Transcribed from the 1873 Bunny and Evans edition by David Price.
[Picture: Portrait of Lord Forester]
OLD SPORTS AND
SPORTSMEN
Or, the Willey Country
* * * * *
WITH SKETCHES OF SQUIRE FORESTER
AND HIS WHIPPER-IN
TOM MOODY
(“You all knew Tom Moody the Whipper-in well”).
* * * * *
BY JOHN RANDALL, F.G.S.
AUTHOR OF “THE SEVERN VALLEY,” ETC.
* * * * *
LONDON:
VIRTUE & CO., 26, IVY LANE
SALOP: BUNNY and EVANS; and RANDALL,
BOOKSELLER, MADELEY
1873
* * * * *
LONDON
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO.,
CITY ROAD.
PREFACE.
IT is too much to expect that these pages will altogether escape
criticism; my object will have been gained, however, if I have succeeded
in collecting and placing intelligibly before the reader such noticeable
facts as are interesting matters of local history. Should it appear that
there has been imported into the work too many details touching the
earlier features of the country, the little that is generally known on
the subject, the close connection of cause and effect, and the influences
the old forests may have had in perpetuating a love of sport among some
members of a family whose name appears to have been derived from pursuits
connected therewith, must be my excuse. Dr. Arnold once remarked upon
the close connection existing between nature and mankind, and how each in
turn is affected by the other, whilst a living writer, and a deeper
thinker, has gone still further, in saying that “He is great who is what
he is from nature.” Of course it is not intended to claim greatness for
Squire Forester in the sense in which the word is ordinarily used, or
qualities, even, differing very much from those bearing the impress of
the common mould of humanity; but simply that he was what he was from
nature, from pre-disposition, and from living at the time he did. Also,
that he was in many respects a fair representative of the squirearchy of
the period, of a class of squires in whom we recognise features
discoverable in those in the enjoyment of the same natural vigour in our
own day, but who may have chosen different fields for its development.
It did not appear to come within the scope of the work to enter to the
same extent upon the doings of other sportsmen of Squire Forester’s time,
or to dilate upon those of gentlemen who subsequently distinguished
themselves. It would have required many additional pages, for instance,
to have done justice to the exploits of the first Lord Forester; or to
those of the present right honourable proprietor of Willey, who upon
retiring from the mastership of the Belvoir hounds was presented with a
massive piece of plate, representing an incident which happened in
connection with the Hunt. Of both Nimrod has written in the highest
terms. The names of several whose deeds the same felicitous writer has
described in connection with Shropshire will occur to the reader, as Mr.
Stubbs, of Beckbury; Mr. Childe, of Kinlet; Mr. Boycott, of Rudge—who
succeeded Sir Bellingham Graham on his giving up the Shifnal country;
Lord Wenlock; Squire Corbett, and the Squire of Halston; names which, as
Colonel Apperley has very justly said, will never be forgotten by the
sporting world. As the reader will perceive, I have simply acted upon
the principle laid down in the “Natural History of Selborne” by the Rev.
Gilbert White, who says, “If the stationary men would pay some attention
to the district in which they reside, and would publish their thoughts
respecting the objects that surround them, from such materials might be
drawn the most complete county history.” This advice influenced me in
undertaking the “Severn Valley,” and I have endeavoured to keep the same
in view now, by utilising the materials, and by using the best means at
command for bringing together facts such as may serve to illustrate them,
and which may not be unlooked for in a work of the kind.
Since the old Forest Periods, and since old Squire Forester’s day even,
the manners and the customs of the nation have changed; but the old love
of sport discoverable in our ancestors, and inherited more or less by
them from theirs, remains as a link connecting past generations with the
present.
It matters not, it appears to me, whether either the writer or the reader
indulges himself in such sports or not, he may be equally willing to
recall the “Olden Time,” with its instances of rough and ready pluck and
daring, and to listen to an old song, made by an aged pate,
“Of a fine old English gentleman who had a great estate.”
Shropshire and the surrounding counties during the past century had, as
we all know, many old English gentlemen with large estates, who kept up
their brave old houses at pretty liberal rates; but few probably
exercised the virtue of hospitality more, or came nearer to the true type
of the country gentleman of the period than the hearty old Willey Squire.
