viii INTRODUCTION 



followed the Royal pack regularly till gout compelled^her to relinquish 

 the saddle for a * one-horse calash.' James Thomson in The Seasons 

 (1730) urged the British Fair not to stain their bosom with the horrid joy of 

 the fierce sport. 



There is one passage concerning the art of riding to hounds which sheds 

 light on the more deliberate methods of the period : 



' It sometimes will happen, that a good horseman is not so well in with 

 hounds as an indifferent one ; because he seldom will condescend to get off 

 his horse. I believe that the best way to follow hounds across a country 

 is to keep on the line of them and to dismount at once when you come to a 

 leap which you do not choose to take ; for in looking about for easier places 

 much time is lost.' 



Fast riding across country had not at this time come into vogue though 

 a good jumper was appreciated ; for instance on 6 November 1777 (Hist. Mss. 

 Comm.) the Marquis of Rockingham writes from Wentworth to the Marquis 

 of Granby : ' I have ordered the grey horse to be delivered to your 

 groom. He is pleasant to ride, and though he has not been hunted can 

 leap well and safely.' It would have been after publication of the Thoughts 

 that Mr. William Childe of Kinlet set the example in what ' Nimrod ' calls 

 ' quick riding to hounds.' Mr. Childe is believed to have taken up his 

 quarters at Melton to hunt with the Quorn, under Mr. Hugo Meynell's 

 mastership, about the year 1780 ; how soon after his appearance in Leices- 

 tershire he adopted the style of riding which won him the soubriquet of ' Fly- 

 ing Childe ' it is impossible to discover. Twenty years later fast riding had 

 become general ; in 1803 a writer in the Sporting Magazine refers to a 

 ' female Nimrod of the name of Duffell ' who regularly followed the Royal 

 Buckhounds and was ' the best flying leaper of the field.' 



A run of from one hour to two satisfied Beckf ord ; he did not desire less 

 than the former or more than the latter, and considered prejudicial to hounds 

 a prolonged chase which did not end in a kill. He would have regarded the 

 Waterloo run, 3 hrs. 45 mins., as a performance demanding investigation 

 and criticism rather than praise, its duration being due either to ' a fault 

 in the day, in the huntsman or in the hounds.' Regarding his conviction 

 that a long chase without blood was harmful to hounds we must always 

 bear in mind that he wrote of the fox-hound yet in the making. 



Unlike his great contemporary Meynell, Beckf ord held that blood 

 was the very first consideration in making a pack : there is nothing in the 

 whole art of fox-hunting upon which he more strenuously insists than the 

 necessity for keeping hounds in blood. It may be that he was moved to 

 lay stress on this point by the fact that the hare-hunters of his age attached 

 small importance to blood. The Master of Harriers had his pack under 

 remarkable control (witness the old system of hunting harriers ' under 

 the pole ' referred to in Letter XIX ; ' Were fox-hounds to stop, like stop- 



