Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 105

At a time when hunting, shooting, and fishing are controversial activities, politically and socially divisive and arousing strong emotions, the history of the sports is not merely of topical interest but also is essential for understanding both participants and opponents. Richard Hoyle is to be congratulated in assembling a team of historians to have a first stab at writing the recent history of a wide selection of these sports. The publisher’s hype is perhaps a little over the top in claiming that ‘this book is the first attempt to offer a proper historical perspective on the subject of field sports in England’, as hunting and shooting, at least, have not been entirely overlooked by rural historians. For the history of otter hunting, wildfowl shooting, salmon fishing, and hare coursing, however, the book can deservedly claim a first. It is more important that the book succeeds in drawing the attention of agricultural historians to the fact that agriculture is not the only, or necessarily the most important, function of the countryside. This is the underlying message of the volume’s eleven essays – three of them by the editor – which present a great variety of approaches, in style and scope as well as in specific subject matter, to the history of how half-a-dozen or more different animals have been chased by our hunting fathers.

Benjamin Britten’s 1936 song cycle, ‘Our hunting fathers’ was by no means the first public critique of the chase. Seventy-odd years later the chief chase had finished, and Richard Hoyle’s reprise verges on a funeral lament, for almost every essay in this splendid volume records the rise of agitation against cruel sports and the legislative extinction of many of them. Thus five of the eleven essays are concerned with sports that are now outlawed, one with a sport whose field of prey has been narrowed by statutory protection of selective designated species, plus a couple of sparkling essays by the editor ranging over a large number of sports. That leaves three contributions devoted to the two survivors from the traditional trio of hunting, shooting, and fishing which have so far have been left largely alone by the state. Two of these three essays are case studies in shooting history. The third, by Harvey Osborne, describes how the lower orders were squeezed out of salmon fishing as it was successfully appropriated by the upper classes as an elitist sport. Edward Bujak shows how shooting pheasants and partridges in huge numbers became the main support as well as the chief occupation of landed society in late Victorian Suffolk. The Elveden estate, for example, at first in the hands of Duleep Singh and then of the Guinnesses, became simply a very large game preserve. Poor soils continued to be cultivated only because pheasants did not care to stay on uncultivated land; and in the county as a whole it was reckoned that two thirds of the country houses were occupied by shooting tenants. Grand battues in which thousands of birds were shot in a season climaxed in Norfolk and Suffolk in the years before 1914, and Bujak reveals that the best shots, who went to shooting parties from estate to estate, were unofficially graded like seeded tennis players. Mark Rothery homes in on the shooting parties on a single estate, that of the Sibthorps on the outskirts of Lincoln, and in a masterly demonstration of record linkage uses the long run of shooting books recording those present to reconstruct the family, social, and patronage networks of the Sibthorps: invitations to shoot, but not to stay in the house, came to include professional men from Lincoln, its leading industrialists, and one or two of the more gentlemanly tenant-farmers.

Farmers, of a reasonably well-heeled sort, were more numerous on the hunting field, making foxhunting easily the least socially exclusive of the sports discussed in this book. That is, if hare coursing, discussed by Ian Roberts, is disregarded: this was essentially a spectator sport, and certainly there were thousands of cloth caps among the crowds drawn to big events, where the betting proved so popular that coursing rapidly morphed into greyhound racing after mechanical hares. Depending, of course, on our ancestry, our fathers are probably more likely to have gone to the dogs than to shooting parties or meets of hounds. They are definitely extremely unlikely to have gone deer stalking and grouse shooting at Balmoral, pheasant shooting at Sandringham, let alone tiger shooting and pig-sticking in India, as recounted in a delightful chapter on royalty and field sports by the editor, which magnificently interprets the book’s sub-title of ‘field sports in England’ in cavalier-imperial spirit. Some of our fathers, if from farming stock, may well have served in county yeomanry regiments, where the close correlation of hunting gentry, farmers, and farmers’ sons with yeomanry officers, NCOs, and troopers, is demonstrated by Nicholas Mansfield. Few will have gone otter-hunting, the subject of essays by Daniel Allen and Charles Watkins, notwithstanding Allen’s revelation that the ruthless sport was passed off as a mere pretext for a pleasant riverside picnic; while fewer still will have ventured into the solitary, silent, pursuit of punt-gunning for wildfowl, whose rise and fall is evocatively examined by John Martin.

It is irrelevant to the interest and importance of this book whether or not any or all of these sports were literally pursued by our fathers. It marks a serious advance in providing an historical perspective on the priorities of the landed classes for the countryside and its animals. It also furnishes an entertaining lesson in the pitfalls of dependence on running script through ‘spell-check’, for we learn that the anti-field sports folk have always been ‘weary of criticizing fishing’, and that gamekeepers were on the lookout for ‘predatory birds, crowns, magpies, hawks’ and others, while the introduction of the ‘breach-loading shotgun’ must indeed have had remarkable effects!