Hunting, Poaching and the Chase
In the case of hunting, sport coincided with both necessity and tradition. Self- evidently justified - traditionalists would say - by the sustenance it provided, hunting could lay claim to being ‘the oldest male profession'.[829] One might dispute the necessity and health of a carnivorous diet, and some voices did so in early modern Europe; likewise, one could question the antiquity and prestige associated with the chase, and a few did that too.
But the period's gradually waning majority opinion lay on the opposite side, regarding meat as a requirement of life and hunting as a quintessential manly activity and key privilege of the aristocracy.The pre-eminent conduct book of the sixteenth century, Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), offers a typical Renaissance panegyric on hunting, observing that
there be... many... exercises, the which though they depend not throughly upon Armes, yet haue they a great agreement with them... And among them me thinke, hunting is one of the chiefest. For it hath acertaine likenesse with warre, & is truly a pastime for greate men, and fit for one liuing in Court. And it is found that it hath also beene much used among them of olde time.
This is an Italian opinion, but one can hear the same thing in other accents, too, as when the Englishman Gervase Markham (1615) praises ‘the hunting of wilde Beasts' above all other forms of recreation ‘as being most royal for the stateliness thereof, most artificial [sophisticated] for the wisedom & cunning thereof and most manly and warlike for the vse and indurance thereof. Such comments echo attitudes already on display in the thirteenth century, when the Majorcan Ramon Lull declares that ‘Knyghtes ought to take coursers to juste and to go to tornoys [tournaments]... to hunt at hartes and bores, and other wylde bestes, for in doynge these things the Knyghtes exercise them to armes for to maynteyne thordre of Knyghthode.'[830] Lull associates hunting with another medieval sport - the joust - to which we must return below, and the association is apt, given that hunting justified itself largely as preparation for warfare.
As such it served as a defining attribute of medieval aristocratic society in the loose sense: that collection of peers and knights and armigerous landowners that understood itself to be first and foremost a warrior class. In medieval law, hunting rights served as an attribute of royal privilege and feudal land tenure, in part because hunting re-enacted and anticipated the military service for which titles and land grants served as a reward.Naturally for a sport associated with warfare, the forms of hunting practised in early modern Europe were valued by their resemblance to battle. In the resulting hierarchy, hunting par force de chiens was most esteemed for its martial qualities. Developed in Anglo-Norman society between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, this form of the chase employed groups of dogs, horses and huntsmen, working in coordinated movements signalled by prearranged horn blasts, to chase the game animal over long distances until dogs held the exhausted beast at bay and the lord of the hunt dispatched it by sword.[831] The strategic challenges presented by hunting par force, together with the physical hazards of pursuing big game on horseback over uneven terrain, distinguished this form of the chase as especially warlike, and other forms of hunting were approved or disparaged by this same standard. The drive hunt, whereby beaters channelled game past a fixed position from which the hunters released arrows or crossbow bolts, clearly required less skill and fortitude (except for the beaters), whereas the practice of coursing with greyhounds - in which the dogs dragged down the game on their own - was ‘essentially a spectator sport'. Other forms of taking game such as hawking or trapping were not considered hunting at all. Thus King James VI of Scotland (1567-1625) could observe that ‘hunting... with running hounds... is the most honorable and noblest sorte thereof, for it is a thieuish sorte of hunting, to shoote with Gunnes and Bowes: & greyhound hunting, is not so martial nor noble a game'.
