Medieval
Hunting
RICHARD ALMOND
To Anne, Rosamunde and Rohan
Front cover: LAT 1156 B f.163 November; deer hunting, from the Hours of Marguerite d’Orleans, 1426-38 by French School, (15th century) Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
First published in 2003
This edition published in 2011
The History Press
The Mill, Brimscombe Port
Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2012
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© Richard Almond 2003, 2011, 2012
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Original typesetting by The History Press
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
One
‘Delite’ and Other Functions
Two
‘Lordes to Honte’
Three
‘Bestis’ and ‘Crafte’
Four
Everyman
Five
Crossing the Barriers
Six
Medieval Dianas
Seven
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
In my research for this book, I have consulted hundreds of manuscripts and printed sources over a period of more than eleven years. Many of these sources feature in this publication. Obviously, over such a long period, I have received help, advice and comment from a large number of people: I wish to thank you all collectively. In addition, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Tony Pollard for reading this typescript and for his constant interest, sage advice and invaluable discussion on ‘things medieval’. For the revised edition of Medieval Hunting (2011) my grateful thanks to John Langton and Graham Jones of St John’s College, Oxford, for the most recent figures of forests and chases. Thanks also to Colin McKelvie for his expert comments on the habits of woodcock. Finally, but not least, I wish to thank my family for their encouragement, tolerance and unfailing belief in me as an author.
Foreword
Late-twentieth century historians, as a whole, disapproved of hunting. As a result they tended to underrate its significance in the medieval centuries. They would note its popularity, especially with the aristocracy, and pass on, regretting the frivolity (or the cruelty), to other weightier and worthier matters. Or, in the case of the common man hounded for poaching, highlight only his struggle against repression. Both focuses were misleading, for hunting was central to the lives of all classes, and enjoyed by all three estates and both sexes. In this splendid new examination of the subject, Richard Almond brings manuscript illustration, documentary sources and literary evidence together to lay bare the purposes, methods, customs and rituals of the pursuit of wild game as a shared culture.
Most of what writing there has been on hunting has focused on the aristocracy, understandably because the surviving sources were generated for their use and pleasure. Besides throwing new light on aristocratic hunting, especially the under-researched participation of women, Almond here does full justice to the hunting practised by the common man, which had its own skills and rituals. Inevitably, since aristocrats sought to preserve a monopoly of the best sport, hunting could be a source of social conflict. However, in the later Middle Ages, from which centuries the greater quantity of evidence survives, hunting was less divisive than either before or after. Broadly speaking, in an era of low population, there was enough game to go around. Social barriers were crossed not just in the organisation of the hunt, but also, as illustrations show, in the aristocratic knowledge and appreciation of general practice.
Nevertheless the boar and especially the deer, were the noble quarry. The aristocratic rituals and ceremonies developed in pursuit of the hart, the mature, male red deer, were of deep cultural significance on several levels. The chase was seen as a preparation for war, not only because it made men fit and hardy, but also because the hunter put himself at risk. Going over the tusks or the antlers for the kill was a moment of supreme danger. It was also a moment, as poets knew, erotically charged. Hunting was thus more than a pastime, a preparation for war, or part of the struggle for existence; it ritually re-enacted male domination. To be learned in venery was as essential an attribute of nobility as to be well-versed in chivalry.
What sets the book apart from earlier works on the subject is the skilled reading of the visual evidence, set against the poetic treatment of the topic and the information provided in the instructional manuals which guided aristocratic hunting. Almond is too good a cultural historian to assume that what illustrators were commissioned to show, poets composed for their audiences, or even instructors set down for the learner, can unquestioningly be taken as representations of reality, of what actually happened. It is one of the great strengths of this work that he continually probes into what might be a representation of the actuality and what of the ideal. What we know of medieval hunting is thus as much how men wanted it to be perceived as what it in practice entailed. But in itself the very representation is highly revealing of the medieval world view. This is a book that both redresses a gap in our understanding and, through its analysis of the evidence, especially the visual, opens up a new window on the medieval mind.
Professor Tony Pollard, 2003
Introduction
Hunting. One of the oldest activities of man and linked from the earliest times with gathering. Today, however, it is one of the most emotive words in the British Isles, immediately conjuring up stereotypical images of fox-hunting, regularly thrust at the public by the British media, hunt-supporters and the anti-hunting lobby. At the outset, therefore, it must be stated that this book is a scholarly study of hunting in the Middle Ages and of its place and functions in late medieval society. In the time-span with which this book primarily deals, the later medieval period and Renaissance (roughly from the early thirteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries), there were numerous methods of hunting and a wide variety of beasts and birds to hunt, many of which are no longer legitimate quarry species.
