Medieval Hunting

by Richard Almond

  Although hunting and hawking are acknowledged to be recurrent themes in late medieval English and European literature,10 for the majority of modern readers the many references to these activities are undetected and remain hidden, and are thus without any contextual significance. However, if one is versed in medieval hunting vocabulary and, in addition, possesses a theoretical and pragmatic widely based knowledge of modern hunting methodology, the numerous references to hunting and hawking in imaginative and romantic medieval works are very significant. Recent work on the identification and usage of hunting language within the fifteenth-century ballads of Robin Hood demonstrates this point. The authors have used hunting and woodsman’s language to try and establish the outlaw’s possible occupation, and the universal audience for whom the ballads were written.11 The original ballads have been analysed by scholars ad infinitum yet the significance of this vocabulary has been almost completely ignored. This in itself is puzzling as all the Middle English words can be found in the hunting manuals and treatises and the rhymes can only be fully understood when the language is properly clarified.

  Man’s atavistic traits and the need to be ‘at one with nature’ were inevitably experienced far more strongly by medieval man, whatever his class, than by his modern counterpart. This is understandable as most of the population lived and were employed in the countryside. Perhaps 95 per cent were peasants, the majority of them unfree, living and working in village communities. The nobles and gentry tended to live in the countryside, visiting and administering their estates and manors. Many of the great monasteries and abbeys were situated in great rural estates. There were few towns and cities, and in England, with the exception of London, these were small in size. Norwich was probably the wealthiest and most populous town after London by 1520, and Bristol, Canterbury, Gloucester and Lincoln were all important centres of trade and commerce. Lay poll tax returns for 1377 indicate that the population of York, the so-called capital of the north, may have numbered some eleven thousand at the end of the fourteenth century,12 slightly larger than a small modern market town such as Richmond in North Yorkshire. However, as trade developed in the later Middle Ages, so too did towns and ports, particularly those connected with England’s premier export industry, the wool trade, later to be overtaken by the trade in cloth. But in spite of this increasing urbanisation, even townsmen remained in touch with the countryside. Land was owned and cultivated just outside the city walls, farmers living within the town but walking without the walls each day to work. Animals were kept in yards and gardens within the town. Townsmen of all levels hunted and poached in the fields and woods surrounding the town, using the same methods as their rural brethren. Wealthy townsmen, particularly the merchant class, who were ambitious and anxious to rise in status, imitated their social superiors and took up the mounted chase. Thus the links between town and country remained unbroken for centuries, only to be severed, but even then not completely, with enclosures and the mass movement of labour to the industrial cities for employment from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Two and a half centuries later, that break is almost complete. Politics, investment, planning and development are very largely orientated towards urban areas and their communication links. Even British agriculture, the provider of at least some of our food and guardian of the land, is misunderstood, neglected, misused and abused by the authorities and many of the general public. Hatred of hunting by some Members of Parliament is but one unfortunate facet of this loss of ease with nature and our countryside heritage.

  The atavistic urge or need to hunt, described by John Cummins as:

  the fulfilment of an enduring compulsion to retain a link with nature in a period barely emerging from the primitive, when immersing oneself in the forests of Europe could still create the illusion of being amid a limitless wilderness with infinitely renewable sources of game,13

  was, and to some extent still is, a powerful psychological impetus to hunters. Although it seems unlikely that the hungry peasant out poaching would have been aware of these emotions, educated nobles certainly were, and Gaston Fébus, in particular, writes of the satisfaction of simple pastoral delights in his manual of hunting Livre de chasse,14 as does the anonymous author of The Parlement of the Thre Ages,15 although this poem belongs to a tradition of didactic literature rather than that of hunting treatises. My point here is that the fundamental desire to hunt was common to all men (and of course, to many women) and that to associate hunting exclusively with the upper levels of medieval society is not only inaccurate but completely unrealistic. This bias in favour of hunting as a purely élitist pastime was initiated by the authors of the manuals, particularly the English writers, who largely ignored the hunting methods of the commonalty and in their writings concentrated on upper-class hunting techniques. Secondary sources appear to have perpetuated this trend and so the inaccuracy gained credence, becoming an accepted ‘well-known fact’. However, the main purpose of the hunting manual was to present the knowledge of venery from an aristocratic viewpoint to an aristocratic audience; hence bias was inevitable.

