It is well established that, in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the prices paid by wealthy collectors for a single specimen of a British-taken rare bird could exceed the monthly earnings of the average tradesman. It has been suggested that this was a motivation for fraud, not least in the case of the 592 documented 'Hastings Rari- ties' specimens collected between 1892 and 1930 (Nicholson & Ferguson-Lees 1962). To George Bristow, the taxidermist who is suspected of knowingly passing on several hundred fraudulent specimens during the Hastings period, this additional income pre- sumably represented a significant sum, although James Harrison, in his defence of Bristow, pointed out that he showed no signs of conspicuous wealth (Harrison 1968).