Their original meanings now obscure, some terms continue in more general use today: when hawks drink, they bowse or booze. Tid-bits are scraps of meat proffered to a falcon; a cadge is a field-perch; a haggard is a wild adult falcon and thus difficult to train. And while the term might be more familiarly applied to exclusive, eye-wideningly expensive properties in central London, mews were originally built to house birds of prey while they moulted in the summer months.
In a 1940s photograph, the American falconer Steve Gatti exercises his peregrine to the lure.
Falconers claim Shakespeare as one of their own. This engraving from J. E. Harting’s 1864 Ornithology of Shakespeare playfully adds a falcon to the famous Chandos portrait.
FALCONRY FURNITURE
Despite the arcane terminology of falconry, its equipment, or furniture, is relatively simple and eminently practical. Perhaps the most familiar of all is the thin leather hood. Popped over the falcon’s head it blocks out all light, and apart from its role in the hunting field, its judicious use keeps half-trained or highly strung birds from alarming sights. Hoods come in many designs – Indian goatskin hoods; soft Arab hoods; stiff, heavy Dutch hoods with coloured side-panels and a wool and feather plume. Modern artisan-falconers have created moulded and beautifully finished hybrid designs that are far lighter and more comfortable for the falcon than many of the ornamented older styles.
Falcons are normally held on the leather-gloved left fist. Arab falconers carry them on a woven mangalah, or cuff. The reasons for holding falcons on the left fist are obscure. Medieval clerics unsurprisingly saw it has having mystical significance. According to one manuscript, falcons are carried on the left hand in order that they should fly to the right to seek their prey:
the left represents temporal things, the right everything that is eternal. On the left sit those who rule over temporal things; all those who in the depths of their hearts desire eternal things fly to the right. There the hawk will catch the dove; that is, he who turns towards the good will receive the grace of the Holy Spirit.10
The trailing leg-straps by which the falconer holds the falcon are called sabq in Arabic, and are made of plaited silk or cord. Their Western equivalents, jesses, are made of soft leather. At home their ends are attached to a metal swivel to stop them twisting, and the swivel in turn to a leash. This leash is tied to a perch or block using the falconer’s knot – for obvious reasons easily tied and untied with one hand.
For centuries, small silver or brass bells attached to the falcon’s legs or tail have been used to locate the falcon while out hawking, their plangent tones audible for half a mile or more downwind. In the 1970s American falconer-engineers developed a tiny radio transmitter that could be attached to a falcon’s tail or leg. With a range of scores of miles, telemetry systems have dramatically reduced the possibility of losing a falcon. Telemetry was greeted with enthusiasm by falconers in the Gulf States, for whom falconry continues to be a vibrant and popular cultural practice. Conversely, many European falconers viewed this new invention with distaste. A minority pursuit compared to more modern hunting methods, European falconers have tended to validate and define falconry in terms of its rich cultural tradition and long history. They commonly assert historical precedent as a legitimating device, and threats to its established, traditional modes of practice tend to be perceived as a threat to falconry itself. Yet these anti-modernist misgivings seem to have been largely overcome. Today many falcons are flown with a modern radio transmitter attached almost invisibly to the tail – often right next to a Lahore brass bell, manufactured in Pakistan to a design of immense antiquity. Plus ça change.
A plate from Diderot and d’Alembert’s 1751 Encyclopédie showing the mews (above) and falconry equipment (below): a screen perch, two Dutch hoods, a rufter hood, turf blocks and a cadge for carrying falcons into the field.
In the United Arab Emirates, falconer Khameez calms a young falcon in training as he picks it up from its wakr, or perch.
