wammmmmmmmm nmmmmmaummmm THE ejagiSmJV .■f('>.,,,s- .,4. Lpl-F20fl U.B.C. LIBRARY mtmmmmmmmsmmmmetmmmmmmmm THE LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA Oo^ Cs^e^^^ <*^2.?r Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2010 witii funding from University of Britisii Columbia Library http://www.archive.org/details/huntingbeauOObeau "i^^c ^abnxxnton S^ibxaxvi OF SPORTS AND PASTIMES EDITED BY HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT, K.G. ASSISTED BY ALFRED E. T. WATSON \ HUNTING PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SiJUARE LONDON HUNTING BY HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT, K.G. ASD MOWBRAY MORRIS WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE EARL OF SUFFOLK AND BERKSHIRE REV. E. W. L. DAVIES, DIGBV COLLINS. AND ALFRED E. T. WATSON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS by J. STURGESS and J. CHARLTON THIRD EDITION LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1886 All rif/i/s reserved DEDICA TION TO H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES. Badminton: October 18S5. Having received^permission to dedicate these volumes, the Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, I do so feeHng that I am dedicating them to one of the best and keenest sportsmen of our time. I can say, from personal observation, that there is no man who can extricate himself from a bustling and pushing crowd of horsemen, when a fox breaks covert, more dexterously and quickly than His Ro}'al Highness ; and that when hounds run hard over a big country, no man can take a line of his own and live with them better. Also, when the wind has been blowing hard, often have I seen His Royal Highness knocking over driven grouse and partridges and high-rocketing pheasants in first-rate vi DEDICA TION. workmanlike style. He is held to be a good yachtsman, and as Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron is looked up to by those who love that pleasant and exhilarating pastime. His encouragement of racing is well known, and his attendance at the University, Public School, and other important IMatches testifies to his being, like most English gentlemen, fond of all manly sports. I consider it a great privilege to be allowed to dedicate these volumes to so eminent a sportsman as His Ro}-al Highness the Prince of Wales, and I do so with sincere feelings of respect and esteem and lo}-al devotion. BEAUFORT. PREFACE. A FEW LINES only are necessary to explain the object with which these volumes are put forth. There is no modern encyclopaedia to which the inexperienced man, who seeks guidance in the practice of the various British Sports and Pastimes, can turn for information. Some books there are on Hunting, some on Racing, some on Lawn Tennis, some on Fishing, and so on ; but one Library, or succession of volumes, which treats of the Sports and Pastimes indulged in by Englishmen — and women — is wanting. The Badminton Library is offered to supply the want. Of the imperfections which must be found in the execution of such a design we are con- scious. Experts often differ. But this we may say, that those who are seeking for knowledge on any of the subjects dealt with will find the result of many years' experience written by men who are in every case adepts at the Sport or Pastime of which they write. It is to viii PREFACE. point the way to success to those who are ignorant of the sciences they aspire to master, and who have no friend to help or coach them, that these volumes are written. To those who have worked hard to place simply and clearly before the reader that which he will find within, the best thanks of the Editor are due. That it has been no slight labour to supervise all that has been written he must acknowledge ; but it has been a labour of love, and very much lightened by the courtesy of the Publisher, by the unflinching, indefatigable assistance of the Sub- Editor, and by the intelligent and able arrangement of each subject by the various writers, who are so thoroughly masters of the subjects of which they treat. The reward we all hope to reap is that our work may prove useful to this and future generations. THE EDITOR. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. The History and Literature of Hunting . i II. Beasts of the Chase 36 the stag 36 the fox and his habits .... 62 harriers and the hare 74 BEAGLES hunted ON -^tOOT .... 83 III. The Stable 89 IV. The Kennel 109 V. Hunt Servants 135 THE DUTIES OF A HUNTSMAN IN THE FIELD . I35 THE DUTIES OF A WHIPPER-IN . . . 141 THE DUTIES OF A KENNEL HUNTSMAN . . 148 THE DUTIES OF AN EARTH-STOPPER . . . 151 COMPENSATION FOR DAMAGES DONE BY HORSE- MEN AND BY FOXES 1 53 ARTIFICIAL FOX EARTHS 1 56 VI. The Horse 159 VII. The Rider 186 VIII. The Shires 216 a X CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE IX. The Provinces 243 X. Hunting from London 266 XI. The Otter and his Ways 2S6 APPENDICES. A. List of AL^sters of Hounds, and Servants . .321 B. Names of Hounds 344 C. Hunting Terms 350 D. Bibliographv 354 INDEX 363 IL L USTRA TIONS. (Executed by G. Pearson.) ARTIST In The Badminton Country , . . . /. Sttirgess ' A View Holloa ' ( Vignette on Title Page) . J. Sturgess In The Olden Time J. Sturgess Chased the Fox as vigorously as he V)Yd\ j ^ the French J Queen Elizabeth J. Sturgess Sky-blue Uniforms /. Sturgess Larking back to Melton /. Sturgess As WE know it now J. Sturgess Hinds, attended by their antlered Lord . J. Charlton Head down, and Tongue out . . .J. Charlton In Search of a Supper J. Charlton Stealing away J. Charlton Hounds whimpering in front . . . . J. Sturgess The Field not to press on the Pack . . J. Sturgess A Merry Cry /. Sturgess A little hard on the Runners . . .J. Sturgess A good deal too hot J. Sturgess The Badminton Stables, Elevation .... ,, ,, ,, Ground Plan . . . . A Natural Position .... The Quorn Kennels ..... The Badminton Kennels J. Sturgess PACK Fron. I lO 13 15 26 34 3S 60. 63 6S 77 81 84 86 90 94 95 96 114 116 ILL US TEA TIONS. A Converted Kennel Puppies Badminton Puppy Houses, Elevation Bringing Hounds into Feeding Room Hounds Feeding Hounds after having been Fed Exercising Hounds on the Road A Good Hound (from a picture) . A Bad Hound .... The Huntsman .... The Whipper-in The Kennel Huntsman The Earth-stopper . Choose by his Head . A Collection of Bad Points . Rapped it like thunder . A Bad Man on a Good Horse Never part company . Give your Pilot plenty of room Get off and walk A Gallop over Twyford Vale The Niagara-like rush A liberal supply of Gates . Rough and various Ground To creep where he must not fly Something to think about next day 'Where Jack the Whip in ambush lay Sons of MacAdam .... With you by Train The Escape of the Otter . Otters at Play .... Full Cry /. Charlton J. Charlton. J. Charlton J. Charlton J. Char It 071 J. Charlton . Aptes Af. Biddulph Agnes M. Biddulph Agnes M. Biddulph Agnes M. Biddulph J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Stufgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Stuigess J. Stuigess J. Sturgess J. Sturgess J. Charlton . J. Charlton J. Charlton . CHAPTER I. OF THE HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF HUNTING. ^ ^ N that most cc pious and ^ useful work, Blaine's ' Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports,' we are reminded by judicious illustrations from both sacred and l)rofane writers for how long a time the pursuit of wild ani- mals, even as an amusement, , has engaged the attention of man. In these days of change, alarm, surprise, B 2 HUNTING. when the brutality of field-sports is being denounced with so much eloquence and energy that one cannot but wonder how the world has remained unconvinced through so many years, it is, perhaps, idle to speculate how much longer our attention will be suffered to employ itself on a pastime which so many wise men have agreed to brand as wanton and debasing. A sort of melancholy pleasure, therefore, has attended the re- searches into which our studies have led us. ' Still distant the day,' about a quarter of a century ago sang Egerton Warburton, that Homer of the hunting-field. Still distant the day, yet in ages to come, When the gorse is uprooted, the foxhound is dumb. When that race of 'harmless vegetarians,' frr whom Mr. Froude anticipates the mastery of the world, shall have come into their kingdom, then Nimrod will no doubt be dead as Pan, and the sports of the field as much an old-world story as the 'bloody laws' of the Roman circus. Those days, however, are not yet. This pious crusade against sport is, after all, no new thing. Even in this small matter we are not really refining on the morals and manners of our fathers. The man who plants cabbages imitates, too ! That member for County Waterford, who, as he himself has told us from his place in Parliament, once and only once joined in the cruel game, and then on the side not of the hunters but the hunted — does not he find his prototype in Master Harry Sandford, whose valorous defiance of a whole field of brutal huntsmen brought a horsewhip across his shoulders, and tears into our ingenuous eyes ? Nay, we may go farther back still ; we may go back to the eleventh century, and to Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, of whom we read in Mr, Green's ' History of the English People,' that when once a hunted hare took refuge under his horse, 'his gentle voice grew loud as he forbade the huntsmen to stir in the chase while the creature darted off again to the woods.' As to speak of hunting, then, in the future may seem but HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 3 a vain thing, so the more excuse may there be for gathering up into one convenient compass the scattered records of its ancient and honourable past. That we shall find anything new to say of it either historically or, if the word may serve, scien- tifically, we may hardly hope. Though it is certainly true, as Gervase Markham observed on a somewhat similar occasion, that 'Time (which is the mother of experience) doth in our labours show us more new and more nearer ways to our ends than at the first we conceive,' still, since he discoursed on the arts of hunting and of 'riding great horses,' so many men have followed in his steps, that it would be a bold spirit indeed who should sit down now to such a theme with the assurance that he had anything fresh to offer either to the knowledge of the veteran or the curiosity of the tyro. A 'Country Gentleman,' writing little more than a century ago, found himself constrained to admit, ' there hath already (by many well-experienced men) been so much written of this subject that I know not well what to write, except I should in some sort repeat another man's tale.' Nevertheless the literature of hunting is of many kinds. To present in a convenient shape the best, to use the fashionable phrase of criticism, of all that has been thought and said on the subject, is the prime purpose of our book. If so far we shall be held in some sort to have succeeded, we shall trust to be excused for having added one more to the many volumes that have been written on a sport which one of its most honourable chroniclers has declared to be ' most royal for the stateliness thereof, most artificial for the wisdom and cunning thereof, and most manly and warlike for the use and endurance thereof We do not propose to begin, as children love to have their stories told them, at the very beginning. Writers of all sorts and conditions, from the gravest, have not disdained to record the pleasures of the chase, and to expound its mysteries. From Xenophon to Major Whyte-Melville, from Oppian to Mr. Bromley-Davenport, from Dame Juliana Berners to the curious individual known to men and columns as ' Ouida/ the list is B 2 4 HUXTIXG. indeed a long and varied one. To exhaust it would involve a demand upon space and time scarce less, if less at all, than that which would have been required by Mr. Caxton's 'History of Human Error,' had that immortal though unwritten work been ever released from the brain of its illustrious projector. Attractive, therefore, as it might be to turn the eyes of the imagi- nation backward o'er the 'abyss of time' to Xenophon putting his precepts into practice among the hares he loved so well to follow in his quiet Elean home ; or side by side with Synesius, the squire-bishop of Cyrene, to chase the ostrich or the antelope through the heavy African sands ; we propose to resist the at- traction, and to confine ourselves to the history of the chase as followed and recorded within our own islands ; starting from the time when it began to be regarded rather as a recreation than as a means for supplying what Mr. Matthew Arnold has eloquently styled the 'great first needs of our poor mortality — lodging, food, and raiment.' It is possible that our readers may be inclined not to regret our self-denial. Beckford, in the introductory chapter to his 'Thoughts on Hunting,' observes that Somerville is the only man, so far as he knows, 'who has written on this subject so as to be under- stood ; ' an observation supported by the preface to the edition of 1820, in which it is stated with amazing effrontery or ignor- ance, that ' till Mr. Beckford's book appeared no work on the subject of hunting had been published, except an anonymous publication in 1733, entitled "An Essay on Hunting."' This is a cruel slur on some most worthy men and amusing writers. Indeed, the early masters of the 'Noble Art of Venerie,' as they mostly delight to style their favourite pastime, are in their way as quaint and entertaining companions as a man not too steadily serious, to use Johnson's phrase, need wish to pass an idle hour with. Their style is, no doubt, not exactly Addi- sonian ; their spL-lling is somewhat arbitrary ; the entertain- ment they provide is apt on occasion to take a form of expres- sion contrary to the modern code of good manners. Let it be HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 5 granted, too, that one would hardly go to them now for mstruc- tion, though as a matter of fact the first principles of the craft have changed but little since their day ; we may teach dif- ferently, but we teach pretty much the same doctrine. Still, they were quite as keen about their business as Somerville, and, allowing for the inevitable change of years, knew quite as much about it. And, certainly, they are very much more amusing than Somerville, if not quite so classical as is that erudite squire. ' The earliest manuscript on hunting I have met with,' says Strutt, in his ' Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,' ' is one in the Cotton Library at the British Museum, written at the commencement of the fourteenth century.' The manu- script Strutt saw was an English version of a French treatise, according to a note in Warton's ' History of English Poetry ' at that time in the possession of a Mr. Farmor, of Tusmor in Oxfordshire. Its full title was as follows : 'Art de Venerie le c^uel Maistre Guillaume Twici venour le Roy d'Angleterre fist en son temps per Aprandreautres.' This Master Wilham Twici was huntsman to Edward IL The King, as became a royal sportsman, had another ' Maisterof the Game,' an Englishman, one John GyfTord, and he it was who made the translation of the Frenchman's treatise that Strutt saw. A second translation, or rather a rescript of the first with additions, was made later by Henry IV. 's huntsman, for the special edification of that ' imp of fame,' Harry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales. This may be identical with the ' Maister of the Game,' to be men- tioned later, but neither Strutt nor ' Cecil' (who, in his ' Records of the Chase,' quotes largely from it) makes this clear. From the extracts the latter gives, it is, however, evident that the writer, whether the Duke of York or another, had carefully studied his predecessor's work. Next we come to the treatise popularly ascribed to Dame Juliana Berners, of pious and immortal, if somewhat apocryphal memory, and included in the famous * Boke of St. Albans,' so called from having been printed at that town in 14S6. A cloud 6 HUNTING. of mystery hung for a long while over the lady and her work, nor indeed has it ever been wholly cleared away. Her name has been variously printed as Barnes, Bernes and Berners. Even her sex was for a time doubtful, for Baker, in his Chronicles, supposing Julyan (as her Christian name was originally printed) must needs be a man's name, describes the worthy prioress as ' a gentleman of excellent gifts, who wrote certain treatises of Hawking and Hunting.' Nor is her share in ' The Boke ' known for certain. By earlier authorities she was held to have been responsible for all three divisions of the volume, Hawking, Hunting, and Heraldry ; by the latest, Mr. William Blades (in the preface to his edition of ' The Boke ' published in 1881), she is dismissed with sad contempt as having ' probably lived at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and possibly compiled from existing MSS. some rhymes on hunting.' Yet, as a matter of fact, this is all that a strictly conscientious historian can permit himself to say about her. Down to a late period she was popularly supposed to have pre- sided over Sopwell Nunnery in Hertfordshire, a house founded about 1 140 under the rule of St. Benedict, and subject to the Abbot of St. Albans ; subject indeed in late years after a fashion not contemplated, let us hope, by its original founders. This conjecture, one would have thought, might have rendered her authorship of a book on field sports, to say the least, somewhat problematical. But the obstacle was satisfactorily removed by the further supposition that our dame's youth was passed at Court, where she would naturally have joined in all fashion- able amusements. Unfortunately for the history-makers, Mr. Blades has pointed out that in the lists of the Prioresses of Sopwell for the fifteenth century no such name as Barnes or Berners is to be found. He also mentions another curious fact on the authority of Mr. Halliwell-Phillips, which may possibly help to explain the mystery, though he does not precisely venture to say so. It seems that men called Berners were employed by the sportsmen of that century to wait upon them with relays of horses — second horsemen, in fact — and also to feed the