Differ as we may in our views of the chase, we must admit that such
amusements served to relieve the monotony of country life, and to make
time pass pleasantly, which but for horses and hounds, and the
opportunities they afforded of intercourse with neighbours, must have
hung heavily on a country gentleman’s hands a hundred years ago.
It is, moreover, it appears to me, to this love of sport, in one form or
another, that we of this generation are indebted for those grand old
woods which now delight the eye, and which it would have been a calamity
to have lost. The green fertility of fields answering with laughing
plenty to human industry is truly pleasing; but now that blue-bells, and
violets, foxgloves and primroses are being driven from the hedgerows, and
these themselves are fast disappearing before the advances of
agricultural science, it is gratifying to think that there are wastes and
wilds where weeds may still resort—where the perfumes of flowers, the
songs of birds, and the music of the breeze may be enjoyed. That the
love of nature which the out-door exercises of our ancestors did so much
to foster and perpetuate still survives is evident. How often, for
instance, among dwellers in towns does the weary spirit pant for the
fields, that it may wing its flight with the lark through the gushing
sunshine, and join in the melody that goes pealing through the fretted
cathedral of the woods, whilst caged by the demands of the hour, or kept
prisoner by the shop, the counter, or the machine? Spring, with its
regenerating influences, may wake the clods of the valley into life, may
wreathe the black twigs with their garb of green and white, and give to
the trees their livery; but men who should read the lessons they teach
know nothing of the rejoicings that gladden the glades and make merry the
woods. Nevertheless, proof positive that the love of nature—scourged,
crushed, and overlaid, it may be, with anxious cares for existence—never
dies out may be found in customs still lingering among us. In the
blackest iron districts, where the surface is one great ink-blotch, where
clouds of dust and columns of smoke obscure the day, where scoria heaps,
smouldering fires, and never-ceasing flames give a scorched aspect to the
scene, the quickening influences that renew creation are felt, teaching
men—ignorant as Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell”—to take part in the festival of
the year. When the sap has risen in the tree when the south wind stirs
the young leaves, and the mechanism of the woods is in motion, when the
blackbird has taken his place in the bush, and the thrush has perched
itself upon the spray, in the month of pelting showers and laughing
sunshine, when the first note of the cuckoo is heard from the ash in the
hedge-row or the wild cherry in the woods, an old custom still proclaims
a holiday in honour of his arrival. When the last lingering feature of
winter has vanished; when brooks, no longer hoarse, sink their voices to
a tinkling sweetness, flooding mead and dingle with their music; when the
merry, merry month, although no longer celebrated for its floral shows
and games as formerly, arrives, the May-bush may be seen over the door of
the village smithy and on the heads of horses on the road.
It would have been of little use passing acts of Parliament, like the one
which has just become law, for the preservation of members of the
feathered tribes, if their native woods had not been preserved to us by
sportsmen. To have lost our woods would have been to have lost the
spring and summer residences of migratory birds: to have lost the laugh
of the woodpecker, the songs of the blackbird and the thrush, the
woodlark’s thrilling melody, and the nightingale’s inimitable notes, to
say nothing of those faint soothing shadowings which steal upon one from
these leafy labyrinths of nature. As some one taking deeper views has
said:—
“There lie around
Thy daily walk great store of beauteous things,
Each in its separate place most fair, and all
Of many parts disposed most skilfully,
Making in combination wonderful
An individual of a higher kind;
And that again in order ranging well
With its own fellows, till thou rise at length
Up to the majesty of this grand world;—
Hard task, and seldom reached by mortal souls,
For frequent intermission and neglect
Of close communion with the humblest things;
But in rare moments, whether memory
Hold compact with invention, or the door
Of heaven hath been a little pushed aside,
Methinks I can remember, after hours
Of unpremeditated thought in woods.”
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE MARSH AND FOREST PERIODS.
The Hawk an Acquisition to Sportsmen—Hawk aeries—Hawks 8
according to Degrees—Brook and other kinds of
Hawking—Hawking and Hunting—A Shropshire Historian’s charge
against the Conqueror—Bishops and their Clergy as much
given to the Sport as Laymen—The Rector of Madeley—The
Merrie Days, &c.
CHAPTER II.
MORFE FOREST.
Morfe Forest one of the Five Royal Forests of 17
Shropshire—Its History and Associations—Early British,
Roman, Danish, and Norman Mementoes—Legends and Historical
Incidents—Forest Wastes—Old Names—Hermitage Hill—Stanmore
Grove—Essex Fall—Foresters—Old Forest Lodge, &c.
