Leechdoms, wortcunning, and starcraft of early England. Being a ...

PREFACE.
XV
sliow that lie gave honest money for them to C ; thus
a team or row of successive owners was unravelled till
it ended in P, who had neglected to secure credible
witnesses to his bargain ; or in Q, who bought them
at a risky price from the actual thief Then Z recovered
his cattle or their value.^ Under this legislation the
chief difficulty of a loser was to trace the direction in
which his cattle had been driven off, and the skill of
the hunter in tracking the slot of the deer, helped to
follow the foot prints of horse or sheep or ox.^ The
less fertile parts of England are still patched by strips
of common, or ways with grassy wastes skirting them,
and the wanderer may often ramble by hedgerow elms
mid hillocks green, among the primroses and violets,
by ups and downs, through quagmires and over gates,
from his furthest point for the day, till he nears the
town and his inn. Elwes, the famous miser, could ride
seventy miles out of London without paying turnpike.
The Saxon herdsman watched the livelono- nie^ht.^
The Saxons also, like the Romans, fed their cattle, Cattle fed on
sometimes, so as to make the notion familiar, with the ^^aves.
foliage of trees. In his life of St. Cu6berht, the venerable
Beda gives an account of a worthy Hadwald (Eadwald),
a faithful servant of ^Iflced, abbess of Whitby, who was
killed by falling from a tree.^ ^Ifric three hundred
years afterwards telling the same story, gives us either
from some collateral tradition, by writing may be, may
be by word, or from his judgment of what was naturally
the mans business at tree climbing, an account that this
tree was an oak, and that he was feeding the cattle
with the foliage, so that he was killed in discharge
of his duty as herdsman.-'^ In the summer of 18G4< this
'
^
DD. in many passages.
Ho^pec, Focppop.
3 Coll. Mon. p. 20. Tota nocte
sto super eos vigilando propter
fures.
*
Incautius in arborem ascendens
deciderat deorsiun, Beda, 256,
22.
5 Horn. II. 150.
b 2