Part 4
I notice that all authorities on this subject dwell on the fact that hare-hunting is an ancient sport; that old writers describe with great ingenuity and veracity all the qualities and ways of this clever little beast. Some of these descriptions are most quaint, for example, the following:--“There are four kind of Hares: some live in the Mountains, some in the Fields, some in the Marshes, some everywhere, without any place of abode. They of the Mountains are most swift, they of the Fields less nimble, they of the Marshes most slow, and the wandering Hares are most dangerous to follow.” The habits noted by the naturalist-sportsmen of this period are as wonderful, and bespeak as much observation, with almost as excellent results, as those given by certain writers on natural history of our own day; for instance, we are told of the hare: “Her ears lead her the way in her chase, for with one of them she hearkeneth to the cry of the dogs, and the other she stretches forth like a sail to hasten her course.”... “Tho’ their sight be dim, yet have they _visum indefessum_.”... “When they watch they shut their Eyes, when they sleep they open them.”... In these good old times they used the correct terms for all the proceedings of the chase, and for every habit and description of each and several kind of beast they had the appropriate language. The hare was a beast of “venery,” and her meat “venison”; whilst, for dislodging a hart, you used the word “unharbour,” for a buck “rouse”; you “start” a hare, “rear” the boar, and “unkennel” the fox. When once the hare is on foot, if she takes the open field, she “soreth”; when she winds about, she “doubleth”; she “pricketh” on the road, and you “trace” her in the snow. Hounds “hunt change,” “hunt counter,” “draw amiss,” “hunt the foil”; when first they find, they “challenge.” If they are assisted by a relay of hounds, it is called a “vaunt-lay”; if the hare tries a place and gives it up, it is called a “blemish.” When hounds kill, and the hare or any part is given to them, it is the “reward.” The hare was always reckoned among the beasts of chase, and sometimes as the “king of beasts”; her order amongst beasts of venery came third or first, according to the fancy of the period, but always far ahead of the fox, which was vermin. Here is one list of the “Beasts of venery.” “Hart, hinde, hare, wild boar, wolf. Beasts for hunting: ye hare, hart, wolf, wild boar. Beasts for the chase: ye buck, ye doe, fox, marten, roe. Beasts which afford greate dysporte: badger, wild cat, otter.”
It is interesting, I mean for a fox-hunter, to try and discover why the hare was so much preferred to the fox by the sportsmen of two hundred years ago. One of them gives this reason: “The Fox never flies far before the Hounds, trusting not on his Legs, Strength or Champion ground [champaign = open country] but strongest Coverts,” and “when he can no longer stand up before the Hounds, he then taketh Earth, and then must he be digged out.” From these two sentences it is obvious that harriers, accustomed as they were to find their game in the open country, had not developed the habit of drawing thick coverts, and were probably poor hands at bustling a fox in a whin cover and at forcing him out. Indeed, we find that they were not always good at finding a hare in the open, for it was a custom to employ “hare-finders,” and Peter Beckford, though he admits paying two guineas in a single day to the men who were thus employed, laments the demoralisation of hounds, consequent on the custom making them bad finders. But there were other reasons. Hares were “game”; they were protected under the Game Laws and by special statutes, such as that of 15 Henry VIII. cap. 18, which made it a penal offence to destroy hares in the snow. The hare was, moreover, ubiquitous, whilst foxes were vermin, and regarded as noxious animals with a price on their heads, fixed by law or local custom--they were scarce and held in contempt when packs of hounds first came in vogue.
Since penning this sentence I have turned over my Beckford. He says: “The hounds most likely to show you sport are between the large, slow-hunting harrier and the little fox-beagle. The former are too dull, too heavy, and too slow; the latter too lively, too light, and too fleet.” He thinks that if the day is long enough you might kill with the first species, and if the country was deep and wet, the others might be drowned. Beckford bred for many years an “infinity of hounds” before he got what he wanted, but at last he had the pleasure to see them “very handsome,” “small yet bony,” after which, he cynically remarks, “when they were thus perfect, I did as many others do, I parted with them.”
