Medieval Hunting (11 page)

Although fierce and brave, the wild boar comes a poor second in the nobility stakes. Its relative position is commented upon by Dalby ‘Of lesser importance than the stag in the medieval hunt was the wild boar. The boar hunt is mentioned or described in MHG [Middle High German] sources much less frequently than the stag chase.' He continues that the boar was more dangerous to hunt than the stag and required great skill with a weapon to despatch. Hunting boar was a less refined sport than stag hunting and was the dominant form of the chase in German lands until the eleventh or twelfth centuries. The boar is often compared to a fierce warrior in the German sources, reflecting an earlier and more heroic age.
²⁵
This imagery is similar to that awarded to the hart and in the same way made the boar a worthy and noble adversary. Gaston Fébus approved of hunting the boar and in
Livre de chasse
devotes eleven chapters and illustrations to its nature, hunting and trapping.
²⁶
He considered the wild boar the most dangerous quarry, admiring and respecting the fierceness of the beast.
²⁷

The Master of Game
translates only one of the chapters on the wild boar from Fébus, but Baillie-Grohman comments that the reason for this omission was probably because Edward of York considered the stag and hare to be ‘the royal sport
par excellence
, and not because there were none to hunt in England in his day'.
²⁸
It is quite probable that wild boar were extinct in the wild in England by the mid-thirteenth century, but what is interesting is that they were still regarded as ‘noble beasts' by aristocratic families and lived on, not only in semi-captivity in parks but also in the public mind in heraldry and romance.
²⁹
A boar appears in
The Luttrell Psalter
(1320/40), but as he lacks hair and has distinct dark skin patches, he is probably a domestic rather than a wild pig.
³⁰
In comparison, Pisanello's
Wild Boar
(
c
. 1430–35), appears to be the authentic hairy forest monster.
³¹
The late fifteenth-century
Boke of Huntyng
contains specific information on the aging and procedures of
undoing
the wild boar,
³²
so in aristocratic minds it must still have been an existing beast of venery in England. It continued to thrive on mainland Europe, extensive forests being essential to its survival, and was hunted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and dedication by royalty and the nobility. However, to judge by the surviving manuals and by its appearances and role in imaginative literature, the boar was most valued as a quarry species in the Iberian Peninsula and Germany.
³³

The third beast of venery is the hare and both late medieval English and French hunters regarded this animal with great esteem. William Twiti begins his treatise with the hare, a sign of its quarry status, as he deems it ‘þe most merveylous beste þat is in þis lond', the reasons being ‘For as miche as he beriþe grese and crotyth and rongith'.
³⁴
By this he meant that the hare produced grease, voided excrement and was a ruminant, thus having the ability to chew the cud. This latter point is not in fact correct as the hare does not have a compound stomach; she can, however, regurgitate food and give it a second mastication.
³⁵
Edward, Duke of York, repeats this sentiment almost word for word,
³⁶
a good example of the plagiarism which is a feature of the late medieval hunting books. He places the hare first in chapter order in
The Master of Game
, reversing the order of
Livre de chasse
, thus emphasising the hare's importance to English aristocratic hunters. Gaston Fébus also regards the hare highly and gives it much space in his text, but places it second to the deer in chapter order, reflecting the priorities of French
veneurs
. John Cummins comments that hunting the hare ‘
par force
. . . was a microcosm of the most complex and subtle aspects of the medieval chase'.
³⁷
The widespread appeal of hare coursing with greyhounds lay in the long chase and also, very importantly for keen hunters, that it could be practised at any time of day or year. Nor did coursing require the elaborate preparation of the stag hunt; hence it was more suitable as an informal pastime.
³⁸
While this may seem at odds with the importance of ritual and procedure in the stag hunt, in spite of the informality of coursing it was clearly regarded as an aristocratic sport in England and France. Coursing was also cheaper than stag or boar hunting and the danger and excitement were provided by the extended chase, not by the quarry, again unlike the pursuit of the hart or wild boar. Surprisingly, this lack of the ‘warrior' aspect of the hare does not appear to have detracted from its value as a noble quarry. It is significant that German sources of the period show that stag hunting and hare coursing were the pre-eminent forms of the chase, as practised by the German nobility during the Middle Ages'.
³⁹

