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Table of Contents

Early Features of the Country—The Hawk an acquisition to Sportsmen—Hawk aeries—Hawks according to Degrees—Brook and other kinds of Hawking—Hawking and Hunting—A Shropshire Historian’s Charge against the Conqueror—Bishops and their Clergy as much given to the Sport as Laymen—The Rector of Madeley—The Merrie Days, &c.

Diversified by wood and moor, by lake and sedgy pool, dense flocks of wild fowl of various kinds at one time afforded a profusion of winged game; and the keen eye and sharp talons of the hawk no doubt pointed it out as a desirable acquisition to the sportsman long ere he succeeded in pressing it into his service; indeed it must have been a marked advance in the art when he first availed himself of its instinct. Old records supply materials for judging of the estimation in which this bird was held by our ancestors, it being not uncommon to find persons holding tenements or paying fines in lieu of service to the lord of the fee by rendering a sore sparrow-hawk—a hawk in its first year’s plumage. Stringent restrictions upon the liberty the old Roman masters of the country allowed with respect to wild fowl were imposed; the act of stealing a hawk, and that of taking her eggs, being punishable by imprisonment for a year and a day. The highborn, with birds bedecked with hoods of silk, collars of gold, and bells of even weight, but of different sound, appeared according to their rank—a ger-falcon for a king, a falcon gentle for a prince, a falcon of the rock for a duke, a janet for a knight, a merlin for a lady, and a lamere for a squire. From close-pent manor and high-walled castle, to outspread plain and expansive lake or river bank, the gentry of the day sought perditch and plover, heron and wild fowl, many of which the fowling-piece has since driven from their haunts, and some—as the bustard and the bittern, the egret and the crane—into extinction.

Mention is often made of hawk aeries, as at Little Wenlock, and in connection with districts within the jurisdiction of Shropshire forests, which seem to have been jealously guarded. The use of the birds, too, appears to have been very much restricted down to the time that the forest-charter, enabling all freemen to ply their hawks, was wrung from King John, when a sport which before had been the pride of the rich became the privilege of the poor. It was at one time so far a national pastime that an old writer asserts that “every degree had its peculiar hawk, from the emperor down to the holy-water clerk.” [10] The sport seems to have divided itself into field-hawking, pond-hawking, brook-and-river hawking; into hawking on horseback and hawking on foot. In foot hawking the sportsman carried a pole, with which to leap the brook, into which he sometimes fell, as Henry VIII. did upon his head in the mud, in which he would have been stifled, it is said, had not John Moody rescued him; whether this Moody was an ancestor of the famous Whipper-in or not we cannot say.

Evidence is not altogether wanting to show that during the earlier history of the Marsh period, the gigantic elk (Cervus giganteus), with his wide-spreading antlers, visited, if he did not inhabit, the flatter portions of the Willey country; and it is probable that the wild ox equally afforded a mark for the arrow of the ancient inhabitants of the district in those remote times, which investigators have distinguished as the Pile-building, the Stone, and the Bronze periods, when society was in what has been fittingly called the hunter-state. At any rate, we know that at later periods the red deer, the goat, and the boar, together with other “beasts,” were hunted, and that both banks of the Severn resounded with the deep notes of “veteran hounds.” Of the two pursuits, Prior in his day remarks, “Hawking comes near to hunting, the one in the ayre as the other on the earth, a sport as much affected as the other, by some preferred.” That the chase was the choice pastime of monarchs and nobles before the Conquest, and the favourite sport of “great and worthy personages” after, we learn from old authors, who, like William Tivici, huntsman to Edward I., have written elaborate descriptive works, supplying details of the modes pursued, and of the kinds of dog which were used.

