330 



THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



walks and gymnastic drill, varied by tea-meetings, lec- 

 tures on the ologies, or part-singing. 



The love of sport, as we in England comprehensively 

 term a long line of exciting and pecuniarily unprofitable out- 

 door amusements, is at present one of the marked charac- 

 teristics of an Englishman. It prevails in all classes, it is 

 understood by both sexes, and it crops out in the most 

 curious and unexpected families. Quakers ride to hounds : 

 one of the greatest masters of horse-knowledge is a distin. 

 guished and intellectual member of that mild and stay-at- 

 home sect. A wealthy and serious soap-boiler of our ac- 

 quaintance, who, from a misdirected letter, learned that his 

 son and partner, in the teeth of parental precept and exam- 

 ple, had for several years combined the best shooting and 

 hunting with his annual northern business tours, was by 

 no means alone in his misfortune, although quite as much 

 astonished and nearly as much shocked as if he had disco- 

 vered his otherwise exemplary offspring robbing a till or 

 forging an acceptance. As will happen with others of like 

 tenets now and then, his precepts and example had not 

 crushed a sportsman, but had cultivated a hypocrite. 



Shopkeepers, brokers of stock and of produce, lawyers, 

 civil engineers, bankers and their clerks, supply a large pro- 

 portion of the fishing men, the shooting men, and the hunt- 

 ing men. The navy grown into a contractor (no uncom" 

 mon metamorphose a few years ago), the potboy converted 

 into a wine-merchant and laud owner, the mechanic who 

 has built up a fortune as well as a factory, the gardener 

 and the fishmonger, the artist and architect, who — from 

 small beginnings and humble origin have risen to be great 

 and famous— all hold shares in the great joint-stock com- 

 pany for cultivating health, exercise, and mental rest, so- 

 ciality, geniality, liospitality, and other virtues difficult 

 to cultivate in this hard-working, class-divided world of 

 England. 



The peculiar school of money-making philosophers who 

 look upon squires, pheasants, and foxes as all alike — vermin 

 . — and destined to be extinguished by the march of agricul- 

 tural improvement, would be rather puzzled if any chance 

 should lead them to join an agricultural- minded public din- 

 ner, by the manner in which the toast of " Fox-hunting" 

 wakes up to light and life those down-trodden vassals, the 

 tenant farmers, whom in their poetical eloquence they often 

 picture as mourning in their melancholy homesteads, crops 

 destroyed and fences smashed by the red-coated invaders, 

 and poultry decimated by the useless vermin of the chase j 

 it would be amazing to them how the glad tally-hos, trium- 

 phant who-whoops, and " one cheer more," come from the 

 very hearts of the farmers ; and when the Master of Fox 

 Hounds, who has been sitting very quiet, gets up and says^ 

 not fluently — for he seldom is fluent except when on horse- 

 back — that " he wishes to show sport, but cannot do so 

 without the farmers to back him as they have done, and he 

 hopes they will still," an overflowing simultaneous burst of 

 applause from the brown-red faces drowns the conclusion of 

 the sentence, and enables the M.F.H. to resume his seat. 

 And if our politico ]ohilosophical philanthropist should, by 

 any force less than that of cart-horses, and cart-ropes — say 

 in search of a profitable investment— be drawn into a truly 

 rural district to some comfortable four or five hundred acre 

 farm just after harvest, he would leam what genuine hospi- 

 tality is; and then, in the fox-hunting season, he might 

 note young farmers riding " like mad" in front, and old ones 

 inviting friends and strangers to trot round and take a glass 

 of ale. In fact, he would find that there is not a well- 

 farmed district in England in which /atr sport is not popular 

 with the real farmers. 



But there is another kind of sport, a bastard selfish sport 

 if sport it can be called, which has been so well dissected 

 and injected and presented in all its hideous deformity in a 

 pamphlet,* that we cannot do better than take our examples 

 from the anatomical museum of the author, descendant of a 

 long generation of sportsmen. 



A battue is a contrivance for killing the largest quantity 

 of game in the smallest time, with the least amount of 

 trouble, by a small, select party. It is next-door to firing 

 wild German swine while taking their daily reeal of corn) 

 as some German princes do, or shooting into a poultry- 

 yard at feeding time. 



The sportsman fond of shooting expects to walk hard and 

 work hard to fill his bag, as the phrase goes ; although, by 

 the way, game in this country is seldom bagged, if it can 

 be helped, but carried daintily by an attendant, in a sort of 

 portable pillory. The peculiar charm of a battue appears to 

 lie, first, in its enormous cost, which places it out of the 

 reach of men of moderate means ; next, in the arrange- 

 ments for wholesale slaughter by people who, being neither 

 good shots nor good walkers, are unable to take advantage 

 of the working of well-trained dogs. 



For a battue, it is essential to concentrate an enormous 

 head of game in a confined space. Thus, after birds have 

 been bred on the plan of a well-managed poultry-yard, 

 hatched under hens, and fed regularly on chosen spots, they 

 are driven, if parUidges, into selected turnip-fields, and if 

 pheasants, into coverts, where certain rides or paths have 

 been stopped up with netting, so that the tame birds may 

 not run out of danger. 



The landowner or game-renter who determines to in- 

 dulge in the ostentatious luxury of a battue, begins by en- 

 gaging a large army of keepers, who are practically, if not 

 legally, invested with an authority that can only be com- 

 pared in its exercise to the functions and privileges of the 

 police and spies of certain continental states. It is the 

 gamekeeper's business to repress poachers ; to encourage 

 the breeding of every kind of game, feathered and four- 

 footed, on every acre of land under his master's control ; 

 and to destroy everything he chooses to call vermin. Rab- 

 bits — the especial enemy of the farmer — being the head 

 gamekeeper's peculiar perquisite, are specially protected 

 and multiplied. A gamekeeper has been known to net 

 three hundred pounds a year by rabbits alone. Hares are 

 the next objects of his care ; for they are safe and favourite 

 battue-marks, and he does not do his duty unless they are 

 at least as plentiful as sheep on turnips, within a mile 

 circle of the principal battue coverts. 



Then, in the breeding season, it is his business to find 

 out every outlying pheasant, and every partridge's nest, and 

 have it watched, as a " political suspect" is watched by a 

 French mouchard. The farmer (that is, the tenant-at-will 

 farmer) and his men are continually under the ever- 

 watchful and malicious eye of the keeper and his under- 

 strappers, who are promoted poachers or lazy labourers. 

 " There is nothing," says Mr. Corbet, " they can do but it 

 is ' his duty' to overlook them. He stands by the mowers, 

 to see they do no harm to ' his nests.' He struts into tlie 

 reaping field, to make sure they don't harm ' his birds.' 

 The boy with his scarecrow, the shepherd with his dog, and 

 the little lass with her kitten, are alike the objects of his 

 hatred and tyranny. He has been known to wrench a gun 

 from the hand of a farmer's son for shooting a rat ; to tell 3 

 farmer himself that he should prefer his not firing at the 



• The Over-Preservation of Game : a paper read before the 

 Central Farmers' Club, by Henry Corbet, the Secretary ; March 

 6, 186 J. 