TRAINING FALCONS
The falconer’s first impression of a new falcon, sitting hooded on her perch, is one of unalloyed wildness. The slightest touch or sound and she’ll puff out her feathers and hiss like a snake. Falcons are trained entirely through positive reinforcement. They must never be punished; as solitary creatures, they fail to understand hierarchical dominance relations familiar to social creatures such as dogs or horses. As Lord Tweedsmuir wrote in the 1950s, secure in his impression that falcons were an avian aristocracy:
No hawk regards you as a master. At the best, they regard you as an ally, who will provide for them and care for them and introduce them to some good hunting. You only have to look at the proud, imperious face of a peregrine falcon to realise that. In reality you become their slave.11
Despite Tweedsmuir’s characterization of the falcon as a death-dealing dominatrix, falcons can become rather affectionate. In the Gulf States, some falcons jump from their indoor perches and run to the falconer should he call their names. British falconer and author Philip Glasier had a tiercel peregrine that slept on his bookshelf and jumped onto his bed in the morning to wake him by nibbling his ear; another British falconer, Frank Illingworth, had a peregrine that took rides around the garden on the back of his dog; gyrfalcons enjoy playing with tennis balls and footballs.
So how does one train a falcon? Early modern authors capture the key perfectly. Through the falconer’s constant attention to the bird’s ‘stomacke’: that is, her appetite and physical condition. Indeed, in the most basic sense, falcons are trained through their stomachs – through associating the falconer with food. If a falcon isn’t hungry, is too high, she’ll see little point either in chasing quarry or returning to the falconer. Conversely, should she be a little too thin, or low in condition, she’ll lack the energy to give that palpable sense of inner urgency in flight that is the watchword of truly exciting falconry. The conditioning of a falcon revolves around a terrifying number of variables: the weather, the time of year, the stage in training, the type of food the falcon has eaten and how much exercise she has had. Falconers assess condition in a variety of ways. Some are quantitative: daily weighing, for example. Others involve tacit knowledges built from years of experience: feeling the amount of muscle around a falcon’s breast-bone, the bird’s posture and demeanour, the way she carries her feathers, even the expression on her face.
Knight with a falcon, from a 15th-century copy of the Codex Capodilista, tempera on vellum.
Taming and training a falcon is a serious and skilled business. Every autumn, falconers bring new falcons to their sheikhs and princes in the Gulf States. In long meetings, the quality and condition of each falcon are assessed, appraised and measured with fine exactitude. Falcons are tamed rapidly in this falconry culture; they are kept constantly on their falconer’s fist, or on perches nearby, totally immersed in everyday human life. While initially stressful, this method quickly promotes an unflappable tameness in the falcon. A similar method, termed ‘waking’, was commonplace in early modern Europe: the new falcon was kept constantly on someone’s fist until it overcame its fears sufficiently to sleep.
Western falcon training today is a far slower process. The untamed falcon is initially handled only while the falconer offers her food on the fist. Soon she associates the falconer with food and jumps to the fist from her perch. The distance she jumps for food is gradually extended and she soon flies to the falconer – first on a light line known as a creance and then free. In both Arab and Western falconry, free-flying falcons are trained to return to a lure, but more creative methods of retrieving falcons have existed: falconer Roger Upton recounts a story from the days when the only lights in the Saudi desert were campfires. Back then, one Bedouin falconer made sure he only ever fed his falcon right next to the fire. When this falcon became lost during hawking expeditions, she flew back, even at night, to the huge fire her anxious falconer built as a beacon for her return. Every spring he released her in the Hejaz mountains so she could breed, an
d every October he returned to the mountains, built a big fire and re-trapped her.
Highly ornate lures and hoods from the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519).