CHAPTER III.
ROYAL CHASE OF SHIRLOT.
Royal Chase of Shirlot—Extent—Places 31
disafforested—Hayes—Foresters—Hunting Lodge—Priors of
Wenlock—Curious Tenures—Encroachments upon Woods by
Iron-making Operations—Animals that have
disappeared—Reaction due to a love of Sport—What the
Country would have lost—“The Merrie Greenwood”—Old Forest
Trees, &c.
CHAPTER IV.
THE WREKIN FOREST AND THE FORESTERS.
The Wrekin Forest and the Foresters—Hermit of Mount St. 54
Gilbert—Poachers upon the King’s Preserves—Extent of the
Forest—Haye of Wellington—Robert
Forester—Perquisites—Hunting Matches—Singular Grant to John
Forester—Sir Walter Scott’s Anthony Forster a Member of the
Shropshire Forester Family—Anthony Forster Lord of the
Manor of Little Wenlock, and related to the Foresters of
Sutton and Bridgnorth—Anthony Foster altogether a different
Character to what Sir Walter Scott represents him
CHAPTER V.
WILLEY.
Willey, Close Neighbour to the Royal Chase of 70
Shirlot—Etymology of the Name—Domesday—The Willileys—The
Lacons—The Welds and the Foresters—The Old Hall—Cumnor Hall
as described by Sir Walter Scott—Everything Old and
Quaint—How Willey came into possession of the Foresters
CHAPTER VI.
THE WILLEY SQUIRE.
The Willey Squire—Instincts and Tendencies—Atmosphere of 77
the times favourable for their development—Thackeray’s
Opinion—Style of Hunting—Dawn of the Golden Age of the
Sport, &c.
CHAPTER VII.
THE WILLEY KENNELS.
The Willey Kennels—Colonel Apperley on Hunting a hundred 83
years ago—Character of the Hounds—Portraits of
Favourites—Original Letters
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WILLEY LONG RUNS.
The Willey Long Runs—Dibdin’s fifty miles no figure of 93
speech—From the Wrekin to the Clee—The Squire’s
Breakfast—Phœbe Higgs—Doggrel Ditties—Old Tinker—Moody’s
Horse falls dead—Run by Moonlight
CHAPTER IX.
BACHELOR’S HALL.
Its Quaint Interior—An Old Friend’s Memory—Crabbe’s Peter 102
at Ilford Hall—Singular Time-pieces—A Meet at Hangster’s
Gate—Jolly Doings—Dibdin at Dinner—Broseley Pipes—Parson
Stephens in his Shirt—The Parson’s Song
CHAPTER X.
THE WILLEY RECTOR AND OTHER OF THE SQUIRE’S FRIENDS.
The Squire’s Friends and the Rector more fully 113
drawn—Turner—Wilkinson—Harris—The Rev. Michael Pye
Stephens—His Relationship to the Squire—In the Commission
of the Peace—The Parson and the Poacher—A Fox-hunting
Christening
CHAPTER XI.
THE WILLEY WHIPPER-IN.
The Willey Whipper-in—Tom’s Start in Life—His Pluck and 124
Perseverance—Up hill and down dale—Adventures with the
Buff-coloured Chaise—His own Wild Favourite—His Drinking
Horn—Who-who-hoop—Good Temper—Never Married—Hangster’s
Gate—Old Coaches—Tom gone to Earth—Three View Halloos at
the Grave—Old Boots
CHAPTER XII.
SUCCESS OF THE SONG.
Dibdin’s Song—Dibdin and the Squire good fellows well 140
met—Moody a character after Dibdin’s own heart—The Squire’s
Gift—Incledon—The Shropshire Fox-hunters on the Stage at
Drury Lane
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WILLEY SQUIRE MEMBER FOR WENLOCK.
The Willey Squire recognises the duty of his position, and 147
becomes Member for Wenlock—Addison’s View of Whig Jockeys
and Tory Fox-hunters—State of Parties—Pitt in
Power—“Fiddle-Faddle”—Local Improvements—The Squire Mayor
of Wenlock—The Mace now carried before the Chief Magistrate
CHAPTER XV.
THE SQUIRE AND HIS VOLUNTEERS.
The Squire and his Volunteers—Community of Feeling—Threats 154
of Invasion—“We’ll follow the Squire to Hell, if
necessary”—The Squire’s Speech—His Birthday—His Letter to
the _Shrewsbury Chronicle_—Second Corps—Boney and
Beacons—The Squire in a Rage—The Duke of York and Prince of
Orange come down
CHAPTER XV.
THE WILLEY SQUIRE AMONG HIS NEIGHBOURS.
The Squire among his Neighbours—Sir Roger de 173
Coverley—Anecdotes—Gentlemen nearest the fire in the Lower
Regions—Food Riots—The Squire quells the Mob—His Virtues
and his Failings—Influences of the Times—His career draws
to a close—His wish for Old Friends and Servants to follow
him to the Grave—To be buried in the dusk of the
evening—His Favourite Horse to be shot—His estates left to
his cousin, Cecil Weld, the First Lord Forester—New Hunting
Song
Appendix 189
Index 201
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
LORD FORESTER _Frontispiece_
THE VALLEY OF THE SEVERN 1
TRAINED FALCON 8
HOODED FALCON 9
MORFE FOREST 17
STAG 17
BOAR HUNT IN MORFE FOREST 21
FALLOW DEER 31
DEER LEAP 36
CHAPTER HOUSE OF WENLOCK PRIORY 38
WATERFALL 44
FOREST SCENERY 46
LADY OAK AT CRESSAGE 50
THE BADGER 53
GROUP OF DEER 54
NEEDLE’S EYE 56
DEER AND YOUNG 59
ATCHAM CHURCH 62
RICHARD FORESTER’S OLD MANSION 65
WILLEY OLD HALL 70
THE OLD SQUIRE 77
FAVOURITE DOGS 83
PORTRAIT OF A FOX-HOUND 93
BUILDWAS ABBEY 100
MOODY’S HORN, TRENCHER, CAP, SADDLE, &c. 122
GONE TO EARTH 122
A MEET AT HANGSTER’S GATE 140
THE FIRST IRON BRIDGE 147
VIEW OF BRIDGNORTH 154
WILLEY CHURCH 173
INTRODUCTION.
[Picture: Valley of the Severn, near Willey]
A SIMPLE reading of the history of the earth is sufficient to show that
hunting is as old as the hills—not figuratively, but literally; and that
the hunter and the hunted, one furnished with weapons of attack, and the
other with means of defence, have existed from the earliest periods of
creation to the present. That is, the strong have mastered the weak, and
in some instances have fallen side by side, as we see by their remains.
In the economy of Nature, the process of decay appears to have been the
exception, rather than the rule; with beak or tooth, or deadly claw, the
strong having struck down the less defended in a never-ending arena.
What a hunting field, in one sense, the Old World must have been, when
creatures of strange and undefined natures infested the uncertain limits
of the elements, and what encounters must have taken place in the ooze
and mud periods, when monsters, enormous in stature and stretch of wing,
were the implacable hunters of the air, the water, and the slime! Nor
can the inhabitants of the earth, the water, and the air, taking the term
in its broad rather than in its technical sense, be said to be less
hunters now, or less equipped with deadly weapons. Some have
supernumerary teeth to supply the loss of such as might get broken in the
fray. One strikes down its prey at a blow, another impales its victims
on thorns, and a third slays by poison. Some hunt in company, from what
would seem to be a very love of sport—as crows and smaller birds give
chase to the owl, apparently rejoicing in his embarrassment, at break of
day.
We need but refer to those remotely removed stages of human life
illustrated by drift beds, bone caves, and shell heaps—to those primitive
weapons which distinguished the lowest level of the Stone Age, weapons
which every year are being brought to light by thousands—to give the
_genus homo_ a place among the hunters; indeed one of the strongest
incentives which helped on Pre-historic Man from one level to the other
through the long night of the darkest ages, appears to have been that
which such a pursuit supplied. To obtain the skins of animals wilder
than himself he entered upon a scramble with the wolf, the bear, and the
hyena. Driven by instinct or necessity to supply wants the whole
creation felt, his utmost ingenuity was put forth in the chase; and in
process of time we find him having recourse to the inventive arts to
enable him to carry out his designs. On the borders of lakes or on river
banks, in caverns deep-seated amid primeval forest solitudes, he
fashioned harpoons and arrow-heads of shell, horn, or bone, with which to
repulse the attack of prowlers around his retreat and to arrest the
flight of the swiftest beast he required for food; and when he emerged
from the dark night which Science has as yet but partially penetrated,
when he had succeeded in pressing the horse and the dog into his service,
and when the cultivation of the soil even had removed him above the
claims of hunger, he appears equally to have indulged the
passion—probably for the gratification it gave and the advantages it
brought in promoting that tide of full health from which is derived the
pleasing consciousness of existence.
