pity. This illustration would be by nomeans a happy one, if addressed to country gentlemen of ourtime: but in Saint John’s days there were not seldom greatmassacres of foxes to which the peasantry thronged with allthe dogs that could be mustered: traps were set; nets werespread; no quarter was given; and to shoot a female with cubwas considered as a feat which merited the gratitude of theneighbourhood. The red deer were then as common inGloucestershire and Hampshire as they now are among theGrampian Hills. On one occasion Queen Anne, on her wayto Portsmouth, saw a herd of no less than five hundred. Thewild bull with his white mane was still to be found wanderingin a few of the southern forests. The badger made his darkand tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the copse-wood grew thick. The wild cats were frequently heard bynight wailing round the lodges of the rangers of Whittleburyand Needwood. The yellow-breasted martin was still pur-* Evelyn’s Diary, June 2,1615.

CHAP.

HI.

20