Sir TCtcbarfc Sutton 407 



double guns were practically unknown, and sportsmen 

 shot solely with single barrels. And not only must the 

 game have been extraordinarily plentiful, but the shooting 

 must have been particularly deadly to account for such 

 enormous bags, unless the birds and hares were driven 

 into a kind of corral and murdered by volleys. It is 

 certain that the annals of English sport could show 

 nothing within reasonable distance of that record up 

 to 1864. 



But since then there have been extraordinary bags 

 of partridges made in a single day to a single gun, 

 which far eclipse the feats of Sutton and Osbaldeston. 

 For example, in 1884 Earl de Grey, on the Studley 

 estate, in Yorkshire, killed 300 birds to his own gun. 

 For the North of England that is a record ; but it is 

 completely wiped out by the records of the late 

 Maharajah Dhuleep Singh on his Elvedon estate, in 

 Suffolk. On September 8th, 1876, the Maharajah, 

 whose ambition, it is said, was to kill 1,000 partridges 

 to his own gun in a single day, bagged 780 birds 

 in 1,000 shots a feat which has never been ap- 

 proached by anyone else. In that same year 2,530 

 partridges fell to his gun in nine days. It is due to 

 the Maharajah to say that he was one of the quickest 

 and straightest shooters ever seen ; but this senseless 

 butchery of hand-reared birds does not speak well for 

 his sportsmanship. 



In Gilbert White's days a sportsman who killed 

 twenty brace of partridges in a single day was deemed 

 " unreasonable," even in a season when birds were 

 unusually plentiful. But then a Hampshire sportsman's 



