Chapter 24

THE ORIGIN OF FOX-HUNTING.

The origin of modern fox-hunting is involved in a degree of obscurity which can only be attributed to the illiterate character of the originators, the Squire Westerns, who rode all day, and drank all the evening. We need the assistance of the ingenious correspondent of _Notes and Queries_:--

"It is quite certain that the fox was not accounted a noble beast of chase before the Revolution of 1688; for Gervase Markham classes the fox with the badger in his 'Cavalrie, or that part of Arte wherein is contained the Choice Trayning and Dyeting of Hunting Horses whether for Pleasure or for Wager. The Third Booke. Printed by Edw. Allde, for Edward White; and are to be sold at his Shop, neare the Little North Door of St. Paule's Church, at the signe of the Gun. 1616.' He says:--

"'The chase of the foxe or badger, although it be a chase of much more swiftness (than the otter), and is ever kept upon firm ground, yet I cannot allow it for training horses, because for the most part it continues in woody rough grounds, where a horse can neither conveniently make foorth his way nor can heed without danger of stubbing. The chase, much better than any of these, is hunting of the bucke or stag, especially if they be not confined within a park or pale, but having liberty to chuse their waies, which some huntsmen call "hunting at force." When he is at liberty he will break forth his chase into the winde, sometimes four, five, and six miles foorth right: nay, I have myself followed a stag better than ten miles foorth right from the place of his rousing to the place of his death, besides all his windings, turnings, and cross passages. The time of the year for these chases is from the middle of May to middle of September.' He goes on to say, 'which being of all chases the worthiest, and belonging only Princes and men of best quality, there is no horse too good to be employed in such a service; yet the horses which are aptest and best to be employed in this chase is the Barbary jennet, or a light-made English gelding, being of a middle stature.' 'But to conclude and come to the chase which is of all chases the best for the purpose whereof we are now entreating; it is the chase of the hare, which is a chase both swift and pleasant, and of long endurance; it is a sport ever readie, equally distributed, as well to the wealthie farmer as the great gentleman. It hath its beginning contrary to the stag and bucke; for it begins at Michaelmas, when they end, and is out of date after April, when they first come into season.'

"This low estimate of the fox, at that period, is borne out by a speech of Oliver St. John, to the Long Parliament, against Strafford, quoted by Macaulay, in which he declares--'Strafford was to be regarded not as a stag or hare, but as a fox, who was to be snared by any means and knocked on the head without pity.' The same historian relates that red deer were as plentiful on the hills of Hampshire and Gloucestershire, in the reign of Queen Anne, as they are now in the preserved deer-forests of the Highlands of Scotland.

"When wild deer became scarce, the attention of sportsmen was probably turned to the sporting qualities of the fox by the accident of harriers getting upon the scent of some wanderer in the clicketing season, and being led a straight long run. We have more than once met with such accidents on the Devonshire moors, and have known well-bred harriers run clear away from the huntsmen, after an on-lying fox, over an unrideable country.

"Fox-hunting rose into favour with the increase of population attendant on improved agriculture. In a wild woodland country, with earths unstopped, no pack of hounds could fairly run down a fox.

"I have found in private records two instances in which packs of hounds, since celebrated, were turned from hare-hounds to fox-hounds. There are, no doubt, many more. The Tarporley, or Cheshire Hunt, was established in 1762 for Hare-hunting, and held its first meeting on the 14th November in that year. 'Those who kept harriers brought them in turn.' It is ordered by the 8th Rule, 'that if no member of the society kept hounds, or that it were inconvenient for masters to bring them, a pack be borrowed at the expense of the society.'

"The uniform was ordered to be 'a blue frock with plain yellow mettled buttons, scarlet velvet cape, and double-breasted flannel waistcoat. The coat sleeve to be cut and turned. A scarlet saddle-cloth, bound singly with blue, and the front of the bridle lapt with scarlet.' The third rule contrasts oddly with our modern meets at half-past ten and half-past eleven o'clock:--'The harriers shall not wait for any member after eight o'clock in the morning.'

"As to drinking, it was ordered 'that three collar bumpers be drunk after dinner, and the same after supper; after that every member might do as he pleased in regard to drinking.'

"By another rule every member was 'to present on his marriage to each member of the hunt, a pair of well-stitched leather breeches,'[213-*] then costing a guinea a pair.

"In 1769, the club commenced Fox-hunting. The uniform was ordered to be changed to 'a red coat, unbound, with small frock sleeve, a green velvet cape, and green waistcoat, and that the sleeve have no buttons; in every other form to be like the old uniform; and the red saddle-cloth to be bound with green instead of blue, the fronts of the saddles to remain the same.'

"At the same time there was an alteration in regard to drinking orders--'That instead of three collar bumpers, only one shall be drunk, except a fox be killed above ground, and then one other collar glass shall be drunk to "Fox-hunting." Among the names of the original members in 1762, we recognise many whose descendants have maintained in this generation their ancestral reputation as sportsmen. For instance, Crewe, Mainwaring, Wilbraham, Smith, Barry, Cholmondeley, Stanley, Grosvenor, Townley, Watkin Williams Wynne, Stanford. But, although the Tarporley Hunt Club has been maintained and thriven through the reigns of George III., George IV., William IV., and Victoria, the pack of hounds, destroyed or removed by various accidents, have been more than once renewed. But the Brocklesby pack has been maintained in the family of the present Earl of Yarborough more than 130 years without break or change of blood; and a written pedigree of the pack has been kept for upwards of 100 years; and it is now the oldest pack in the kingdom. The Cottesmore, which was established before the Brocklesby, has been repeatedly dispersed and has long passed out of the hands of the family of the Noels--by whom it was first established 200 years ago."

