To this he
continually traces the decay of some favourite custom, and, indeed, the
general downfall of all chivalrous and romantic usages. "English
soldiers," he says, "have never been the men they were in the days of
the cross-bow and the long-bow; when they depended upon the strength of
the arm, and the English archer could draw a cloth-yard shaft to the
head. These were the times when, at the battles of Cressy, Poietiers,
and Agincourt, the French chivalry was completely destroyed by the
bowmen of England. The yeomanry, too, have never been what they were,
when, in times of peace, they were constantly exercised with the bow,
and archery was a favourite holiday pastime."
Among the other evils which have followed in the train of this fatal
invention of gunpowder, the Squire classes the total decline of the
noble art of falconry. "Shooting," he says, "is a skulking,
treacherous, solitary sport, in comparison; but hawking was a gallant,
open, sunshiny recreation; it was the generous sport of hunting
carried into the skies."
"It was, moreover," he says, "according to Braithwate, the stately
amusement of 'high and mounting spirits;' for as the old Welsh proverb
affirms in those tunes, 'you might know a gentleman by his hawk,
horse, and grayhound.
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