27o MERRIE ENGLAND
A glance at a set of precedents for use in a manorial court shows
us that cases of poaching were expected to occur in the normal
course of business. In one specimen case we are told of a man
and his servant taken with two greyhounds within the lord's
park. The defendant pleads that he had taken no beast of any
kind, and adds:
Not but that I will confess that my two greyhounds escaped from
the hand of my small boy by reason of his weakness, or that I followed
them to the park and entered thereby a breach that I found already
used, and pursued my hounds and retook them, so that no damage
was done to any manner of wild beast on that occasion.1
Unfortunately the steward adjourned the case till the next court
"to speak of the amends", so that we do not know what effect
this specious plea had upon him.
Or take again" one of the most vivid pictures we have of rustic
life which is contained in another specimen plea from the same
manuscript. It reads:
Sir, for God's sake do not take it ill of me if I tell thee the truth,
how I went the other evening along the bank of this pond and looked
at the fish which were playing in the water, so beautiful and so bright,
and for the great desire I had for a tench I laid me down on the bank
and just with my hands quite simply, and without any other device,
I caught that tench and carried it off; and now I will tell thee the
cause of my covetousness and my desire. My dear wife had lain abed
a right full month, as my neighbours who are here know, and she
could never eat or drink anything to her liking, and for the great
desire she had to eat a tench I went to the bank of the pond to take
just one tench; and that never other fish from the pond did I take.2
One last glimpse of this side of the peasant's life comes from
the fourteenth-century poem The Parlement of the Thre Ages?
with its magnificent account of a night in the woods. It is diffi-
cult to believe that the writer of this poem was not speaking with
an intimate knowledge of what had happened in many an
English woodland of his time:
1 Sdden Soc. iv, 53; cf. 34, "Of chasing or taking beasts in the Lord's
park".
2 Selden Soc. iv, 55; cf. other precedents, 37, 75. For actual cases, see
pp. 122,124,128,131; cf. Durham Halmote Rolls, 91,131,144,178. Davenport,
op. of. 75.
* Edited by Sir I. Gollancz, 1915.