Medieval Hunting (10 page)

As with horses, so hounds (rather than dogs) conveyed notions of status and Baillie-Grohman comments that no hound seems to belong so peculiarly to the age of chivalry as the greyhound ‘and one cannot picture a knight without one'. He also quotes a supposedly old law of King Canute which decreed that a greyhound may not be kept by any person inferior (in rank) to a gentleman.
¹²⁷
However, this use of the term ‘gentleman' seems rather suspect within the context of the period, it being a rank which was not precisely defined until the early fifteenth century. Nigel Saul writes that after 1415 the vernacular use of ‘gentleman' is employed quite precisely ‘for the limited purpose of denoting the lowest order of the gentleborn'.
¹²⁸

Dame Juliana believes a gentleman should also learn the conformation of a good greyhound as part of his education. As with her description of a good horse, she draws upon the physical characteristics of other animals, hence ‘The properties of a goode Grehound' in
The Boke of Saint Albans
‘A Grehounde shulde be heded like a Snake. And /necked like a Drake. Foted like a kat. / Tayled like a Rat. Sydd lyke a Teme. /Chyned like a Beme.'
¹²⁹
Greyhounds quite commonly appear in the illustrations of Gothic manuscripts, often in pursuit of a stag or hare. It is significant that a greyhound chasing a hart is traditionally used as a marginal motif on the opening page of Books of Hours. The location of such a cameo scene is revealing and it may be that the greyhound represents every Christian who should follow Christ, himself symbolised as a wounded hart and shedding blood to make the pursuit easier.
¹³⁰
MS Egerton 1146, a German Book of Hours, from about 1500, begins with a beautiful example of such a scene, the hart's left side spotted with blood.
¹³¹
The Hours of Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy
, completed around 1370, has a marginal picture of two greyhounds coursing a hare.
¹³²
MS Douce 62, a French Book of Hours dated from about 1400, has a much more unusual scene, a
bas-de-page
illustration of a greyhound chasing an antelope.
¹³³
The antelope is identified by its jagged horns, the standard device used by illuminators of bestiaries and manuscripts to depict this particular cloven-footed ungulate.

Greyhounds are by far the commonest hunting dog to appear in late medieval illustrations, particularly manuscripts, the reasons perhaps being twofold. Firstly, although there was no single breed of these swift hounds which hunted by sight, giving rise to the old term of ‘gazehounds', they all tended towards a lithe and elongated ‘type'. Secondly, illustrations show them in all manner of domestic situations, in living- and bedrooms, at the board when their owners are at meals, sitting by the fireside and even at mass. Of all dogs, they appear to have been the most constant of companions of their masters during journeys, in war and at home.
¹³⁴
It is therefore no surprise that the type appears so often in illustrated sources, particularly those which portray scenes of everyday life. Artists produced images of what they and their audiences knew about.

It is interesting that possession of a greyhound today is not an indication of high social status – usually the very opposite in fact, greyhounds being associated in the public mind with the stereotypical images of the cloth caps and racing pigeons of working men in the industrial north of England. This is undoubtedly due to the change of role of greyhounds by the eighteenth century, from that of hunting deer, hare, wolf, boar and fox to that of coursing hares in organised matches. Coursing involves the use of two greyhounds, termed a ‘couple', which are ‘slipped' as the hare, which has been driven up by beaters, passes them. Greyhound racing evolved from coursing
¹³⁵
and it is probably this sport, with its associated betting, which gives the modern greyhound, and its owner, relatively low status compared to the past.

Another breed of hound, the possession of which conveyed the notion of gentlemanly status, was the spaniel. Both
Livre de chasse
and
The Master of Game
devote short chapters decorated with illustrative miniatures to these small hounds and their nature. Fébus refers to them as
chiens doysel
, meaning bird-dogs, or
espaignolz
, meaning spaniels.
¹³⁶
The present-day Brittany, incorrectly called a spaniel by the uninitiated, is said to be descended from these medieval
chiens d'oiseaux
. They are still, like their ancestors, excellent at hunting-up and flushing game birds and starting small game. They are good in water and useful for retrieving duck and other waterfowl. In the Middle Ages these hounds were particularly liked by falconers owing to their great ability at finding and flushing partridge and quail.
¹³⁷
They were thus associated with the gentle country pastime of hawking,
The Master of Game
commenting ‘It is a good thing to a man that hath a noble goshawk or a tiercel or a sparrow hawk for partridge, to have such hounds.'
¹³⁸
However, both Fébus and Edward agree that spaniels can be quarrelsome, undisciplined and bark too much, the Duke of York adding to Fébus's comments that he would not have any ‘especially there where I would hunt.'
¹³⁹

Aristocratic hunting was defined, above all, by two factors, the quarry species and methodology. Although common hunters took the beasts reserved for gentle hunters, they did it illegally and would suffer punishment if caught, usually in the form of a fine suited to their status. It is significant that taking ‘noble' quarry did not confer gentility on common hunters while poaching of other people's game by aristocrats did not diminish their own status. It was not what was hunted and caught, but how the hunter did it which defined him as a gentleman or ungentleman.