Tradition, no less than archæology and the physical history of the
country itself, lead us to suppose that when those oscillations of level
ceased which led to the present distribution of land and water, one-third
of the face of the country was covered with wood and another with
uncultivated moor, and that marsh lands were extensive. Remains dug up
in the valley of the Severn, and others along the wide stretch of country
drained by its tributaries, together with those disinterred from the bog
and the marsh, show that animals, like plants, once indigenous, have at
comparatively recent periods become as extinct as Dodos in the Mauritius.
Old British names in various parts of the country, particularly along the
valley of the Severn, exist to show that the beaver once built its house
by the stream, that the badger burrowed in its banks, and that the eagle
and the falcon reared their young on the rocks above. At the same time,
evidence exists to show that the bear and the boar ranged the forests as
late as the conquest of England by the Normans, whilst the red deer, the
egret and the crane, the bittern and the bustard, remained to a period
almost within living memory.
River loams, river gravels, lake beds, and cave breccias, disclose hooks
and spears, and sometimes fragments of nets, which show that hunting and
fishing were practised by the primitive dwellers along river plains and
valleys.
The situations of abbeys, priories, and other monastic piles, the ruins
of which here and there are seen along the banks of rivers, and the
records the heads of these houses have left behind them, lead us to
suppose that those who reared and those who occupied them were alive to
the advantages the neighbourhood of good fisheries supplied. Some of the
_vivaries_ or fish-pools, and meres even, which once afforded abundant
supplies, no longer exist, their sites being now green fields; but
indications of their former presence are distinct, whilst the positions
of weirs on the Severn, the rights of which their owners zealously
guarded, may still be pointed out. Sometimes they were subjects of
litigation, as with the canons of Lilleshall, who claimed rights of
fishing in the Severn at Bridgnorth, and who obtained a bull from Pope
Honorius confirming them in their rights. In 1160 the Abbot of Salop,
with the consent of his chapter, is found granting to Philip Fitz-Stephen
and his heirs the fishery of Sutton (piscarium de Sutana), and lands near
the said fishery. These monks also had fisheries at Binnal, a few miles
from Willey; and it is well known that they introduced into our rivers
several varieties of fish not previously common thereto, but which now
afford sport to the angler.
Fishing, it is true, may have been followed more as a remunerative
exercise by some members of these religious houses, still it did not fail
to commend itself as an attractive art and a harmless recreation
congenial to a spirit of contemplation and reflection to many
distinguished ecclesiastics. That the Severn of that day abounded in
fish much more than at present is shown by Bishop Lyttleton, who takes
some pains to describe it at Arley, and who explains the construction of
the coracle and its uses in fishing, the only difference between it both
then and now, and that of early British times, being that the latter was
covered with a horse’s hide.
A jury, empannelled for the purpose of estimating the value of Arley
manor upon the death of one of its proprietors, gave the yearly rental of
its fishery at 6_s._ 8_d._,—a large sum in comparison with the value of
sixty acres of land, stated to have been 10_s._, or with the rent of a
ferry, which was put down at sixpence. There must have been fine fishing
then. Trout were plentiful, so were salmon; there were no locks or
artificial weirs to obstruct the attempts of fish—still true to the
instinct of their ancestors—to beat the tide in an upward summer
excursion in the direction of its source. The document states that the
part of the river so valued “abounded in fish.”
* * * * *
NOTE.—The Bishop of Worcester, by his regulations for the Priory of
Little Malvern, in 1323, enjoins the prior not to fish in the stew set
apart from ancient times _for the recreation of the sick_, unless
manifest utility, to be approved by the Chapter, should sanction it; in
which case he was, at a fit opportunity, to replace the fish which he
caught.
We fancy it is not difficult to recognise a growing feeling against
that separation of religion, recreation, and health which unfortunately
now exists, and in favour of re-uniting the three; and we are persuaded
that the sooner this takes place the better for the nation.
