Nineteenth Century Hunting
As forests and wild deer diminished in England, sportsmen took to the fox; Charles Chenevix Trench describes how hunting became the pastime of more varied social classes.
There is an ancient belief, questioned only in recent years, that hunting is good for the soul.
The Duke of York who was to die at Agincourt argued that when a hunting man came home tired from the chase, had wined and dined, washed his arms and legs ‘and peradventure his whole body’, he was in no mood for unwholesome thoughts and carnal pleasures.
It is certainly good for the body. ‘Live in the saddle,’ advised an eighteenth-century physician. ‘Despite all the vile stuff that finds its way down his throat, whoever heard of a bilious post-boy?’
Up to the end of the seventeenth century the stag was the quarry reserved for the aristocracy, the hare that of squires and farmers. But as the forests of England disappeared, and with them the wild deer, sportsmen discovered the virtues of the fox, notably that (as the Duke of York had earlier discovered) ‘he stinketh evermore’.
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