Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/408

394 394 HUNTING active hunter, and excelled in all the branches of that noble art, to which he applied with incessant labour and amazing success.&quot; l Of his grandson Athelstan it is related by William of Malmesbury that after the victory of Brunan- burgh he imposed upon the vanquished king of Wales a yearly tribute, which included a certain number of &quot; hawks and sharp-scented dogs fit for hunting wild beasts.&quot; Ac cording to the same authority, one of the greatest delights of Edward the Confessor was &quot; to follow a pack of swift hounds in pursuit of game, and to cheer them with his voice.&quot; It was under the Anglo-Saxon kings that the dis tinction between the higher and lower chase first came to be made, the former being expressly for the king or those on whom he had bestowed the pleasure of sharing in it, while only the latter was allowed to the proprietors of the land. To the reign of Cnut belong the &quot; Constitutions de Foresta,&quot; according to which four thanes were appointed in every province for the administration of justice in all matters connected with the forests ; under them were four inferior thanes to whom was committed immediate care of the vert and venison, 2 The severity of the forest laws which prevailed during the Norman period is sufficient evidence of the sporting ardour of William and his successors. The Conqueror himself, we are told by his contemporaries, &quot; loved the high game as if he were their father ; &quot; and the penalty for the unauthorized slaughter of a hart or hind was loss of both eyes. Stag Stag Hunting. Although at an early period stag hunt- hunting. i n g W as a favourite re-creation with royalty, it is difficult to say when the royal buckhounds were first established. It seems probable that in the reign of Henry VIII. the royal pack was kennelled at Swinley, where, in the reign of Charles II. (1684), a deer was found that went away to Lord Petre s seat in Essex ; only five got to the end of this 70 miles run, one being the king s brother, the duke of York. Grsorge III. was a great stag hunter, and met the royal pack as often as possible. The Devon and Somerset staghounds are the only pack in England that now pursue the wild red deer. In his interesting work, The Chase of the Wild Red Deer, Mr Collyns says that the earliest record of a pack of stag- hounds in the Exmoor district is in 1598, when Hugh Polland, Queen Elizabeth s ranger, kept one at Simonsbath. The succeeding rangers of Exmoor forest kept up the pack until nearly 200 years ago, the hounds subsequently passing into the possession of Mr Walter of Stevenstone, an ancestor of the Hollo family. Successive masters continued the sport until 1825, when the fine pack, descended probably from the blood hound crossed with the old southern hound, was sold in London. It is difficult to imagine how the dis persion of such a pack could have come about in such a sporting country,but in 1827 the late Sir Arthur Chichester got a pack together, and the country has been hunted ever since, the present master being Mr Fenwick Bissett. Stag hunting begins on the 12th of August, and ends on the 8th of October ; there is then a cessation until the end of the month, when the hounds are unkennelled for hind hunting, which continues up to Christmas : it begins again about Ladyday, and lasts till the 10th of May. The mode of hunting with the Devon and Somerset hounds is briefly this : the whereabouts of a warrant able stag is communicated to the master by that important functionary the harbourer; two couple of steady hounds called tufters are then thrown into cover, and, having 1 See Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, who also gives an illustration, &quot; taken from a manuscriptal painting of the 9th century in the Cotton Library,&quot; representing &quot;a Saxon chieftain, attended by his huntsman and a couple of hounds, pursuing the wild swine in a forest.&quot; 2 See Lappenberg, Hist, of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings (ii. 361, Thorpe s transl.). singled out a warrantable deer, follow him until he is forced to make for the open, when the body of the pack are laid on. Very often two or three hours elapse before the stag breaks, but a run over the wild country fully atones for the delay. With all other packs of staghounds, except one in the New Forest, which hunts fallow deer, the quarry is the carted deer; the animal is turned out from a vehicle resembling a prison van in appearance, and the hounds are laid on after a quarter of an hour s law. Fox Hunting. It is only within comparatively recent Fox times that the fox has come to be considered as an animal huntii of the higher chase. William Twici, indeed, who was huntsman-in-chief to Edward II., and who wrote in Nor man French a treatise on hunting, which still exists in an English translation, mentions the fox as a beast of venery, but obviously as an altogether inferior object of sport. Strutt also gives an engraving, assigned by him to the 14th century, in which three hunters, one of whom blows a horn, are represented as unearthing a fox, which is pursued by a single hound. The precise date of the estab lishment of the first pack of hounds kept entirely for fox hunting cannot be accurately fixed. In the work of &quot; Nimrod &quot; (C. J. Apperley), entitled The Chase, there is (p. 4) an extract from a letter from Lord Arundel, dated February 1833, in which the writer says that his an cestor, Lord Arundel, kept a pack of foxhounds between 1690 and 1700, and that they remained in the family till 1782, when they were sold to the celebrated Hugh Meynell, of Quornclon Hall, Leicestershire. Lord Wilton again, in his Sports and Pursuits of the English, says that &quot;about the year 1750 hounds began to be entered solely to fox.&quot; The Field of November 6, 1875, p. 512, con tains an engraving of a hunting-horn then in the posses sion of the late master of the Cheshire hounds, and upon the horn is the inscription : &quot; Thomas Boothby, Esq., Tooley Park, Leicester. With this horn he hunted the first pack of foxhounds then in England fifty-five years. Born 1677. Died 1752. Now the property of Thomas d Avenant, Esq., county Salop, his grandson.&quot; These extracts do not finally decide the point, because both Mr Boothby s and Lord ArundePs hounds may have hunted other game besides fox, just as in Edward IV. s time there were &quot; fox dogs &quot; though not kept exclusively for fox. On the whole, it is probable that Lord Wilton s surmise is not far from correct. Since fox hunting first commenced, however, the system of the sport has been much changed. In our grandfathers time the hounds met early, and found the fox by the drag, that is, by the line he took to his kennel on his return from a foraging expedition. Hunting the drag was doubtless a great test of nose, but many good runs must have been lost thereby, for the fox must often have heard the hounds upwind, and have moved off before they could get on good terms with him. At the present day, the woodlands are neither so large nor so numerous as they formerly were, while there are many more gorse covers ; therefore, instead of hunting the drag up to it, a much quicker way of getting to work is to find a fox in his kennel ; and, the hour of meeting being later, the fox is not likely to be gorged with food, and so unable to take care of himself at the pace at which the modern foxhound travels. On hunting days it is the master s duty to say what The covers are to be drawn, and to request the field to take up such positions as will enable the fox to have fair play. The management of the field requires considerable firm ness, but the very strong language one sometimes hears is better avoided. Where a professional huntsman is em ployed, he is responsible for the actual hunting, and the less he is interfered with by the master or anybody else the better. The country should be hunted fairly through- mast c