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- Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Few people hunting today are fully aware of the history of their sport. Accounts of the subject can be somewhat dry and academic. So, in an easy and entertaining manner, here is a concise summary of how this much-misunderstood sport has survived and flourished through centuries of change, to the benefit of the fox and its environment. • Concise chapters gallop through the history of hunting from 1066 to the present day, interspersed with snippets of hunting verse and song • Index of foxhunting packs in the UK, Ireland and North America • Specially-commissioned line illustrations of hunting scenes by Alastair Jackson Hunting is a sport with not only a colourful history, but also a promising future. The next generation still responds with great enthusiasm and commitment to the appeal of foxhunting, providing eager recruits each season to the hunting field. This book will appeal to social historians and all who hunt today.
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A Short History of
FOXHUNTING
Alastair Jackson & Michael Clayton
Illustrated by Alastair Jackson
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Too many accounts of the history of foxhunting have been somewhat dry and academic. We have set out to provide a succinct account of foxhunting’s history to inform and entertain newcomers and those who have hunted for years. Alastair Jackson’s inimitable illustrations, born of his own long experience as a Master and huntsman, add a special dimension to our history.
The history of this great British country sport is closely linked with all other aspects of rural life. A recreation which grew out of man’s ancient need to hunt, foxhunting’s history is colourful and eventful. Royalty and the aristocracy have enjoyed it, but it has been highly successful as a sport appealing to the widest cross-section of society, underpinned by the staunch support of farmers and landowners throughout the British Isles. Despite profound changes, and misguided or malicious attacks, foxhunting has survived peace and war, and profound social changes.
We have described the key characters who sustained foxhunting, especially the great huntsmen and breeders who created the Foxhound, in our opinion the greatest hound breed in the world. We have endeavoured to explain the science of venery with clarity. Jumping hedges on horseback in pursuit of hounds is a unique thrill, but watching hounds work in our beautiful countryside is a life-time’s preoccupation whether the foxhunter is mounted or on foot.
Foxhunting, through the planting of coverts, has made a unique visual contribution to the beauty of our landscape in many areas, and provided valuable habitats for wildlife. The pleasures of foxhunting, the beauty of horse and hound, have evoked a tradition of sporting art of which Britain can be justly proud, and a range of sporting literature which has delighted generations of readers. We have provided information and pointers for those who have yet to explore these artistic records of the hunting field.
Too often foxhunting has been grossly misrepresented by its opponents, especially those in the animal rights movement.
No history of foxhunting is complete without an informed account of the chaotic arrival of the Hunting Act 2004, seeking to ban traditional hunting with hounds in England and Wales.
Not least, our history of foxhunting gives full justice to the story of the fox, conserved by foxhunting as a much-valued species in our countryside. Conducted under strict rules, and observing a close season, foxhunting for so long provided a special status for the fox, conserved at an acceptable level by the Hunts. This status has been reduced to that of mere vermin by the iniquitous Hunting Act.
Despite ludicrous legislation, Britain’s foxhound packs are still triumphantly in place, and making a major contribution to our way of life in the countryside. Foxhunting’s heritage is that of a sport involving high skills with horse and hound, an indelible part of the rural calendar.
Youth still responds with immense enthusiasm and commitment to the appeal of foxhunting, providing eager recruits each season to the hunting field, and confounding the intentions of the prejudiced and ignorant who wished to destroy the Hunts.
Our new, up-to-date history of foxhunting aims to inform, to entertain, and thereby to enhance a sport which for so many has become a passion and a life-long pleasure.
So in an easy-to-peruse, and hopefully entertaining manner, we’re providing a concise version of how our much misunderstood, too often misrepresented, sport has survived and flourished through centuries of change in the countryside – to the benefit of the fox and its environment.
Good Hunting!
Alastair Jackson & Michael Clayton June 2013
CHAPTER ONE
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR AND BEFORE
After William the Conqueror crossed our shore
He felt he’d had enough of war.
So for many a year, he hunted deer
And brought the Norman venery here.
He made strict rules for voice and horn,
To be used by all who were well-born.
The poor he banned from hunting stag –
So they hunted the fox by scenting its drag.
MOST PEOPLE believe it was William the Conqueror who brought hunting with hounds to these shores and the date of 1066, when he invaded, is firmly fixed in the head of even the least attentive schoolboy. However, the English Kings before the Norman Conquest, such as Edward the Confessor, all hunted with enthusiasm and the Irish and Welsh hunted passionately, as they still do, from unrecorded ages.