Hunting and hawking are an integral part of European culture and they have provided an immense wealth of written and illustrative material, much of it instructive, some humorous, some ludicrous and not a little of it ambiguous and requiring reading on several levels. All of this evidence, however, is interesting, whatever one’s views on modern hunting, and assists in recreating a picture of medieval life and society. Because it was an important part of everyday life, hunting was a feature of some schoolboy songs in the Middle Ages.1 Hunting still survives in a few children’s rhymes, notably ‘Bye Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a’ hunting, / Gone to get a rabbit skin, to wrap a Baby Bunting in’. On wider and higher literary levels, the works of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare all include passages about, and clear allusions to, hunting and hawking, as do those of many other writers of the period. This is not surprising; th
ese pastimes were part of their culture and everybody else’s, whatever their class or status. For those fortunate enough to be able to participate in the formal chase on horseback and in hawking, which was also pursued on horseback, there were a number of well-known instruction texts on quarry species, methodology, dress and correct behaviour. These didactic manuals and treatises make fascinating reading for anybody remotely interested in what country life was like and how the aristocracy and gentry behaved and even thought, many centuries ago. The illustrated heritage of hunting and hawking is, perhaps, by its very nature, more immediately fascinating. The evidence is overwhelming in variety and amount and includes fabulous illuminated manuscripts such as Books of Hours and psalters, panel paintings, altar pieces, paintings by famous artists, tapestries, wall-paintings, frescoes, stained and painted glass, tomb sculpture and wood-carvings such as misericords. It has the advantage of being virtually all in colour too, so in that respect alone is more empathic to the mind-picture of the period than black-and-white photographs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which inevitably conjure up images of a dull, drab, monochrome world. The medieval world was none of these things; the pictorial evidence grabs the imagination and presents a colourful and intensely romantic slice of history. Is this image accurate? It is not, but it does nevertheless form some part of the whole picture and all the evidence of hunting is vitally important in the clarification, assemblage and creation of a holistic image of the medieval world.
Confusions of terminology need to be clarified at this point. What was ‘hunting’ in the late medieval period and Renaissance? From the 1750s in England, when a Leicestershire landowner called Hugo Meynell began to raise faster breeds of foxhound,2 the term hunting has referred specifically to hunting live quarry with foxhounds, basset hounds, beagles, harriers, otter hounds or staghounds. With the invention of personal firearms which were capable of hitting moving or flying quarry, shooting evolved as a separate field sport in the British Isles. The ancient pastime (not occupation) of angling was already considered a separate sport. This division is not so in continental Europe, North America or most of the rest of the world, where hunting is used as a much more generic term which covers all varieties of hunting and shooting. A working definition of what I regard as medieval hunting is therefore necessary at this point. In order to try and accommodate the great wealth and variety of evidence from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, my parameters are necessarily wide: Hunting is the pursuit and taking of wild quarry, whether animal or bird, using any method or technique. Wilhelm Schlag, the author of the Summary and Commentary accompanying The Hunting Book of Gaston Phébus, a recent translation of Manuscrit français 616, the best version of Livre de chasse, defines hunting as follows:
Hunting in this context, and throughout the book, denotes all methods of taking game employed at the time, i.e. by shooting with bow and crossbow, trapping, etc., and not merely chasing it on horseback with a pack of hounds.3
His definition, too, is wider than the general historical notion of medieval hunting, embracing as it does methods other than the aristocratic chase. Even so, his study is of one particular treatise which necessarily constrains his parameters.
What was considered ‘game’ in the Middle Ages? It certainly did not include all ‘fur and feather’, but, equally, the term covered more than the modern, legally defined game birds and animals. It was to some extent, therefore, a more generic term than it is today or has been for several centuries. The aristocratic medieval hunter’s division of quarry into the categories of ‘beasts of the chase’, ‘beasts of venery’ and ‘vermin’ is discussed in chapter three.
Anglers will immediately note that fishing is excluded from my definition of hunting. This is not because I am anti-fishing. The very reverse, as I was brought up by my father to be a fly fisherman. There is a very good reason for omitting fishing and it is that ‘fishing with an angle’ has its own fascinating history and there are scholarly historians of angling who research and write about it. One of the latest historical works to be published is Dame Juliana – The Angling Treatyse and its Mysteries, by Fred Buller and Hugh Falkus. Some anglers protest that fly fishing is true hunting and I agree that it contains many of the essential elements of hunting: the quest, the stalk, the pursuit, the fight and the death. However, it was, and is, treated as a separate subject by authors and there I must leave the matter. Disappointed anglers may be interested to find a short discussion on the status of angling in the Middle Ages in chapter six.