  Certainly, a great deal of the ancient lore of hunting and woodcraft has been lost as society has increasingly moved away from the land and into towns and cities; this must be to the detriment of the many variants of hunting and shooting which still flourish today. Fortunately, much hunting and hawking meth-odology and wisdom was written down in what can be termed how-to-do-it books, the late medieval hunting texts. In spite of their frequent disorder and fragmentary structure, the most outstanding features of these fourteenth- and fifteenth-century hunting manuals and treatises is the vast accumulated knowledge they contain and the expertise which is indicated and expected of the true hunter. These early books of instruction were compiled and written by aristocratic authors for the education of aristocratic or ‘gentle’ hunters, young and old.

  To authors of works on hunting such as Gaston III, compte de Foix, and Edward, Duke of York, hunting was not just a sport or pastime; it was the essence of life itself, the very reason for existence. In the Prologue to his Livre de chasse, probably the most informative and technically useful text on medieval hunting, Gaston Fébus writes of the three delights of his life – arms, love and hunting, but claims to be an expert only in the last.16 However, even for the nobility, there was more to hunting than mere pleasure and its various functions are clarified and examined in chapter one.

  In his love of hunting, the medieval noble usually had the example of his monarch. Famous royal hunters included Holy Roman Emperors Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and Maximilian I, Kings Edward III and Henry IV of England and Philip II of France. Royalty and the upper classes hunted as part of their heritage; it was expected of them; it was part of being a gentleman. William Langland commented in Piers Plowman that it was proper for ‘lewede men to labory, lordes to honte’,17 and this view of the formal chase as élitist and the prerogative of the ruling classes is undoubtedly accurate. Aristocratic hunting is both well documented and profusely illustrated. My approach to sorting this somewhat unwieldy corpus of evidence into a useable and coherent structure was to divide the material into two chapters: in chapter two, the elements of aristocratic prerogative, dress and equipment are considered; in chapter three, quarry type, language, methodology and techniques are examined.

  In contrast, commonalty hunting lacks direct evidence and even indirect evidence is in short supply. Both textual and pictorial information on lesser men hunting tends to be marginal to the aristocratic chase. A few medieval authors acknowledge commonalty hunting methods and techniques, others ignore them completely. Much of the official evidence recording commonalty hunting refers specifically to deer poaching whereas the frequency with which other quarry was hunted is more difficult to assess. The threads of evidence showing that people from other classes hunted in their own ways constitute chapter four. As the amount of evidence is relatively small compared to that for aristocratic hunting, the systematic approach combines the structures of chapters two and three
, providing some measure of comparison for the reader.

  However, even the mounted aristocratic chase and its success depended upon the administration, organisation and expertise of the king’s, or great magnate’s, hunt establishment. This organisation consisted of a hierarchy of officials and salaried professional huntsmen, most of whom were not of gentle birth but originated in the commonalty. These men were ‘lerned’ but not ‘gentle’, as William Baillie-Grohman’s compilation of hunt officials and their salaries in The Master of Game clearly indicates.18 In The Stag of Love, Marcelle Thiébaux comments that ‘there is no lack of medieval evidence of the hunt’s widespread practice’19 and this can reasonably be interpreted to include the participation of those other than the nobility, that is, the employed hunt officials. Furthermore, in certain methods of hunting, the professionals employed beaters from the locality to drive game, principally deer, towards the gentle hunters waiting at their stands or trysts, bows in hand. Were these peasant beaters participators in the hunt? I think that they were and undoubtedly their experience made them knowledgeable of aristocratic hunting practices, just as modern beaters are au fait with every aspect of grouse- or pheasant-shooting, although they are not actually shooting the game themselves. Poaching is the great grey area of hunting. All classes were doing it, including nobles, gentry, ecclesiastics and townsmen, even women, and being prosecuted and fined by the Forest courts. Where do poachers fit into the structure of medieval society? Both occupational hunting and poaching are explored in chapter five.