Again, the hounds of those earlier days were not, in point of pace and quality, equal to hunting such wild foxes as there were. It was only as the small harriers were improved into the type of what we call fox-hounds, that hunting-men realised that fox-hunting was a high-class sport. Harriers were first turned into regular fox-hounds about the year 1740. From this date, then, we can begin to class hounds into two divisions: the harriers, kept small, active, but slow, and, above all, sure with their noses; and those improved in size, gradually acquiring the dash and pace necessary for pursuing the fox. Success in hare-hunting depends more on perseverance; that in fox-hunting, on pace. It is curious to note that the old harrier type is being destroyed. The slow, deep-mouthed southern hound, the beagle, and the light, active, snipey-nosed harrier are going out before the modern craze to have harriers dwarf fox-hounds. My own idea is that no sport can be obtained equal to that which was afforded by harriers of the stamp that distinguished the pack until lately hunted by Mr. Robert Fellowes, of Shotesman,--little beauties, all quality and activity, not too fast and flighty to hunt a cold line or a doubling hare, and yet able to drive along when the opportunity arrived, and requiring a good hunter under one when they meant going. It may be replied that in adopting the dwarf fox-hound type, present Masters are reverting to a still older standard. I readily admit it. Indeed, I was recently looking at a print of Mr. Astley’s harriers in 1810, in which they are something like “dwarf fox-hounds,” but they _are_ “dwarf,” and, behold, a terrier accompanies the pack, telling the tale that they hunted the fox as well as the hare. If the old type of hound had answered its purpose, those generations which were hare-hunters rather than fox-hunters would not have abandoned the dwarf fox-hound type for that which was properly regarded as pure harrier. It is more than doubtful if harriers ought to be more than eighteen inches high; and beagles, for following on foot, should not exceed fourteen inches.
Certainly hare-hunting affords the greatest scope for the huntsman’s craft and the finest exhibition of hound work. The hare is really a much more _rusé_ animal than the fox; she can steal away better, and, once started, there is no end to her wiles and dodges. She runs craftily and cunningly, doubling back on her own foil, pricking her way down watery furrows, or lobbing along the high road. She will “squat” or “clap” just as hounds are carrying a head, or turn out a fresh hare; if her pursuers overshoot her, she will sneak back in the least expected direction. Hare-hunters are fond of talking about straight-necked hares. My experience has been unfortunate. I have not seen many good points made by hares, and it is not in the straight run that the art of the huntsman and the virtues of the harrier are tested and brought into play. To enjoy the regular sport with a pack, you must have a keen appreciation of all the niceties of the game, and be able to watch with pleasure all the ins and outs, the windings and twistings so neatly unravelled with such a pretty hubbub of bass and treble music from the busy little hounds. There is a joy quite of its own in the cry of harriers and beagles (I am not speaking of dwarf fox-hounds). A minute’s silence at the fault, the competition of all the little beauties casting round--a sight delightful to the eye;--then a full note of the pure truth, the rush up to the speaking hound, the chorus of consent from a score of throats, swelling to the full cry of the whole pack as they go driving away as if possessed by one soul--a sound delightful to the ears, and not exactly described to me by a farmer as “joost like a flock o’ craws gettin’ out ov a tater field.”
Every man has a right to his own opinion, and mine is that the perfection of hare-hunting is with beagles. The average hare is overmatched by the modern harrier. The beagle is not too fast, his nose is finer, he far excels the harrier in vigilance, energy, and persistency, whilst the music of a pack of beagles is unequalled. But we live in fast times; we have not the leisure even to enjoy the time it takes for a pack of 10 or 11-inch beagles to trace and puzzle out the course of a hare with beautiful exactness till their perseverance is at length rewarded. We must find a hare at once, and kill her in a few minutes, and, if she is lost, find another without waste of time. This, however, is not the spirit of hare-hunting, but the fever of our day. As a spectacle, as a wonder, and an exhibition of the marvellous senses and powers with which nature has endowed both hare and hound, give me a pack of beagles at work. The present generation of followers of harriers are scarcely aware of the perfection to which beagles can be brought, and how undefeated even a 10-inch pack can prove itself to be with the best of hares. I do not suppose there exists to-day a pack like that of Mr. Honeywood’s, fifty or sixty years ago, not a hound above 10 inches, all level, and every one pure white, a perfect little lot. One contemporary writer said: “It is quite beyond credence the number of hares they kill in the course of a season. When running with a good scent, they might belong to the Fairy Queen, so small, fast, and handsome are they.”
Hare-hunting ought to preserve an honoured place amongst our national sports. For the young on foot it is a manly and healthy pursuit; for those who have to ride, a pleasant and pretty pastime. It gives those whose stud is too limited for fox-hunting an opportunity of sharing the incomparable pleasures of the chase. The man on foot, if wind and limb will not allow him to be with them, can see much of the game from the hill-top, if not from the gate-post; while the man on his only mount may see every detail of the hunt and have his three days a week; he has, too, one advantage over the fox-hunter, that he is more sure of his entertainment. His disappointments are fewer, for he does not expect a 9-mile point or forty minutes racing across country. It is a sport for rich and poor, for tender youth and old age, and for all those who enjoy the niceties of the huntsman’s craft tested at its highest.
