332 



THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE, 



visits, to entice tliom to wander from their legitimate pur- 

 suits, into unlawful paths, and thus increase the grinning 

 trophies of the " Gamekeeper's museum" nailed on a barn, 

 door. Mr. Bucklaud, in his amusing Curiosities of Natural 

 History, tells of a gamekeeper who purchased distant and 

 domestic opts to swell the evidences of his zeal, As for dogs, 

 a battue-manufactm'er la a moment of candour declared 

 that a farmer had no business with any dogs, and that " the 

 shepherd's collie was a useless nuisance," for ever disturb- 

 ing and attracting his master's eye to the sacred animals 

 which in England occupy the place of the cats and the 

 ibis of the ancient Egyptians, and the bulls of the modern 

 Hindoo-. 



Under the influence of this religion, we have had magis- 

 trates, and clergymen too, convicting and fining a farmer 

 for picking up a hare killed in her form by his horse's foot ;* 

 sending a labourer to prison for pocketing a leveret " the 

 size of a rat," which had been first mortally wounded by a 

 companion's scythe while mowing ; and the young daughters 

 of a farmer, returning from a social party along the high 

 road, have been first brutally assaulted by gamekeepers, 

 and then fined on the charge of hunting game with the 

 house-dog they had with them for their protection. 



And what is. the repayment for all the destruction of corn 

 and roots, of man's food and cattle food ; all the burdens 

 imposed on farmers, poor-rates and gaol-rates which ought 

 to be called poacher's rates ; all this demoralisation of la- 

 bourers, tempted beyond human endurance by half tame 

 birds and beasts scattered in their path like so many live 

 half-crowns, squeaking " Come sell me ! come sell me !" ? It 

 ends in some half-dozen blase gentlemen lazily turning out 

 about mid-day, placed with due regard to rank and prece- 

 dent by the head keeper at certain favoured spots, at the 

 head of rides, where the game driven up by the beaters and 

 stopped by nets comes up in droves on to " hot corners," 

 and the final sport consists in a boquet of pheasants shot 

 by sportsmen who have nothing to do but blaze away as fast 

 as the loaders can hand them their guns. Which noble re- 

 sult is duly recorded in a paragraph in the Morning Toast- 

 rack, relating how the Earl of Wholesale and Retail, Lord 

 Kickupadust, the Honourable Frank Eastman, and three or 

 four other great guns at his lordship's magnificent seat, the 

 Slaughter-House, in the course of the moraiug killed some 

 two hundred pheasants, a hundred-and-fifty hares, thr-ee 

 hundred rabbits, two woodcocks and a water-hen, seriously 

 wounded a jacksnipe and a beater; and, it might be, but is 

 not, added, " half ruined a tenant farmer." Well may the 

 Secretary of the Farmers' Club observe : " What exercise — 

 what skill — what of the excitement or the prowess of a 

 sportsman's life is there in this?" The lad who gets liis 

 three shots a penny at the tiny running hare in the famous 

 Home preserve at Cremorne, may be quite as good a marks- 

 man ; the wortliy citizen who sits in his punt under Mar- 

 low-bridge, pulhng up gudgeons as fast as the boatman can 

 pull them off', enjoys a vase deal more of glowing exertion. 

 And, what is more, the punt-fishing enthusiast does give 

 the silly gudgeons a choice and a chance of his line. To 

 parallel the battue, the fisherman should cast his line in a 

 well-stored basin, or a tub duly filled over-night with hungry 

 roach and dace. 



The extent to which the mania for easy shooting, and a 

 complimentary puff in the newspaper, is carried, may be 

 illustrated by the fact that a few seasons ago, a nobleman 

 being about to shoot in an outlying wood in which there 



* This conviction was reversed on ^peal to the Commissioners 

 of Inland Kevenue. 



was little or no game, ordered his keeper to put some 

 pheasants in overnight. The poachers did not, on this 

 occasion, get at the secret, as they sometimes do. In the 

 morning cama my lord and iris party — pretty good shots all 

 of them — and famous sport they had ; so good, in fact, that 

 after lunch they wanted to go back to the big wood ; but the 

 keeper hesitated, and, when pressed, explained that " it was 

 of no use my lord going there again ; they had killed a 

 hundred and eighty and odd pheasants already, and he had 

 only turned down a couple of hundred." 



This is the ridiculous side of the question; but there is 

 a lower deep. Pheasants well fed may be kept at home, 

 and it may be presumed that, in many instances, or on 

 great estates, they are not fed on the farmer's produce, or, 

 if so fed, that the tenant gains in rent what he loses in game 

 — though this would be rather strong presumption in a case 

 last season, where, on the property of a noted game-pre- 

 serving peer in Sufl'olk, towards the close of an autumn 

 afternoon three hundred pheasants were counted round a 

 tenant's barley stack. But then, when the battue is over ; 

 when, to paraphrase Dryden, 



They are all shot down and vanished hence, 

 Three days of slaughter at a vast expense, 

 where do they go ? To market generally, to compete with 

 the expensively dairy-fed pork ani poultry of the farmer 

 class, who feed their landlord's more sacred animals for 

 nothing. After one of these double-barrelled festivals in 

 Essex last year, pheasants and hares were sold at a shilling 

 a head, and rabbits were cheaper than meat or poultry. We 

 know a parish within an easy rail-ride of London, where 

 farmers v.'ith lands overrun with game, are obliged, when 

 they want a brace of pheasants or a hare, to send to 

 Leadenhall Market and buy them. And their landlord, 

 who does not shoot himself, hires his shooting out to a 

 stranger: 



We have referred to the popularity of the master of the 

 fox-hounds; we mean, of course, the master who takes 

 pains to make himself liked by all classes ; who does not 

 forget the farmers in the game season, or the farmers' wives 

 in personal politeness or payment for poultry. But who 

 is hated like a battue game preserver, especially a pheasant- 

 preserving parson ? Ask the farmers in Nottinghamshire, 

 say in Sherwood Forest ; ask them in Norfolk or in Sufl'olk; 

 or, if a great landlord doubts, let him try the toast ingeni- 

 ously proposed by the Secretary of the Farmers' Club, and 

 give at a lively agricultural dinner after the tally-hos have 

 died away, " The truly British sport of battue shooting," 

 and let him, in a neat speech, thank the farmers for having 

 enabled him to kill hundreds upon hundreds of hares and 

 pheasants in a day, " and trust they will still continue to 

 enable him to show sport to his fashionable guests." 



The honest truth is, that the battue system is as dishonest 

 as it is ridiculous; and the sooner public opinion, which is 

 much more powerful than acts of Parliament, washes it 

 clean away, the better for the landlords in a rent-paying, in 

 a popular, a social, and a political sense. Good sport, on 

 the other hand, is consistent with well-paid rents, and the 

 widest and warmest popularity among tenants, What says 

 Squire Shirley, owner of a fine estate, formerly M.P. for a 

 county, a Conservative in politics, and as good a sportsman 

 as ever followed a brace of pointers, or put a horse at a 

 fence, in his evidence before a committee of the House of 

 Commons ? 



" I am very fond of shooting, but my amusement is 

 shooting. with my own dogs, and walking. I never sold any 

 game in my life. I have shot two or three times at battues, 

 and don't like it. In Norfolk, at my brother-in-law's, in a 