hounds. HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 7 Somewhere between these two comes ' The Maister of the Game,' not mentioned by Strutt, but a copy of which ' Cecil ' says he had seen in the possession of a Mr. Richard Dansey, of Herefordshire. He supposes it to have been written by Edmund de Langley, Duke of York, son of Edward HI., who was noted among his contemporaries for his delight and skill in hunting and hawking, and was made by his father, as Harding tells us in his Chronicle, Maister of the mewhouse, and of hawkes feire. Of his Venerie, and maister of his game. From the extracts quoted by ' Cecil ' it seems to be superior in point of style to Twici's work, and also more exhaustive and practical, but to those extracts our knowledge is confined. In the following century our bibliography appears to have been enriched by only two writers, George Turberville, and Sir Thomas Cockaine. Of the latter history is silent, but Turber- ville, or Tuberville, was a personage of some note, a poet and diplomatist, as well as a sportsman. He was educated at Winchester, and at New College, of which he was a Fellow. He went to Russia as secretary to Randolph, Elizabeth's famcvis ambassador, and published a poetical description of that country, besides other volumes of verse, songs, sonnets, and translations. Anthony Wood in his ' xVthenae Oxonienses ' de- scribes him as a most accomplished gentleman, and ' much admired for his excellencies in the art of poetry.' As far as we have got hitherto, there is certainly some colour for Beckford's contemptuous dismissal of all writers before Somerville. It is certainly not easy to gather from these books any very precise idea of the way our forefathers took their pleasure in the field. Turberville's and Cockaine's — the latter but a small pamphlet — are worth looking at chiefly for the quaintness of the woodcuts, and also of their language. Twici busies himself chiefly with the different notes to be sounded on the horn, according to the game being hunted and the state of the chase ; but he also gives the nam.es of the various beasts S ■ HUM'ING. ■ that are legitimate objects of sport, and some directions for blooding the hounds and breaking up the game, the huntsman being particularly warned against giving any part of the fox to the hounds, 'for it is not good for them.' Dame Juliana, or whoever is to be credited with the book that goes under her name, has practically done little more than put into doggrel rhyme the precepts of Twici and his English translator, though the rhymester quotes the legendary authority of Sii Tristram, who seems to have been regarded in those days as the par- ticular patron of huntsmen ; we find Cockaine, for example, gravely asserting that 'it hath been long received for a truth that Sir Tristram, one of King Arthure's knights, was the first writer and as it were founder of the honourable and delightful sport of hunting.' They have their own interest, all t lese works, but the interest is one which appeals rather to the anti- quarian than the sportsman. They tell the latter little, and it is hard to imagine that they can have told their own contem- poraries very much. Our knowledge of what we may call the dark ages of hunt- ing is derived mainly from the indefatigable Strutt, who has, if we may employ a sporting metaphor, drawn all sorts of coverts which up to that time had been undisturbed, and but for him had very likely remained so to this day. It is true that what he has contrived to unearth is not very much, but it is something ; it gives us some idea of the estimation in which hunting was held by our remote ancestors, if not very much of the way in which it was pursued. He found, for example, that Alfred the Great, that pious and learned king, was a ' most expert and active hunter, and excelled in all the branches of that most noble art, to which he applied with incessant labour and amazing success.' While the Danes ruled in England the sport began to be fenced about with certain restrictions tending to confine it to the upper classes, though Canute, who also prohibited all hunting and hawking on the Sabbath, while rigorously forbidding all trespass on the royal hunting grounds, allowed each man to dis- port himself at will on his own. Any violation of these restric- HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 9 tions was severely punished, in certain cases with death. These game-laws were in existence at any rate down to the time of John, and lost, we may be sure, none of their rigour under the Norman rule. Hunting w^as then pre-eminently a royal pastime. Even Edward the Confessor, who abhorred all secular amusements, made an exception in favour of the chase both with hound and hawk. He took the greatest delight, says Strutt, quoting William of Malmesbury, 'to follow a pack of swift hounds in pursuit of game, and to cheer them with his voice.' Everyone knows the cruel measures taken by the Conqueror to make and stock the royal hunting-grounds, an example followed, though in a less brutal degree, by his son Henry, who made the great park at Woodstock, and walled it round with seven miles of stone ; wherein after him his grand- son, the first of our Plantagenet kings, kept, if history speak truth, other game than stag and boar. Gradually the great nobles followed suit. Henr}-, Earl of Warwick, made a park at Wedgenoke, and others began to inclose ground in various parts of the country, without much regard to the rights of the commons. A contemporary writer, John of Salisbury, gives a gloomy picture of the height to which the ruling passion had grown, and of the hardships to which the lower classes were subject for their rulers' pleasure. ' In our time,' he says, ' hunt- ing and hawking are esteemed the most honourable employ- ments and most excellent virtues by our nobility, and they think it the height of worldly felicity to spend the whole of their time in these diversions ; accordingly they prepare for them with more solicitude, expense, and parade, than they do for war; and pursue the wild beasts with greater fury than they do the enemies of their country. By constantly following this way of life they lose much of their humanity, and become as savage nearly as the very beasts they hunt. Husbandmen, with their harmless herds and flocks, are driven from their well-cultivated fields, their meadows and their pastures, that wild beasts may range in them without interruption.' And he then gives the following piece of advice to all whom it may concern : ' If one lo HUNTING. of these great and merciless hunters shall pass by your habita- tion, bring forth hastily all the refreshment you have in your house, or that you can readily buy or borrow from your neigh- bours ; that you may not be involved in ruin, or even accused of treason.' This refreshing practice is, happily, still much in vogue, though not from the same interested motives. Per- haps the worthy chronicler did not disdain a little to over- colour his picture, after the fashion of sundry good souls of our own day. Historj', at any rate, hardly bears out the com- Chascd the fox ns visjorouslv as he did the French.' plaint that these 'di- versions' weakened the Englishman's arm for war. ^^'hen Edward III., for ex- ample, was engaged in his French wars, he had always with him in the field sixty couple of stag-hounds and as many harriers, with which he diverted himself when not more sternly engaged — a practice followed, we may add, though in less royal fashion, by a still greater conqueror than Edward, for throughout the Peninsula campaign Wellington always kept a pack of hounds at head- quarters, and chased the foxes quite as vigorously and suc- cessfully as he did the French. But there is no doubt that HISTORY AND LITERATURE. ii hunting, as then enjoyed by the upper classes, entailed much suffering and oppression on the lower. The clergy were par- ticular oiTenders. By a charter of Henry III. archbishops and bishops were allowed, when travelling through the royal forests, on the King's service, to kill two deer under certain conditions. In time their permission came to be construed more largely, and the priest grew as mighty a hunter as the baron. Chaucer has many a hit at this unclerical practice. In the Prologue to his ' Canterbury Tales ' the monk is described as — A fayre for the maistrie, An outrider that loved venerie ; A manly man to bell an abbot able. Full many a deinte hors hadde he in stable. Therefore he was a prickasoure a right : Greihoundes he hadde as swift as foul of flight : Of pricking and of hunting for the hare Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare. Again, in the ' Ploughman's Tale,' if that be truly Chaucer's, which is specially directed against the luxury and loose living of the clergy, it is laid among the monk's malpractices that he wui ride on courses as a knight With hawkis and with houndis eke, and that, He mote go hunte with dogge and bich And blowen his home and cryin Hey. Of a certain Walter, bishop of Rochester in the thirteenth century, Strutt tells us that 'he was an excellent hunter, and so fond of the sport that at the age of fourscore he made hunting his sole employment, to