The out-of-doors amusements of this period appear in general to have been rude and boisterous. The girls and women seem to have been passionately fond of the dance, which was their common amusement at all public festivals. The young men applied themselves to gymnastic exercises, such as wrestling, and running, and boxing; and they had bull-baitings, and sometimes bear-baitings. On Roman sites, the ancient amphitheatres seem still to have been used for such exhibitions; and the Roman amphitheatre at Banbury, in Oxfordshire, was known by the title of “The Bull-ring” down to a very late period. The higher ranks among the Normans were extraordinarily addicted to the chace, to secure which they adopted severe measures for preserving the woods and the beasts which inhabited them. Every reader of English history knows the story of the New Forest, and of the fate which there befell the great patron of hunting--William Rufus. The Saxon Chronicle, in summing up the character of William the Conqueror, tells us that he “made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind, should be blinded. As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed concerning the hares, that they should go free.” The passion of the aristocracy for hunting was a bane to the rural population in more ways than one. Not only did they ride over the cultivated lands, and destroy the crops, but wherever they came they lived at free quarter on the unfortunate population, ill-treating the men, and even outraging the females, at will. John of Salisbury complains bitterly of the cruelty with which the country-people were treated, if they happened to be short of provisions when the hunters came to their houses. “If one of these hunters come across your land,” he says, “immediately and humbly lay before him everything you have in your house, and go and buy of your neighbours whatever you are deficient of, or you may be plundered and thrown into prison for your disrespect to your betters.” The weapons generally used in hunting the stag were bows and arrows. It was a barbed arrow which pierced the breast of the second William, when he was hunting the stag in the wilds of the New Forest. Our cut (No. 76), from the Trinity College Psalter, represents a horseman hunting the stag. The noble animal is closely followed by a brace of hounds, and just as he is turning up a hill, the huntsman aims an arrow at him. As far as we can gather from the few authorities in which it is alluded to, the Saxon peasantry were not unpractised hands at the bow. We find them enjoying the character of good archers very soon after the Norman conquest, under circumstances which seem to preclude the notion that they derived their knowledge of this arm from the invaders. In the miracles of St. Bega, printed by Mr. G. C. Tomlinson, in 1842, there is a story which shows the skill of the young men of Cumberland in archery very soon after the entrance of the Normans; and the original writer, who lived perhaps not much after the middle of the twelfth century, assures us that the Hibernian Scots, and the men of Galloway, who were the usual enemies of the men of Cumberland, “feared these sort of arms more than any others, and called an arrow, proverbially, a _flying devil_.” We learn from this and other accounts, that the arrows of this period were barbed and fledged, or furnished with feathers. It may be observed, in support of the assertion that the use of bows and arrows was derived from the Saxons, that the names _bow_ (_boga_) and _arrow_ (_arewe_), by which they have always been known, are taken directly from their language; whereas, if the practice of archery had been introduced by the Normans, it is probable we should have called them _arcs_ and _fletches_.