By the kindness of Lord Yarborough, I was permitted to examine all the papers connected with his hounds. Among them is a memorandum dated April 20, 1713: it is agreed "between Sir John Tyrwhitt, Charles Pelham, Esq., and Robert Vyner, Esq. (another name well known in modern hunting annals), that the foxhounds now kept by the said Sir John Tyrwhitt and Mr. Pelham shall be joyned in one pack, and the three have a joint interest in the said hounds for five years, each for one-third of the year." And it was agreed that the establishment should consist of "sixteen couple of hounds, three horses, and a huntsman and a boy." So apparently they only hunted one day a week. It would seem that, under the terms of the agreement, the united pack soon passed into the hands of Mr. Pelham, and down to the present day the hounds have been branded with a P. I also found at Brocklesby a rough memoranda of the kennel from 1710 to 1746; after that date the Stud Book has been distinctly kept up without a break. From 1797 the first Lord Yarborough kept journals of the pedigree of hounds in his own handwriting; and since his time by the father, the grandfather, and great-grandfather of the present huntsman.

In the time of the first Lord Yarborough, his country extended over the whole of the South Wold country, part of the now Burton Hunt, and part of North Nottinghamshire; and he used to go down into both those districts for a month at a time to hunt the woodlands. There were, as he told his grandson when he began hunting, only three or four fences between Horncastle and Brigg, a distance of at least thirty miles.

Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt kept harriers at his Manor House of Aylsby, at the foot of the Lincolnshire Wolds, before he turned them into fox-hounds. A barn at Aylsby was formerly known as the "Kennels." The Aylsby estate has passed, in the female line, into the Oxfordshire family of the Tyrwhitt Drakes, who are so well known as masters of hounds, and first-rate sportsmen; while a descendant of Squire Vyner, of Lincolnshire, has, within the last twenty years, been a master of fox-hounds in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Mr. Meynell, the father of modern fox-hunting, and founder of the Quorn Hunt, formed his pack chiefly of drafts from the Brocklesby.

Between the period that fox-hunting superseded hare-hunting in the estimation of country squires, and that when the celebrated Mr. Meynell reduced it to a science, and prepared the way for making hunting in Leicestershire almost an aristocratic institution, a great change took place in the breed of the hounds and horses, and in the style of horsemanship. Under the old system, the hounds were taken out before light to hunt back by his drag the fox who had been foraging all night, and set on him as he lay above his stopped-earth, before he had digested his meal of rats or rabbits. The breed of hounds partook more of the long-eared, dew-lapped, heavy, crock-kneed southern hound, or of the bloodhound. Well-bred horses, too, were less plentiful than they are now.

But the change to fast hounds, fast horses, and fast men, took place at a much more distant date than some of our hard-riding young swells of 1854 seem to imagine. A portrait of a celebrated hound, Ringwood, at Brocklesby Park, painted by Stubbs, the well-known animal painter in 1792, presents in an extraordinary manner the type and character of some of the best hounds remotely descended from him, although the Cheshire song says:--

"When each horse wore a crupper, each squire a pigtail, Ere Blue Cap and Wanton taught greyhounds to scurry, With music in plenty--oh, where was the hurry?"

But it is more than eighty years since Blue Cap and Wanton ran their race over Newmarket Heath, which for speed has never been excelled by any modern hounds.

And it is a curious fact, that although Somerville, the author of The Chase, died in 1742, his poem contains as clear and correct directions for fox-hunting, with few exceptions, as if it were written yesterday. So that the art must have arrived at perfection within sixty or seventy years. In the long reign of George III. the distinction between town and country was much broken down, and the isolation in which country squires lived destroyed. Packs of hounds, kept for the amusement of a small district, became, as it were, public property. At length the meets of hounds began to be regularly given in the country newspapers.

With every change sportsmen of the old school have prophesied the total ruin of fox-hunting. Roads and canals excited great alarm to our fathers. In our time every one expected to see sport entirely destroyed by railroads; but we were mistaken, and have lived to consider them almost an essential auxiliary of a good hunting district.

Looking back at the manner in which fox-hunting has grown up with our habits and customs, and increased in the number of packs, number of hunting days, and number of horsemen, in full proportion with wealth and population, one cannot help being amused at the simplicity with which Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who comes from a country where people seldom amuse themselves out of doors (except in making money), tells in her "Sunny Memories," how, when she dined with Lord John Russell, at Richmond, the conversation turned on hunting; and she expressed her astonishment "that, in the height of English civilisation, this vestige of the savage state should remain." "Thereupon they only laughed, and told stories about fox-hunters." They might have answered with old Gervase Markham, "Of all the field pleasures wherewith Old Time and man's inventions hath blessed the hours of our recreations, there is none so excellent as the delight of hunting, being compounded like an harmonious concert of all the best partes of most refined pleasures, as music, dancing, running and ryding."

Mrs. Stowe's distinguished countryman, Washington Irving, took a sounder view of our rural pleasures; for he says in his charming "Sketch Book:"--

"The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has had a great and salutary effect upon national character. I do not know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterizes the men of rank of most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, of robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the country."

FOOTNOTES:

[213-*] I think this is a mistake. In a copy of the rules forwarded to me by a Cheshire squire, one of the hereditary members of the club, it is a pair of _gloves_. But in the notes, the songs and ballads by R. Egerton Warburton, Esq., of Arley Hall, it is printed "breeches."