V
FOX-HUNTING
V
“Hunting is the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, with only five-and-twenty per cent. of the danger.”
SO John Jorrocks felt and said; but in his oratorical effort to glorify hunting he both over- and under-did his figures of rhetoric--for though stag-hunting, so long as we have the buck-hounds, may yet be a royal sport in Old England, the whole line of crowned heads that have done us the honour of sitting on our throne would repudiate fox-hunting as the sport of kings, while the people would claim it for their own. It is the privilege of no class; its constitution is republican, founded and living on liberty, equality, and fraternity. Fox-hunting has grown out of ill-repute during the last two centuries, and has long been placed first in popular affection. Good Queen Bess,[1] by a statute (8 Eliz. cap. 15) “for killing of verming as foxes and such like,” gave expression to her people’s wishes, and provided a machinery of rewards for the head of every “fox” or “gray” (badger); whilst St. John, in his speech on the trial of Strafford, makes the blood of the modern sportsman run cold as he cries out: “It is true we give law to hares and deer because they be beasts of chase. It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play to knock foxes and wolves on the head as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey.” Mr. R. B. Turton, the editor of _The North Riding Quarter Sessions Records_ (from whom I quote), truly remarks that, however shocking to our feelings, fox-hunting seems to have occupied somewhat the same position in this period that rat-catching does now. The statute of Elizabeth just referred to remained on the Statute-Book till 1863, and was actually in operation in Cleveland at least as late as 1847. There are in the Register and Churchwarden accounts for Lythe many entries of the rewards paid by the parish for “werment,” from 1705 to 1847. A few extracts will suffice for my object, which is to find some excuse for the illegitimate proceedings that have been continued even to my own day in certain outlying districts of the Cleveland Hunt.
1706.--Ugthorpe quarter--for 14 fullmor[2] heads 0 04 8 Newton--for 11 fullmor and 3 fox heads 0 12 8 Barnby--6 fullmor heads 0 02 0 Lythe--3 fox heads and 6 fullmor heads 0 11 0 1787.--To 10 fox heads, 2 at Kettleness, 1 at Mickleby, 1 at Ugthorpe, 3 at Goldsbro’, and 3 catched in a trap at Mulgrave Castle 2 0 0
(We still know of the trap in which these foxes were “catched”!)
1846.--1 jackal head 0 8 0 5 fox heads 1 0 0 1847.--(Last entry) 1 fox head 0 4 0
From a study of the many entries similar to the above, it appears that the price set on a fox’s head in Cleveland was, in the earlier period, 3s., and in the present century 4s. The “jackal head” is a mystery that I cannot pretend to solve; the only jackal I ever heard of in Cleveland being a tame one that I imported from Africa, which is living and thriving to-day, after several years of domestic life in anything but an African climate. When I was a boy, I was told by a very old sporting yeoman farmer, that it was the custom in other days, after a kill with the “Roxby and Cleveland” hounds, to go to the parson with the head, get the head money, and then to adjourn to the nearest public-house and expend the price of blood over a bowl of punch, the flavour of which was heightened by the addition of a pad, the brush, or the whole head to the mixture. This, I have no doubt, might correctly be described as strong drink.
But to hark back on the line for a moment. I feel I must qualify my opening paragraph, for I have suddenly remembered a passage I lately read in one of the Reports of the Historical MSS. Commission, which both shows that royalty in the seventeenth century countenanced fox-hunting, and that it is of greater antiquity than some modern authors generally suppose. Here is the extract taken from a Newsletter, November 17, 1674: “11th, on Saturday or Sunday (!) next His Royal Highness and the Duke of Monmouth and divers persons of quality go to Chichester, where they are to lodge in the Bishop’s (!) Palace, and expect all the gentry of the neighbourhood to repair with their dogs for seven or eight days’ fox-hunting.” It must have been a curious sight on that Sunday morning to see His Royal Highness, the Duke, the Bishop, the divers persons of quality, with their dogs, at the palace--and one can picture the appearance of the “dogs,” collected from all parts of the country, of all shapes and sizes.