the total neglect of the duties of his office.' Another occupant of the episcopal bench, Reginald Brian, bishop of Worcester, we find writing, in the following century, to his brother, bishop of St. Davids, to remind him of a promised gift of some hounds. His heart languishes, he says, for their arrival : 'let them come then, oh! 12 HUNTING. reverend father ! without delay ; let my vroods re-echo with the music of their cry and the cheerful notes of the horn, and let the walls of mv palace be decorated with the trophies of the chase!' Again, William de Clowne, Abbot of St. Marj-'s in Leicestershire, was so famous a hunter and so renowned for his breed of hounds, that he was granted, by royal charter, the privilege of holding an annual fair or market for their sale. From the earliest times, indeed, it seems Churchmen were wont to be particular sinners in this respect, for Mr. Froude tells us that Wulsig and Walnoth, Abbots of the great monas- tery of St. Albans in the ninth century, were notorious for neglecting their duties for the society of hound and hawk, as well as for other society even less convenient for an abbot. Henry II. and Richard II. both in their times tried to put a stop to such scandals, but probably more with a view to thwart the power and ambition of the priesthood than from any strictly moral motive. At any rate neither they nor their successors 5eem to have been able to effect much. In the reign of Henry VI. the clergy are particularly warned against ' hawkynge, huntynge, and dawnsynge ; ' and at the time of the English Reformation the see of Norwich alone owned thirteen parks well stocked with game of every kind ! The presence of ladies in the hunting-field dates from very early times. At first probably they were content to be spec- tators only, watching the sport from wooden stands erected for ih^ purpose, beneath which the game was driven. But they evidently soon aspired to a more active part. From an illus- trated manuscript of the fourteenth century, some cuts from which are given by Strutt, we learn that ladies took the field on horseback, and bestrode their horses, moreover, after the fashion of men ! How they disposed of the garments proper to their sex, which they apparently still retained, does not seem very clear. The costume now in vogue among Amazons did not apparently come into use till three centuries later, and then only partially. Strutt quotes a writer of that time to the effect that the ladies of Bury in Suffolk, 'that used hawking and hunting HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 13 were once in a great vaine of wearing breeches,' whence arose, he says, many severe and ludicrous sarcasms. It was urged, on the side of the ladies, that in case of accident decency was thus better preserved ; but to this the answer was, ' that such accidents ought to be prevented in a manner more consistent with the delicacy of the sex, that is, by refraining from such dangerous recreations' — and possibly, as Goldsmith's connois- seur observed of a different matter, there is much to be said on both sides. Queen Elizabeth was a notable huntress. Blaine, in his ' Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports,' quotes an ' Queen Elizabeth was a notable liunti'ess.' account from an eye-witness of her Majesty's prowess at Kenilworth during her magnificent entertainment by Leicester in 1575 ; and towards the end of her long life, when at Oatlands, she is described in a contemporary letter as still ' well and excellently disposed to hunting, for every second day she is on horseback and continues the sport long.' Though Lord Tennyson has called her the ' man-minded offspring ' of her father, it does not appear that she was sufficiently mascu- line to adopt the seat in vogue among her sex in the fourteenth century. According to Blaine that fashion was put out of court i4 HUNTING. in England by Anne of Bohemia, wife of Richard II., who was the first to ride in the modern manner ; though in Portugal, if Sir Nathaniel Wraxall may be trusted, the earlier style still pre- vailed in the latter half of the last century. If this were so, we must suppose that the ' Bury ladies ' aped the sterner sex only in their garb and not in their seat ; that, in fact, they draped themselves much as the Dianas of our own time, save that they did not consult decorum to the extent of a skirt. From a passage in Pope's correspondence we learn that in his time hunting was high in fashion among the Court ladies, though in one instance, at any rate, it seems to have been a fashion followed, like so many other fashions, less from inclination than etiquette. ' I met the Prince,' he writes to some anony- mous fair, 'with all his ladies on horseback coming from hunting. Mrs. B and Mrs. L took me into protec- tion (contrary to the laws against harbouring Papists), and gave me a dinner with something I liked better, an opportunity of conversation with Mrs. H . We all agreed that the life of a Maid of Honour was of all things the most miserable ; and wished that every woman who envied it had a specimen of it. To eat Westphalia ham in a morning, ride over hedges and ditches on borrowed hacks, come home in the heat of the day with a fever and (what is worse a hundred times) with a red mark in the forehead from an uneasy hat ; all this may qualify them to make excellent wives for fox-hunters, and bear abun- dance of ruddy-complexioned children.' The most renowned Diana of that century seems to have been Lady Salisbury, who kept a pack of dwarf foxhounds at Hatfield, and went a-hunting in great state, her servants magnificent in sky-blue uniforms, black collars, lappels, and jockey-caps. In the ' Sporting Magazine' for March 1795, there is an account of her triumphs in a great run of two hours and a half : ' Out of a field of fourscore,' says her enthusiastic chronicler, ' her ladyship soon gave honest Daniel the go-by ; pressed Mr. Hale neck-and- neck, soon bio wed the whipper-in, and continued, indeed, throucrhout the whole of the chase to be nearest the brush.' HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 15 A worthy match to her would have been that stout old French lady of whom Mr. Vyner tells us in his ' Notitia Venatica ; ' Dame Marie Cecile Charlotte de Lauretan, Baronne de Dracek. When she lived is not made precisely clear, but Mr. Vyner saw her picture in 1839 when he visited the old castle in which she used to hold her state, about sixteen miles from Calais. She was painted on her favourite grey horse, dressed in a green coat, with a gold waist-belt. Her hair was powdered and ' Magnificent in sky-blue uniforms.' arranged in large curls, and her hat was high crowned with a gold band. Her nether woman was clad in boots and leather breeches, and she rode as men do. Eight hunters were in her stable, and in her bedroom she kept her favourite guns and saddles. She hunted three days a week, and had a dinner party on every hunting day. More than 670 wolves are said to have fallen by her hand ; and when sterner game was not to be had. t6 hunting. she did not disdain the badger or the fox. She died of apoplexy in her own house at seventy-five years of age. There was a certain Miss Draper also, appropriately christened Diana, the daughter of a famous old Yorkshire squire, who won great praise in her time. She was wont to assist her father in the field, 'cheering the hounds with her voice.' It is also noted of her that she 'died at York in a good old age, and, what was more wonderful to many sportsmen who dared not follow her, she died with whole bones in her bed.' Her father was quite ' a character,' and as he must be the earliest of the old fox-hunters of whom we have any note, if it be true, as the 'Druid' says, in 'Scott and Sebright,' that he com- menced operation in 1726, the following account of him, from 'The Hunting Directory,' may be interesting : 111 the old, but now ruinous, mansion of Berwick Hall, in tlie East Riding of Yorkshire, once lived the well-known William Draper, Esq., who bred, fed, and hunted the staunchest pack of foxhounds in Europe. Upon an income of only 700/. he brought up creditably eleven sons and daughters; kept a stable of excellent foxhounds, besides a carriage with horses suitable for the conveni- ence of my lady and her daughters. He lived in the old honest style of his country, killing every month a good ox of his own feeding, and priding himself on maintaining a substantial table, but with no foreign kickshaws. His general apparel was a long, dark drab hunting-coat, a belt round his waist, and a strong velvet cap on his head. In his humour he was very facetious, always having some pleasant story, both in the field and in the hall, so that his company was much sought after by persons of good con- dition, and which was of great use to him in the advancement of his children. His stables and kennels were kept in such order, that sportsmen observed them as schools for huntsmen and grooms, who were glad to come there without wages merely to learn their business. When they had obtained proper instruction he then recommended them to other gentlemen, who wished for no better character than Squire Draper's