  Then there is the conundrum and ambiguity of medieval women hunting. Were they active participants with a true ‘lernedness’ of venery or merely decorative audience on the sidelines? Why were they apparently marginalised by men and why do modern historians remain silent on this subject? What other roles did women play within the wide parameters of hunting? This complex subject is analysed in chapter six.

  The traditional picture of medieval hunting is thus not as clear cut as most historians would have us believe. We need to assess a wide variety of evidence, searching in particular for three elements, participation, quarry species and methodology, in order to appreciate the universality of hunting and its essential contribution towards a better understanding of our medieval forebears. Chapter seven is thus necessarily a brief summary of the eclectic collection of evidence and my own thoughts on the interpretation of this material, together with some examples of composite pictorial evidence which support my notion of the universality of hunting.

  Finally, I must make two points relating to the analysis and interpretation of the source material used in the compilation of this book. Firstly, throughout the book I have used both textual and illustrated sources and have endeavoured, wherever possible, to read them together in order to produce clear and plausible results. Secondly, the precise interpretation of any evidence, particularly illustrated material from hundreds of years ago, presents particular problems and challenges to the historian attempting to elucidate what actually happened and what constituted ‘reality’. There are almost always several levels of meaning to a medieval or Renaissance hunting illustration, whether it be from a manuscript, painting, misericord or tapestry. This multiplicity of possible meanings also often applies to medieval literature, especially romantic and imaginative texts. Although this methodological difficulty provokes issues, sometimes of an ambiguous or conflicting nature, it is also immensely stimulating to the historian and helps make the interpretation of medieval and Renaissance sources an utterly fascinating pursuit.

  ONE

  ‘Delite’ and Other Functions

  In Livre de chasse, a canonical manuscript begun on 1 May 1387 and completed in 1389,1 Gaston Fébus remarks ‘tout mon temps me suis delite par espicial en trois choses, l’une est en armes, l’autre est en amours, et l’autre si est en chasce . . . .’2 This illustrates the importance that hunting held in the life and mind of one medieval French noble, a self-confessed hunting enthusiast and former mercenary captain who had retired from his profession to his vast estates in south-west France. However, it can be applied to a greater or lesser extent to the educated European upper classes as a genre and as a class. The Second Estate, the nobility and knights, hunted and were expected to do so. Not everybody in the establishment automatically approved, however; in his satirical work Policraticus, John of Salisbury derides hunting as one of the diversions and frivolities of courtiers and adopts a hostile, even socialistic, attitude towards aristocratic hunters.3 In addition, he acidly remarks ‘Rarely is one found to be modest or dignified, rarely self-controlled, and in my opinion never temperate.’4 Harsh words, although he admits his criticisms are partially for amusement’s sake.

  Yet in spite of the apparent monopoly of this pastime by the upper classes, hunting in its widest sense was not the preserve of the courtiers and educated élites. Owing to the various and disparate needs of medieval society, the functions of hunting ensured that it was widely engaged in throughout every community.

  For the ruling classes, avoiding idleness, and therefore sin, was important and hunting provided the ideal anodyne of healthy, violent and enjoyable exercise. Edward, Duke of York, using the words of Gaston Fébus, comments on this function of venery:

  The first resouns is for the game causeth oft a man to eschewe þe vii deedly synnes. Secoundly men byn bettir ryding, and more just and more vndyrstondyng, and more appert, and more esye and more vndirtakyng, and bettir knowyng of all contrees and of all passages . . . and helthe of man and of his sowle for ho that fleeth þe vii dedly synnes . . . shal be saued, than a good huntere shal be saued, and in this world haue joye ynow, and of gladnesse and of solace . . . .5

