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."