But I am hanging on the line, if not dwelling in covert, and all this was meant to be by way of saying that these old-fashioned ideas of fox-hunting seem to have penetrated, to some extent at least, to the days when I first hunted with the Cleveland hounds. I can testify that to many of the sportsmen on foot, even to many of the farmers on horseback, the fox was certainly in the class of “verming and such like,” and that they considered it a most magnanimous proceeding, instead of “to knock” foxes on the head as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey, “to shake him out of a bag and collect all the dogs,” and have a “hoont.”
The reader must not be too hard on them; they were hard-working farmers, with small means, who could not afford the serious depredations that they suffered from foxes amongst their moor sheep, and especially amongst their lambs in the spring. There was no M.F.H., in the modern sense. They kept a few hounds, one here and one there, which were collected or “blown up” on hunting days, and they managed their sport in a very homely and simple fashion, many of them never having a horse to ride, and following on foot. For the man on foot with fox-hounds I have the most profound respect and admiration. I mean, of course, the genuine article,--not the loafer with a club and a hare-pocket in the inside of his coat, nor the determined and ignorant sightseer, who stands in the middle of the field next the whin covert, displaying British independence when asked to “come in,” or who obstinately sits on a gate hallooing every time a fox attempts to break; but the dauntless man whose love of the sport and hound work is such that he counts as nothing aching limbs and blowing bellows, nor the weary tramp home, if he can only get a look in.
It is not the footman who alone sins through carelessness and ignorance--in some riding-men the latter quality seems invincible. I knew one, a regular follower of hounds, who went out with Lord Zetland’s and finished with the Hurworth, without ever discovering that he had changed packs. Such good fellows as the followers of hounds on foot ought to receive the fraternal welcome of their mounted colleagues in the field--whilst a kind word, instead of choice Billingsgate, will do more than restrain the ignorant sinner, and tend to his better understanding of what is required of him. Every man, as long as he respects the rules of the game, has a right to be there. It occurs to me, as I turn over the leaves of my hunting diary, that I was not always so patient with the footmen, as, for instance, on December 26, 1881, when I record: “Monday, Hounds at Paradise Farm. A most inappropriate name for a most unfortunate day--the country flooded with foot people. The sky-line black with them--a most horrible sight! We had soon a fox on foot, but, headed in every direction, he fell a victim to the mob’s thirst for blood. A like horrible fate awaited the second fox on Guisborough Moor, above Bethel Slack; the spectacle of the hundreds round the corpse of the poor murdered brute, clamouring for fox-skin, was heartrending. What added to the mortification was the fact of the day being an ideal one, soft, cloudy, scenting. Some of the remarks I overheard tended to relieve the dark melancholy of the day. One delightful ruffian, with an awful club, turned to another with a bludgeon in his hand. ‘The dogs never gav oos a chance, they moordered him, not killed him.’ Mr. ---- nearly rode over one of the crowd, and on the nearly overridden one remonstrating in forcible language, soothed him with the remark, ‘There’ll be plenty more left when you’re done for,’ which, however unfeeling, was the naked truth. Another scene of this unhappy day that gave a momentary joy was that of two men on bare-backed, hairy-heeled farm horses with blinkers on. One said to the other, ‘Blame it all! I wish we could get away from these foot people!’”
Years ago, when I was a boy, it was not a rare thing with the farmer’s trencher-fed pack with which I hunted to turn a fox down in the moorland district where grouse-preserving or sheep-farming made a find always uncertain and often impossible. Thirteen minutes was the law allowed, and when time was called, hounds were laid on. There is no denying that if pace and distance are the only desiderata, a stout old moor- or cliff-fox, turned down some distance from home, will give a better run than any you are likely to get by legitimate methods in a season. The blot on such a performance is not so much unfairness to the fox, for with thirteen minutes’ law a good fox was more than often a match for the hounds, even when aniseed or turpentine had been applied to his pads. He had at least as good a chance of saving his bacon as if he had been found in the whin covert, where many a good fox has been chopped before making his try for the open. No, it is not the pace of a run, the distance from point to point, or the perfection of the country, that make up the whole sport of hunting. The sport consists in the meeting of the hound and the animal hunted on nature’s own terms in a free field with no favour, and in being there to see the struggle. And to the man with real hunting instinct, no steeplechase after aniseed or a bagman can give the satisfaction and delight of the success in accounting for a wild-bred fox, whether the day be bright or dull, the scent hot or cold. And while no one could derive greater enjoyment from the fast good thing over the pick of the country, more than half his pleasure is due to the feeling that the reward of a red-letter day has been worked for honestly and is due to no resort to artifice.