Best H. Bright hunter of the skies

New York, NY: The MacMillan Company, 1961. — 164 p.Not since the world began has there been a sport to compare with falconry. It is said to have been known in China almost four thousand years ago. It was most popular in Europe between 1100 and 1600. Then everyone who could buy a hawk or catch and train a hawk went hawking and talked hawking. The prioress of a nunnery, who wrote a book on the sport which was printed toward the end of the fifteenth century, describes fourteen classes of birds, each suitable to a particular kind of person, from the unwieldy eagle flown by an emperor to the delicate little merlin that rode upon a lady's glove.
The nobility competed with each other in the complicated and spectacular flying of long-winged falcons. The common man, or yeoman. hunted with his round-winged goshawk, which was easy to handle, and the best game-getter of them all. Nor did the "powere" or poor man fare too badly, for his tercett, as the male goshawk was called, was almost as good a pothunter as the female goshawk.
Geographically, too, the sport was almost universal. It reached from the northwest coast of Ireland, where the best goshawks were caught, through England, Europe, Syria, Turkey, Arabia, Persia, India, Mongolia, China, to Japan where falconry was sacred to the Emperor. Ships went to remote Greenland specially to collect the valuable girfalcons, which combined some of the best qualities of eagle and peregrine falcon. Boys climbed trees to catch sparrow hawks. Professional falcon trainers were as welcome throughout Europe as religious pilgrims.
People seem to have felt undressed without hawks of some kind riding on their gloved fists. Hawks went to battle and attended court. Nobles like Harold, the future king of England, took their favorite falcon when traveling abroad on diplomatic missions. Kings exchanged girfalcons as royal gifts more prized than jewels. The nobility usually went falconing on horseback, but Henry the Eighth of England is said to have followed the sport on foot. Once he nearly drowned when his leaping pole broke and he landed headfirst in a dike!
The sport was so popular that the famous Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily and Jerusalem, devoted his life, when he wasn't fighting battles, to writing a long treatise on falcons; this was in the middle of the thirteenth century. One of the first printings in the English tongue in Caxton's newly invented movable type was the book mentioned above, written bv Dame Julyana Berners. It must have been in great demand, for a revised edition was printed ten years later, in 1496.