"Forasmuch as divers artificers, labourers, servants, and grooms, keep greyhounds and other dogs, and on the holy days, when Christian people be at church hearing Divine service, they go a-hunting in parks, warrens, and coningries of lords and others to the very great destruction of the same, and sometimes under such colour they make their assemblies, conferences, and conspiracies for to rise and disobey their allegiance, &c."
Hence none but laymen with 40_s._ and clerks with £10 were suffered to keep dogs or use ferrets, nets, harepipes, cords, or other engines to destroy deer. Instead of engaging in such perilous diversions, servants and labourers were ordered to "have bows and arrows and to use the same on Sundays and holy days, and leave all playing at tennis or football and other games called quoits, dice, casting of the stone, kailes (skittles) and other importune games." Swords and daggers were prohibited "but in time of war for the defence of the realm of England"--a wise measure when the country was infested with vagrants and there were so many liveried retainers prompt to resent a real or imaginary affront.
At the conclusion of the previous section allusion was made to retinues as constituting a danger to the industrious members of the body politic. In this, our final section, we turn, or rather return, from the life of the fields to that of the hall. Some notice of the interior order of great houses has appeared in earlier chapters--e.g., that on "Children of the Chapel"--but such special reference, involving no more than the religious side of domestic arrangements, leaves a sense of incompleteness, and this void we must now proceed to fill.
Starting with the peril and annoyance involved in the maintenance of retinues, the proposition may be easily demonstrated. Alike in town and country the presence of armed and idle ruffians was a source of well-grounded apprehension. Thus, when the Bishop of Durham attended parliament, he had to obtain a licence before his retainers could be quartered at Stratford-at-Bow; and the manifold inconveniences produced by these satellites in country districts during the reign of Edward I. form the subject of a versified complaint, to be found in Wright's 'Political Songs'. One of the causes of the grievous scarcity of labour is believed to have been that nobles and others, under the pretence of husbandry, kept in their pay able-bodied dependants who, rather than eke out a miserable existence on the land, preferred to follow some warlike lord.