238 England's oldest hunt. 



puppies are lost from jaundice or distemper. The system of thus 

 keeping hounds has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. 

 In the first place, hounds so maintained cost naught except 

 their licences, and in a farmer's hunt, as the Sinnington had 

 essentially been up to now, and in an especial manner still is, 

 this was an important matter. Another recommendation 

 was, and is yet, that farmers and others who kept hounds 

 in this way had a living interest in the hunt, which had an 

 influence for good. 



A fairly analogous picture to the Sinnington ere Mr. Swan 

 took them was that painted by a writer in the " Sporting 

 Magazine " for July, 1827, who spoke of an old Essex Squire 

 who flourished about 1800 : — 



He kept a pack of hounds, was a Nimrod by nature, and had a 

 jovial soul, indulging in the spontaneous influences of each without 

 niggardly restraint. It was not the fashion in those days to organise 

 your establishment in much refinement. . . My friend's harriers, 

 as they were called, because they used to hunt the hares, were of a 

 grotesque character, not definable as a whole by any rules of Beckford 

 or Somervile. The deep tongued, blue-mottled, the dwarf foxhound, 

 the true bred harrier, the diminutive beagle, all joined in the cry, and 

 helped to supply the pot. Being somewhat strangers to one another, 

 discord prevailed — having a butcher for one master, a baker for another, 

 a farmer for a third. Spreading pretty well through the village, and 

 with such heterogeneous qualities, and not in social intercourse, with 

 an impenetrable county to hunt over, whippers-in were indispensable, 

 of which there was a plentiful supply, personated, I may say, by all 

 the attendants, with immense long whips, and deep sounding lungs 

 not sparingly used. 



As I stated in an earlier chapter, dealing with the Bilsdale 

 Hunt, those who kept hounds years ago — nor is the custom 

 and privilege quite extinct to-day in moorland countries — 

 held it as a matter of course that they helped in the hunting 

 of the pack, or at any rate the cheering-on of their own 

 charge. One cannot imagine how hounds would ever get 

 settled down on a line with the picture the late Captain 

 Turton gives of the manner in which the Roxby (late the 

 Cleveland) were hunted years ago. No doubt it was a very 

 sporting and enthusiastic attendant upon hunting Reynard on 

 the Cleveland moors to hear all this shouting, but it certainly 