  He continues in the same manner, emphasising the dreadful possibilities idleness afforded for dwelling on the sins of the flesh:

  for whan a man is ydul and rechless without travayle and men ben occupyed to be doyng somme þinges, and abideth ther in here oiþer in here Chambre it is a thyng which draweth men to ymaginacioun of fleishly lust an plaisire. . . .6

  Gentle hunters were instructed in the art of hunting from an early age and The Master of Game advises ‘It wilt tech a man to be a good huntere, first þe must be a childe passid vii. or viii. yere of age or litel elder . . .’.7 According to Nicholas Orme, the tradition of including hunting in the curriculum of young nobles, particularly heroes, dates back to the epics of the twelfth century.8 Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, written in about 1210, provides the earliest available full account of education for a young noble; its requirements include knowledge of tracking and hunting, riding, the military arts and athletics as well as the study of reading, languages and proficiency in music and chess.9 Horn, a king’s son and the hero of a French poem written between 1150 and 1175, learns ‘to play all the instruments under heaven, to hunt in wood and by river, to manage a horse and defend himself’.10 In Guy of Warwick, a slightly later French poem of about 1235, Guy, the son of the Earl of Warwick’s steward, the Lord of Wallingford, has a Master to teach him and is given experience in handling dogs and falcons.11 The education of these fictional young heroes is reflected in that of many historical figures of the late medieval period. Thus, Alexander III of Scotland, aged ten, hunted in Galtres Forest near York in 125112 and Henry VI coursed hares and foxes at Bury St Edmunds in 1433/4 when he was twelve.13 This royal tradition of formalising the subjects included in the educational system was quickly adopted by all ranks of the aristocracy eager to produce educated offspring who would make their way successfully in the world. Thus Geoffrey Chaucer, son of a London vintner, received the education of a gentleman, beginning as a page in the household of Prince Lionel, second son of Edward III.14 This education inevitably included instruction in hunting and hawking, and his poems, such as The Booke of the Duchesse and The Assembly of Foules contain many references and allusions to both aristocratic activities. Several illustrations in Livre de chasse show Gaston Fébus as Master, instructing young nobles in the arts of hunting.15 This gentlemanly ideal of ed
ucating one’s sons in the correct way continued into the Tudor period and beyond. Henry VIII’s archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, was an active and enthusiastic athlete in his youth and his father:

  was very desirous to have him learned, yet would he not that he should be ignorant in civil and gentleman-like exercises, insomuch that he used him to shoot and many times permitted him to hunt and hawk and to exercise and to ride rough horses . . . after study, he would both hawk and hunt . . . and would sometimes shoot the long bow.16

  The curriculum for girls was necessarily different in several respects, but in Medieval Children, Nicholas Orme comments that ‘noble and gentle girls needed to learn table manners like those of their brothers, and some of them took part in hunting of a less exacting kind’.17

  For young men of the upper classes, the three basic accomplishments – facility of address, the practice of religion and mastery of etiquette – were acquired early in life, and were followed by knowledge of literature, music and the visual arts and competence at dancing plus training for war, hunting, archery and indoor games. From hunting children learned several essential skills, including horsemanship and the management of weapons, and gained knowledge of terrain, woodcraft and strategy.18 For the future ruling classes, the warriors and leaders in war, hunting provided invaluable lessons and practical experience. This formal education also produced a class which spoke its own technical language of venery and understood the hunters’ catechism of specialised vocabulary, indicating they were ‘lerned’ both by birth and training.19 Because of this early instruction, the upper classes took hunting and hawking as part of their existence for granted and, in addition, the rest of society expected them to participate in these activities. In Piers Plowman William Langland makes this latter point very clearly. Peris, the farmer, agrees to labour, having been told ‘Y shal swynke and swete and sowe for vs bothe’,20 then says to the knight that in return he must guard the Church, protect Peris from wasters and wicked men: