6 HARE-HUNTING AND HARRIERS 



per annum shall have or keep any Grey-hound, Hound, 

 Dog, Ferret, Net or Engine to destroy Deer, Hares, 

 Coneys, or any other Gentleman's Game, in pain of 

 one whole year's imprisonment, which Justices of 

 Peace have power to inflict." 



The boar and wolf were in process of time exter- 

 minated in these islands, and wild deer, except on the 

 moorlands of the West — Exmoor chiefly — and the 

 fells of Cumberland and Westmoreland, became more 

 and more difficult to find. Sportsmen were thus 

 reduced to hunting the semi-feral deer of their own 

 parks, a form of sport which, by the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries, French writers upon Venery 

 already referred to with some contempt. With the 

 decline of deer, it is certain that the chase of the hare 

 assumed much more importance, and by the seven- 

 teenth century it is clear that hare-hunting was a sport 

 held in high favour among English squires. During 

 this and the eighteenth century it seems to have been 

 the custom among country gentlemen to keep a mixed 

 kennel of hounds, with which they pursued hare, otter, 

 and occasionally fox, as it pleased them. By the early 

 years of the eighteenth century the fox had emerged 

 from its once low estimation and was beginning to be 

 hunted regularly. The foxhound proper had now 

 been evolved, and from the middle of the eighteenth 

 century it may be said that fox-hunting increased more 

 and more in favour until it had quite outstripped in 

 popularity the chase of the hare. 



William Somervile, the author of " The Chace," 

 undoubtedly the finest poem on hunting in the English 

 language, was a typical squire of his time. He flour- 

 ished between 1677 and 1742, residing, after the age 

 of twenty-seven, when he resigned his Fellowship at 

 New CoUege, Oxford, upon his own estate of Edstone, 



