XLII. DANCING AND CHESS PLAY. Dancing was certainly an ancient and favourite pastime with the women of this country: the maidens even in a state of servitude claimed, as it were by established privilege, the license to indulge themselves in this exercise on holidays and public festivals; when it was usually performed in the presence of their masters and mistresses.' In the middle ages, dice, chess, and afterwards tables, and cards, with other sedentary games of chance and skill, were reckoned among the female amusements; and the ladies also frequently joined with the men in such pastimes, as we find it expressly declared in the metrical romance of Ipomydon. The passage alluded to runs thus: When they had dyned, as I you saye, With other gamys more or lesse. 2 In another poem, by Gower, a lover asks his mistress, when she is tired of "dancing and caroling," if she was willing to "play at chesse, or on the dyes to cast a chaunce." Forrest, speaking in praise of Catharine of Arragon, first wife of Henry VIII., says, that when she was young, With stoole and with needyl she was not to seeke, And other practiseings for ladyes meete; To pastyme at tables, tick tacke or gleeke, XLIII.--LADIES' RECREATIONS IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. The English ladies did not always confine themselves to domestic pastimes, they sometimes participated with the other sex in diversions of a more masculine nature; and engaged with them in the sports of the field. These violent exercises seem to have been rather unfashionable among them in the seventeenth century; for Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, speaks of their pastimes as much better suited to the modesty and softness of the sex. "The women," says he, "instead of laborious studies, have curious needle-works, cutworks, spinning, bone-lace making, with other pretty devices to adorn 1 See p. xxxv. houses, cushions, carpets, stool-seats," &c. Not but some of these masculine females have occasionally made their appearance; and at the commencement of the last century, it should seem that they were more commonly seen than in Burton's time, which gave occasion for the following satirical paper in one or the Spectators, written by Addison: "I have," says he, “very frequently the opportunity of seeing a rural Andromache, who came up to town last winter, and is one of the greatest foxhunters in the country; she talks of hounds and horses, and makes nothing of leaping over a six-bar gate. If a man tells her a waggish story, she gives him a push with her hand in jest, and calls him an impudent dog; and, if her servant neglects his business, threatens to kick him out of the house. I have heard her in her wrath call a substantial tradesman a lousie cur; and I remember one day when she could not think of the name of a person, she described him, in a large company of men and ladies, by the fellow with the broad shoulders." XLIV. THE AUTHOR'S LABOURS-CHARACTER OF THE ENGRAVINGS. Having laid before my readers a general view of the sports and pastimes of our ancestors, I shall proceed to arrange them under their proper heads, and allot to each of them a separate elucidation. he task in truth is extremely difficult; and many omissions, as well as many errors, must of necessity occur in the prosecution of it; but none, I hope, of any great magnitude, nor more than candour will overlook, especially when it is recollected, that in a variety of instances, I have been constrained to proceed without any guide, and explore, as it were, the recesses of a trackless wilderness. I must also entreat the reader to excuse the frequent quotations which he will meet with, which in general I have given verbatim; and this I have done for his satisfaction, as well as my own, judging it much fairer to stand apon the authority of others than to arrogate to myself the least degree of penetration to which I have no claim. It is necessary to add, that the engravings, which constitute an essential part of this work, are not the produce of modern invention, neither do they contain a single figure that has not its proper authority. Most of the originals are exceedingly ancient, 1 Part ii. sect 2. cap. 4. No. 57, A. D. 1711. and all the copies are faithfully made without the least unnecessary deviation. As specimens of the art of design they have nothing to recommend them to the modern eye, but as portraitures of the manners and usages of our ancestors, in times remote, they are exceedingly valuable, because they not only elucidate many obsolete customs, but lead to the explanation of several obscurities in the history of former ages. January, 1801. SPORTS AND PASTIMES OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND. BOOK I. RURAL EXERCISES PRACTISED BY PERSONS OF RANK. CHAPTER I. I. Hunting more ancient than Hawking.-II. State of Hunting among the Britons. -III. The Saxons expert in Hunting.-IV. The Danes also.-V. The Saxons subsequently;-The Normans.-VI. Their tyrannical Proceedings.-VII. Hunting and Hawking after the Conquest.-VIII. Laws relating to Hunting.-IX. Hunting and Hawking followed by the Clergy.-X. The Manner in which the dignified Clergy in the Middle Ages pursued these Pastimes.-XI. The English Ladies fond of these Sports.-XII. Privileges of the Citizens of London to Hunt ;-Private Privileges for Hunting.-XIII. Two Treatises on Hunting considered.-XIV. Names of Beasts to be hunted.-XV. Wolves not all destroyed in Edgar's Time.-XVI. Dogs for Hunting.-XVII. Various Methods of Hunting.-XVIII. Terms used in Hunting ;-Times when to hunt. I. HUNTING MORE ANCIENT THAN HAWKING. WB have several English treatises upon the subject of Hunting, but none of them very ancient; the earliest I have met with is a MS. in the Cotton Library at the British Museum,' written at the commencement of the fourteenth century. These compositions bear great resemblance to each other, and consist of general rules for the pursuit of game; together with the names and nature of the animals proper for hunting, and such other 1 Vespasian, B. xii. There are also three copies of this MS. but more modern, in he Royal Library. [See sec. xiii. of the present chapter.] B |