recommendation. He was always up during the hunting season at four in the morning, mounted on one of his nags at five, himself bringing forth his hounds, who knew every note of their old master's voice. In the field he rode with judgment, avoiding what was unnecessary, and helping his HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 17 hounds when they were at fault. After the fatigues of the clay, which were generally crowned with the brushes of a brace of foxes, he entertained those who would return with him, and which was sometimes thirty miles' distance, with old English hospitality. Good old October was the liquor drunk ; and his first fox-hunting toast was All the brushes iti Christendom. At the age of eighty years this gentleman died as he chiefly lived, for he died on horse- back. As he was going to give some instructions to a friend who was rearing up a pack of foxhounds, he was seized with a fit, and dropping from his old favourite pony, he expired ! There was no man, rich or poor, in his neighbourhood but lamented his death, and the foxes v/ere the only things that had occasion to be glad Squire Draper was no more. Though hunting was, as we have seen, in its early days the exclusive amusement of the noble classes, an exception was always made in favour of the citizens of London from almost immemorial times. Strutt quotes a charter granted to them by Henry I. which contains the following clause : ' The citizens of London may have chases, and hunt as well, and as fully, as their ancestors have had ; that is to say, in the Chiltre, in Middlesex and Surrey.' According to ' Cecil,' the Lord Mayor himself kept hounds from a time vaguely specified as ' many centuries ago ; ' and Lincoln's Inn Fields, St. James's, and May Fair were the favourite places of meeting. The privi- leges granted by Henry were confirmed by all succeeding kings. In the reign of George I. we find 'riding on horse- back and hunting with my Lord Mayor's hounds when the common-hunt goes out,' reckoned by Strype among the favourite amusements of Londoners. This 'common-hunt' was, no doubt, the origin of that ' Epping Hunt ' which has been the butt of so many wits from the time of D'Urfey down to our own. In the ' Sporting Magazine ' for 1795 there is an account of a run with the Lord Mayor's hounds, de- signed to show how unfounded were the jests cut at the good citizens' expense, and that the sport was a serious and a legitimate business. A stag is turned out, and it is particularly noted that his antlers had been sawn off, a practice which has c i8 HUNTING. long been common in the Royal Hunt, but was then an innova- tion. This gallant beast was taken in ' Burleigh's Pond,' as we see in an accompanying engraving, but reserved for a future occasion. So far all may have been well enough, but the chronicler, unfortunately for his cause, is a little too minute in his details. Not only were booths for refreshment erected at the place of meeting, but, after the proper sport of the day was over, a ' genteel marquee ' was pitched, appropriately enough near an inn known as 'The Bald-Faced Stag,' wherein a lady, ' elegantly dressed ' in a riding-habit, and with ' a bewitching face and fascinating address,' presided over sundry E.O. tables. To turn again to our bibliography, in the seventeenth century we find a great improvement. Gervase Alarkham's ' Country Contentments,' and Richard Blome's ' Gentleman's Recreation,' are not only intelligible enough for any reader, but also extremely useful and practical ; so that Beckford's saying is itself intelligible only on the supposition that he was unaware of their existence. Markham was the son of a Nottinghamshire squire, and a man of many pursuits and accomplishments. He was a soldier, a poet, and a playwright, as well as a sportsman and farmer. It was in his latter capacities, however, that he won most fame. His treatises on horsemanship and sport were so highly esteemed in his time that, according to a document in Stationers' Hall, he bound himself by an agreement with his publishers to write no more, lest the copyrights they already held should be injured by further publications. Of Blome, or Bloome, we know less. There is a man of that name very roughly handled in the ' Athenae Oxonienses ' for pirating an edition of Bareham's * Display of Heraldry.' He is described by Wood as 'a kind of arms painter (originally a ruler of paper, and now a scribbler of books), who hath since practised for divers years progging tricks in employing necessitous persons to write in several arts, and to get contributions of noblemen to promote the work.' Blome's book was certainly published by sub- scription, one of the editions containing the coats-of-arms of the various subscribers. It also includes a treatise on heraldry, HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 19 as well as a disquisition on the arts and sciences, so that we may reasonably conclude that more than one hand went to its composition. Still, despite Wood's objurgations, the book is really both a curious and valuable one, in the department of field-sports at any rate, whatever may have been Blome's precise share in it. It contains, moreover, a number of plates, which are not only good specimens of the engraving of the day, but useful as showing the costume in which our fathers took the field. On the whole it may be said of all our early works on sport to be the one which gives the fullest and most practical information on the subject. Markham is practical, too, but he occupies himself more with the breeding, training, and manage- ment of horses and hounds, than with the actual pursuit of the game, though he does not altogether neglect that. Blome is naturally, moreover, less archaic in his language and style than the elder writer, about whom still hangs that flavour of quaint- ness which belonged to English prose down to the age of Dryden. Hunting, for example, he defines as ' a curious search or conquest of one beast over another, pursued by a natural! instinct of enmitie, and accomplished by the diversities and distinctions of smells onelie, wherein nature equallie deviding her cunning giveth both to the offender and offended strange knowledge both of offence and safety.' He writes of ' high- way dogges,' hounds, that is to say, which will carry the scent along a high road ; of 'dogges of nimble composure,' meaning quick and well-made ; and of certain others being ' the most principall best to compose your kennell off.' In Blome's book of course we get much less of this style of writing, though he, too, can amuse as well as instruct us ; by warning, for ex- ample, those who go forth to hunt the hare, that it is 'a very melancholy beast,' and therefore 'very fearful and crafty.' First in the next century comes that anonymous author of that ' Essay on Hunting ' which Beckford's editor declares, as we have seen, to have been the only book written on the subject prior to the famous letters. It was published in 1773 and is said by the same authority to be full of 'good sense and c 2 20 HUNTING. practical knowledge.' Whether this statement is R";ore in accordance with fact than the othei we cannot say, as we must confess to have never met with a copy. Our only knowledge of it is derived from the ' Druid,' who was more fortunate than we. The author,' as he tells us in ' Silk and Scarlet,' ' pre- sumes on pardon from the loquacious world, if among so many treatises, vindications, replies, journals, craftsmen, hyp-doctors, and lay preachers, the press be borrowed a day or two for a plain essay on the innocent recreation of us country squires.' The hunting of the hare was clearly the recreation nearest the heart of this particular squire. In the 'Druid's' words, 'a fox, it is true, is curled up at the end of the essay ; but he runs hare throughout.' Still more candid is the next writer, a jSIr. Gardiner, author of 'The Art and the Pleasures of Hare Hunting, in six letters to a Person of Quality,' who evidently thinks the ' triumph of the timid hare ' is the only triumph worthy of a true sportsman. Three years later we get into a wider field with * The Country Gentleman's Companion,' compiled by 'a Country Gentleman from his own Experiences ; ' a sensible little book, owing a great deal, of course, to its predecessors, despite the author's prefatory disclaimer, nor always acknowledging its debts, but yet with a good deal to say for itself, especially on the breeding and management of hounds, and the general economy of the kennel. Between the anonymous ' Essay on Hunting ' and these two works comes Somerville's ' Chase,' which most people interested in the subject have probably read once at least in their lives ; if they have never studied the original, they must at any rate have got a very fair idea of it from Beckford's book, in which from first to last the most important part of the poem is practically reprinted. Beckford himself of course marks an era not only in the literature but in the history of hunting. Whatever may have been the real value of the writers before him, it is certain that to all who have come after him he has been a ' guide, philosopher, and friend.' It is scarcely too