However, the strongest tradition of scent hounds developed in France. St. Hubert (656-727), who hunted stag and boar in the vast forests of the Ardennes, was converted to Christianity when he saw a crucifix between the horns of the stag he was hunting. Having founded a monastery and developed his breed of black and tan hounds, he was eventually canonised as the patron saint of hunters.
The St. Hubert hounds were taken from the Ardennes into Normandy, probably in the 10th century and would have been the sort of hound brought to England by William the Conqueror. William set about preserving the forests as royal hunting grounds and put in place some savage penalties, including blinding, for killing a deer or boar, and this at a time when the murder of a man only resulted in a moderate fine. For killing a hind, King Rufus later increased the penalty to death.
These new laws to preserve game caused immense hardship and ill-feeling among the conquered Saxons, and remained a running sore in rural life for many generations. Reforms of Forest Law were part of the demands in Magna Carta submitted to King John. The fox, although hunted by the lower orders, was considered little more than vermin, with no protection as a beast of the chase. Indeed, suitable hounds for hunting fox or badger were apparently ‘Welsh or Breton shaghaired verminers’ which were particularly cunning at finding their quarry. The rough-coated hounds of Wales have survived to the present day.
The Normans produced a more defined technique for hunting with hounds, and several modern Foxhunting terms are derived from the original French. ‘Tally ho’ came from ‘Ty a hillaut!’ the huntsman’s shout signalling the rousing of the deer, and ‘Leu in’ is another Norman derived term still widely used to encourage hounds to draw a covert. ‘Leu’ is a corruption of loup, the wolf. ‘So-ho’ was a Norman wolf hunter’s cry, giving its name to London’s ‘saucy square mile’ Soho, which was a hunting ground long before modern notoriety.
CHAPTER TWO
SLOW AND STEADY STAYS THE PACE
When fences were met by the Duke of Buckingham
His policy was for carefully ducking ’em.
’Twas the long slow hunt on a fox’s drag
That pleased the field, though the pace would lag.
And ne’er they cared how the time went past
While they sat around by the earth at last –
As hounds spoke long and loudly,
While Buckingham looked on proudly.
Yet squatting for hours on the cold, bare ground
Was no good for his kidneys, I’ll be bound.
The Duke caught a chill which wine couldn’t kill –
So ending the life of this sporting old squire –
In a hunt where the pace was too slow to enquire.
WHEN the ruthless Norman hold on the countryside had dissipated, a passion for hunting continued for several centuries, with the management of packs of hounds being shared between royalty, the aristocracy and the local squires. Foxhunting however remained a rather steady performance, with the hounds picking up the overnight scent of the fox, known as his ‘drag’ and hunting slowly back to its earth. Here the hounds would sit by the hole, giving tongue melodiously while the fox was dug out.
This was the undoing of the Duke of Buckingham, the premier foxhunter in the North of England during the 1600s, who died of a chill caught while sitting on the ground waiting for a fox to be dug out. That is not to say that these early foxhunters did not achieve some long hunts. It was just that the horse, when one was used, was purely a means of following the hounds, and the challenge of crossing the country was irrelevant. Rather than use the usual 18 inch curved hunting horn of the time, Buckingham designed the small straight metal horn, which is used to this day.
Three hundred years ago West Sussex, and not Leicestershire or Gloucestershire, was regarded as the Mecca of foxhunting. It was on the South Downs that the famous Charlton Hunt was formed, probably one of the first organised Hunts to hunt the fox regularly. It was a very aristocratic affair; the list of subscribers reads like a Burke’s Peerage: the Duke of Bolton, Duke of Devonshire, Duke of Kingston, the Earl of Pembroke, Earl of Lincoln, Earl of Sandwich….. and so on. At one time the Duke of Monmouth, the ill-fated illegitimate son of Charles II, was Master. While awaiting his execution, he wrote a letter to his huntsman, Tom Johnson, telling him which bitches to breed from! Tom Johnson died in 1744 and was buried in Singleton churchyard, near Charlton. On his tombstone is the verse:
Here Johnson lies, what hunter can deny
Old Honest Tom the tribute of a sigh,
Deaf is that ear which caught the opening sound,
Dumb is the tongue that cheered the hills around.
Unpleasing truth: Death hunts us from our birth;
In view, then like foxes take to earth.
The blue Charlton livery is still worn by the Chiddingfold, Leconfield and Cowdray Hunt, which covers the old Charlton country, although they do not have the gold tassels on their caps.