‘As for hawking', James continues, ‘I condemne it not, but I must praise it more sparingly, because it neither resembleth the wars so neere as hunting doth, in making a man hardie & skilfull riddin in all grounds'. This stress on the martial character of hunting also led enthusiasts to spurn the sport's utility, as when Gottfried von Strassburg (c. 1210) describes Tristan and Isolde as hunting ‘solely for the amusement it affords' and ‘more for their recreation than for their table'.[832] This early emphasis upon the recreational character of the chase anticipates later developments such as the rise of the English fox hunt.Like the forms of hunting, kinds of game were also classified by their ability to provide appropriately martial sport. Reviewing English forest law in the 1590s, John Manwood thus distinguished between the mostly large and dangerous beasts of forest (the hart, hind, boar, wolf and hare), smaller beasts of chase (the buck, doe, fox, martin and roe deer), and beasts and fowls of warren (the hare, rabbit, pheasant and partridge), with the first category privileged ‘for the Estimation that Kinges and Princes haue had of them, and for the noble pastime in the hunting and chasing of them'. Elsewhere similar distinctions obtained, but with much variance of detail. In Saxony, for instance, game classifications issued between 1662 and 1717 include a varying cast of animals in all three categories: bear, wolf, hart and others in the first; boar, roe deer, duck and grouse in the second; and in the third such beasts as the hare, fox, beaver, martin, weasel, squirrel and even the hamster.[833]
The English case exhibits direct connections between the environmental and social consequences of game preference as these developed during the early modern period. In the 1590s, for instance, when Manwood includes wolves among the English beasts of forest, he himself acknowledges that they have already ceased to exist in England:
And whereas they doe accompt the wolfe for a wilde beast of the Forrest, and yet we haue not any in England, it is to be understood, that, although there are no wolfes in Engla[n]d at this day, yet here haue been plenty of them, and they haue beene accompted beasts of venery or Forrests, and kings and princes haue greatly delighted in the hunting of them.
Although Manwood seems unaware of the fact, another of his beasts of forest - the wild boar - also stood on the verge of English extinction. Rare references to boars and boar hunting appear in English records as late as the 1680s, but a century earlier these animals were already growing scarce. Efforts to reintroduce them in Wiltshire were afoot during the reign of Charles I, who ‘sent for some out of France, and putt them in the New Forest, where they much encreased, and became terrible to the travellers': ‘In the civill warres' however, ‘they were destroyed'. While it may be that ‘the principal cause of most historic extinctions is agriculture, not hunters',[834] England's wolves and boars went extinct on a specifically regional basis, after centuries of enthusiastic species persecution. It is hard not to see this persecution as instrumental in their disappearance. In any case, by the late 1600s two of England's five beasts of forest existed only in the realm of legal fantasy.
Nor does the tale end here. The principal remaining beasts of forest, the hart and hind (male and female red deer, accounted different species under law because they were hunted in different seasons), also suffered badly in the period leading to the civil wars. Together with the smaller fallow and roe deer (both beasts of chase), the red deer had been losing ground in England for centuries prior to 1642, gradually devolving from a truly wild beast to a game beast maintained in emparked estates for sport. As such, these animals became a prime target for poaching by anyone - alienated gentry, desperate squatters, political subversives - who wished to challenge the established social order. Such challenges growing more frequent during the early 1600s, deer populations shrank accordingly, despite repeated efforts to restock and protect them. In 1500 the royal forest of Bowland in Lancashire was said to contain about 2,000 deer; by 1556 that number had shrunk to ‘134 red deer and 146 fallow deer'; in 1652 a survey found 20 red deer ‘of all sortes; viz.
staggs, hyndes, and calves', and 40 more fallow deer remaining. During the reign of Queen Mary, Needwood Forest in Staffordshire held almost 900 deer in seven parks; by 1650 ‘a Commonwealth survey recorded that the deer population had been reduced to 120 head'. By the Restoration, indeed, England's supply of deer had so declined that, while deer hunting continued thereafter in diminished form, the sport could never again be pursued in the manner of past generations, when Henry VIII could preside over a drive hunt that slaughtered 240 does and stags and then repeat the carnage the following day with greyhounds, or when the ageing Elizabeth I could pass an idle day by shooting ‘three or four' deer in a paddock in the morning and then retiring in the evening to an observation turret to watch the dogs drag down another ‘sixteen buckes'. As for deer poaching, by the mid 1700s this pursuit was also in decline - according to E. P. Thompson, ‘simply because there were fewer deer to steal'.[835]Thus by the eighteenth century all the traditional great game of England had been driven into or close to extinction, and, lacking any better object of pursuit, the realm's hunters now turned their attention to the local foxes. While foxes had been designated beasts of chase since medieval times and were persecuted as pests by farmers for centuries, it was not until the Restoration that fox hunting began to emerge as a distinctive preoccupation of the landed class. Among English fox hunts, the earliest appears to be the Bilsdale, instituted in 1668 by George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham; however, this late date belies the sport's fundamental conservatism. In fact, ‘Stuart fox hunting was still quite similar to the royal sport of stag hunting';[836] the mounted pursuit of game with hounds, the use of horn signals, and the breaking up of the dead game animal are all cognate practices linking the later sport to its predecessor.