much to say that since his ' Tiioughts upon Hunting ' were first printed in 1781 there has been no writer who has gone at all i HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 21 seriously into the science and economy of the subject who has not more or less made use of their amusing pages. For they are as amusing as sensible. Even those who regard the subject itself with indifference or dislike could not but allow on trial that Beckford is at least never tedious or dull, for all his own modest declaration that 'fox-hunting, however lively and animating it may be in the field, is but a dull dry subject to write upon.' He has generally some witty story or shrewd saying at hand to point his moral, and his style is quite a model for such a work. No man ever so happily illustrated Johnson's saying of the importance of being able to write trifles with dignity. At the same time he is never pompous or pedantic, any more than he is slovenly or vulgar. Beckford was in fact a remarkably well- read and cultivated man, one of the very best specimens of the English country squire the last century affords us — a striking antithesis, indeed, to that other fox-hunting squu-e whom Fielding drew, more typical of the breed, perhaps, than Beckford. Cousin to that famous Lord Mayor, John Wilkes's champion, patron that was to have been of poor Chatterton, and father to the great lord of Fonthill, our author inherited from his father a comfortable estate in Dorsetshire which enabled him to in- dulge his tastes both for letters and sport. His ' Familiar Letters from Italy to a Friend in England,' the record of a continental tour made just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, are most agreeable reading, the work of a man well versed in ancient and modern literature, and of good taste and perception. A contemporary writer has thus pithily summed him up : 'Never had fox or hare the honour of being chased to death by so accomplished a huntsman ; never was huntsman's dinner graced by such urbanity and wit. He would bag a fox in Greek, find a hare in Latin, inspect his kennels in Italian, and direct the economy of his stables in exquisite French.' ' With Beckford's book our retrospect of the literature of hunting may fitly close. He clearly marks the end of the old ' We are indebted to the courtesy of Mr. Robert Harrison, Librarian of the London Library, for these particulars of Beckford's accomplishments. 22 HUXTIXG. school and the beginning of the new. With the works of the latter, both serious and fictitious, from Delme Radclifife and ' Nimrod,' down to ' Scrutator ' and ' Cecil,' Surtees, John Mills and Whyte-Melville, we may suppose our readers to be well enough acquainted ; and as we shall ourselves have many occasions to consult them in the course of the following pages, it would be superfluous to spend further time over them here. When hunting began to be regarded as an organised pastime with laws and arts of its own, a list was drawn up of the beasts a true sportsman might legitimately occupy himself in chasing. It was, of course, a pretty large one, and was divided by Twici into three classes. The first contains four, distinguished as ' beasts for hunting,' the hare, the hart, the wolf, and the wild boar ; the second five, known as ' beasts for the chase,' the buck, the doe, the fox, the martin, and the roe ; in the third come the grey or badger, the wild cat, and the otter, mentioned as afford- mg ' greate dysporte ' to the huntsman, but evidently regarded as legitimate game only in default of something better. By later writers the ' beasts of the chase ' were subdivided into two further classes. In the first were the buck, the doe, the bear, the rein-deer, the elk and spytard, a hart of one hundred years old ; in the second, which obviously includes also the original third class, the fulimart, the fitchat or fitch, the cat, the badger, the fox, the weasel, the martin, the squirrel, the white rat, the otter, the stoat, and the pole-cat. The first division was known as beasts 'of sweet flight,' to distinguish it from the others who were classed as beasts of 'stinking flight;' a distinction which Strutt interprets as referring to the scent the latter give when chased ; but inasmuch as the former must certainly have supplied a snnilar means of pursuit, it most probably was de- signed to distinguish the estimation in which the two classes of game were held. It is at any rate clear that our ancestors, when they went a-hunting, were pretty much of a mind with the accommodating witness provided for one of Mr. Jaggers's clients, and were prepared ' in a general way for anythink.' HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 23 As our business, however, lies with the game of to-day, we need not stay to consider in what manner the capture of the weasel or the pole-cat was encompassed, or even of the wolf or the boar. As the forest gradually disappeared, and land came more and more under cultivation, the greater part of these beasts either vanished altogether or became so infrequent as to drop out of the sportsman's list and take their place on the roll of vermin. Even Twici practically confines himself to the stag, the fox, and the hare, and we may be well content to follow Twici's example. Of these, the stag of course held the first place, from his size, swiftness, and courage, as well as from the uses to which he could be put after death in supplying both the inner and the outer necessities of man. ' Of the Stagge,' says Markham, ' which is the most princelie and roiel Chase of all Chases, and for whom indeed this Art of Hunting was first found out and invented, he is of all beasts the goodliest, statelyest, and most manly.' But though the supreme qualities of the stag were thus duly acknowledged, the triumph over the hare seems from very early times to have been considered the prime test of a huntsman's quality. ' We will begin with the hare,' says Twici. ' Why, sir, will you begin with the hare, rather than with any other beast ? ' 'I will tell you. Because she is the most mar- vellous beast which is on this earth.' The study of natural history was then but in its infancy, and some of the properties which struck King Edward's ' Master of the Game ' with such astonish- ment will hardly surprise us very much to-day. Among other marvels we are told that 'at one time it is male, and at another time it is female,' but whether this diversity of sex is supposed to belong to the individual hare, or to be a general characteristic of the species, is not clear. Markham thought hare-hunting the ' freest, readiest and most enduring pastime : ' and Blome follows suit, styling it an art ' full of subtlety and craft, and possessed of divers delights and varieties, which other chases do not afford,' though he adds, 'whosoever hath hunted one and the same hare twice, and doth not kill her the third time. 24 HUXTIXG. deserves not the name of a huntsman, for generally they use the same sleights, doublings and crossings.' In Shakespeare's immortal stanzas, of the three beasts which the love-sick goddess advises her flinty-hearted boy to ' uncouple at ; ' the timorous flying hare, Or at the fox which lives by subtlety. Or at the roe which no encounter dare, the first is evidently the chase the poet knew best, though from his compassionate epithets he seems, like a later bard, to have thought it but a ' poor triumph.' Thomson, as we know, held this opinion, and urged the ' sylvan youth ' of Britain, since such noble prey as ' the roused-up lion,' or the 'grim wolf,' or the ' blinded boar,' are not for them, to direct their energies against the fox. Your sportive fury, pitiless, to poui Loose on the nightly robber of the fold : Him, from his craggy winding haunts unearth'd, Let all the thunder of the chase pursue. Throw the broad ditch behind you ; o'er the hedge High bound, resistless ; nor the deep morass Refuse, but through the shaking uilclerness Pick your nice way ; into the perilous flood Bear fearless, of the raging instinct full ; And as you ride the torrent, to the banks Your triumph sound sonorous, running round, From rock to rock, in circling echoes toss'd ; Then scale the mountains to their woody tops ; Rush down the dangerous steep ; and o'er the lawn In fancy swallowing up the space between, Pour all your speed into the rapid game ; For happy he who tops the wheeling chase ; Has every maze evolved, and every guile Disclosed ; Who knows the merits of the pack ; Who saw the villain seized, and dying hard, Without complaint, though by a hundred mouths Relentless torn : O glorious he, beyond His daring peers! HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 25 Beckford, too, was evidently of the same mind with Thomson. 