Having defined hunting, a further question needs some consideration at this early stage. Where did hunting take place? The parameters of hunting are so wide that depending upon the scale and method, it could have occurred just about anywhere, ranging from woodland, through heath and waste to pond, field and orchard. Throughout this book I have used several terms which refer to where hunting took place and these need to be clarified now to avoid confusion. A Forest belonged to the monarch and was a legal term for an area subject to the Forest Laws which were codified by the king. Each Forest was administered by a hierarchy of appointed officials who were accountable to the king. An area such as the New Forest was originally a preserve for hunting deer, reserved for the king and to whomever he granted licence. The inhabitants of a Forest usually retained long-established use-rights (usufruct) within the area, unlike the situation in a park.4 A chase was a free liberty; hence the Forest Laws did not apply to such an area. However, in practice this distinction was usually lost for many of the chases were granted to favoured nobles and prelates by the king, who retained jurisdiction and required the Forest Laws to be observed and enforced through seigneurial courts. In addition, when the Crown acquired chases from subjects, whether through confiscation, lack of an heir or by gift, then the Forest Laws automatically became applicable to those areas.5 A park or deer-park was an area completely enclosed from the common waste by a permanent fence of wooden pales, constructed to hold breeding populations of red, fallow or roe deer for the purpose of hunting by the owner. A park was usually situated close to the main residence from which the progress of the hunt could be viewed. A park could belong to the king, an aristocrat, a prelate or an ecclesiastical body and was usually administered by a parker or keeper. The right of imparking could be granted or purchased and the number of parks increased enormously during the later Middle Ages and Tudor period.6 As well as creating chases and licensing imparkment to favoured persons such as tenants-in-chief, the Crown could also grant rights of free warren, the entitlement to hunt for lesser game (not red deer) on the demesne land of the grantee. Parks and free warrens only had the protection of Common Law.7
As the habitat suitable for red deer diminished, the necessity to impark and hunt captive populations became more urgent. The number of Forests and chases in England and Wales is unknown, but recent research at St. John’s College, Oxford, by John Langton and Graham Jones has revised the customary figure of below 200 to about 650 in England and 350 in Wales.8 Outside the Forest boundaries, chases, imparked areas, free warrens and conygers (garrenas), freeholders were allowed to hunt on unenclosed land.9 For the common man who was not a freeholder, areas where he could hunt using his own methods were usually severely curtailed by law and often necessitated a clandestine approach. Hence, although there was a great deal of commonalty hunting, much was discreet or unlawful. However, poaching on royal and other men’s land was by no means restricted to rustic peasants and other humble folk.
The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate incontrovertibly that in the late medieval world hunting was a universal activity. It must follow, therefore, that I believe that most of the population either hunted in some way or at least had some knowledge of hunting and its vocabulary. My book presents a considerable corpus of evidence which strongly supports this belief. The available material indicates that rank and status were the deciding factors in how one hunted and what was hunted. In other words, different levels of society hunted in markedly different ways using method
s and techniques peculiar to, and indicative of, their own class. Scholars studying the later Middle Ages should be aware of this and acknowledge hunting as one of the most important activities in the medieval world. These are considerable assertions, largely for two reasons. Firstly, almost all recent British historians, with a very few notable exceptions, either ignore hunting as if it did not exist or simply dismiss it in a few lines, relegating the art of venery to the level of an élitist sport confined to the nobility. Secondly, again with the same exceptions, very little scholarly research has been conducted into hunting. It is not that a corpus of evidence does not exist or is unavailable in both textual and pictorial form. Rather it is that over the course of the twentieth century, the great majority of British historians have tended to disregard hunting and its important place within the social and economic fabric of the medieval world. William Baillie-Grohman and his wife Florence, joint editors of The Master of Game (1904 and 1909), were the great exceptions to this lack of interest. A select few modern historians of the medieval period have acknowledged the importance of hunting in their overall considerations of late medieval society; these include Maurice Keen, Nicholas Orme, Anthony J. Pollard and Oliver Rackham. However, almost no specialist or single-study books on medieval hunting were published by English authors and very few scholarly articles appeared in the academic press until the late 1980s. The great exception to this general neglect was Lexicon of the Mediaeval German Hunt, by David Dalby, published in 1965, a fastidiously researched work on Germanic hunting methodology and vocabulary. Thus, as less and less was researched and written on the subject in the twentieth century, so hunting really did lose its significance. Interest was not to be revived in this country until John Cummins published The Hound and the Hawk, the Art of Medieval Hunting, in 1988, later reinforced at a literary level by Anne Rooney’s Hunting in Middle English Literature, in 1993. Roger Manning’s scholarly Hunters and Poachers, A Cultural and Social History of Unlawful Hunting in England 1485–1640, appeared in the same year. Jean Birrell made a valuable contribution to our understanding of peasant deer poaching in royal Forests in her chapter in Progress and Problems in Medieval England, published in 1996.
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