FOX AND HOUND 



The practice of trailing up to the fox had been, by 

 some Masters at least, abandoned at this time. 

 Beckford drew a covert in the modern style, though 

 he would have us at the covert-side by sunrise. 



Colonel John Cook, Master of the Essex 1808-1813, 

 suggests that the practice of meeting at sunrise was 

 adopted with the definite purpose of hunting the fox 

 before he was in running trim, or the slow hounds 

 of an older generation would never have caught him.* 

 However this may be, the system of meeting soon 

 after sunrise and trailing up to the fox continued in 

 the New Forest during the earlier years of the nine- 

 teenth century, and is still pursued by the fox-hunters 

 of the Fells, and in Wales : and these latter do not 

 find their foxes unable to run in the early morning. 

 When Colonel Cook wrote, in 1829, the sunrise meet 

 had been generally renounced: 'The breed of hounds, 

 the feeding, and the whole system is so much im- 

 proved that the majority of foxes are found and 

 killed . . . after twelve o'clock.' 



There was, it must be said, at least one among the 

 improvements the Colonel did not regard as such : to 

 wit, the second horse system, which by this time had 

 been commonly adopted, no doubt as a result of the 

 greater speed of hounds. It was introduced by Lord 

 Sefton during his Mastership (1800-1802) of the 



1 They certainly required time to catch their fox on occasion : witness the 

 famous Charlton run of 26th January, 1738 : hounds found a vixen at 7.45 a.m. 

 and killed her at 5.50 p.m., having covered a distance conscientiously affirmed to 

 be 58 miles 2 furlongs 10 yards. 



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