The high status and popularity of the hare as a quarry species in England are reflected in its widespread appearance in pictorial sources. The hare often appears in the margins of illuminated manuscripts as a hunter of men, exemplifying the ‘world upside-down' of medieval moralists and satirists in which role reversal and topsy-turvy situations upset the divine rational order of things. A well-known
bas de page
from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, shows two hunter-hares, one with a crossbow, the other carrying the quarry, a man with bound hands, from a game-pole, while a smirking leveret looks on in admiration.
⁴⁰
However, it was not only illuminators who used the hare in such imagery. Painters and wood-carvers did too. The Brabantine painter Hieronymus Bosch (
c
. 1450–1516) provides an excellent example in his triptych
Garden of Earthly Delights
. The right wing illustrates
Hell
and in the foreground a large hare, readily identifiable by his long ears with dark tips, blows a hunting horn and carries his slain quarry, a shapely woman bleeding profusely from a huge gash in her belly, slung from the type of pole commonly used for carrying hares and rabbits on hunting forays.
⁴¹
In the right wing of another triptych,
Haywain
, Bosch has used world upside-down imagery in a slightly different way. In the foreground of the hell scene, a devil-hunter blows his horn and carries his human quarry on a game-pole, a man paunched from throat to genitals like a hare or rabbit.
⁴²
Wood-carvers also utilised such humorous world upside-down imagery, and hunter-hares appear on some misericords in ecclesiastical settings. Thus this situation of hunter turned hunted is found on a misericord in Manchester Cathedral where hares roast a hunter on a spit over a fire while his hounds boil and are seasoned in cauldrons. This scene, inaccurately called
The Rabbits' Revenge
as the animals are hares, was copied by the Manchester wood-carver from an elaborate engraving by Israhel van Meckenem (d. 1503).
⁴³

Although long extinct in Britain, bears were abundant in Europe and outlasted wolves in the Alps.
⁴⁴
In continental hunting treatises, the bear was included as ‘noble' quarry for aristocratic hunters. In his Foreword to the first edition of
The Master of Game
, President Theodore Roosevelt, an acknowledged historian and sportsman, comments ‘The kings and nobles, and the freemen generally, of the regions which now make up France and Germany, followed not only wolf, boar, and stag . . . but [also] the bear.'
⁴⁵
Gaston Fébus devotes several chapters to the nature and hunting of the bear. It must have been a familiar quarry in the Pyrenees as Fébus begins by saying ‘Ours est assez comune beste, si ne me covient ja dire de sa faisson, quar pou de gens sont qui bienn'en aient veu.' He respected the beast for its great strength but not for its low intellect ‘il sont tous estourdiz, et, si fort y sont feruz'.
⁴⁶
Rather ironically, Fébus died in 1391 after returning from a bear hunt in the forest of Sauveterre.
⁴⁷
In Iberia the bear had high quarry status, both Alfonso XI of Castile and John I of Portugal regarding it as royal game.
⁴⁸
The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I was also an ardent bear-hunter. In his book
Thuerdank
, there are three sections on bear hunting and in his
Hunting Notebook
Maximilian advises ‘You must go hunting with a spear, and always have one – go after him with the spear . . .'.
⁴⁹
His favourite method was to tackle the beast in its lair, on foot and single-handed, armed only with a short hunting spear or hunting sword.
⁵⁰
This almost suicidally brave technique reflects Maximilian's regard for the fighting qualities and courage of the bear, making it a worthy foe to take on face-to-face. The bear thus emerges as a personal challenge to the fanatical hunter, rather than as a quarry beast providing a prolonged and exciting chase. In spite of dedicated enthusiasts such as Fébus, Alfonso XI and Maximilian, opinions on the big beast varied and
The Lexicon of the Mediaeval German Hunt
says of the bear ‘Amongst other heavy game . . . even the brown bear is of little importance'.
⁵¹
German sources do mention the bear but its value as a quarry species is generally regarded as being considerably inferior to that of the stag, boar and hare. However, bears sometimes feature in manuscripts and MS Egerton 1146, a Germanic manuscript, has two illuminated illustrations of these beasts. In the
bas de page
of October in the Calendar, the mounted hunter thrusts a cross-hilted spear into a huge black bear which is being harried by hounds, whereas in a marginal illustration the hunter is on foot, using a long spear to despatch the bear.
⁵²

