The Pleasures of the Chase circa 1735 to circa 1831

Abstract

In 1733, an anonymous country squire published An Essay on Hunting, lamenting how urban luxury had corrupted English youth who lost those ‘useful Hours that our Fathers employed on Horse-back in the Fields’ ‘betwixt a Stinking Pair of Sheets’.² Patriotism and natural science were both nurtured by the pursuit of the hare, and England would soon succumb to ‘Degeneracy’ unless the ‘Manly Exercise’ of hunting were once again to become popular. The anonymous squire need not have worried, since for the next hundred years the hunting field would be constantly reinvented as a proving ground of English manhood. The rise of modern fox-hunting, as distinct from other forms of chase, can be understood as an expression of the ‘new patriotic, patrician machismo’, as a ‘conscious and aggressive effort on the part of the landed élite to assert its status as arbiter and guardian of the national culture,’ as Linda Colley puts it.³

The persevering speed and fortitude of the game, the constantly improving high-mettled excellence of the hounds, the invincible spirit of the horses, and the unrestrained ardour of their riders, have given it a decided superiority over every other sport or amusement ever yet known to the people of this kingdom. Its salutary and permanent effect upon the human frame has been so long self-evident, that it appears to be too firmly established ever to be shaken even by time itself; the superlative pleasure of every variegated scene, the diversities of the country, the rapturous enjoyment of the aggregate, and the ecstacy with which it is embraced by its infinity of devotees, have exalted the estimation and excellence of this sport to a system of perfection never before known: in fact, so very much so, that some of the most opulent, the most eminent, and the most learned characters are principally and personally engaged in it, in almost every county from one extremity of the kingdom to the other.

[William Taplin], The Sportsman’s Cabinet, Vol. 2 (1804)

Our hunting fathers told the story

Of the sadness of the creatures,

Pitied the limits and the lack

Set in their finished features

W.H. Auden, ‘Our Hunting Fathers’ (ll. 1–4)¹