‘NOTHING SO FREQUENT’
For more than 500 years, falconry was immensely popular across Europe, Asia and the Arab world. It carried enormous cultural capital. Historian Robin Oggins describes early modern European falconry as an almost perfect example of conspicuous consumption; ‘expensive, time consuming and useless, and in all three respects [serving] to set its practitioners apart as a class’.12 Expensive it was. Extraordinarily so. In thirteenth-century England a falcon could cost as much as half the yearly income of a knight. Four hundred years later, Robert Burton maintained that there was ‘nothing so frequent’ as falconry, that ‘he is nobody, that in the season hath not a hawk on his fist. A great art, and many books written on it.’13 Some European gentlemen hawked every day, even on campaign or when conducting official business. Henry VIII hawked both morning and afternoon if the weather was fine, and would have drowned in a bog while out hawking had his falconer not pulled him out. Medieval Spanish falconer Pero López de Ayala considered falconry an essential part of a princely education, for it prevented sickness and damnation and demanded patience, endurance and skill. For much of its long European history, falconry was considered to exemplify youth and the active life, and, like all elite pursuits, it was ripe for satire. In his 1517 work De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur, the Tudor diplomat and man of letters Richard Pace put these words into the mouth of a nobleman: ‘It becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn nicely, to hunt skilfully and elegantly carry and train a hawk! But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics.’14
Despite falconry’s opposition to the via contemplativa, clergy were keen falconers too. D’Arcussia suggested that ‘more devout souls’ should go hawking in order to raise spirits ‘brought down from previous vigour by continual study or by having too many concerns’.15 The councils of 506, 507 and 518 strictly forbade priests and bishops to practise falconry, but the clergy deliberately misinterpreted the word devots (devotees) so that the term would not apply to them. Pope Leo X was such an inveterate falconer that he would hawk in any weather. D’Arcussia described him as ‘so sharp . . . a sportsman that he would not spare from his wrath anyone . . . who failed to observe any of the duties of Falconry’.16 William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, complained that nuns taking their falcons into chapel with them interfered with the service, and it’s said that an enraged medieval bishop of Ely stormed back into the cathedral and threatened to excommunicate the culprit after he discovered his falcons had been stolen from the vestry.
THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen infamously led a Holy Crusade even after he’d been excommunicated. His contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the wonder of the world. Modern falconers know him familiarly as ‘Fred the second’, consider him the world’s greatest-ever falconer and still glean his massive thirteenth-century work De arte venandi cum avibus, ‘On the art of hunting with birds’, for practical hints. Eastern falconry techniques and technologies were imported into Europe through his court; his interpreter Theodore of Antioch translated Arab and Persian falconry works into Latin, and the emperor employed Arab, English, Spanish, German and Italian falconers ‘at great expense’. He wrote:
We . . . summoned from the four corners of the earth masters in the practice of the art of falconry. We entertained these experts in our domains, meantime seeking their opinions, weighting the importance of their knowledge, and endeavouring to retain in memory the more valuable of their words and deeds.17
Falconry techniques and knowledges have been traded between disparate cultures for millennia. European knights took falcons with them on the Crusades, and learned how to hood falcons from their foes. In the early twelfth century, in what is now Syria, falconer Usamah Ibn-Muquidh complained that because his hunting land was now adjacent to Frankish territory, his falconry expeditions needed extra horses, attendants and weapons. Falconry’s symbolic system was largely shared between both sides, and so it was able to articulate power-struggles and conflicts in ways immediately comprehensible to either. A besieged Richard I sent an envoy to Saladin to request food for his starving falcons; Saladin immediately delivered baskets of his best poultry for the falcons alone. During the siege of Acre in 1190 a prized gyrfalcon belonging to King Philip I broke its leash and flew straight to the top of the city walls. Philip was horrified. An envoy requesting that the falcon be returned was refused, as was a second envoy accompanied by trumpets, ensigns and heralds, offering 1,000 gold crowns to Saladin in exchange for the errant falcon.
A 19th-century rendering of Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215–50) and one of his falconers.