'By inclination,' he says, 'I was never a hare- hunter. I followed this diversion more for air and exercise than for amusement ; and if I could have persuaded myself to ride on the turnpike-road to the three-mile stone, and back again, I should have thought I had no need of a pack of harriers.' He adds, however, with his wonted respect for every legitimate form of hunting, that he speaks only of the country where he lives, where ' the hare-hunting is so bad, that, did you know it, your wonder would be how I could have persevered in it so long, not that I should forsake it now.' On the other hand, John Smallman Gardiner, Gent., whose letters have been already mentioned, has scarce words enough to express his admiration of the hare as an object of chase, and his contempt for the fox. He allows, indeed, that it 'would be imprudent to declaim against other people's diversions to enhance the satis- faction found in mine ; ' yet he does declaim, and pretty vigorously, though his objections seem to be much of a nature with those which a certain Etonian of a past generation found against football, that it was too rough and violent to take rank as a ' gentlemanly ' game ! This is what he says : ' A lover of hunting almost every man is, or would be thought ; but twenty in the field after an hare find more delight and sincere enjoy- ment than one in twenty in a fox-chase, the former consisting of an endless variety of accidental delights, the latter little more than hard riding, the pleasure of clearing some dangerous leap, the pride of bestriding the best nag, and showing somewhat of the bold horseman ; and (equal to anything) of being first in at the death, after a chase frequently from county to county, and perhaps above half the way out of sight or hearing of the hounds. So that, but for the name of foxhuntmg, a man might as well mount at his stable-door, and determme to gallop twenty miles an end into another county.' This is a view of fox-hunting that has been accepted since Mr. Gardiner's day by many less inclined to go along with him in his objections to the hard riding part of it, if there be any truth in the saying 26 HUXTING. attributed to a noted first-flight man of our grandsires' time, who, ' larking ' with some brother spirits back to Melton after a poor day's sport, exclaimed in a burst of rapture, ' What fim ice might have^ if it wasn't for these d d hounds ! ' It is clear that till about the middle of the last century fox- hunting by no means held the pride of place amongst sportsmen that it now holds. Despite the fox's admission into the list of beasts of chase, there can be no doubt that then and for long ')' T~t WW'' ' Larking with some brother jpirits back to Melton.' after he was looked on as a marauder, whose death was to be encouraged by any means, fair or foul. The well-known passage in Chaucer's ' Nun's Tale,' revealing the treacherous abduction of poor Chanticleer, may be cited as a case in point, Avhere, by the w-ay, the fox is called * Dan Russet ' from his red or russet colour. . Sterner evidence still is the speech of Oliver St. John, Solicitor-General, against Strafford before the House of Lords in 1641. 'It is true,' he said, as reported by HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 27 Clarendon, ' that we give law to hares and deer because they are Beasts of Chase ; but it was never accounted either cruelty, or foul play, to knock foxes and wolves on the head as they can be found, because they are beasts of prey.' AValter Scott, too, it will be remembered, puts the same sentiment in the mouth of Roderick Dhu ; — but, though the beast of game The privelege of chase may claim. Though space and law the stag we lend Ere hound we slip, or bow we bend, Who ever reck'd where, how, or when. The prowling fox was trapp'd or slain ! It is true, Twici gives directions for hunting him ' above ground,' which shows that he was then beginning to be re- garded as something better, at least, than a badger ; but much later writers than Twici evidently regard his chase, though in default of a better it may yield sport enough, as not com- parable to that of the stag or the hare. IMarkham, for ex- ample, who, by the way, does class poor Reynard with the badger, says of both that they ' are chases of a great deal lesse use or cunning than anie of the former,' though his reasons ' be- cause they are of much hotter scent, and indeed very few dogges but will hunt them with all egernesse,' may strike us as not very cogent. Blome considers the chase of the fox ' not so full of diversity as the hare,' and the ' Country Gentleman ' agrees both with Blome and Markham. He is always mentioned as 'the craftiest beast that is,' trusting less in his 'strength of body or swiftness of legs' than in his cunning. Turberville, indeed, gives some very remarkable instances of his shifts to escape from his pursuers, which the verbal decorum of our age will not allow us here to reproduce. But perhaps the most striking illustration of our ancestors' ideas on the subject of fox-hunting is to be found in Cockaine, who tells us that 'every huntsman his part is to hew him, or backe him into the covert again when he ofifereth to breake the same.' This murderous piece of advice may perhaps be partly condoned by the fact that in those 28 HUNTIXG. days the tox seems generally to have been hunted on foot ; even in Blome's time it appears from the illustrations to his book that the huntsman proper did not put his trust in the legs of a horse. A former Lord Wilton in his ' Sports and Pursuits of the English,' says it was not till 1750 that hounds were entered solely to fox. But in his famous ' Quarterly ' article on ' The Chase,' 'Nimrod' quotes a letter written to him by Lord Arundel, from which it appears that one of his lordship's ancestors kept a pack at the close of the previous century. They hunted both in Wiltshire and Hampshire, and remained in the family till 1782, when they were sold to ' the great ]\Ir. Meynell,' the real father of the modern English chase. There must, however, have been another pack at least coeval with this, for some few years ago there was in the ' Field ' an engraving of a hunting-horn in the possession of the then master of the Cheshire hounds, on which was the following inscription : ' Thomas Boothby, Esq., Tooley Park, Leicester. With this horn he hunted the first pack of fox-hounds then in England 55 years: born 1677, died 1752.' Another authority gives 1730 for the year when Thomas Fownes, of Stepleton in Dorsetshire, kept a regular pack of fox-hounds, which were afterwards sold to Mr. Bowes, of Yorkshire. It is, however, very possible that Lord Wilton's date may be the correct one, for there is nothing to show that these packs were not occasion- ally stooped to other game than fox ; a practice which even Beckford, that staunch legitimist, though he does not recom- mend it, writes of as a possibility when foxes are unusually scarce. According to a memoir of the Belvoir hounds, the present pack can prove an uninterrupted descent from the year given by Lord Wilton. Seven years earlier the records of the Badminton kennels could show only one couple of fox-hounds, the rest being deer-hounds and harriers. According to 'Cecil,' it was not till 1762 that this famous hunt turned itself solely to the chase of the fox. In that year the filth Duke, then still a minor, while pnssing Silk Wood on his way home after a poor HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 29 day's sport, threw his hounds into covert; 'a fox was found which gallantly faced the open, a capital run was the result, which so delighted the young sportsman, that the hounds were forthwith steadied from deer, and encouraged to fox.' When the last Lord Berkeley kept hounds his country stretched from Bristol to Wormwood Scrubs, a distance, that is, of some 120 miles, necessitating four separate sets of kennels ! His son, Grantley Berkeley, has told us he had often heard from their old huntsman how he had killed a fox where the flowers now blossom in Kensington Gardens. Nor was this lord the first of his name who found his sport so near London ; an earlier Lord Berkeley used to kennel his hounds at Charing Cross, and hunt in Gray's Inn Fields, and roundabout Islington. The tawny liveries still worn by the Old Berkeley Hunt are a relic of those days. Before 1750, and in many parts of the kingdom for long after, every country squire no doubt kept a few couple of hounds, and on occasions he and his neighbours would unite their force and so form a respectable pack. These were known as 'trencher hounds,' from their running loose about the place, and picking up their food as they best might, and 'Nimrod' supposes them to have beeii much of a piece with the large broken-haired Welsh harrier.