The wolf was widespread in mainland Europe, and to a lesser extent in Britain, during the later Middle Ages.
⁵³
Fébus confirms this in the beginning of his chapter on the nature of the wolf, saying ‘Lou est assez commune beste, si ne me convient ja dire de sa faisson, quar pou de genz sont qui bien n'en aient veu'.
⁵⁴
Medieval man had an ambivalent attitude towards the wolf; peasants feared and hated the beast as it was a public danger to stock and human life whereas hunters appreciated its natural abilities. The wolf's strength, speed, strong scent and self-confidence made it an interesting and challenging quarry.
⁵⁵
The wolf was also a dangerous and cunning beast to hunt. Wolf hunting was complex, required thought and proper preparation, and according to John Cummins, it also presented ‘an economic insouciance beyond the possibilities of the average yeoman'.
⁵⁶
Thus the considerable outlay necessary for successful wolf hunting in itself made the sport an aristocratic preserve. Included in
The Boke of Huntyng
as a beast of venery,
⁵⁷
the wolf must have qualified on its sporting potential alone as its flesh is totally inedible.

Gaston Fébus rated the wolf highly, giving it far more folio space in his book than the hare, but then he admired the strength and fighting qualities of quarry in preference to their social values.
The Master of Game
places the wolf between the wild boar and fox in chapter order, as does Fébus, but Edward omits the later chapters on hunting and trapping the wolf, probably for reasons of snobbery. The large amount of space allocated to the wolf in both
Les livres du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio
and
Livre de chasse
indicates its high status as a quarry species hunted by the nobility in France.
⁵⁸

In Germany the attitude towards wolves appears more practical than sporting. Wolves were regarded as vermin with no legal restrictions on their hunting and trapping. This was probably a response to the threat posed by their large numbers in rural Germany. They are briefly mentioned in some German sources, but as Dalby comments ‘these animals were not normally chased by noble sportsmen, in Mediaeval Germany'.
⁵⁹
Wolves appear occasionally in manuscript illustrations, such as in the February
bas de page
of the Calendar of MS Egerton 1146, in which a wolf is being pulled down by hounds, the hunter galloping up to despatch the beast with his drawn sword.
⁶⁰

In England, the Norman kings enjoyed wolf hunting on horseback with hounds and wolf hunting tenures were common, probably surviving for some time beyond the wolf. For example, in 1370 Thomas Engaine held lands in Pitchley on condition that he provide dogs (wolfhounds) to be used in the hunting and destruction of wolves and foxes; in 1427 Robert Plumpton held wolf-hunt land in Nottingham ‘for the winding of a horn' and wolf chasing in Sherwood Forest.
⁶¹
Edward I organised a largely successful campaign to exterminate wolves, employing a certain Peter Corbet to take and destroy all the wolves in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire.
⁶²
Records confirm the presence of wolves at Marske, west of Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire, until 1369. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was for a time Lord of the Swale Marches in Yorkshire, and he hunted a vast chase stretching from Wensleydale to Stanemoor (
sic
) which abounded with wolves and great herds of red deer. Traditionally, John of Gaunt is credited with personally slaying the last wild wolf in England, near Leeds.
⁶³
The final documentary evidence in England mentioning wolves dates from 1394 to 1396, and records that the monks of Whitby were paid 10
s
9
d
‘for tawing 14 wolfskins', indicating the survival of wolf packs on the North Yorkshire Moors. It is likely that wolves were hunted to near extinction in England by the end of the fourteenth century with odd pockets of breeding pairs holding out in the remoter areas of the northern hills and forests. In Scotland they survived until the early seventeenth century; the last positive record is of an enormous bounty of £6 13
s
4
d
paid for a wolf slain in Sutherland in 1621. In Ireland there were wolves until the early eighteenth century, the last ones being killed in County Cork between 1709 and 1710.
⁶⁴
In the seventeenth century they must have still posed a considerable threat to stock and humans, as the Irish Council offered cash bounties on wolves: £6 for a bitch, £5 for a dog and 40
s
for a cub.
⁶⁵