Our Saxon ancestors no doubt brought with them from the great forests of Germany not only their institutions but the love of sport of their forefathers, pure and simple. With them the forests appear to have been open to the people; and, although the Danes imposed restrictions, King Canute, by his general code of laws, confirmed to his subjects full right to hunt on their own lands, providing they abstained from the forests, the pleasures of which he appears to have had no inclination generally to share with his subjects. He established in each county four chief foresters, who were gentlemen or thanes, and these had under them four yeomen, who had care of the vert and venison; whilst under these again were two officers of still lower rank, who had charge of the vert and venison in the night, and who did the more servile work. King William curtailed many of the old forest privileges, and limited the sports of the people by prohibiting the boar and the hare, which Canute had allowed to be taken; and so jealous was he of the privileges of the chase that he is said to have ordained the loss of the eyes as the penalty for killing a stag. His Norman predilections were such that an old Shropshire historian, Ordericus Vitalis (born at Atcham), who was at one time chaplain to the Conqueror, charges him with depopulating whole parishes that he might satisfy his ardour for hunting. Prince Rufus, who inherited a love of the chase from his father, is made by a modern author to reply to a warning given him by saying:—

“I love the chase, ’tis mimic war,

And the hollow bay of hound;

The heart of the poorest Norman

Beats quicker at the sound.”

King John stretched the stringent forest laws of the period to the utmost, till the love of liberty and of sport together, still latent among the people, compelled him to submit to an express declaration of their respective rights. By this declaration all lands afforested by Henry I. or by Richard were to be disafforested, excepting demesne woods of the crown; and a fine or imprisonment for a year and a day, in case of default, was to be substituted for loss of life and members.

To prevent disputes with regard to the king’s forests, it was also agreed that their limits should be defined by perambulations; but as a check upon the boldness of offenders in forests and chaces, and warrens, and upon the disposition of juries to find against those who were appointed to keep such places, it was deemed necessary on the other hand to give protection to the keepers.

Large sums were lavished by kings and nobles on the kennels and appliances necessary for their diversions. Nor were these costly establishments confined to the laity. Bishops, abbots, and high dignitaries of the Church, could match their hounds and hawks against those of the nobles, and they equally prided themselves upon their skill in woodcraft.

That the clergy were as much in favour of these amusements as the laity, appears from an old Shropshire author, Piers Plowman (Langland), who satirically gave it as his opinion that they thought more of sport than of their flocks, excepting at shearing time; and likewise from Chaucer, who says, “in hunting and riding they are more skilled than in divinity.” That Richard de Castillon, an early rector of Madeley, was a sportsman appears from the fact that when Henry III. was in Shrewsbury in September, 1267, concluding a treaty with Llewellyn, and settling sundry little differences with the monks and burgesses there, he granted him license to hunt “in the royal forest of Madeley,” then a portion of that of the Wrekin. In 1283 also, King Edward permitted the Prior of Wenlock to have a park at Madeley, to fence out a portion of the forest, and to form a haia there for his deer. It has been said that Walter, Bishop of Rochester, was so fond of sport, that at the age of fourscore he made hunting his sole employment. The Archdeacon of Richmond, at his initiation to the Priory of Bridlington, is reported to have been attended by ninety-seven horses, twenty-one dogs, and three hawks. Walter de Suffield, Bishop of Norwich, bequeathed by will his pack of hounds to the king; but the Abbot of Tavistock, who had also a pack, was commanded by his bishop about the same time to break it up. A famous hunter was the Abbot of Leicester, whose skill in the sport of hare hunting was so great, that we are told the king himself, his son Edward, and certain noblemen, paid him an annual pension that they might hunt with him. Bishop Latimer said: “In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me to shoot as to learn me any other thing, and so I think other men did their children. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body in my bow, and not draw with strength of arms as other nations do;” and the good bishop exclaims with the enthusiasm of a patriot, “It is a gift of God that He hath given us to excel all other nations withal; it hath been God’s instrument whereby He hath given us many victories over our enemies.”

Such were the “merrie days,” when the kennels of the country gentry contained all sorts of dogs, and their halls all sorts of skins, when the otter and the badger were not uncommon along the banks of Shropshire streams, and ere the fox had taken first rank on the sportsman’s list. An old “Treatise on the Craft of Hunting” first gives the hare, the herte, the wulf, and the wild boar. The author then goes on to say—

“But there ben other beastes five of the chase;

The buck the first, the second is the doe,

The fox the third, which hath ever hard grace,

The fourth the martyn, and the last the roe.”