HARE SHOOTING 
T here are possibly not a few at the present day who would echo 
the sentiment of the old writers on field sports that the hare was 
not intended to be shot, but to be fairly coursed with grey- 
hounds or hunted with hounds. This was the opinion of all who 
wrote in praise of hunting from the days of Xenophon and 
Arrian, and all through the ages to the time of Gaston de Foix, 
Jacques du Fouilloux, and our own Turbervile. Not that weapons were 
wanting in those days for a manifestation of the shooter’s skill, for since 
very early times both the long-bow and the cross-bow were in use for such 
a purpose; but from the representation given of them in illuminated MSS. 
it would appear that they were employed chiefly for killing hares for food, 
by taking “ sitting shots,” so that little or no skill was required on the 
part of the shooter, and the practice, like that of netting or snaring, had 
nothing to recommend it as a legitimate form of sport. Indeed, a time 
came when these methods of taking hares were prohibited by statute, 
and penalties were imposed upon any persons making use of hare -nets, 
hare -pipes, and other engines for their destruction. For poachers and 
other habitual disregarders of the law such legislation probably was of 
little avail, but eventually a complete change in the mode of killing hares 
was brought about by the introduction of sporting guns and the use of 
small shot. 
“As a sporting weapon,” says Mr W. Greener,* “the gun dates 
from the invention of the wheel -lock, invented at Nuremberg in 1515. 
Before that period the long-bow in England and the cross-bow on 
the continent were the usual weapons of the chase. In the fifteenth 
century [qu. sixteenth], fire-arms were used for sporting purposes 
in Italy, Spain, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, in France. In 
Great Britain little use appears to have been made of them for 
game shooting until the latter half of the seventeenth century [ 5 /c], 
and at that time the arms used for the purpose were entirely of 
foreign make.” 
In the opinion of the writer this places the date of the use of shot-guns 
for killing game and wild -fowl in England a century too late. For the latter 
half of the seventeenth we should read sixteenth century, there being 
ample evidence to support this correction. 
*The Gun and its Development, 8th edition, 1907, p. 67. 
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