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finest of all the French works on hunting. The count was well known to Froissart, who writes of him and his unhappy son in his famous "Chronicles." He is said to have possessed 800 couples of hounds and dogs, four at least of which-Tristan, Hector, Brun and Rolland-came from England. The Comte de Foix's hounds were magnificently lodged, and the wonderful illustrations show with what infinite care they were looked after. The well-known "Maister of Game," written by Edward of Langley, Duke of York, for the use of Henry V, when Prince of Wales, was little more than a translation of the " Livre de Chasse." Turbervile's" Booke of Hunting," published in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1576) is excellently illustrated in the costumes of the period. But the letterpress is no more than a free translation of "La Vénerie," written by Jaques de Foilloux in 1561, with further excerpts from Gaston de Foix and other writers. Turbervile's book, like that of the Comte de Foix, shows with what care hounds were lodged and tended. There is an excellent picture of the kennel, showing even the very straw-posts against which hounds could rub and clean themselves.

The Englishman deals here and there with fox-hunting, but his methods are taken mainly from the French work. The fox can be attracted by a trail (trayne) to a stand, where he may be killed in an evening with the cross-bow. "The hunting of the Foxe," says Turbervile, " is pleasant, for he maketh an excellent crye, because his sent is very hot, and he never flieth farre before the houndes, but holdeth the strongest coverts . . and when he perceiveth that he may no longer endure nor stande up before the houndes, then will he take the earth and will trust to his castles there." Hunting the fox to his earth was, as I have already hinted, the real foxhunt of those days; our ancestors having plenty of deer with which to amuse themselves, and not having yet learned the delights of a rousing fox-chase in the open.

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Digging was a real art, and Turbervile gives the materials thus: "The instruments to dig withal must be these, sharpe pointed Spades, Howes or Mattocks and Pickaxes, a Colerake and a payre of Clampes or Holdfasts, Shovells both shodde and bare, an Axe and a sharpe paring Spade." Full directions follow, and terriers were always in readiness for the fray. "In this order of battell, a nobleman or gentleman may march to beseige the Foxe and Badgerd, in their strongest holes and castles. And VOL. 246. NO. 502.

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may break their Casmats (Casemates), Platformes, Parapets, and worke to them with Mynes and Counter-Mynes, until they get their Skynnes, to make furres and myttens." If foxes were taken from the earth alive, with the tongs or clamps, then, says Turbervile, "put them into a sacke or poke, to hunt with your Terriers in your gardens or close courtes, at your pleasure. He that will be present at such pastimes, may do well to be booted, for I have lent a Foxe or Badgerd ere nowe, a piece of my hose, and the skin and fleshe for companie, which he never restored againe. Let these few precepts suffice for the hunting of Foxes and Badgerds."

Such was Tudor fox-hunting. Nevertheless hounds, even in very early days, when the fox was thus hunted and destroyed as vermin, were maintained for the pursuit of these animals. In the Wardrobe Accounts of the time of Edward I, for instance, there is a payment of £9 3s. to the King's Foxhunter for the keep of foxhounds at d. a day apiece. The season was a short one. From the "Charta de Forest" it seems that foxhunting then began on Christmas Day and ended at the Feast of Annunciation (March 25th)-three months only! Hare hunting then opened at Michaelmas and finished at the end of February. Hart (or stag) from July 8th to Holyrood Day (September 14th); Hind, September 14th to Candlemas (February 2nd). It is difficult to say why the fox-hunting period was so short. It is to be noted that in the time of Elizabeth fox-hunting differed somewhat in the north of England. There the “Gazehound" (greyhound) was employed to hunt fox as well as hare in open country," wherewith they (the followers) are more delighted than with the prey itself." Thus writes the learned Caius, whose " English Dogges was published in 1576.

By the time of James I, hunting was undergoing certain changes. The wolf had disappeared and wild boar were becoming rare, even in the more inaccessible parts of the country. In Wiltshire, for instance, then a very remote county, the last wild boar was slain by Sir Richard Grobham, in the reign of Elizabeth, in Grovely Woods near Wilton, still even now a splendid woodland. Grovely was then part of the great forest tract known as Cranborne Chase, which extended to Warminster and beyond. The handsome tomb of Sir Richard and his lady may be seen in Wishford Church, in the delightful Wylye valley. Wild red deer and fallow deer, which in the early years of Henry VIII

were very numerous, were a hundred years later steadily declining, and by the reign of Charles I were nothing like so plentiful as they had been. It is significant that Charles I, two days only before the battle of Naseby, was hunting a fallow buck from Fawsley Park (the seat of the Knightleys), near Daventry, a locality nowadays so well known to followers of the Pytchley and Grafton foxhounds. This was, no doubt, a park deer and not a wild fallow buck.

The growing scarcity of red deer, except in the wilder parts of the country, as for instance Exmoor, Dartmoor, the New Forest and the Lakeland fells, was sadly hastened by poachers during the troubled period of the Civil War. The savage game laws of the early kings had fallen much into desuetude, and while lords, knights, gentry and commoners were at each other's throats during the struggle between Charles I and his parliament, poachers, deer-stealers, and soldiers-especially parliamentary soldiers—all hastened the downfall of the wild red deer.