Throughout the early modern period, travelling European merchants and diplomats encountered falconry traditions that awed and bewildered them. Marco Polo was familiar with falconry, but its scale in Central Asia astonished him. With bated pen he explained that the falconry expeditions of the Great Khan involved a retinue of ten thousand falconers – a figure not to be taken literally, but surely indicating a sizeable army. On hawking expeditions the Great Khan was borne by up to four elephants. On their backs stood a pavilion furnished inside with gold braided cloth and outside with lion’s skins. ‘Such facilities’, he wrote, ‘are required by the Kublai Khan on these hunting excursions also, since he is very much bothered by gout in the feet’:
In this pavilion he always has with him twelve of the best gyrfalcons and twelve of his particularly beloved honour bearers for diversion and for company. The riders beside the Khan inform him when in the vicinity of cranes or other birds flying by. He then raises the curtain of the pavilion, and when he has seen the game, he casts the falcons, which hunt the cranes and overcome them after a long flight. The Khan lies on a comfortable lounge, and the sight of this gives him, as well as the gentlemen serving him and the riders surrounding him, great pleasure.18
Persian kings were so enamoured of falconry that they trained sparrows and starlings to catch butterflies, recorded Sir Richard Burton. In the late seventeenth century, English traveller Sir John Chardin enthused about the ability of Persian falconers. One could see them ‘all year round in the City and the Country . . . going backwards and forward with a Hawk on their Hand’. Chardin heard of some stranger and less sociable traditions here. It seemed that falcons were once commonly taught to assault men. ‘They say’, he wrote in wonderment, ‘that there are still such Birds in the King’s Bird-House. I have not seen any of them, but I hear’d that Aly-couly-can, Governour of Tauris, whom I was particularly acquainted with, could not forbear diverting himself with that dangerous and cruel sport, tho’ with the loss of his friends.’19
A late 15th-century gouache of a mounted falconer with white gyrfalcon.
And falconry’s reach was extraordinary. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, falcon-traders brought falcons to the French court from Flanders, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, Spain, Turkey, Alexandria, the Barbary States and India. The fifth Earl of Bedford imported hawks from as far afield as North Africa, Nova Scotia and New England. In many European countries only noblemen were allowed to use native falcons. In sixteenth-century England, a thriving smuggling trade developed after foreign hawks were classed as luxuries and were subject to an import duty of a shilling in the pound.
But by the end of the seventeenth century, falconry’s popularity was waning in Europe. Louis XIII was exceptional: so obsessed with falconry that he hawked most days of the week, he even composed a libretto for his ballet La Merlaison describing the delights of hawking for blackbirds and thrushes. The use of falcons as diplomatic gifts gradually faded in the eighteenth century, and falconry’s connection with royalty and nobility won it no favours after the French Revolution. Landowners converted their mews to other u
ses; new sports had become fashionable: shooting, fox-hunting and horse-racing. By the nineteenth century European falconry had become the pursuit of a very few individuals who had banded together into falconry clubs – and of eccentrics, among whom was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s father. Toulouse-Lautrec senior used to walk about the streets of Albi with shirt-tails flapping and falcon on his fist. ‘Not wishing, doubtless, to deprive his raptors of the succour of religion’, wrote Henri, ‘he would give them holy water to drink.’20
IMPERIAL FALCONRY
But falconry was still practised elsewhere. In 1913 the American writer William Coffin explained that while in Europe ‘it exists . . . only as a fad of a few medieval-minded sportsmen, in the East, where the art of falconry perhaps originated, it flourishes still’.21 Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers often used falconry’s persistence in non-Western cultures as evidence that such cultures either lagged far behind the West or, indeed, existed entirely outside the progress of history. And falconry had further roles to play in the age of Empire. Still the sport of elite or ruling classes in many countries, it seemed to offer a global naturalization of social hierarchy. Hunting-crazy officers in nineteenth-century British India took up falconry and employed local falconers. Not only did they enjoy the sport, but they saw it as a means of reinforcing their elite social status and winning loyalty from Indian soldiers under their command. In the North Punjab the Regiment of Guides (Cavalry and Infantry) kept a regimental establishment of saker falcons; officers flew them at ravine deer and houbara.22 Lieut. Col. E. Delmé-Radcliffe of the 88th Connaught Rangers famously responded to the first cries of his newborn child with the exclamation ‘Good God! There’s a cat at my falcons!’23 Lieut. Col. E. H. Cobb took up hawking while political agent in Gilgit in the 1940s because a shortage of shotgun cartridges precluded partridge shooting. But to his delight he soon discovered that in falconry at least ‘the local Chiefs readily supported the British Officers’.24 ‘From time immemorial’, he wrote happily, falconry ‘has been considered to be a princely sport and nowhere can it be practised to such advantage as by the feudal chieftains of the Hindu Kush . . . for they have the power to control large areas of falconry ideally suited to falconry and also to command a large army of falconers.’ He added that as far as falconry goes, ‘the Asiatic methods are very similar to our own’.25
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