INTRODUCTION vii 



witness his remarks on entering hounds : " If you have plenty and can 

 afford to make a sacrifice of some of them for the sake of making your 

 young hounds steady, take them first where you have least riot. . . . 

 If in such a place you are fortunate enough to find a litter of foxes you 

 . . . will have but little trouble with your young hounds afterwards.' 

 His own huntsman ' sometimes turns down a cat before them which they 

 hunt up to the kill : and when the time of hunting approaches he turns 

 out badgers or young foxes.' He also approved of entering young hounds 

 to the ' Martin cat ' (Letter VII) as they thus learned to draw thick coverts. 

 The species to which he refers would be the pinemarten l (Mustela martes), 

 now rare in the south of England. These methods point to shortage of 

 foxes though many huntsmen at the present day like to let their young 

 hounds get hold of a badger, believing that it makes them keener they 

 also suggest that Beckford gave his young entry an education more thorough 

 than is given by moderns ; thoroughness, as said before, was characteristic 

 of him. 



Beckford had found reason to object to turned-down foxes on the 

 score of mange ; nevertheless he describes his ' fox court ' and his method 

 of finishing the education of youngsters with cubs turned down in a large 

 covert through which ' ridings ' were cut. Probably foxes in his day 

 were less well preserved than they are now. He had all the modern' foes 

 with whom to cope ; the farmer who regarded the fox as the enemy of 

 lambs must have been a particularly dangerous enemy in a country whose 

 downs carried vast flocks of sheep (and, be it remembered, wool was a 

 far more valuable asset in those days than it is to the modern agriculturist), 

 the pheasant-preserver, and ' the old women for their poultry.' 



Neither was Beckford a stranger to modern difficulties in the field. 

 He suffered from the men who talk and halloa at the wrong time, who 

 over-ride hounds when they are puzzling out the scent and press them 

 at a check. He has a certain sympathy with the ' thruster ' ; he censures 

 ' but with respect ' that eager spirit who leads his followers astray in this 

 regard, but he has no patience with the man who cannot hold his tongue. 



Throughout the book there is no mention of ladies following hounds. 

 The famous Marchioness of Salisbury was then master of the Hatfield 

 Harriers (1775 1819), but fox-hunting for ladies seems to have gone out of 

 vogue during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Ladies rode to 

 hounds in Queen Anne's day, following the fashion set by the Queen who 



1 Perhaps it is unnecessary to mention that both pine-marten and pole-cat (sweet mart 

 and foul mart or fou-mart) are still hunted in the Lake District the Coniston hounds 

 having been originally (1825) established ' to hunt fox, mart and hare.' Captain J. E. H. 

 Herrick, Master of the Bellmount Beagles in the Co. Cork, hunts in summer another of the 

 family, the stoat, which affords very pretty sport, standing before hounds for from two to 

 four miles. 



