soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble
hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, he
says, as a Frenchman had good right to say, were not equally to be
praised), its wide meres and bogs, about it like a wall. In it was,
to quote roughly, 'abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, roe,
and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets,
which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins. But of the kind
of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In the pools
around are netted eels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel,
perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents;
smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a mistake for
sturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds which haunt
around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound.
Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks,
of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time,
I have seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or
birdlime,' and so forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchman
may sit on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years more, 'ere
they will make one ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter
cease to set his nets, or one fowler to deceive the birds with
springe and snare.'

And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard in
those days, under dark skies, in houses--even the most luxurious of
them--which we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for
felons' cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and
thankful to God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of
green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age. And
ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm and
darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the long