BRITISH SPORT PAST AND PRESENT 



whole wood resounds ! — That turn was very short ! — There ! — 

 now ! — aye, now they have him ! Who — hoop ! ' . . . 



The practice of traiUng 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 con- 

 tinued in the New Forest during the earlier vears of the 

 nineteenth 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 improved that the majority of foxes 

 are found and killed . . . after twelve o'clock.' 



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

 ments 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 Quorn. Lord Sefton was a heavy weight, but his 

 example was speedily followed by those who had not burthen 

 of flesh to excuse them. 



The sporting ethics of a century ago were lenient on the 

 subject of bagmen. It would seem from this note, culled 

 from the Sporting Magazine of 1807, that if the owner of a 

 pack wanted to hunt any particular district, and foxes hap- 



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

 Charlton run of 26th January 1738 : hounds found a vixen at 7.4.5 a.m. and killed her at 

 .5.50 P.M., having covered a distance conscientiously affirmed to be 58 miles 2 furlongs 

 10 yards. 



6 



