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people natural facts, not merely accidents of society. Fables work similarly to naturalize the storyteller’s social mores. But the nor- mative strength of fables is sneakily increased by the way readers are complicit in the myth-making, taking pleasure in working out the moral before reading it themselves. Thomas Blage’s 1519 animal fable Of the Falcon and the Cock begins with a knight’s falcon refusing to return to his fist.
A Cock seeing this, exalted him selfe, sayeing: What doe I poore wretch alwayes living in durte and myre, am I not as fayre and as great as the Falcon? Sure I will light on hys glove and be fedde with my Lords meate. When he had lighted on hys fiste, the knight (though he were sory) yet somwhat rejoyced & tooke the Cock, whom he killed, but hys fleshe he shewed to the Falcon, to bring him againe to his hand, which the Falcon seeing, came hastily too it. 3
Blage’s moral hammers home the message: ‘Let every man walke in his vocation, and let no man exalte him selfe above his degree.’ His fable rests on a robust and ancient perception of falcons as noble animals. Refinement, strength, independence, superiority, the power of life and death over others – for millen- nia these have been assumed features of falcon and nobleman alike. Consequently, falcon myths often reinforce human social hierarchies through appealing to the straightforward ‘fact’ that falcons are nobler than other birds.
In early modern Europe the worlds of humans and birds were thought organized in the same way, shaped according to the same clear social hierarchy. Royalty sat at the top of one, raptors at the top of the other, and the class distinctions between various grades of nobility were paralleled by species distinctions between various types of hawks. Often misread by modern falconers as a prescriptive list of who-could-fly-which- hawk, the fifteenth-century The Boke of St Albans illustrates this correspondence with sly facility; a kind of Burke’s Peerage meets British Birds :
Ther is a Gerfawken. A Tercell of gerfauken. And theys belong to a Kyng.
Ther is a Fawken gentill, and a Tercell gentill, and theys be for a prynce.
There is a Fawken of the rock. And that is for a duke. Ther is a Fawken peregrine. And that is for an Erle. Also ther is a Bastarde and that hawk is for a Baron. Ther is a Sacre and a Sacret. And Theis be for a Knyght. Ther is a Lanare and a Lanrett. And theys belong to a
Squyer.
Ther is a Merlyon. And that hawke is for a lady. 4
While the existence of this natural hierarchy was unques- tionable, with sufficient social authority one could be iconoclastic within its bounds. Thus the Chancellor of Castile, Pero López de Ayala, could declare his preference for the nobly conformed peregrine over the gyrfalcon, for the latter was ‘a villein in having coarse hands [wings] and short fingers [primaries]’. 5
Such notions of parity between hawk and human exemplify that ferociously strong aspect of Kulturbrille in which humans

assume that the natural world is structured exactly like their own society. A Californian Chumash myth held that before humans, animals inhabited the world. Their society was organized in ways just like that of the Chumash themselves, with Golden Eagle chief of all the animals, and Falcon, kwich, his nephew. Such parallels seem obvious. But they may be hidden deep. Sometimes their very existence is surprising – particularly when they occur in ‘objective’ science. But they are there. Furthermore, ecologists have routinely inflected their under- standings of predation ecology with concerns relating to the exercise of power in their own society. Sometimes mappings
‘Ther is a Gerfawken . . . and theys belong to a Kyng’. On his throne, King Stephen feeds a white gyrfalcon.
From the Chronicle of England by Peter de Langtoft, c . 1307–27.
from human to natural world have assumed moral, as well as functional, equivalences between raptors and humans, particu- larly in the ways