FOX-HUNTING AND ITS FUTURE 



process of time, as freedom was slowly wrested from the 

 king and aristocracy, the yeomen and tenant farmers 

 became enabled to join in the sport of hunting, and 

 to mingle, as they have mingled now for some two 

 hundred and fifty years, with the squires and nobility in 

 a friendly, equal, and most honourable rivalry, which 

 even five and twenty years of bitter depression have not 

 sufficed to quench or endanger. 



Fox-hunting in its present form has existed for little 

 more than two hundred and fifty years. The more 

 important of the wild fauna of the country, which for 

 centuries had afforded sport to the great feudal lords, 

 had been steadily vanishing ; the wolf had become 

 practically extinct ; the wild red deer was becoming 

 scarce ; the roe no longer flourished in its former 

 plenty ; the best of the land was becoming gradually 

 enclosed. In earlier times the fox seems to have been 

 looked upon as a less important quarry even than the 

 hare, the otter, and the marten. But by the reign 

 of Charles I. his due worth and importance had become 

 recognised, and Reynard of England was beginning 

 to take high rank in the system of venery. By the 

 reign of Queen Anne fox-hunters pure and simple 

 were as well known and recognised in the social system 

 as they are at the present day. In the early part of the 

 eighteenth century these gentry seem to have been 

 mostly Jacobites and high Tories, and the writings 

 of Addison and others refer frequently to them. The 

 English portion of the ill-starred Stuart rising of 1715 

 was managed, or rather mismanaged, mainly by a few 

 north-country fox-hunting squires, of whom Tom 

 Forster, of Bamborough, and the Earl of Derwentwater 

 were at the head. These honest gentlemen were better 

 sportsmen than politicians and warriors, as history 

 has long since demonstrated. Addison, in an amusing 



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