By now England was thronged with other packs of hounds, large and small, but the exact dates of their conversion to foxhunting is mostly unknown. Another ancient hunting establishment was the Berkeley. When Roger Berkeley was given land in Gloucestershire by William the Conqueror and Berkeley Castle was built, hounds were kept there and have been in the control of the same family ever since. Thus the Berkeleys must be considered the oldest hunting family in England.
The change from staghounds to foxhounds took place under the Mastership of the 5th Earl and the ‘tawny yellow’ livery of his Hunt servants was seen throughout this vast country, which stretched from Berkeley Castle on the Severn Estuary, to Berkeley Square in London. To hunt this extraordinary area, four outlying kennels were used between Berkeley and London. In 1790 the country was broken up and part of it was taken by the Old Berkeley Hunt and founded on a subscription basis; its tawny yellow coats are still worn by the Kimblewick Hunt, who hunt that country today.
Other major establishments at this time included those belonging to the Coventry family who kept hounds at Croome in Worcestershire from about 1600, the Lowthers in Westmoreland from about 1650, the Pryses in the Gogerddan country, and the Williams’s in the Llangibby who both had packs of comparable antiquity in Wales.
The foxes of the Lake District were strong and expensive predators on farm stock, and must have been hunted from time immemorial. Hounds bred to hunt the Fells were first developed by Sir Thomas Cockaine in the reign of Elizabeth I and would have been ‘trencher fed’ (kept on the farms and brought together on a hunting day, when they were followed on foot). This method applied to some extent until recently where hounds returned to their farms in the summer, and the huntsman would take alternative farm work until they returned to the kennels for the hunting season.
CHAPTER THREE
THE HOOROOSH OF THE CHASE
When Hugo Meynell comes to the Shires
A speedy pack he soon acquires;
Faster and faster grows the pace
’Til old Hugo’s red in face.
‘I haven’t had a day of peace
‘Since those rascals went like grease.
‘Those smarty boots ride down my hounds –
‘And I would give a thousand pounds
‘To make rude thrusters in the Quorn
‘Rue the day that they were born.’
THE ‘modern’ style of hunting, providing an exciting ride for the followers, dates from 1753 in Leicestershire. It was then that a young Derbyshire squire called Hugo Meynell, only 18 years old, moved his hounds and household to Quorndon Hall and hunted the country between Nottingham and Market Harborough.
This was an ideal hunting country, naturally well drained so that the grassland rode light, with well-spaced coverts that encouraged a fox to run in the open, and an undulating countryside which enabled huntsman and followers to watch hounds hunting ahead.
Meynell’s early years in Leicestershire were remarkably unsuccessful because, although he had boundless energy and enthusiasm, there was no knowledgeable ‘elder statesman’ to help him. However, by the 1770s the Quorn under his Mastership had so improved as to be the premier pack in the land for half a century. He was a highly intelligent man, and a member of London’s fashionable set – an intellectual contrast with some of the country squires depicted as Masters until then.
The Meynell method was to let hounds hunt on their own, with as little noise from whippers-in as possible. By breeding hounds for nose, pace and stamina he soon built up a pack that were second-to-none for showing sport. The performance of his hounds, combined with his personality, and the superb country over which he hunted, soon attracted a new breed of foxhunter.
In about 1780 a provincial arriviste, William Childe from Shropshire – nicknamed Flying Childe, the name given to a famous racehorse – showed how it was possible to ‘ride up to hounds’ by jumping the thorn fences, known as fly fences, for which Leicestershire became famous. The challenge and thrill of riding over fences at speed after hounds soon caught on, and it was not long before like-minded foxhunters were congregating at Melton Mowbray ‘for the season’.
These Meltonians, as they came to be known, rode hard all day and some drank hard most of the night, getting up to all sorts of pranks. In 1837 the Marquess of Waterford and friends, under the influence of drink, daubed some of Melton Mowbray’s buildings with pots of red paint, adding the phrase ‘painting the town red’ to the English language.
Mr Meynell was horrified by this new breed of ‘thrusters’ who constantly pressed and over-rode his hounds. However, by the end of his 47 years Mastership, the Quorn had shown the way: High Leicestershire became the focus of modern foxhunting for the next 200 years.
The other establishment central to the development of modern foxhunting was that of the Duke of Beaufort in Gloucestershire. Henry Somerset was created 1st Duke of Beaufort in 1682 by Charles II; he built Badminton House, and the staghounds and harriers he established there were the forerunners of the present pack of foxhounds.
Sporting legend says that in 1762 the 5th Duke of Beaufort, at the age of 18, put his hounds into Silk Wood, a covert still existing near Tetbury, after a poor day’s staghunting, and had such a good hunt on a fox that he vowed to hunt fox thereafter. In fact the general transition from stag to foxhunting was a much more gradual affair. Its cause was the progressive enclosure of the countryside. At first foxes were not very plentiful, causing the 5th Duke to extend his boundaries to take in what is now the whole of the Heythrop country. To the present day, Badminton is the traditional home of the modern foxhound.
CHAPTER FOUR
LEADING THE WAY IN THE 19th CENTURY
Talk of horses and hounds
And the system of kennel.
Give me Leicestershire nags
And the hounds of old Meynell!
The Shires
In 1800 Hugo Meynell, ever since known as the ‘Father of foxhunting’, gave up the Quorn hounds after 47 seasons. He sold 50 couple of hounds and Quorndon Hall to Lord Sefton. Sefton was a very heavy man who regularly paid £1,000 for his horses, and brought the second horse system into fashion. This enabled a rider of any weight to gallop and jump all day, changing to a fresh mount brought to the hunting field by a ‘second horseman’ who rode quietly on the lanes until the change was needed.
Mr Thomas Assheton Smith was the first Master of the Quorn to hunt hounds himself, and was a bold enough horseman to out-thrust the thrusters.
Several important Masterships ensured the highest standards were achieved, culminating in that of Lord Lonsdale, ‘the Yellow Earl’ at the Cottesmore and Quorn. A consummate showman, no expense was spared and he would lay on a fleet of yellow carriages to convey his house parties to the meets.
He had inherited the immortal Tom Firr as Quorn huntsman, who, in order not to waste an ounce of his energy that might be needed in the field, would travel seated beside the Master in his yellow phaeton, while the hounds travelled in a yellow horsedrawn hound van.
The Quorn retained its reputation as the ultimate fashionable Hunt, attracting visitors, many from London, who would base themselves at Melton for the hectic winter season.
The Quorn is one of three famous Hunts around the Leicestershire market town of Melton Mowbray, sometimes called ‘the capital’ of foxhunting (and nowadays the venue of the Museum of Foxhunting), the others being the Belvoir and Cottesmore. ‘Shires packs’ are those which hunt wholly or partly in Leicestershire, and include other Hunts such as the Fernie and the Pytchley.
The Belvoir Hunt became famous as the fount of foxhound breeding in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It derived from the family packs of deer hounds kept at Belvoir Castle by the Dukes of Rutland whose ancestor came with William the Conqueror. The pack was increasingly entered to hunt fox from about 1730 by the 3rd Duke. Earlier he ran the Hunt as a ‘confederate’ pack with four other neighbouring noblemen, hunting a vast country that took in much of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Nottinghamshire.
In 1732 the Earl of Gainsborough left the confederacy, taking with him 25 couple of hounds and started to hunt the country known today as the Cottesmore, to the south of Melton Mowbray. Much to the anger of the Duke, he also took the cauldron that was used to cook the hounds’ food, and testy correspondence still exists at Belvoir relating to the arguments over the ownership of this vessel.
Throughout the 19th century the breeding policy for the Belvoir hounds was sustained by long serving huntsmen such as Will Goodall (1842-59). He was an outstanding professional whose methods were enshrined by Lord Henry Bentick in his book Goodall’s Practice. Goodall cleverly acquired one of the most influential stallion hounds of all time in Brocklesby Rallywood ’43, immortalised in a painting by Ferneley, and described as ‘the father of the foxhound of today’. He sired many litters at Belvoir; no less than 53 couple of his progeny were sent out to walk in one season.
Frank Gillard, a former whipper-in at the Belvoir, was retrieved from the Quorn in 1870 to be huntsman, and proved an excellent hound breeder as well. He bred such a level pack that only the most experienced visitors to the kennels could tell them apart. Belvoir Weathergauge ’76 became the most influential stallion in the Foxhound Kennel Studbook, with four lines to the aforementioned Brocklesby Rallywood ’43. The Belvoir were set to become the most influential kennel in foxhound breeding for the next few decades. Hounds remain the property of the Duke of Rutland today, although hunted as a subscription pack.
The West Country
A more provincial but no less remarkable 19th century establishment was that of Squire Farquharson in Dorset. While Peter Beckford was hunting his hounds from Steepleton and writing his classic work