T
he medieval classification of quarry species is complex and confusing, much depending upon which source is consulted. Broadly, the quarry species which are illustrated in most pictorial sources and figure in almost all textual sources are the red deer stag or hart, the red deer hind, the hare, the wild boar, the wolf and the bear. These beasts were traditionally categorised as ‘noble' and their lawful pursuit identified the hunter as a ‘gentle hunter'. Some French and English hunting books divide game into two distinct categories, the ‘beasts of venery' and the ‘beasts of the chase'.
¹
Additional categories of
folly
or
rascal
and
vermin
are sometimes mentioned.
²
In general, gentle hunters pursued the first two categories of quarry, at least publicly, the first group being regarded as the most prestigious. William Twiti, huntsman to Edward II and author of
The Art of Venerie
, gives the basic classification:

To venery y caste me fyrst to go/ Of wheche iiii bestis be, that is to say,/ The hare, the hert, þe wulfe, the wylde boor also;/ Of venery for sothe þer be no moe . . .

And then ben othyr bestis v of chase:/ The buck the first, the do the secunde,/ The fox the thryde, which ofte haþ hard grace,/ The ferthe the martyn & þe last the Roo,/ And sothe to say ther be no mo of tho . . .'
³

Juliana Berners'
Boke of Huntyng
declares ‘Fowre maner beestys of venery there are,/ The first of theym is the hert, the secunde is the hare,/ The boore is oon of tho,/ The wolff, and not oon moo.'
⁴
Later, the
Boke
continues with the beasts of chase but also introduces the category of ‘rascal' or, in other words, everything else:

I shall yow tell which be beestys of enchace./ Oon of theym is the bucke, a nother is the doo,/ The fox and the martron and the wilde roo./ And ye shall, my dere chylde, other beestys all,/Where so ye hem fynde, rascall ye shall hem call/ In fryth or in fell/ Or in forest, I yow tell.
⁵

Notice that Dame Juliana does not mention the red deer hind, but David Dalby comments as an aside to German stag-hunting practice that ‘Hinds were sometimes hunted with hounds, and were usually driven into nets rather than pursued across country'.
⁶
Hinds gave inferior sport to harts as they did not run so strongly and in consequence were regarded as mere suppliers of venison. There was thus no shame in driving them, sometimes in groups, into fixed nets.

The bear does not feature in
The Art of Venerie
or the
Boke of Huntyng
, the logical reason for its exclusion being its complete extinction in England centuries earlier.
⁷
However, it was still common on mainland Europe in the late medieval period and was hunted both on horseback and on foot, particularly in southern and mountainous regions. Bears were hunted on horseback with hounds by the princes and nobles of the north Italian city states in the Renaissance.
⁸
Both Gaston Fébus and Emperor Maximilian I regarded bears as worthy and dangerous quarry.
⁹

Pictorial and textual sources clearly indicate that it was the red deer which was the favourite quarry species of medieval aristocratic hunters. For example, while the cycle of twelve hunting illustrations in the Calendar of MS Egerton 1146 includes the five major quarry species, there is a heavy emphasis on red deer. The frequency is as follows: red deer appear seven times, wild boar twice, and the hare, bear and wolf only once each. Overall, it is the stag, or more correctly the hart, with its great rack of antlers, that dominates both textual and pictorial sources as the icon of nobility hunting. Referring specifically to Germany, but equally applicable to the rest of Europe, David Dalby states ‘During the German Middle Ages, the stag was the most important quarry for noble huntsmen . . . and other deer are mentioned less frequently.'
¹⁰
He later remarks ‘the stag chase became the favourite hunting sport during the “courtly centuries”' meaning after the twelfth century. Stag hunting required a high degree of skill and technical know-how, and importantly involved much élitist ritual, making it suitable as a courtly pastime.
¹¹
One German manual illustrates the importance of the stag to German noble hunters by its very specialisation.
Die Lehre von den Zeichen des Hirsches
is an instructive examination of the tracks and signs of the stag, all indications of whether the beast was chaseable.
¹²
A sixteenth-century German hunting manual,
Die Hohenloheschen Handschrift
, contains a series of detailed diagrams showing the different slot-marks (tracks) of deer for the instruction of hunters assessing age, size and condition of quarry.
¹³
In the appendix to his edition of
The Master of Game
, William Baillie-Grohman emphasises the expertise required of both the professional and aristocratic stag hunter and notes that:

One of the first essentials for a huntsman in the Middle Ages was to learn to know the different
signs
of a stag (according to German Venery there were seventy-two signs), so as to be able to ‘judge well'. These signs were those of the
slot
, the
gait
, the
fraying-post
, the
rack or entry
(i.e. the place where the stag entered covert), and the
fumes
.
¹⁴

It was the ‘great hart', however, which held the premier position as noble quarry. These beasts, at least six years old with ten points or tines to their rack of antlers, were often described as
warrantable
in the hunting treatises.
¹⁵
The Master of Game
specifies the male red deer as correctly being termed as in ‘the fifth [year] a stag; the sixth year a hart of ten and first is he chaseable, for always before shall he be called rascal or folly'.
¹⁶
The hart was regarded as royal game, and so belonged to the king or ruler of the country. Hunting the wild hart was thus a royal prerogative and a courtly activity, although special licences to take red deer and other game were granted on occasion by the sovereign to specially favoured courtiers.
¹⁷
The social primacy of the hart is indicated by two early hunting texts. The surviving version of
De arte bersandi
, written by Guicenna(n)s in Germany in the early thirteenth century, is the beginning of a comprehensive instruction on the hart hunt. It is also the earliest medieval hunting text which survives and the only known hunting treatise written in Latin. The earliest vernacular hunting treatise is
La Chase dou cerf
, written in Picardy in about 1250. This poem treats of all aspects of the hart hunt, from the chase to breaking-up the carcass.
¹⁸

Edward of York's observations make it clear why the hart was regarded with such esteem throughout Europe ‘The harts be the lightest beasts and strongest, and of marvellous great cunning.'
¹⁹
They were also fierce and dangerous quarry and therefore worthy of the respect of noble hunter-warriors. As Edward graphically describes:

And then they are bold, and run upon men as a wild boar would do if he were hunted. And they be wonderfully perilous beasts, for with great pain shall a man recover that is hurt by a hart, and therefore men say in old saws, ‘after the boar the leech and after the hart the bier.' For he smiteth as the stroke of the springole, for he has great strength in the head and the body.
²⁰

The risks of injury or death while out hunting are seldom mentioned by the authors of the hunting books, so this rare grim reminder is interesting as well as thought-provoking. Understatement of the dangers of hunting and other noble pastimes was characteristic of medieval aristocratic culture and to some extent has endured as part of English ‘stiff upper-lip' attitudes.

Because of its admirable warrior-like natural characteristics, the hart was thus elevated in medieval minds to a special position of ‘nobility', making its pursuit a ‘noble sport' and in turn bestowing high status and glory on its hunter. However, unfortunately for aristocratic hunters, numbers of the red, or ‘high', deer in England fell dramatically during the later Middle Ages. This decline was largely the result of a decrease in suitable habitat, much former wilderness and waste being brought under cultivation, particularly as grazing for sheep, the mainstay of England's premier industry. Felling timber for charcoal burning, iron, copper and lead smelting also reduced wild red deer habitat. In addition, much of the land used for game reserves and parks was also used to provide grazing and timber, and in order for this dual function to work careful woodland and pasture management was necessary. Woodlands which were excessively exploited became degraded, the classic case being Thorpe Wood which lay across the River Wensum near Norwich. In 1100 it was covered in oak woodland, but owing to overgrazing and excessive timber extraction it had degraded to heathland and been renamed Mousehold Heath by the early sixteenth century.
²¹
Roger Manning estimates that by 1539 the numbers of red deer in the royal game reserves in the north of England had dwindled to around two thousand. In southern England it was necessary to boost low numbers by breeding programmes in parks. Stags are notoriously aggressive during the rutting season so imparked red and fallow deer had to be kept apart. Herds of red deer were still to be found in Windsor Forest, Ashdown Forest and at least three other parks in Sussex in the reign of James I.
²²
So, although the great hart survived in the English hunting manuals as the premier large quarry of the nobility, in reality its place was increasingly taken by the imparked fallow buck, an animal which was far more available and still gave good sport. Stocks in Forests and private parks were partly maintained by buckstalls and deer-leaps. The buckstall was a woodland enclosure, surrounded by a fence of wattle hurdles within which was a broad and deep ditch called the deer-leap. The low fence allowed driven deer to leap into the enclosure but the deep ditch on the other side prevented them from escaping. The captive deer would be fed ivy, holly, oak twigs and other browsings within the fenced enclosure until they were required for stocking or meat.
²³
Another function of these one-way structures was to allow tenants to drive deer from the unenclosed Forest into their own fenced preserves. In addition, it allowed access by hunters in the surrounding Forest who were following up wounded deer which had taken refuge in the park. This was an arrangement of benefit to both parties: the owner of the game rights and his tenant.
²⁴