CHAPTER I.
THE MARSH AND FOREST PERIODS.
Early Features of the Country—The Hawk an acquisition to Sportsmen—Hawk
aeries—Hawks according to Degrees—Brook and other kinds of
Hawking—Hawking and Hunting—A Shropshire Historian’s Charge against the
Conqueror—Bishops and their Clergy as much given to the Sport as
Laymen—The Rector of Madeley—The Merrie Days, &c.
[Picture: Trained Falcon] DIVERSIFIED by wood and moor, by lake and sedgy
pool, dense flocks of wild fowl of various kinds at one time afforded a
profusion of winged game; and the keen eye and sharp talons of the hawk
no doubt pointed it out as a desirable acquisition to the sportsman long
ere he succeeded in pressing it into his service; indeed it must have
been a marked advance in the art when he first availed himself of its
instinct. Old records supply materials for judging of the estimation in
which this bird was held by our ancestors, it being not uncommon to find
persons holding tenements or paying fines in lieu of service to the lord
of the fee by rendering a _sore_ sparrow-hawk—a hawk in its first year’s
plumage. Stringent restrictions upon the liberty the old Roman masters
of the country allowed with respect to wild fowl were imposed; the act of
stealing a hawk, and that of taking her eggs, being punishable by
imprisonment for a year and a day. The highborn, with birds bedecked
with hoods of silk, collars of gold, and bells of even weight, but of
different sound, appeared according to their rank—a ger-falcon for a
king, a falcon gentle for a prince, a falcon of the rock for a duke, a
janet for a knight, a merlin for a lady, and a lamere for a squire. From
close-pent manor and high-walled castle, to outspread plain and expansive
lake or river bank, the gentry of the day sought perditch and plover,
heron and wild fowl, many of which the fowling-piece has since driven
from their haunts, and some—as the bustard and the bittern, the egret and
the crane—into extinction.
Mention is often made of hawk aeries, as at Little Wenlock, and in
connection with districts within the jurisdiction of Shropshire forests,
which seem to have been jealously guarded. The use of the birds, too,
appears to have been very much restricted down to the time that the
forest-charter, enabling all freemen to ply their hawks, was wrung from
King John, when a sport which before had been the pride of the rich
became the privilege of the poor. It was at one time so far a national
pastime that an old writer asserts that “every degree had its peculiar
hawk, from the emperor down to the holy-water clerk.” {10} The sport
seems to have divided itself into field-hawking, pond-hawking,
brook-and-river hawking; into hawking on horseback and hawking on foot.
In foot hawking the sportsman carried a pole, with which to leap the
brook, into which he sometimes fell, as Henry VIII. did upon his head in
the mud, in which he would have been stifled, it is said, had not John
Moody rescued him; whether this Moody was an ancestor of the famous
Whipper-in or not we cannot say.
Evidence is not altogether wanting to show that during the earlier
history of the Marsh period, the gigantic elk (_Cervus giganteus_), with
his wide-spreading antlers, visited, if he did not inhabit, the flatter
portions of the Willey country; and it is probable that the wild ox
equally afforded a mark for the arrow of the ancient inhabitants of the
district in those remote times, which investigators have distinguished as
the Pile-building, the Stone, and the Bronze periods, when society was in
what has been fittingly called the hunter-state. At any rate, we know
that at later periods the red deer, the goat, and the boar, together with
other “beasts,” were hunted, and that both banks of the Severn resounded
with the deep notes of “veteran hounds.” Of the two pursuits, Prior in
his day remarks, “Hawking comes near to hunting, the one in the ayre as
the other on the earth, a sport as much affected as the other, by some
preferred.” That the chase was the choice pastime of monarchs and nobles
before the Conquest, and the favourite sport of “great and worthy
personages” after, we learn from old authors, who, like William Tivici,
huntsman to Edward I., have written elaborate descriptive works,
supplying details of the modes pursued, and of the kinds of dog which
were used.
