4 ART AND PRACTICE OF HAWKING 



losing their favourites. In the unsettled state to which Europe 

 was reduced by the innumerable wars consequent on the 

 Reformation, it was impossible for falconers to identify or 

 punish those who recklessly or deliberately slaughtered a 

 neighbour's lost hawks ; and although the offenders were still 

 liable to serve penalties, they could snap their fingers at the 

 protective laws. Finally, the more rapid subdivision of the 

 land, and its enclosure with fences for agricultural purposes, 

 spoilt, for the falconer's purposes, large tracts of country which 

 had formerly been the most suitable, and was especially hurtful 

 to the flying of the long-winged hawks, for which an expanse 

 of open ground is indispensable. On the Continent these various 

 causes operated surely but slowly to displace falconry in the 

 public estimation. But in England a special circumstance 

 almost ruined it at one blow. The outbreak of the Great Civil 

 War interrupted rudely all peaceful sports, and its disasters 

 destroyed a vast number of those who were the best patrons of 

 hawking. From the blow then struck English falconry never 

 rallied in any general sense. Certainly it did revive, or rather 

 survive, to a certain extent. It would be wrong to suppose that 

 the sport has ever been extinct in the British Isles, as so many 

 writers are fond of reiterating. But its devotees have kept it up 

 without any of the pomp and show which once distinguished it, 

 carrying on in comparative privacy, and in the retirement of 

 rather remote spots, an amusement in which the difficulties 

 always besetting the sport were aggravated by a thousand new 

 dangers and annoyances. 



The annals of falconry, since it was deposed from its fashion- 

 able place — in England by the Great Rebellion, and afterwards 

 in France by the Revolution — are obscure, and for the most 

 part buried in oblivion. Here and there the name of a notable 

 falconer, professional or amateur, emerges from the mist, showing 

 us that the sport was still carried on with vigour by a few. In 

 the middle of the eighteenth century Lord Orford flew kites in 

 the eastern counties, and this sport, as well as rook-hawking 

 and heron-hawking, was successively carried on by the Falconers' 

 Society, the Falconers' Club, and the High Ash Club, which 

 latter existed from about 1792 to later than 1830, and included 

 amongst its members Lord Berners, Colonel Thornton, and 

 other sporting celebrities. In Scotland falconry has always 

 been kept up. The life of John Anderson covers the whole of 

 the last half of the eighteenth century, as well as more than a 

 quarter of the nineteenth. This accomplished trainer of hawks 

 was for the first twenty years or so of the present century in 