Thus hunting par force survived the gentry's translation from warrior to leisure class in a diminished form determined by the environmental karma of the gentry's own past hunting behaviour, which helped annihilate the larger, more dangerous game emblematic of the traditional relationship between hunting and warfare.As an unintended travesty of hunting par force, the fox hunt proved an ideal vehicle for satire of the upper classes. By 1711, for instance, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele introduce readers of The Spectator to Sir Roger de Coverley, a bumbling country squire noted for ‘his remarkable Enmity towards Foxes' and for his limited literacy skills, a man who, ‘had [he] ever read Shakespeare', might have echoed Theseus' praise of his hounds in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Here is the same comic vein explored by Oscar Wilde two centuries later when he describes ‘the English country gentleman galloping after a fox' as ‘the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable'; however, this kind of satire far predates fox hunting. It already appears in Desiderius Erasmus' Praise of Folly (1508), when the great Dutch humanist ridicules aficionados of the chase:
I expect such people think even dog-turds smell like cinnamon. But what pleasure is there in slaughtering animals, in whatever numbers?... When they have finished dissecting and devouring the dead beast, what have they accomplished except to degrade themselves into beasts while imagining that they are living the life of kings?
Contemplating the governorship promised him in part two of Don Quixote (1615), Sancho Panza dismisses hunting as a diversion for privileged idlers: ‘Mercy on me! What Pleasure can you find... in killing a poor Beast that never meant any Harm?... I think these Sports and Pastimes are fitter for those that have nothing to do than for Governors.'[837]
At a little distance from this mode of satire there also developed an early modern anti-brutality discourse that stigmatised hunting and its related activities, and that would prove increasingly influential in subsequent centuries. Michel de Montaigne offers the most famed example, protesting in his essay ‘Of Cruelty' (1578): ‘Natures that are bloodthirsty toward animals give proof of a natural propensity for cruelty'. Fifty years earlier, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) presented hunting as ‘a species of butchery', and an especially vile one at that, since ‘a hunter kills and mutilates poor little creatures purely for his own amusement'. Coupled with Protestant notions of personal regeneracy, this critique could lead to programmes of pacificism and vegetarianism, as when Thomas Tryon's Wisdom's Dictates (1691), the first English-language vegetarian cookbook, urges readers to ‘Refrain Hunting, Hawking, Shooting, and all violent and oppressive Exercises', since
A time shall come when the Lyon shall eat Hay with the Ox, and the Wolf lye down with the Lamb, that is, the fierce savage beastial Nature in Man, shall be thorough shined and bowed before the Divine Principle, or Lamb-like Spirit; and whosoever comes to know that time, will be contented with innocent Herbs, Bread, and the like harmless Foods.
Such developments might add supportive detail to Steven Pinker's argument that ‘violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence'.11 However, the practice of ethical vegetarianism in the West dates back at least to Pythagoras in the sixth century bce. Nor is there much cause for pride in the thought that current human behaviour represents the best the species has ever had to offer.
In any case, fox hunting survives as the one derivative of hunting par force to be carried abroad with European settlement of the colonies. British colonials introduced the European red fox to North America ‘during the mid 1700s for hunting purposes', and imported European specimens apparently interbred with indigenous red foxes during the late 1700s. At roughly the same time, too, British colonists in America imported hunting dogs. The earliest known pack of foxhounds in North America appears in 1747, fittingly in the household of the continent's one resident peer, Thomas, sixth Lord Fairfax; Fairfax's neighbour George Washington likewise maintained a pack, including three and a half couple given him by the Marquis de Lafayette. Beyond the Americas, the British also introduced red foxes to Australia in the mid 1800s, again for purposes of sport, their naturalisation on that continent bringing such dire consequences for indigenous fauna that ‘the species achieved formal pest status in Victoria in 1894'.12 [838] [839] Over two centuries before the British and their foxes, however, the Spanish had already introduced the New World to their own variant of another European hunting style: coursing with greyhounds. Rodrigo Rangel, Hernando De Soto's private secretary during the latter's exploration of south-eastern North America (1539-42), describes the activity with clear distaste. De Soto, Rangel declares, ‘was very given to hunting and killing Indians'. Having made landfall in Florida, he ordered his lieutenant Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa to a nearby village: And this Captain having gone there, he found the people gone, and he burned the town, and he set the dogs on [aperrear] an Indian he brought as a guide. The reader must understand that to set the dogs on [an Indian] is to make the dogs eat them or kill them, tearing the Indian to pieces. The conquistadors in the Indies have always used greyhounds or fierce and valiant dogs in war... Therefore, that guide was killed in that way, because he lied and guided poorly. According to Rangel, De Soto's penchant for coursing Indians with greyhounds was no unique vice, he having acquired it during prior service in Nicaragua and Peru.13 So it appears that the conquistadors were employing - and enjoying - this practice throughout their holdings in the Americas, within forty years of Columbus's first appearance there. But ironically, the most important development in European hunting from 1500 to 1800 originated not in Europe itself but in East Asia. By the mid 1300s gunpowder weapons had reached Europe from their place of creation in China, and over the next five centuries European gunsmiths would so refine these weapons as to transform the world of hunting in the process. By the mid 1500s two innovations - rifled musket barrels and the wheel-lock firing mechanism - together enabled firearms for the first time consistently to match the performance of bows and crossbows. Thus ‘the second quarter of the sixteenth century... saw the beginnings of the firearm as a real hunting weapon'; the earliest books on gun hunting - Pablo del Fucar's Ballestas Mosquetes y Arcabuces (1535) and Erasmo di Valvasone's didactic poem Della Caccia (belatedly published in 1593) - were composed around the mid century.[840] [841] While aristocrats made predictable efforts to restrict the possession of firearms to their own circle, these were doomed, and the introduction in the 1600s of further innovations, especially the flintlock, guaranteed that by the end of that century rifled muskets would become the weapon of choice both for warfare and for sport. As projectile weapons, firearms function essentially in the manner ofbows and crossbows, so many hunting techniques first developed for bow-weapons transferred naturally to gun hunting as well. Prominent among these was the drive hunt, wherein beaters directed the game towards marksmen located in a fixed firing position. This technique transferred well to the game-rich environments of the colonies, where it could produce stupefying results. In one celebrated case, organised in 1760 near Pomfret Castle, Pennsylvania, huntsmen under the command of one ‘Black Jack' Schwartz employed fire and noise to chase a great herd of terrified animals to the centre of ‘a circle many miles in diameter'. The slaughter done, the head count ran to ‘41 panthers, 109 wolves, 112 foxes, 114 mountain cats, 17 black bears, 1 white bear, 2 elk, 198 deer, 111 buffalo, 3 fishers, 1 otter, 12 gluttons, 3 beavers, and upwards of 500 smaller animals'. In South Africa, too, drive hunting proved popular as the preferred method for slaughtering antelope such as the springbok. Other game required different techniques of pursuit, but the effects of gun hunting on the whole proved devastating for wildlife populations. Peter Kolb, writing of the Cape Colony in 1719, offers a final representative assessment. Of the Hottentots Holland mountains, some eighty kilometres south-east of Cape Town, he observes: The Lion, the Tiger, the Leopard, the Rhinoceros, the Elk, and every other Wild Beast, seen in the Cape-Countries, were to be met with here. But, by Powder and Ball, they were quickly destroy'd or frighten'd into remote Quarters. And now-a-days very rarely are any Wild Beasts seen here... When they are, they are quickly destroy'd, or chac'd far away, and, by the Fire and Noise of Guns, deterr'd from ever appearing there again.[842]