Lords and Ladies

27

The complex issues of class distinction in falconry apparently existed in medieval times just as Terry describes them here. In The Once and Future King, T. H. White quotes a paragraph by Abbess Juliana Berners: “An emperor was allowed an eagle, a king could have a jerfalcon, and after that there was the peregrine for an earl, the merlin for a lady, the goshawk for a yeoman, the sparrow hawk for a priest, and the musket for a holy-water clerk.”