Our Saxon ancestors no doubt brought with them from the great forests of
Germany not only their institutions but the love of sport of their
forefathers, pure and simple. With them the forests appear to have been
open to the people; and, although the Danes imposed restrictions, King
Canute, by his general code of laws, confirmed to his subjects full right
to hunt on their own lands, providing they abstained from the forests,
the pleasures of which he appears to have had no inclination generally to
share with his subjects. He established in each county four chief
foresters, who were gentlemen or thanes, and these had under them four
yeomen, who had care of the vert and venison; whilst under these again
were two officers of still lower rank, who had charge of the vert and
venison in the night, and who did the more servile work. King William
curtailed many of the old forest privileges, and limited the sports of
the people by prohibiting the boar and the hare, which Canute had allowed
to be taken; and so jealous was he of the privileges of the chase that he
is said to have ordained the loss of the eyes as the penalty for killing
a stag. His Norman predilections were such that an old Shropshire
historian, Ordericus Vitalis (born at Atcham), who was at one time
chaplain to the Conqueror, charges him with depopulating whole parishes
that he might satisfy his ardour for hunting. Prince Rufus, who
inherited a love of the chase from his father, is made by a modern author
to reply to a warning given him by saying:—
“I love the chase, ’tis mimic war,
And the hollow bay of hound;
The heart of the poorest Norman
Beats quicker at the sound.”
King John stretched the stringent forest laws of the period to the
utmost, till the love of liberty and of sport together, still latent
among the people, compelled him to submit to an express declaration of
their respective rights. By this declaration all lands afforested by
Henry I. or by Richard were to be disafforested, excepting demesne woods
of the crown; and a fine or imprisonment for a year and a day, in case of
default, was to be substituted for loss of life and members.
To prevent disputes with regard to the king’s forests, it was also agreed
that their limits should be defined by perambulations; but as a check
upon the boldness of offenders in forests and chaces, and warrens, and
upon the disposition of juries to find against those who were appointed
to keep such places, it was deemed necessary on the other hand to give
protection to the keepers.
Large sums were lavished by kings and nobles on the kennels and
appliances necessary for their diversions. Nor were these costly
establishments confined to the laity. Bishops, abbots, and high
dignitaries of the Church, could match their hounds and hawks against
those of the nobles, and they equally prided themselves upon their skill
in woodcraft.
That the clergy were as much in favour of these amusements as the laity,
appears from an old Shropshire author, Piers Plowman (Langland), who
satirically gave it as his opinion that they thought more of sport than
of their flocks, excepting at shearing time; and likewise from Chaucer,
who says, “in hunting and riding they are more skilled than in divinity.”
That Richard de Castillon, an early rector of Madeley, was a sportsman
appears from the fact that when Henry III. was in Shrewsbury in
September, 1267, concluding a treaty with Llewellyn, and settling sundry
little differences with the monks and burgesses there, he granted him
license to hunt “in the royal forest of Madeley,” then a portion of that
of the Wrekin. In 1283 also, King Edward permitted the Prior of Wenlock
to have a park at Madeley, to fence out a portion of the forest, and to
form a haia there for his deer. It has been said that Walter, Bishop of
Rochester, was so fond of sport, that at the age of fourscore he made
hunting his sole employment. The Archdeacon of Richmond, at his
initiation to the Priory of Bridlington, is reported to have been
attended by ninety-seven horses, twenty-one dogs, and three hawks.
Walter de Suffield, Bishop of Norwich, bequeathed by will his pack of
hounds to the king; but the Abbot of Tavistock, who had also a pack, was
commanded by his bishop about the same time to break it up. A famous
hunter was the Abbot of Leicester, whose skill in the sport of hare
hunting was so great, that we are told the king himself, his son Edward,
and certain noblemen, paid him an annual pension that they might hunt
with him. Bishop Latimer said: “In my time my poor father was as
diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn me any other thing, and so I
think other men did their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay
my body in my bow, and not draw with strength of arms as other nations
do;” and the good bishop exclaims with the enthusiasm of a patriot, “It
is a gift of God that He hath given us to excel all other nations withal;
it hath been God’s instrument whereby He hath given us many victories
over our enemies.”
Such were the “merrie days,” when the kennels of the country gentry
contained all sorts of dogs, and their halls all sorts of skins, when the
otter and the badger were not uncommon along the banks of Shropshire
streams, and ere the fox had taken first rank on the sportsman’s list.
An old “Treatise on the Craft of Hunting” first gives the hare, the
herte, the wulf, and the wild boar. The author then goes on to say—
“But there ben other beastes five of the chase;
The buck the first, the second is the doe,
The fox the third, which hath ever hard grace,
The fourth the martyn, and the last the roe.”