^. A day's hunting was then in all probability very like that described in ' Guy Mannering,' though the sportsmen were stirring at even an earlier hour than Dandie Dinmont and his guest. For almost the only point on which we can really afford to be certain was the desperately early hour at which our fathers commenced operation, 'so soon as they could distinguish a stile from a gate,' says ' Nimrod.' A famous old sportsman, Mr. Lockley, a contemporary of Meynell's, used, says ' Cecil,' always to begin the account of a certain wonderful day's sport with, ' We breakfasted at twelve o'clock at night.' Men in those days did not hunt to ride, and their greatest pleasure was to watch their favourites drawing up to their game on a cold scent. We know, too, that the fox was hunted then as the stag is now A couple or two of steady old hounds were 30 HU ACTING. thrown in when the drag had led the pack up to the covert where he lay, taking his rest after his midnight rambles, and it was not till he was fairly on foot and away that the body of the pack was laid on. Both hounds and horses were slow then as compared with now, and the riders we may guess to have been much like Squire Draper, 'avoiding what was unnecessar}' and riding with judgment.' The whole affair was eminently sloiu no doubt, according to our modern notions, but still, one fancies the sport, as distinct from the riding, may not have been much the worse. In the ' Sporting Magazine ' for July 1S27, there is a description of a pack of hounds kept by an old Essex squire who at the close of last century hunted the country between Col- chester and the sea on the Maldon side. The hounds were known as harriers, 'because they used to hunt the hares,' but, 'the deep-toned blue-mottled, the dwarf fox-hound, the true- bred harrier, the diminutive beagle, all joined in the cr}', and helped to supply the pot.' The general economy of the esta- blishment was peculiar. The hounds were kept anyhow, * having a butcher for one master, a baker for another, a former for a third, spreading pretty well through the village.' Whip- pers-in seem to have been numerous, the butcher, the baker, &c., each probably playing that part to his favourite hound. The huntsman seems to have been of a piece with the rest, and to have been at least as famous for his feats at table as in the field. Yet ' he was a capital sportsman, and could almost hunt a hare himself This picture might probably serve for most of the provincial packs at that time hunting in England whether fox or hare. The chase of the stag was pursued in much more orthodox fashion, and with far more pomp and ceremony, both from the nature of the animal and the fact of the sport being so much older and more fashionable. From a very early date the royal buckhounds were quartered in their present neighbourhood. In Henry VIII. 's reign the kennels were in Swinley, probably on the spot where the deer-paddocks now stand. There, too, in the old days lived the masters of the royal pack, and kept HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 31 high revels according to the ' Druid' in a house which has long since disappeared, but whose site he marked under the shadow of some noble limes hard by that where Cotterill, the present keeper of the paddocks, lives, as his family lived for many generations before him. There is a record of a wonderful run in the time of the second Charles from that place to Lord Petre's in Essex, a distance of seventy miles, the Duke of York being one of the few who saw the deer pulled down. The indefatigable ' Druid ' has unearthed too another big affair, from Aldermaston to Reading in the days of ' Good King George.' On this occasion both his Majesty's horses were done 'to a turn,' and their rider had to make his way back to Windsor in a butcher's cart, chatting affably to the driver on crops, stock, and other such congenial topics. The present fashion of stag-hunting seems to have been first practised in this reign, and to suit King George's sober pace the custom of stopping the hounds seems also to have been inau- gurated. According to Blaine the meet was then a much more imposing affair than it now is. The King himself was almost always present, attended by his master of the horse and the equerries-in-waiting. The servants of the hunt wore the familiar scarlet and gold-laced liveries then as now, but the master's coat was light blue, with collars and cuffs of black velvet, the costume also of his Majesty, w^ho, moreover, if a story told by the ' Druid 'on the authority of the late Bill Bean, of hard riding and facetious memory, be true, never took the field without a star on his breast.^ There was always a great show of carriages and foot-people, and apparently rather more blowing of horns than would chime with modern notions. The Fourth George patronised the stag but rarely, either as prince or king, though he kept up the hunt in great splendour, and penned with his own hand a most courtly note to Charles Davis on his appointment as huntsman, hoping that he would get the hounds ' The late Prince Consort (Albert) always wore the ribbon under his waist- coat out shooting. The Editor has often shot with him, iind invariably seen it on him. 32 HUNTING. so fast that they would ' run away from everybody,' which was pretty well what that excellent sportsman and rider did do. The Prince had been entered to fox in his father's lifetime, and for a few seasons hunted the Hambledon country from Moor Critchell, solacing himself on by-days with a pack of rabbit- beagles, seven couples of which could ride to the meet in a couple of panniers. But, despite the ' Druid's ' loyalty, one can hardly suppose him ever to have been very keen about hounds. The turf suited him better than the chase ; and Carlton House and Brighton better, probably, than either. No pack of hounds in England could show a cleaner or more direct pedigree than could the staghounds of North Devonshire up to the year 1825. Exmoor was a royal hunting- ground in the time of the Conqueror, and from that day down into the present century there has always, we believe, been a Ranger of Exmoor holding office under the Crown. The history of the Devonshire hounds can be traced in a straight line back to the year 1598, when Hugh Pollard, Elizabeth's Ranger, kept a pack at Simonsbath. From that time down to 1825 the sport flourished exceedingly under a goodly roll of masters, particularly under Sir Thomas Acland, the second of the name, and the late Lord Fortescue, who kept the hounds at Castle Hill in 1802 and again from 1812 to 1818. 'Those were glorious days,' sighs the historian of the latter's master- ship : ' When a good stag had been killed, the custom was for James Tout, the huntsman, to enter the dining-room at Castle Hill after dinner in full costume with his horn in his hand, and after he had sounded a mort, "Success to stag-hunting" was solemnly drunk by the assembled company in port wine.' ^ In 1825 the pack was sold, but two years later another was formed, and, with one or two short intervals, the North Devon stag- hounds have continued to show what is in many ways the finest and most genuine sport in England. The twelfth Earl of Derby, great-grandfather to the present, also kept a pack of some note in his day, with which he • See Collyns's Notes on the Chase of the Wild Red Deer, HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 33 hunted from The Oaks, his place near Epsom from which the famous race takes its name. The deer were all bred at Knows- ley, and occasionally crossed with the Yorkshire breed of Lord Fitzwilliam ; they were noted for their speed and stoutness, and the hounds were a good match for them in both qualities. Pace was becoming the fashion then everywhere, and there is a story told of Lord Derby's huntsman summing up the praises of a favourite bitch by vowing that she could run four miles in less time thaii a greyhound ! The late Thomas INIoreton Fitzhardinge Berkeley (born in 1794, died in August 1882, legally Earl of Berkeley, but who, out of respect to his mother's memory, never would assume the title) and his brother Grantley when young men also hunted stag with a pack kept at Cranford, the family seat. The brothers were the officers of the hunt, together with Mr. Henry Wombwell, all wearing the orange tawny livery of the family. The pack was given up about 1830, when Mr. Grantley Berkeley went to hunt the Oakley. A smart little pack was also kept some years ago near Leamington, and the Surrey Stag- hounds are of very ancient fame. But save in the West Country the wild stag has not been hunted in England (excepting occa- sionally in Windsor Forest in George III.'s time), certainly within this century, though in Ireland the sport has been, we believe, occasionally followed within more recent times, but not as we understand 'hunting.' It consists in driving the woods of Killarney and forcing the stags into the Lake, where they are shot or caught with ropes by the horns. Wild deer exist no- where else in Ireland. Fox hunting, as we know it now, with its pace and its hard riding, its sumptuousness and refinement, may be said to hav^ come in with this century. Mr. Childe of Kinlet, says ' The Druid,' first began hard riding in Leicestershire to Mr. Mey- nell's great disgust, and on a half-bred Arabian, too ! When Lords Forester and Jersey came with the reckless style of riding, the good old sportsman declared that he * had not had a day's happiness ; ' as he has been described as a ' regular little dumpling ' in the saddle, probably the new style of going was D 34 HUNTING. not much to his taste. Moreover, one of his first laws was never to cast his hounds so long as they would hunt ; and the observation of this law was clearly not compatible with hard riding. Whether the sport is now what it was in the days whose glories ' Nimrod ' has written of and Aiken painted, it would be as ungenerous to ask as difficult to answer. If the stories unearthed by the untiring industry of 'The Druid' -