With this decline, the great landowners and squires of England began to look about them for fresh quarry, especially for an animal that would yield them a longer and straighter chase than that of the circling hare. They pitched at length, in the reign of Charles II, on the fox, and thenceforth fox-hunting proper, as we understand it, began to enter upon its long and gallant life. That indefatigable hunter, James II, was already pursuing the fox in his brother's reign. Thomas Fownes, a very famous sportsman, who bought the estate of Stapleton-Iwerne, County Dorset, in 1654, maintained a pack of foxhounds there for many years and is said to have bred the best hounds in England. This pack afterwards went to Mr. Bowes, in Yorkshire, and no doubt became the progenitors of many good foxhounds in the north. It is worthy of note that the estate of Stapleton-Iwerne was in 1745 purchased by Julines Beckford, father of the famous author of "Thoughts on Hunting." In these pleasant Dorset fields, and the neighbouring Cranborne Chase, Peter Beckford hunted hare and fox and perfected himself to such excellent purpose in the pursuit of both animals.

In 1679 there were maintained at Charlton, near Goodwood❤ two packs of foxhounds, one of them belonging to the Duke of

*"Records of the Old Charlton Hunt." By the Earl of March.

Monmouth, the other to Lord Grey of Wark. Grey was the man who so badly let down the Duke in his ill-fated attempt on the throne of England in 1685. Monmouth, who was a keen sportsman, skilled in all athletic exercises, and was wont to stay with Lord Grey at Uppark, near Charlton, used to say “that when he was king he could come and keep his court there.” The master and manager of these hounds was Mr. Roper, a Kentish gentleman, brother-in-law of Squire Butler, of Amberley, M.P. for Arundel. Roper retired to France during the brief reign of James II, but returned some time after the revolution and established a fresh pack of foxhounds in conjunction with the Duke of Bolton. This pack soon attracted the notice of many distinguished sportsmen, including the Earl of Burlington, "the Vetruvius of his day," who built at Charlton a banqueting hall. The hunting company included the Marquis of Hartington, the Earl of Halifax, the Duke of Richmond, Lord March, the Duke of Montrose, Lord N. Poulett, Lords William and Henry Beauclerk, General Compton and the Lords Forester, Hervey, Harcourt and others. William III and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, then the king's guest in England, came down and enjoyed some foxhunting proper, and the fame of Charlton and its sport spread rapidly. Old Mr. Roper carried on until 1722, when, having reached his eighty-fifth year, he died, after a long and vigorous career, in the field near Findon, just as a fox was found. The Duke of Bolton remained Master of the Charlton Hunt till 1728, when, having married Lavinia Fenton, the famous actress, then playing in the "Beggar's Opera," he seems to have lost his zest for hunting and gave up.

In 1720 the second Duke of Richmond acquired Goodwood, and thenceforward for many years took the keenest interest in the Charlton Hunt. He became master of the hounds in 1728, and during his reign sport was extraordinarily good. The most famous chase of this period was the historic hunt of January 26, 1738. The hounds, finding at 7.45 a.m. in East Dean Wood, ran for ten hours and killed their fox at 5.50 p.m. on the Arundel rivera great performance. Out of a distinguished company, which included the Duke of Richmond, the Duke of St. Albans, Lord Harcourt, Lord Ossulston, Lord H. Beauclerk, Sir H. Liddell, Ralph Jennison, Esq., Master of the King's Buckhounds, and others who saw the find, only three, the Duke of Richmond,

Brigadier-General Hawley and Billy Ives, Yeoman Pricker to the Royal Pack, were up at the kill. Of these, General Hawley is thus mentioned in a curious MS. account of the hunt, which, framed and glazed, hung for many years in a farmhouse at Funtington: "To the immortal honour of 17 stone and at least as many campaigns!" Hawley was the man who, eight years later, lost the battle of Falkirk to Prince Charlie's Highland army.

There are clear evidences that at this period-the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century-foxhunting proper was making its way in other parts of the kingdom. George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, after destroying a noble patrimony by his long career of ruinous follies, retired to a Yorkshire estate at Helmsley, in 1685, and there, in the country now known as the Sinnington, maintained a pack of foxhounds which occasionally hunted deer. He was then nearly at the end of his tether, and died of a chill at Kirkby Moorside, in 1687. Pope has described the miserable end of this once great noble :

In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floors of plaister and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed but repair'd with straw,
With tape-ty'd curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from the bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies! alas, how changed from him
That life of pleasure and that soul of whim !*

Addison, in a curious article in The Freeholder (1715), pokes fun at the Northumbrian Jacobite foxhunters, one of whom had arrived in town "in order to give his testimony for one of the rebels, whom he knew to be a very fair sportsman." In another number of The Freeholder he represents the Tory foxhunter as complaining that there had been no good weather since the Revolution, and expatiating on "the fine weather they used to have in Charles the Second's reign."

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*It is still a matter of dispute whether Buckingham died at an inn or private house in Kirkby Moorside. His body, subsequently buried in Westminster Abbey, was almost certainly embalmed in a house next to the King's Head Inn. There is a very curious entry in the Parish Register, evidently in the Yorkshire vernacular; it runs as follows: "Burial. 1687. 1687. April 17th. George Viluas, Lord dooke of bookingham." This refers doubtless to the internal parts of the deceased Duke, which had burial at Kirkby Moorside.

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